“Is it blood, Holmes?” I asked. “Human blood?”
“There is the stain of human blood, yes. But there is also a second stain . . . a layer of coagulated blood from a species unknown. It has some traits of human blood, yet it more closely resembles the blood groups of aquatic vertebrates. The blood is both manlike and fishlike.”
I shuddered again, and looked at Jephson Norrys while he slept. His mouth opened and closed silently.
“Come, Watson, have a look at this.” Sherlock Holmes drew forth a folded sheet of foolscap. “Here is the letter which our friend Norrys sent me. You are in this as deep as I am, so you ought to read it.”
For brevity’s sake, I shall not divulge the full text. Suffice it to say that Norrys was the landholder of Exham Priory, a medieval estate in Anchester. In recent months he had grown aware of curious incidents in the priory, combined with peculiar changes in his own health.
Holmes was examining the loose-leaf notebook which Norrys had given him. On its cover, I recognized the royal emblem of Her late Majesty Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, of four years past. “Whatever else our friend Norrys might be, he is clearly a patriotic Englishman,” said Holmes. “You see, Watson? This memorandum book is one of the innumerable pieces of merchandise—most of them worthless cheapjack—which greedy souvenir merchants foisted upon the British populace in 1897 as mementos of the Jubilee. Look here.” From a slipcase inside the notebook’s cover, Sherlock Holmes withdrew a hand-colored square of pasteboard. It bore two photographic studies, side by side, like a stereopticon. The first image depicted Victoria Regina in her youth, with Prince Albert and some of the royal children. The second image showed our late queen as she was in ’97, in her widow’s weeds, wearing the crown of the Empire.
“Observe, Watson,” said my friend. “This pasteboard portrait of Her Majesty was included with the notebook during its manufacture, to justify the notebook as a Jubilee souvenir. The pasteboard is creased and dog-eared, yet still in its original slipcase. Clearly, Jephson Norrys has taken this card out of its case many times to gaze upon the likeness of his monarch and then returned the portrait to its rightful place in the notebook despite its long wear. The notebook’s leather cover is split and stained, yet the gilt of the royal Jubilee emblem is like new: it has been lovingly polished and cleaned, even though it has no pecuniary value. Our man Norrys is a loyal subject of the Crown, come what may. Hmm! Let us see what he wanted us to find in these pages.”
Holmes began reading the loose-leaf book which Norrys had lent him, and he passed each page to me in turn. Pasted into the notebook’s frontispiece was a tintype photograph, dated to Jubilee month of 1897. The portrait displayed a clear-eyed handsome man in a Norfolk jacket, and I felt a shiver through my spine when I realized that this was Jephson Norrys. I glanced at the slumbering deformity in the corner of our compartment: he seemed barely human now. How could any man have degenerated so thoroughly in so short a time?
The papers were all written in the same hand, which I took to be that of Norrys . . . yet, as I viewed the pages in their sequence, the handwriting gradually devolved from a neat schoolboy cursive into a clumsy scrawl. It took much the length of our railway journey for me to peruse the lot. In brief, Norrys had been a respectable Cornishman of good family and prospects until he was summoned to Anchester to assist his uncle Habakuk Norrys in the management of Exham Priory. The eleventh Baron Exham had quit this estate during Stuart times and fled to the Virginia colony without explanation: the priory had been Crown property ever since, until the elder Norrys had purchased it in 1894. The priory was not electrified, nor even gas-fitted, and Habakuk Norrys had begun the sorely needed task of renovation . . . until he acquired some peculiar malady which seemed to be progressively deforming him. Now the same ailment had afflicted Jephson, and it was steadily worsening.
I looked back at the letter posted to Holmes and scanned again its last paragraph. Several days earlier, with a paraffin-lantern and an electric torch, Jephson Norrys had descended into the subcellar of Exham Priory to discover the source of certain “eldritch sounds” (as he deemed them) which he had heard there at night: the rapid scrabbling of clawed feet, and eerie intonations like the chanting of obscene acolytes. The cellar was dark in full daylight. During his descent, Norrys had stumbled on the limestone staircase: his torch and lantern were extinguished, and he fell headlong down the staircase. In the darkness (Norrys wrote), his outflung hand touched something cold as stone, and circular and damp. A fragment of this broke away in his grasp. Without light, he made his way up the staircase as rapidly as his deformity permitted, and fled to one of the outbuildings on the priory’s grounds. He sought aid from the residents of the neighboring village: they spurned him, and the local constabulary refused to enter the priory. The district magistrate declined to take action.
