Two minutes’ silence elapsed while Mycroft completed his superficial examination. “Purbeck stone,” he said. “Much more friable than Portland stone—easy enough to work with simple tools, but liable to crumble if force is misapplied. Easily eroded, too, but if this piece is as old as it seems, it’s been protected from everyday wear. It could have been locked away in some cabinet of curiosities, but it’s more likely to have been buried. You’ve doubtless examined the scars left by the knives that carved it and the dirt accumulated in the finer grooves. Iron or bronze? Sand, silt, or soil?” He set the object down on a side table as he framed these questions, but positioned it carefully, to signify that he was not done with it yet.
“A bronze knife,” Sherlock told him, without undue procrastination, “but a clever alloy, no earlier than the sixteenth century. The soil is from a fallow field, from which hay had been cut with considerable regularity—but there was salt, too. The burial place was near enough to the sea to catch spray in stormy weather.”
“And the representation?” Mycroft took a certain shameful delight in the expression of irritation that flitted across Sherlock’s finely chiseled features: the frustration of ignorance.
“I took it to the museum in the end,” the great detective admitted. “Pearsall suggested that it might be an image of Oannes, the Babylonian god of wisdom. Fotherington disagreed.”
“Fotherington is undoubtedly correct,” Mycroft declared. “He sent you to me, of course—without offering any hypothesis of his own.”
“He did,” Sherlock admitted. “And he told me, rather impolitely, to leave Watson out of it.”
“He was right to do so,” Mycroft said. And to notify the secretary in advance, he added, although he did not say the words aloud.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the sailor, “but I’m rather out of my depth here. Perhaps you might explain what that thing is, if you know, and why it was sent to Captain Pye . . . and whether it will finish me the way it finished him. I have to admit, sir, that Rockaby seemed to have near as much hatred of me as he had of the captain toward the end, even though we were friends once and always near neighbors. I don’t mind admitting, sir, that I’m frightened.” That was obvious, although John Chevaucheux was plainly a man who did not easily give in to fear, especially of the superstitious kind.
“Alas, I cannot give you any guarantee of future safety, Mr. Chevaucheux,” Mycroft said, already fearing that the only guarantees to be found were of the opposite kind, “but you will lose nothing by surrendering this object to me, and it might be of some small service to the Diogenes Club if you were to tell me your story, as you’ve doubtless already told it to Dr. Watson and my brother.”
Sherlock shifted uneasily. Mycroft knew that his brother had hoped for more even if he had not expected it—but Sherlock and he were two of a kind, and knew what duty they owed to the accumulation of knowledge.
The seaman nodded. “Telling it has done me good, sir,” he said, “so I don’t mind telling it again. It’s much clearer in my head than it was—and I’m less hesitant now that I know there are men in the world prepared to take it seriously. I’ll understand if you can’t help me, but I’m grateful to Mr. Sherlock for having tried.”
Anticipating a long story, Mycroft settled back into his chair—but he could not make himself comfortable.
“You’ll doubtless have judged from my name that I’m of French descent,” said Chevaucheux, “although my family have been in England for a century and a half. We’ve always been seafarers. My father sailed with Dan Pye in the old clippers, and my grandfather was a middy in Nelson’s navy. Captain Pye used to tell me that he and I were kin, by virtue of the fact that the Normans who came to England with William the Conqueror were so called because they were descended from Norsemen, like the vikings who colonized the north of England hundreds of years earlier. I tell you this because Sam Rockaby was a man of a very different stripe from either of us, although his family live no more than a day’s ride from mine, and mine no more than an hour on the railway from Dan Pye’s.
“Captain Pye’s wife and children are lodged in Poole, my own on Durlston Head in Swanage, near the Tilly Whim caves. Rockaby’s folk hail from a hamlet south of Worth Matravers, near the western cliffs of St. Aldhelm’s Head. To folk like his, everyone’s a foreigner whose people weren’t clinging to that shore before the Romans came, and no one’s a true seaman whose people didn’t learn to navigate the Channel in coracles or hollowed-out canoes. Dr. Watson tells me that every man has something of the sea in his blood, because that’s where all land-based life came from, but I don’t know about that. All I know is that the likes of Rockaby laugh into their cupped hands when they hear men like Dan Pye and Jack Chevaucheux say that the sea is in our blood.
