The Cthulhu Casebooks

by James Lovegrove

  “You have been doing your homework, sir. I applaud you. And would I, in turn, be correct in thinking that your friend was firing bullets made not of lead but iron?”

  “Iron is a known counteragent to the zuvembie, and can cause harm to various other supernatural manifestations. But no, you would be wrong.”

  Moriarty frowned, then smiled, as though he had swiftly solved a riddle or some complex mathematical equation. “The Seal of Unravelling. Of course. An elegant ploy, with a host of suitable applications. Bravo.”

  “While we are engaged in this badinage, and before the inevitable hostilities break out,” said Holmes, “the headgear you are sporting – I believe it is what is known as a Triophidian Crown.”

  “None other. How do you like it?”

  “It certainly covers up your receding hairline. I imagine, too, that it grants you dominance over that scaly curiosity by your side.”

  “A Triophidian Crown?” I said.

  “Do you not recall from our researches, Watson? Specifically from the Book of Eibon? A Triophidian Crown is an artefact of some potency, giving the wearer the ability to control all serpents – as well, it would seem, as men who have more than a trace of the serpent about them. Moriarty’s appears to be brand new and homemade, not one of the original crowns, of which only three are known still to be in existence.”

  “All of them impossible to obtain,” said Moriarty. “One is in the private collection of a vastly wealthy American antiquarian who guards his possessions so jealously that he has not set foot outside his property in more than twenty years. He refuses to see visitors, and any who approach his house, save his own domestic staff, are treated to blasts from a shotgun fired from one of the mansion’s upstairs windows.”

  “Meaning that even you, with your exceptional persuasive skills, might have trouble gaining access to it,” said Holmes.

  “Not without potentially receiving a face full of buckshot. Another of the original Triophidian Crowns resides in a temple deep in the Amazonian jungle whose location is a well-kept secret. That crown is reputed to be a dud anyway. Its power has waned over the centuries through disuse, so that it is now little more than a pretty trinket. As for the third, it lies in a Persian museum, under lock and key in an underground vault. It is inaccessible not so much because the vault is secure, although that is the case, but because it is buried amongst thousands of similar relics, all in identical packing crates, without documentation or markings to differentiate them. Unearthing it from that jumble would take months, perhaps years. Making a Triophidian Crown of my own therefore seemed the most judicious option.”

  “No mean feat.”

  “It required the retrieval of numerous lesser magical objects and the siphoning off of their eldritch power, which I transferred into an otherwise inert assemblage of bronze tubing. Far from straightforward, but I enjoyed the challenge.”

  “Gathering those objects was the purpose of your travels abroad last year.”

  Moriarty nodded. “I scoured the world, far and wide, for months on end. It was tiring, but it was an enlightening experience too. Travel broadens the mind, as they say, even if it does also slim the wallet.”

  “Luckily not your wallet. Gong-Fen’s.”

  “Which was so fat, it hardly felt the loss.”

  “And was abroad where you found this snakelike consort of yours? Was he lurking in some ancient ruined city half engulfed by desert sand? Or perhaps he was the prisoner of a travelling Bedouin caravanserai, exhibited as a freak in marketplaces to earn a few coins?”

  “Oh no, Mr Holmes. My friend here is something of a local. More of a local, one might say, than any Londoner.”

  The snake man seemed to intuit that he was the topic of conversation. He hissed softly and swayed from side to side, still not lifting his gaze from Moriarty. There was a kind of adoration in those beady oval eyes of his, and something else buried beneath, an emotion I took to be resentment. He was a hapless thrall of the Triophidian Crown, and he did not like it.

  “You are telling me,” I said, “that he hails from this very city?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, where does he live? If he has been here all this time, how has he managed to go unseen, unnoticed, for so long? Does he dwell in the sewer system? Is that it? Has he been right under our feet ever since those tunnels were dug?”

  “No, he makes his home deeper than that, so deep that Mr Bazalgette’s engineers would never have come across him during their excavations. He and his kind were here long before that great public work commenced. There are places in the capital about which none of its citizens has a clue. There are civilisations far older than man’s that have coexisted alongside ours in secret, unbeknownst to us, from time immemorial.”