The testament of Jephson Norrys ended in a demented scrawl that was barely legible: I had thought that the sounds might be rats in the walls: now I know they are something far worse. The whispering voices in the subcellar seemed human at first; I had feared that they might be burglars, or tramps, or smugglers evading the Welsh tariffs. But now I have seen the blood-caked dish, and I know: the lurkers in the priory’s cellar have no right to call themselves human . . .
“Come, Watson!” said Sherlock Holmes briskly. “Here we are at Birmingham, and the engine change for Anchester. I’ll collect our luggage while you see to wakening our companion.”
It was past midnight when the spur line brought us to an obscure railway station in northwestern Shropshire. A single brougham stood vigil in the cab rank, and—although the cabman glanced sharply at Norrys—Holmes persuaded him to convey us to Anchester. As the cabman took up his reins, Holmes returned the memorandum book to Norrys, who concluded his narrative:
“My agony grows steadily worse, gentlemen. Each morning, I waken to find myself slightly less human. At night, my desperate efforts at sleep are invaded by queer dreams: nightmares, in which I hear dark voices whispering obscene promises.” Norrys trembled, and there was a dampness in his eyes. “The police will not help me; my telegrams to the Home Office receive no reply. Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson: you two are my very last hope.”
“What do you hope to achieve?” I asked as gently as I could. “Your medical condition may well be irreversible, and—”
“I want the voices in the dark to go away,” Norrys quavered. “The voices and . . . and the sound of the rats in the walls!” Norrys clamped his hands over his ears, although his ears by now had dwindled to mere vestigial slits on his scaled flesh. “My life is nothing to me now. I have not entered the priory these last three days . . . yet I can still hear the whispering voices, and the rats in the walls!”
Our cab stopped abruptly, and the cabman informed us that he “warn’t going no nearer that there priory.” We paid him and alighted on a Shropshire country road, lined with high bushes of yellow gorse. Looming ahead of us was a dark tower, weirdly silhouetted in the moonlight, which Norrys assured us was our destination. Holmes switched on his battery lamp whilst I slid back the safety catch on my revolver.
Jephson Norrys had difficulty keeping up with us: he walked with a shambling gait, as if his legs were determined to fuse together and had to be forcibly separated with each stride.
The priory was a moss-crusted dilapidation at the edge of a limestone precipice. The grass all around the verge of the estate was blighted and yellow, and the night beasts which are so common to the countryside of England’s Salopian region—the bats, the owls, the voles—were strangely absent. I saw some broken headstones on the priory’s outermost grounds. Norrys produced an old brass ring with several warded church keys, and he used these to unlock the outer gate, then the inner gate, and then he finally unlatched the door leading into the priory itself.
A strange odor assailed us. Motioning for me to keep my weapon ready, Holmes led the way through the priory’s antechamber to a half-open doorway. Here we beheld a crumbling limestone stairway, des
cending into the depths of the priory’s cellars. To Norrys, I gently suggested: “Perhaps you should wait here . . .”
Jephson Norrys shook his head grimly and clenched the remnants of his teeth. “I will see this thing through, Doctor.”
We began our descent. I felt a maddening certainty that we were not alone in the cellar. All around us in the dark were muffled sounds, like the scurrying of tiny unseen creatures. I fancied I heard voices whispering nearby me, plucking at my mind as though seeking entrance. Voices accosted me, proclaiming themselves as denizens of many centuries and climes. I understood only some few of them. A voice speaking French introduced himself to me as Montagny, a courtier of Louis XIII. Another sentience, speaking in baroque dialects of English, professed to be the disembodied intellect of James Woodville, a merchant of Cromwell’s time. My grasp of Latin was sufficient to perceive another voice which claimed to be the mind of Titus Sempronius, quaestor palatii of the Roman Empire. All of these voices, and others, beseeched me to heed them.