“Mr. Sherlock tells me that you don’t get about much, sir, so I’ll guess you’ve never been to Swanage, let alone to Worth Matravers or the sea cliffs on the Saint’s Head. You’re dead right—and then some—about the way the local people work the stone. They used Portland stone to make the frontage of the museum Mr. Sherlock took me to yesterday, but no one has much use for Purbeck stone because it crumbles too easily. These days, even the houses on the isle are mostly made of brick—but in the old days stone was what they had in plenty, and it was easily quarried, especially where the coastal cliffs are battered by the sea, so stone was what they used. They carved it, too, though never as small and neat as that thing, and you’ll not see an old stone house within ten miles of Worth Matravers that hasn’t got some ugly face or deformed figure worked into its walls. Nowadays it’s just tradition, but Sam Rockaby’s folk have their own lore regarding such things. When Sam and I were boys he used to tell me that the only real faces were those that kept watch on the sea.
“ ‘Some’ll tell ye they’re devils, Jacky boy,’ Sam told me once, ’an’ some’ll tell ye they’re a-meant for the scarin’ away of devils—but they ain’t. The devils in hell are jest fairy tales. Mebbe these are the Elder Gods, and mebbe they’re the Others, but either way they’re older by far than any Christian devil.’ He would never tell me exactly what he meant, though, so I always figured that he was teasing me. It was the same with the chapels. All along that coast there are little chapels on the cliff, where whole villages would go to pray when their menfolk were caught at sea by a storm. Even in Swanage the rumor was that it wasn’t just for the safe return of fishermen that Rockaby’s folk prayed, for they were wreckers even before they were smugglers, but Sam sneered at that kind of calumny.
“ ‘They rearranged the stones to build the chapels,’ he told me, ’An’ threw away the ones that scared ’em—but the stone knows what it was before your Christ was born, an’ fer what its eyes were set to watch. The Elders were first, but their watchin’ did no good. The Others came anyway, an’ printed their own faces in the stone.’ He was always a little bit crazy—but harmless, I thought, until the fire got him.
“Rockaby’s father and mine sailed together once or twice. So far as I know, they got on well enough with Dan Pye and each other. When I first signed on the Goshen Sam’s dad was still on the sailing ships, and I reckon Sam would have followed him if the age of sail wasn’t so obviously done. Sam never liked steam, but you can’t hold back the tide, and if you want to work you have to go where the work is. He was a seaman through and through, and if going under steam was the price of going to sea, he’d pay it. I don’t think he was resentful of my having got my mate’s papers by the time he joined the Goshen, even though he was older by a year or two, because he didn’t have an ounce of ambition. He was a good seaman—and the most powerful swimmer I ever saw—but he wasn’t in the least interested in command. I always wanted to be master of my own ship, but he never wanted to be master of anything, not even his own soul.
“I can’t put my finger on any one incident that first set Rockaby and Captain Pye at odds. It’s in the nature of seamen to grumble, and they always find a scapegoat on the bridge. I wasn’t aware that anything new had
crept into the scuttlebutt when the Goshen set out, although the talk grew dark soon enough when the weather wouldn’t let up. Landlubbers think that steam’s made seafaring easy, but they don’t know what the ocean’s like. A steamship may not need the wind for power, but she’s just as vulnerable to its whims. Sometimes, I could swear that the wind tries twice as hard to send a steamship down, purely out of pique. We had a rough ride out, I can tell you. I never saw the Mediterranean so angry, and no sooner were we through the canal and into the Red Sea than the storms picked us up again. Rockaby was the only man in the crew who wasn’t as sick as a pig—and that, I suppose, might be why things between him and Dan Pye began to get worse. Rockaby said he was being picked on, given more than his fair share of work—and so he was, because he was sometimes the only man capable of carrying out the orders. The captain did more than his own share, too, and I tried, but there were times when we were all laid low.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being sick at sea. They say Nelson took days to find his sea legs. But the ordinary kind of seasickness was only the beginning—laudanum got us through the fevers and the aches, until we were far enough east to buy hashish and raw opium. You might disapprove of that, Mr. Mycroft, but it’s the way things work out east, at least among seafaring men. You have bad dreams, but at least you can bear to be awake. Or so it usually goes. But this time was different; the ocean seemed to have it in for us. We were carrying mail for the company, so we had to make a dozen stops on the Indian mainland and the islands, and somewhere along the way we picked up the fire. St. Anthony’s fire, that is.