  “Your snake man, then, is not such a rarity,” said Holmes. “There are more.”

  “Many, many more,” said Moriarty, and he touched a hand to the Triophidian Crown. “Why don’t I introduce you to some of them?”

  His brows knitted, and the diadem began to emanate a soft greenish glow. At the same time it emitted a low throbbing hum which I felt as much as heard. The noise seemed to penetrate the bones of the skull and make them reverberate along their sutures. The sensation was not unlike a dentist’s drill boring into a molar, and only marginally less unpleasant.

  From the dark all around us, more snake men emerged. They came skulking out from behind columns. They lowered themselves from the ceiling, dropping to the floor gracefully, with scarcely a sound. A couple slid out from alcoves, where they had been lying in wait, concealed behind the supine unliving occupants.

  There were a score of the hominids, and although all bore serpentine characteristics, some had them in greater abundance than others. A few could almost have passed for ordinary humans, save for their eyes, which were enlarged, round and wide-spaced, and the smattering of scales on their shoulders and the backs of their arms. Equally, there were those whose heads were simply proportionate versions of a snake’s, attached to squamous bodies with slender, sinuous torsos and loathsomely attenuated extremities. One was even hooded like a cobra. There were varieties of skin colouration to be seen, too, from jade green to cinnamon red to pitch black, with bands, speckles and “eyes” providing patterning.

  The creatures, at Moriarty’s mental behest, moved towards Holmes and me. We retreated until we found ourselves with our backs against a wall, and the snake men closed in, surrounding us in a broad semicircle. They stood within arm’s length of one another, leaving gaps through which one could not hope to pass without risk of being grabbed. There was an eerie, precise choreography to it all, Moriarty marshalling them like a child positioning his toy soldiers. Thanks to the Triophidian Crown, he had only to think a command and it was projected into the snake men’s minds, becoming a compulsion to them, an irresistible inner urge.

  This required effort on his part, to judge by the scowl of concentration on his face and the droplet of sweat that beaded on his forehead. The diadem was a fine-tuned instrument, demanding skill and focus from its user. Yet he appeared equal to the task.

  Beside me, Holmes had stiffened. Out of the corner of my eye I spied him sinking his weight onto his back foot, as a pugilist does. He was braced for an assault.

  I took my example from him, pocketing my revolver and raising my fists. The gun was spent, and there would be no time to reload. Moriarty was not about to give me the opportunity.

  “Holmes…” I began.

  “Just do your best, old man. That’s all anyone can ask. Give a good account of yourself.”

  “But there are so many more of them. The odds are stacked against us.”

  “Then do not let them have victory lightly. Make them work for it.”

  Moriarty peeled back his lips in a grin, one which itself had a somewhat snakelike quality. “Such stiff-upper-lipped Britishness. But, Mr Holmes, this is your own fault. I gave you every chance to leave me alone, as I advised. Instead you sent that telegram to vex me, to dec
lare yourself my enemy and my equal. Now you and your colleague shall reap the consequences.”

  He flicked a hand.

  “My friends – take them.”

  The snake men launched themselves at us, hissing, snarling, and there followed a mêlée in which Holmes and I, though heavily outnumbered, nonetheless acquitted ourselves well. I was weaponless, and therefore obliged to rely on the boxing skills I had learnt at school and the more underhand brawling techniques I had picked up from the rugby scrimmage. Holmes, however, had brought along a singlestick, which he had been keeping sheathed in a long, specially tailored pocket in the lining of his coat, adjacent to the button hem. This baton-like implement he drew with a flourish, and instantly set about using it to belabour snake men left, right and centre, his movements as deft and controlled as any fencer’s. The thwack of the singlestick’s impacts were now and again matched by the snap of breaking bone and a shriek of distress from the victim, who then hobbled away in retreat. Yet the snake men were generally hardy, and those blessed with an extensive covering of scales were to some degree armoured, protected from the full force of Holmes’s strikes. A blow which might have incapacitated or even crippled an ordinary human, these creatures more often than not could shrug off.