“Can you hear it, Watson?” There was awe in my friend Sherlock’s voice. “A parliament of minds! There seem to be many intelligences here: a harvest of intellects, gathered from several millennia. I recognize one voice’s speech as predynastic Chinese, and another employs a Greek dialect. Like shadows out of time, projected into our midst. ’Pon my word, Watson, this is astonishing!”
“How is it possible, Holmes?” I asked while we descended the staircase.
“Perhaps these voices somehow transcend time itself. Watson, have you read the works of Henri Bergson, or Loubachevskii? They postulate a fourth dimension of space, enabling instantaneous communication across vast gulfs of distance and vast intervals of time. I wonder if—”
“You always did talk too much, Holmes,” said a harsh voice, somewhat louder and nearer than the others.
In the pale glow of Holmes’s battery lamp, I beheld a strange man. He was exceedingly tall and thin, round-shouldered, with a high-domed forehead and a protuberant face punctuated by two deeply sunken eyes. As there was something fishlike in the appearance of Jephson Norrys, there was much in this man that seemed reptilian. He stood midpoint along the flight of steps on the limestone staircase beneath us, glowering malevolently upward at Holmes.
“Dr. Watson, I have the honor of presenting Professor Moriarty,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes. “Although it had been my understanding that Moriarty long ago gave quits to this earthly realm, and changed his forwarding address to the realm of the dead.”
“Merely a temporary inconvenience, I assure you, Mr. Holmes,” said Moriarty. From the darkness behind him, there came the chanting unison of many unseen throats:
Tekeli-li, tekeli-li!
Tch’kaa, t’cnela ngöi!
Tekeli-li, teka’ngai,
Haklic, vnikhla elöi . . .
I raised my revolver, but Holmes’s hand on my arm restrained me. “Steady on, Watson. Professor Moriarty has been killed at least once already . . . or perhaps twice, if those rumors I encountered in Kowloon are accurate.” Gesturing for Jephson Norrys to draw closer, Holmes spoke: “Come, Moriarty! What is your unholy interest in this man?”
“None whatever,” Moriarty replied. “Norrys is merely the tenant of this place. It is the priory itself which we covet. Of all places on Earth, this priory’s subcellar is uniquely suited to our needs. By we, of course, I mean myself and the Elder Gods.”
Behind Moriarty, the chanting grew louder.
“I have long suspected, Moriarty, that I am your true prey,” said Sherlock Holmes. “This unfortunate fellow Norrys was merely your bait. Now that I am here, will you release Jephson Norrys and restore him to his manly condition?”
Moriarty spread his long spidery hands, palms upturned. “You wrong me, Holmes. I am innocent of any crime against Norrys. The taint which you behold is in his blood. The Norrys bloodline is obliquely descended from the house of de la Poer, the ancestral heirs to this estate . . . and the inheritors of its curse. By returning to these ancient grounds, first Habakuk Norrys and then his nephew Jephson have awakened the long-dormant taint in their ancestral blood.”
“Tekeli-li!” said the voices, as if in agreement with Moriarty.
“What do you want of me?” Sherlock Holmes asked.
“That’s better,” said Moriarty, rubbing his thin hands together. “You will join me, Holmes, in a long journey . . . a one-way passage, without a return ticket. A voyage to Yith.”
“Where’s that when it’s at home, then?” asked Jephson Norrys.
Moriarty waved a hand airily. “Yith is the home of the Old Ones, countless millions of miles from here . . . yet, when the stars are right, and the dimensions of space can be bent to the Elder Gods’ whim, Yith lies only a few inches beyond Shropshire’s realm in this cellar.” Beckoning us to draw nearer, Moriarty pointed into the darkness behind him at the base of the stairs. “This way.”
And now a most peculiar violet-colored glow appeared at the foot of the stairs. It began as a single point of light, then it rapidly swelled and enlarged until it formed a glowing sphere, then it suddenly flattened into a hexagon of violet-colored light in midair. The hexagon’s vertical axis expanded until it became coffin-shaped.
