The Cthulhu Casebooks

by James Lovegrove

  Thus it was that, by trial and error, we wound up on the west-facing flank of the church, next to a bossed wooden door situated at the foot of a short flight of steps. It was the entrance to a level below ground, presumably the crypt. The lodestone solution glowed all the more effulgently when Holmes held the test tube to the door.

  “There we are,” said he in a low voice. “Our quarry lies within.”

  He stowed the test tube away and produced in its stead a plain old pocket-lantern, the candle of which he carefully lit.

  “And as if to put the issue beyond question…” He held the lantern up close to the padlock which secured the door. “Do you see that, Watson?”

  “See what?”

  “Why, the discrepancy.”

  “Between…?”

  “Padlock and hasp. The one is brand new, the other corroded and old.”

  “Is that so remarkable? One might conclude that the previous padlock rusted up and thus had to be replaced.”

  “One might conclude that. One might equally conclude that the padlock has been changed recently by someone who wishes to go in and out through this door but lacked the key to the original padlock. If you look more closely at the hasp, you will see a series of straight, parallel scratches directly behind the padlock’s shackle. Unless I am very much mistaken, those are the marks left by the tip of a pair of bolt cutters when they were used to sever the shackle of the original padlock.”

  “Which does not gainsay my interpretation of the facts. If the first padlock had become inoperable, it could not have been removed in any other way but by bolt cutters, wielded no doubt by the church sexton.”

  “The hasp could have been unscrewed from the door instead, a simpler and more logical remedy. It has not. The application of bolt cutters implies a desire to do the deed swiftly, with the minimum of fuss. That in turn implies furtiveness, the behaviour of someone not wishing to be caught in the act – in other words, not the sexton, nor the verger, nor any other ecclesiastical functionary. Hold this.”

  Holmes passed me the pocket-lantern, then produced the small leather pouch which held his set of lockpicks.

  “Torsion wrench first,” he murmured, inserting a slender L-shaped instrument into the keyhole. For the first time I had a ringside seat while he utilised this dexterous talent of his. “Hmmm. Three-pin tumbler. Nothing too out of the ordinary. A half-diamond pick will do. Keep that light steady, will you?” He inserted the pick as well and prodded it gently along the keyway. “Ah yes, there’s the binding pin. Bit of resistance. Up you go. And the next pin. Up over the shear line. And last but not least…”

  With a clunk the padlock sprang open.

  “Voilà! Child’s play.”

  “Don’t you think that was a little too easy?” I said. “If it is Moriarty who swapped the padlocks, would he not have put more effort into forestalling intruders?”

  Holmes chuckled, but then his face fell.

  “Oh, Watson. How I wish you hadn’t said that.”

  “Because it makes me sound querulous?”

  “No. Because you are correct, and I have been overzealous.” He pointed at the padlock as it hung loose from the shank of the hasp. “There. On the toe of the shackle. Just above the notch.”

  Into the rod of metal was scored a tiny elaborate symbol. It had been etched by hand, and had lain concealed when the padlock was shut. I did not recognise the symbol per se but I knew it to be a magical sigil of some kind. As we watched, a crackle of bright white light coursed along its shallow grooves, there then gone in an instant, quick as a wink, leaving a crimson afterimage of itself on my retinas.

  “Palgroth’s Ward, if I don’t miss my guess,” said Holmes. “Well, at least Moriarty now knows for sure that he has guests. I hate to think what sort of reception committee awaits us.”

  HOLMES EASED THE DOOR INWARD, AND WE DUCKED under the low lintel and proceeded through into the crypt with the utmost caution. The beam of the pocket-lantern picked out runs of brick columns in a grid pattern, holding up a vaulted ceiling. The floor was unevenly flagged, and dense cobwebs hung everywhere in ragged, overlapping layers. Dust and damp in the air clogged my throat, tasting of clay.