  I, meanwhile, punched jaws and fended off grappling hands. There was an acrid stench in my nostrils, an ammoniac reek coming off the snake men’s bodies, some kind of natural odour. It was nauseating, choking, repellent, and it gave me added incentive. I fought all the harder, simply to keep the stench and the creatures generating it away from me.

  Superior numbers won out in the end, though. Not even Holmes’s singlestick could tip the balance in our favour. One of the snake men managed to wrest it from his grasp, and promptly snapped it in half with his bare hands. My companion resorted to baritsu and caused a fair bit of mayhem thus, but soon enough he was overwhelmed. Snake men thronged around him, clung to him and brought him to the floor with sheer weight of numbers, as they did me. Holmes and I both struggled, but we were pinned down.

  The cobra-like snake man loomed above me, and his mouth opened wide to expose a pair of fangs. They were as long as my little finger and wickedly curved, and at their sharp, hollow tips I saw globules of a clear yellow liquid welling.

  Venom.

  I made one last supreme effort at resistance, but it was futile. The fangs descended towards my neck.

  I LET OUT A DEFIANT, LAST-DITCH ROAR, AS though I might stave off death simply by bellowing at it loudly enough. It was all I could do. What sort of demise would the cobra man’s bite bring? It could only be a lingering, agonising one. I had seen snake venom at work in Afghanistan when I had tried in vain to save the life of a lieutenant in the 14th Ferozepore Sikhs who accidentally trod on a Levant viper. Haemotoxia spread through the fellow’s bloodstream like wildfire. His limbs swelled, his skin turned purple, and after half an hour of screaming and convulsions, he was gone.

  The single pathetic hope I could latch onto was that the cobra man would surely be injecting me with a dose of venom commensurate to his size. In other words, he would be putting so much of the toxic substance into me that the end would arrive altogether more quickly than it had for the Sikh, although it would also be far more excruciating while it lasted.

  “N’rhn!”

  The cobra man halted, his fangs a mere inch from my throat.

  Moriarty repeated the command. “N’rhn!” I recognised it as the R’lyehian for “Stop!”

  The cobra man turned his head and snarled in indignation. “K’na n’rhn?” he said. Why should I stop?

  “I wish them subdued,” Moriarty replied, still speaking in the ancient language. “Not dead. Not yet.”

  “But he is my prey. I have vanquished him.”

  “Do not defy me!” Moriarty thundered. He had moved into my field of vision, and the Triophidian Crown on his head was aglow as never before, wreathed with coruscating emerald brilliance. “Kill him, and I will make you suffer in ways you cannot begin to imagine.”

  The cobra man clearly wanted to defy him. He wanted, with every fibre of his being, to strike and sink his fangs into me. But Moriarty was having none of it, and was deploying the Triophidian Crown to its fullest in order to get his way. It was a battle of wills between master and slave. The diadem fairly crackled with energy, its light dazzling.

  The other snake men looked on with great interest. Several of them muttered to the cobra man, advising him to back down. The version of R’lyehian they spoke was rudimentary and unconventional, though still comprehensible. It used a dialect which was more sibilant and less guttural than the standard language – at least the version I had studied and had heard Stamford speak – and hence was better suited to the vocal cords of beings that were part snake.

  In the end, the cobra man relented. He raised himself from me with a frustrated growl and sidled off. Moriarty fixed him with an imperious glare, although I noticed that the professor was wan of cheek and seemed unsteady on his feet. The mental exertion of operating the crown at such intensity must be draining. He probably could not have faced down another challenge to his authority, not in such rapid succession.

  Recovering somewhat, Moriarty gestured to the other snake men and seemingly issued a silent mental command. Holmes and I were hoisted to our feet. Our arms were held fast, twisted up behind our backs so that we were forced to bend forward. The snake men were strong, exceptionally so. There was no way we would readily be able to squirm out of their clutches.

  “I do apologise, Doctor,” Moriarty said to me. The Triophidian Crown’s glow was ebbing to its former level of luminosity. “That was unseemly and I would rather it had not happened.”