“Dr. Watson told that he’d encountered similar cases while he was in India—I first met him in Goa thirteen years ago, while I was an able seaman on the Serendip—and that the cause was bad bread, contaminated with ergot. Maybe he’s right, but that’s not what seamen believe. To them, the fire is something out of hell. The men who took it worse said they felt as if crabs and snakes were crawling under their skin, and they had blinding visions of devils and monsters. This time, Rockaby was affected just as badly as anyone else, and he took it very bad indeed. He began blaming Dan Pye, saying that the captain had ridden him too hard, and brought the affliction on the ship by the insult to his blood.
“We lost two more men before we made port in Padang and laid in fresh supplies. That was when Rockaby disappeared—overboard, we thought, though he was too strong a swimmer to drown so close to shore, raving or not. We nearly shipped out without him, but he got back to the ship just in time, unfortunately. He was over the fire, didn’t seem any worse for wear than the rest of us, physically speaking—quite the reverse, in fact—but we soon found out that his mind hadn’t made the same recovery as his body. No sooner were we under way that he began twitching and jabbering away, sometimes mumbling away as if in a foreign language, stranger than any I’d ever heard. He did his work, mind—there was no lack of strength in him—but he was a changed man, and not for the better. Captain Pye said that his mumbling was nonsense, but it really did sound to me like a language, though maybe one designed for other tongues than human. There were names that kept cropping up: Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu, Azathoth. When he did speak English, Rockaby told anyone who would listen that we didn’t understand and couldn’t understand what the world was really like, and what it will become when the Others return to claim it.
“Captain Pye could see that Sam was ill, and didn’t want to come down hard on him, but ships’ crew are direly superstitious. That kind of ill-wishing can make any trouble that comes along a thousand times worse. No one likes to be part of a jittery company even at the best of times, and when a ship’s already taken a battering and there are typhoons to be faced and fought . . . well, a captain has no alternative but to try to shut a Jonah up. Dan tried, but it only made things worse. I tried to talk some sense into Sam myself, but nothing anyone could say had any effect but to make him crazier. Perhaps we should have dropped him off in Madras or Aden, but he was a Purbeck man when all was said and done, and it was our responsibility to see him safely home. And we did, though I surely wish we hadn’t.
“By the time we came back into Southampton Water, Rockaby seemed a good deal better, though we’d dosed him with opium enough to keep an elephant quiet and maybe taken any unhealthy amount ourselves. I thought he might make a full recovery once he was back home, and I traveled with him on the train to Swanage to make sure that he got back safely. He was calm enough, but he wasn’t making much sense. ‘Ye’re a fool, Jacky,’ he said to me, before we parted. ‘Y’ think you can make it right but y’ can’t. The price has to be paid, the sacrifice made. The Others never went away, y’ know, when they’d seen off the Elder Gods. They may be sleeping, but they’re dreaming, too, and the steam filters into their dreams the way sails never did, stirrin’ an’ simmerin’ an’ seethin’. Ain’t no good hopin’ that they’ll let us all alone while there’s tides in the sea an’ the crawlin’ chaos in our blood. Y’ can throw away the faces but y’ can’t blind the eyes or keep the ears from hearin’. I know where the curses are, Jacky. I know how Dan Pye’ll die, an’ how it has to be done. Cleave to him an ye’re doomed, Jacky. List to me. I know. I’ve the old blood in me.’