  It was hard to tell how far the crypt extended, since the lantern’s mirror-augmented cone of light reached no more than a few yards into the gloom before petering out. I imagined that it took up more or less the same space as the main body of the church above, which was big enough, but I had heard of crypts which spread beyond the footprint of the buildings they served, tunnelling out sideways into the grounds. I wondered if this was one of those. I hoped not. Already there was too much darkness around us for my liking, too much I could not see, too many hiding places.

  “Keep your wits about you, Watson,” Holmes said.

  “I can go one better than that,” I replied, and drew my revolver.

  We ventured away from the entrance, Holmes moving the lantern back and forth in an arc so as to illuminate the broadest possible area of our surroundings. Several times I thought I detected movement in its light, a flicker such as of someone or something flitting past, and swung my gun in that direction. On each occasion it proved to be merely a cobweb wafting in the breeze from the open doorway.

  “You are excessively on edge,” Holmes admonished.

  “Can you blame me?”

  “You are jumping at shadows.”

  “I am afraid of shadows, with good cause.”

  Onward we went, deeper into the crypt, every step putting the sole available point of egress further behind us. I found myself constantly estimating, and re-estimating, how long it would take to sprint back to the door, and gauging the most direct route through the maze of columns to get there.

  Then I spied a sight which sent a tingle of horripilation over my entire body. The phrase “every hair standing on end” would not be inapt.

  Leering at me from the dark was a toothless, hollow-eyed brown face.

  It took me several seconds to realise that I was looking at the head of a corpse. It lay in an alcove, and the cadaver was clearly very old. It had undergone a natural process of desiccation, so that it was now a set of bones encased in papery skin and the rotted remnants of clothing. Long dead, it could surely do me no harm. It had given me a fright, but it had no more agency than that.

  As I composed myself, Holmes moved closer to the corpse. If he had been as startled as I by the sudden appearance of its yawning, withered features in the lantern light, he gave no sign. He shone the beam around, to reveal that the cadaver was not alone. Several dozen identical alcoves were ranked along one wall of the crypt. Each had the dimensions of a bunk bed, and each was home to a husk of a human being.

  “Sailors,” he said. “All of them from the last century. Naval officers. You can tell by the uniforms, what’s left of them. Look. That one is wearing a Monmouth cap. That one a tarpot hat with a ‘tally’ above the brim, a ribbon with his ship’s name on it, although the painted letters have faded beyond deciphering. That one has the cocked hat of a midshipman. Here a neckerchief, navy blue. There a brass-buttoned frock coat, also navy blue. This fellow would have been a captain, no less. White waistcoat with gold braid, and a bicorn. One can only assume all these seamen hailed from the more prosperous Shadwell families. Not for them a common coffin in the earth and the depredation of worms. They were granted their final berth in altogether more amenable conditions.”

  “Fascinating, I’m sure,” I said. “But shall we get on with what we came here to do?” The sooner we found Moriarty and his captives, the sooner our stay in the crypt would be over. I was resolved to spend not a second longer in that miserable place than I had to.

  We turned away and resumed our search. We had gone no more than a few paces, however, when a soft scraping sound behind us drew our attention. We swung round, as one, and Holmes aimed the lantern back at the alcoves.

  All was well, I thought. The corpses still lay in their last resting places. Every alcove held its cargo of decade
s-decayed sailor.

  “Watson…”

  The lantern’s beam came to rest on one of the alcoves.

  It was empty.

  “That one was unoccupied before,” I whispered.

  “It was not,” said Holmes with finality.

  “I know. Wishful thinking on my part.”

  “Be on your guard, old man.”

  “You don’t honestly believe…?”

  I would have finished the interrogative by saying, “… that the corpse has got up and walked?” But I did not have to.

  For the corpse had got up and walked.

  The evidence was there before us, shambling into the light on rickety, creaking legs.

  * * *

  It is peculiar that I was less alarmed by seeing a corpse become ambulatory than I had been by that glimpse of an unmoving skeletal face a few moments earlier. The reanimated body was too surreal, too impossible, to have the same impact on me. It belonged in the realm of the utterly fantastic, so far outside the norm that my mind had no easy way of accepting its substance. At first glance, I was quite convinced that what I beheld was some kind of grotesque life-sized puppet, a thing of papier-mâché and carved wood, a mannequin being manipulated by some unseen marionettist. I may well have looked above its head for the strings that supported it.