  “By sparing my life, Professor, you have simply given me another chance of ending yours.”

  “Sparing your life? Ho ho! Is that what I have done? No, sir. Prolonged it by a matter of minutes, that is all. But do not be downhearted, by all means. It’s rather touching.”

  He stooped to pick up Holmes’s pocket-lantern, which my companion had laid aside on the floor prior to our scuffle with the snake men. By some miracle it had not been knocked over during the fight and its flame still burned. Now Moriarty used its beam to light our path as he led us to the far northern end of the crypt.

  There lay an area of floor that had been dug up. It was roughly square and some five yards long on each side. Flagstones lay piled neatly nearby, along with several mounds of excavated soil, atop one of which rested a pick and a shovel.

  “You have been busy, Moriarty,” Holmes observed. “I never envisaged you as the type to engage in manual labour, yet what I am looking at here is clearly the handiwork of just one man, else there would be more than a single set of digging tools.”

  “It was quite an endeavour, I must admit,” came the reply. “The blisters, the backache, the night after night of industry… But it had to be done, and it seemed fitting that I should do it alone. The toil constituted an act of mild self-mortification, one might say. A libation of sweat.”

  The pit was deep, I had to give Moriarty that. It went down a good ten feet and must have taken at least a hundred man-hours to dig. I did not envy him the effort he had expended on it.

  Its purpose was immediately evident, too, when I spied the monument which stood uncovered at its centre. This was an obelisk some seven or eight feet tall, shaped like a steep-sided pyramid. It was fashioned from smooth, gleaming black stone into which were etched numerous lines of R’lyehian text. The runic inscriptions and everything else about the obelisk struck me as incredibly ancient. Without doubt it had lain here for many centuries, embedded in the earth well before the original St Paul’s Church was erected.

  “You are asking yourselves, what am I looking at?” said Moriarty. “What is this thing faced with onyx, protruding from the ground?”

  “Some relic,” I said in an offhand manner. “An artefact dating back to the Stone Age, or beyond.”

  “Well, yes, but there is more to it than that.
Mr Holmes? Would you care to advance an opinion?”

  Holmes scrutinised the obelisk. He was battered and bedraggled from our fight, much to the same extent as I, yet his eyes retained their usual keen inquisitiveness.

  “If I read the inscriptions correctly,” said he, “it is some kind of gateway. A ‘portal to a lower realm’. It affords access solely to ‘those who utter the appropriate words’. That would seem to suggest some kind of incantation is required to open it.”

  “And I am just the man to say those words. Come along now.”

  Moriarty climbed down a stepladder that was canted against one wall of the pit. Holmes and I made an altogether less elegant descent, as the snake men holding us passed us down to others of their kind who had clambered into the pit to receive us. The manhandling was undignified and crude, and I remonstrated volubly, not that the snake men appeared to care. Once the two of us were securely pinioned again, the snake men set about assisting their brethren whose bones Holmes had broken with his singlestick. These afflicted individuals were lowered into the pit a great deal more gently and solicitously than we had been.

  Moriarty, in the interim, had positioned himself before one of the obelisk’s faces. He intoned a handful of lines in R’lyehian, amongst which two words recurred several times: nglui, meaning door or threshold, and ktharl, meaning unlock. His voice rose in volume as he chanted, its timbre deepened, and all at once the obelisk face swung smoothly inward, creating a triangular aperture. Steps were visible within, sinking into darkness.

  “Gentlemen, after you,” Moriarty said with a sweep of the arm, like a maître d’ ushering diners to their table.

  * * *

  The stairs made a left turn, then another left turn, then another, at increasing intervals, and I quickly grasped that they – and we – were travelling in a widening downward spiral. Cold stone wall remained ever to our right, pitched at the same angle as the faces of the obelisk, whilst to our left there was only, as far as I could tell from the lantern’s meagre corona of light, open space. The echoes of our footfalls were magnified as we descended, as though resounding across a greater and greater expanse of emptiness. It was clear that we were inside a vast hollow subterranean edifice, the stairs tracing an internal perimeter which broadened out the deeper we went.