A wind sprang up in the still air of the priory’s cellar. I felt a breeze rush headlong past me down the stairway toward the hexagon of light. The wind clutched at my sleeves, at my coattails and cravat. A piece of lichenous moss suddenly tore loose from the wall near my elbow: I saw the moss whirl through the air, borne on the current of wind, until it was suddenly and awfully pulled into the violet-colored aura, where it vanished. In a paroxysm of horror, I observed that the peculiar glowing hexagon was a vortex of some sort . . . siphoning air and life from this catacomb to some hideous place.
And now I heard the voices again. Beneath the strange alien chant, I heard the whispers of human dialects: French, Latin, Old English, and others . . . beckoning within my mind.
“D’you hear them, Watson?” said Holmes beside me. I saw the look on his face, and I shuddered. Sherlock Holmes was trembling with a rapture that seemed nearly spiritual. “Hear them, Watson! All the minds that have preceded me into this place: intellects out of time, from Earth’s past and Earth’s future. Some snatched unwillingly, some abducted, yet all of them awaiting me on the far side of that vortex . . . and gloriously sentient! Think of all the secrets . . . all the mysteries which their abducted wisdom can reveal to us! Come, Watson! Let us visit to Yith, and pay a call on the Old Ones.”
“No, Holmes!” I cried. “It’s a trick! We daren’t . . .” And then, as I spoke, I heard one other whisper joining the alien chorus. This voice was gentle, and fair, and familiar . . . and I heard her sweet words easily above the growing howl of the wind.
“John,” said the beckoning voice. “Darling John, here I am . . .”
I knew that voice, though I have not heard it for these past seven years. The voice came from the center of the vortex. I knew I must not turn toward it. I knew I must not raise my head to see. And yet . . . I looked.
Within the glowing hexagon I beheld my dear departed wife, Mary, exactly as I had known her before her last consumptive illness carried her off. With all my intellect, I knew the truth: she was dead, she is buried in Nunhead Cemetery. No power in the universe could restore life to my beloved Mary Morstan and convey her, smiling and complete, to the other side of the unearthly portal from which she now stood beckoning me. And yet she was there . . .
Suddenly a memory from my university days broke the surface of my consciousness. I recalled one of my professors demonstrating a peculiar rhizomatous flower, native to certain American swamps. Insects are lured to the deadly leaves of this plant by the sweet nectar which it exudes from its flowers to entice unsuspecting prey. It is Dionaea muscipula, or Venus’s-flytrap. But why was I suddenly reminded of . . .
Sherlock Holmes had a death grip on my arm. I felt him pulling me, step-by-step, down those limestone stairs toward the beckoning
vortex. I tried to resist him, as I tried to resist the enticements of my departed wife, whom I knew to be not my wife at all. “Come to me, John . . .” she whispered. “Hurry to me, for the vestibule between the worlds cannot stay open much longer.” And I knew that I could not resist . . .
“I am coming, Mary.” The words escaped my lips, despite myself.
Somewhere far away, yet very close, I heard Moriarty’s laughter.
“Can’t you see it’s a trap?” Someone rushed past me on the stairs. I saw Jephson Norrys fling himself headlong at Moriarty. For a moment they grappled at the brink of the grim vortex: Moriarty within it, Jephson still outside it on the bottom stair of the subcellar. I saw the two men struggle, yet it was clear that Moriarty was the stronger. Laughing dementedly, he gripped Norrys by the throat and bent him easily backward, threatening to snap his spine. With Moriarty’s hands ’round his throat, I saw Jephson Norrys gasping for air like a fish out of water while the wind of the vortex clutched and tore at Norrys’s coat.
Something fell from his pocket. I saw that it was Norrys’s memorandum book. It struck the staircase, and the gray limestone split it open. I saw loose-leaf pages scattered by the wind, whirling in spirals of air. I saw the tintype photograph of Jephson Norrys in his younger days, snatched by the gale force and sucked into the vortex. I saw something else fall from the memorandum book. In the dim glow of the battery lamp, I saw a glimpse of color . . .
Moriarty saw it, too. I saw him release his grip on Jephson Norrys, who fell sprawling while Moriarty looked toward the foot of the limestone staircase. As Norrys fell, I saw Moriarty’s face change. His features softened; his expression of leering cruelty became almost wistful. I saw the face of a man who had suddenly glimpsed something precious which he feared was lost forever. I saw Moriarty bend, and reach down to pick it up . . .
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