  Even when Holmes breathed an oath expressing incredulity and dismay, I still could not quite accept that the corpse was exactly what it was: a dead man somehow reanimated. That explanation seemed weirdly banal. Perhaps at last I was beginning to take the preternatural in my stride. The extraordinary, to me, was starting to become the everyday.

  How naïve, to assume I would ever fully acclimatise to the new world in which Holmes and I now lived.

  As the corpse made its stiff, stumbling way towards us, a second corpse swung a leg out and slithered down from the alcove in which it had been shelved. A third and a fourth followed suit. None was swift. They reminded me of very elderly people crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, every joint as inflexible as a rusted door hinge. Nor did they possess any great sense of balance, it seemed. It was as though the erstwhile naval officers were having trouble reacquainting themselves with upright motion after so long a period of horizontal inactivity. They had not yet regained their “life legs”, so to speak. They lurched and swayed with every shuffling step, perpetually on the brink of teetering over.

  What they did have, for all their maladroitness, was an unmistakable and unshakeable purpose. They closed in on Holmes and me, and one after another they lifted their arms and stretched them out towards us. Hands that were spindly, mummified appendages, hands in which almost every metacarpal and phalange was distinguishable, hands that were in several instances missing fingers, they groped for us, and their owners seemed intent on seizing hold of us and inflicting I know not what gruesome maltreatment – tearing us limb from limb, presumably, had they sufficient strength. All to the accompaniment of the rustle of threadbare rags and the relentless grinding of bone against bone.

  “Well?” said Holmes to me, as the deceased sailors, now a half-dozen of them all told, formed a rough semicircle around us. We, in turn, had begun backing away. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “What do you propose? If you mean fire bullets at them, what use will that be? These creatures are insentient. They are scarecrows of dead flesh, granted a semblance of life by sorcerous means. Surely they are impervious to harm by conventional weaponry?”

  “And are you carrying a conventional weapon?”

  “A Webley? Nothing could be more so.”

  “But what is in the gun?” Holmes pressed. “For heaven’s sake, man, think! Did I or did I not, just this afternoon, adapt an entire box of Eley’s No. 2 cartridges specifically to counter a threat such as the one before us? Did I or did I not, at some pains, daub the nose of each round with a design called the Seal of Unravelling, using a paste that numbers amongst its ingredients my own blood?”

  “You did,” I said, abashed.

  “And you forgot.”

  “In the heat of the moment…”

  “Shoot, Watson.” We had butted up against one of the columns, our backs to its brickwork. “Six corpses. Six chambers in your Webley’s cylinder. See if you can manage it without having to reload.”

  “Should I aim anywhere in particular?”

  “As centrally as you can, for maximum efficacy.”

  I levelled the gun at the nearmost of the corpses, which was the one Holmes had identified as a midshipman. The crack of the gunshot was amplified to a deafening level in those close confines, like a skewer driven into the eardrums. The muzzle flash seemed as bright as a lightning bolt.

  The round struck the midshipman in the sternum. The impact briefly staggered the corpse, but almost immediately it renewed its unsteady forward march.

  So much for the Seal of Unravelling. I darted a sidelong look at my companion. Holmes’s face was inscrutable, but even he must have been disappointed by the failure of the alchemy-enhanced bullet.

  Then the corpse halted in its tracks, and if those shrivelled, decomposed features had been capable of forming an expression, one might have said it registered bewilderment.

  That was followed quickly by consternation and then distress, as the bullet hole in the midshipman’s chest began radiating lines of orange brilliance. These spread out, multiplying like cracks in shattered glass, with a sound akin to that of tinder catching alight. Dried flesh, hollow bone, even clothing – all was affected by the progress of the searing-hot orange lines, until in next to no time the entire corpse was riddled head to toe with tiny, lambent fissures. A strong whiff of burning filled my nostrils.