“I left him at Swanage station, waiting for a cart to take him home, or at least as far as Worth Matravers. He was still mumbling to himself. I heard no more from or about him—but less than two weeks later I got a letter from Dan Pye’s wife begging me to come to their house in Poole. I caught the first train I could.
“The captain was confined to his bed, and fading fast. His doctor was with him, but didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with him, and had nothing to offer by way of treatment save for laudanum and more laudanum. I could see right way that it wouldn’t be enough. All laudanum can do is dull the pain while your body makes its own repairs, and I could tell that the captain’s body was no longer in the business of making repairs. It seemed to me that his flesh had turned traitor, and had had enough of being human. It was changing. I’ve seen men with the scaly disease, that makes them seem as if they’re turning into fish, and I’ve seen men with gangrene rotting alive, but I never saw anything like the kind of transformation that was working in Dan Pye. Whatever kind of flesh it was that he was trying to become, it was nothing that was ever ancestor to humankind, and no mere decay.
“He had breath enough left in him to tell me to get rid of the doctor and to send his wife away, but when we were alone he talked fast, like a man who didn’t expect to be able to talk for long. ‘I’ve been cursed,’ he told me. ‘I know who did it, though he isn’t entirely to blame. Sam Rockaby never had the least vestige of any power to command, though he’s a good follower if you can get mastery over him, and a powerful swimmer in seas stranger than you or I have ever sailed. Take this back to him, and tell him that I understand. I don’t forgive, but I understand. I’ve felt the crawling chaos and seen the madness of darkness. Tell him that it’s over now, and that it’s time to throw it off the Saint’s Head, and let it go forever. Tell him to do the same with all the rest, for his own sake and that of his children’s children.’ The thing he gave me to give back to Rockaby was that thing your brother just gave you.
“He said more, of course, but the only thing relevant to the story was about the dreams. Now, Dan Pye was a seaman for forty years, and no stranger to rum, opium, and hashish. He knew his dreams, Dan did. But these, he said, were different. These were real visions: visions of long-dead cities, and creatures like none that Mother Earth could ever have spawned, whether she’s been four thousand or four thousand million years in the making. And there were words, too: words that weren’t just nonsense, but parts of a language human tongues were never meant to speak. ‘The Elder Gods couldn’t save us, Jack,’ he said. ‘The Others were too powerful. But we don’t have to give ourselves up—not our souls, not our will. We have to do what we can. Tell Rockaby that, and tell him to throw the lot into the sea.’
“I tried to do what Dan asked me to, bu
t when I went to Worth Matravers I found that Rockaby had never arrived home after I left him at Swanage station. I didn’t throw the stone off the cliff because I found out that the curse that killed Dan had already started in me, and I thought it best to show it to whoever might be able to help me. I knew Dr. Watson from before, as I said, and I knew he’d been in India. I wasn’t certain that he’d be able to help, but I was sure that there wasn’t a doctor in Dorset who could, and I knew that any man who’s been long in India has seen things just as queer and just as bad as whatever has its claws in me. So I found Dr. Watson through the Seamen’s Association in London, and he sent me to see Mr. Sherlock Holmes—who has promised to find Sam Rockaby for me. But he wanted to come here first, to ask your advice about the cursing stone, because of what this chap Fotherington told him at the museum. And that’s the whole of it—apart from this.”
While he completed this last sentence John Chevaucheux had unbuttoned his coat and the shirt he wore beneath it. Now he drew back the shirt to display his breast and abdomen to Mycroft’s gaze. The seaman’s eyes were full of horror as he beheld himself, and the spoliation that had claimed him.
The creeping malaise appeared to have commenced its spread from a point above Chevaucheux’s heart, but the disfiguration now extended as far as his navel and his collarbone, and sideways from one armpit to the other. The epidermal deformation was not like the scaly patina of icthyosis; it seemed was more akin to the rubbery flesh of a cephalopod, and its shape was slightly reminiscent of an octopus with tentacles asprawl. It was discolored by a multiplicity of bruises and widening ulcers, although there seemed to be no sign yet of any quasi-gangrenous decay.
Shadows over Baker Street Page 13