  All at once, the undead thing lost cohesion. It had been divided into a million fragments, and these fell apart in a sudden, catastrophic avalanche. The midshipman collapsed to the floor, granules of him scattering everywhere. Nothing was left but a spill of blackened, charred debris with a clinkery texture, from whose surface wisps of smoke drifted up.

  I paused to marvel at the devastation wrought by the Seal of Unravelling. A potent device after all.

  Then I took potshots at the remaining five corpses. The range was point blank. Every round found its mark. The naval officers’ second lives were snuffed out, terminating in a welter of scorching fiery lines and attendant disintegration.

  When it was over, my ears were ringing, but I felt a profound sense of satisfaction. A surge of optimism, too. We had faced an enemy that might have cowed and destroyed anyone who lacked our specialised knowhow, and we had overcome.

  “If that is the worst Moriarty can throw at us…” I began, but Holmes cut me off with a cautionary wagging finger.

  “Let us not tempt fate,” said he. “We proved equal to this challenge, but there may yet be others in store.”

  A loud, slow handclap echoed from a remote recess of the crypt. Then came a voice: “Congratulations, Mr Holmes. You did indeed prove equal to the challenge. But then it would have been a poor show – embarrassing, almost – had a handful of clumsy, barely mobile revenants been your downfall. My expectations of you are at least marginally higher than that.”

  From the darkness emerged the figure of Professor Moriarty.

  He was not alone.

  ACCOMPANYING THE ACADEMIC WAS A HOMINID with a sloping, elongated brow and a scale-covered hide. At first I thought, with a start, that it was one of the lizard men of Ta’aa. The resemblance was close. Then I perceived that, although the thing’s features were reptilian, they derived from a different subgroup of that class of animals. The scales were of varying size. The eyes were lidless. Most telling of all, a forked tongue flickered between the upturned lips of the mouth. Not a lizard man, then, but a near relative. A snake man.

  The particular nature of this monster and its similarity to the lizard men did not come as a complete surprise to me. I had encountered several references in the Pnakotic Manuscripts to ancient anthropoid races which bore non-mammalian characteristics. Som
e, according to more contemporary sources, existed even to this day. A New England port called Innsmouth was said to be infested with batrachian-like humans. On our own south coast a sighting or two of something similar had been recorded. Man’s evolution, it would seem, had taken some aberrant turns, more so than even Mr Darwin might suspect.

  The serpentine creature stood at Moriarty’s side in the hunched stance of an underling. Its gaze was fixed on him as though it awaited instruction, like a gundog poised to retrieve the fallen grouse at a command from its handler.

  Moriarty himself looked serenely smug, perhaps more so than when we had first met. To his sartorial ensemble of frock coat and tapered pinstripe trousers was added a new accessory; on his head he wore a diadem fashioned of bronze and wrought in intertwining plaits somewhat like a Celtic knot. At its fore arose an ornamental device which took the shape of a trio of snake heads, each jutting in a different direction. Although I had no way of fathoming the diadem’s true purpose just then, I sensed it was more than a mere item of apparel. There must be some link between its serpentine aspects and those of the hominid accompanying Moriarty.

  “Yes, it would have been a terrific pity, Mr Holmes,” Moriarty said, “if you were to have been deterred, or even defeated, by what were after all just skeletons. Things so fragile and brittle, a puff of wind might blow them away. I should have been very disappointed, especially after Gong-Fen Shou made such a fuss about you. ‘A most gifted individual’, he called you.”

  “Gong-Fen was too kind,” said Holmes. “I certainly anticipated something like that little conjuring trick of yours. What do churches have in abundance? Human remains. A supply which, in the correct hands, with the correct potions and cantrips, may be turned into a weapon.” He gestured at the heaps of ash to which the six corpses had been reduced. “Zuvembies, am I right? You resurrected them and enslaved them to your will using the infamous Black Brew, in the manner of a Haitian houngan.”