The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

by Brian Stableford

  The smallest cygnet longed to ask how wide the world was, but feared the answer he might receive.

  “Ugly little devil can’t keep up,” the swan husband observed. “He’s slowing us all down. The rats will have him if we’re not careful.”

  “We’re not in any hurry,” the swan wife replied, “and it’s up to us to make sure that the rats don’t get to him.”

  Unfortunately, the small cygnet overheard everything that was said of him, and realized that he was an embarrassment to his family. He would have run away had he not been so terribly afraid of the rats. Fortunately, the swan husband was a fearsome deterrent, not merely to rats and magpies but foxes and humans, so the smallest cygnet was able to do as much growing up as he was capable of doing—which was, alas, not nearly as much as his handsome brothers and sisters. With every week that passed the ignominy of the smallest cygnet’s existence was further increased, and so was his shame.

  Autumn came, and it was time for the swans to migrate.

  “The rest are ready,” said the swan wife, “but I don’t think the little one’s up to it. Perhaps we should give the Mediterranean a miss this year. How bad can winter be?”

  “Ask the frogs and the squirrels,” the swan husband replied. “It’s so bad they try to sleep through the whole thing. I’m too old to learn to hibernate—and what kind of swans would we be if we didn’t fly south for the winter? The runt will have to keep up as best he can.”

  “We really ought to stay,” said the swan wife, dutifully—but it was obvious to everyone, including the smallest cygnet, that she didn’t really mean it. This time, the smallest cygnet figured, it really was time to run away, for the sake of the family. It was bad enough that he was holding them back on the shore of the remote lake; how could they possibly hold up their heads on the Mediterranean with something as small and ugly as him in tow?

  So the ugly cygnet went into the forest and hid, until all the swans had flown away.

  Had it not been for global warming, the ugly cygnet would not have made it through the long winter, but the winter was exceptionally mild. The lake never froze, and the competition for food was so relaxed that the ugly cygnet managed to find enough food to stay alive and to provide for such meager growth as he was capable of making. He knew that he would never catch up with his siblings in terms of their size, but he did hope that he might one day match them for whiteness. Alas, every time he looked at his reflection in the water he saw that he was getting more and more colorful with every week that passed. By the time spring arrived, he was a vivid patchwork. He knew that his parents and siblings would laugh at him, but he looked forward to their return nevertheless. They were, after all, the only family he had.

  But when the swan wife and the swan husband returned to their nesting-site to raise a new brood, they did not recognize the little creature that emerged squawking from the weeds, joyfully addressing them as “Mum” and “Dad”.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” the swan husband said. “You’re not a swan at all—you’re a duck.”

  “Technically,” the swan wife pointed out, “he’s a drake. But the effect is the same. He’s definitely not one of ours.”

  “But I am!” the smallest cygnet protested. “My egg might have got into your nest by accident, but you sat on me, and protected me from the rats and the magpies, and the foxes and the humans. You’re my real father and my real mother, no matter what appearances may say.”

  “No way,” said the swan husband.

  “We couldn’t have made a mistake like that,” said the swan wife.

  The ugly cygnet realized then that he was not and never had been a real cygnet, and that he would never, under any imaginable circumstances, be accepted as a swan.

  “But I can fly,” he said. “Not as fast or as far as you, perhaps, but I can fly. I can find out for myself how wide the world is.”

  “Good idea,” said the swan husband.

  “The sooner the better,” said the swan wife. Being a swan, she had the grace to wait until the drake had flown away before she added, in a tone of deep disgust: “Me, raise a duck! As if!”

  “Nasty little paint-pot with delusions of grandeur,” said the swan husband, nodding his handsome head in agreement. “Still—it all goes to prove what they say. Once a loser, always a loser. It’s the way of the world. He can fly all the way around it if he wants to, but he won’t find anywhere different.”

  ART IN THE BLOOD

  “Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.” (A. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”)

  It was not yet five o’clock; Mycroft had barely sunk into his nook and taken up the Morning Post when the Secretary appeared at the door of the reading room and gestured brusquely with his right hand. It was a summons to the Strangers’ Room, supplemented by a particular curl of the little finger, which told him that this was no casual visitation but a matter in which the Diogenes Club had an interest of its own.

  Mycroft sighed, and hauled his overabundant flesh out of his armchair. The rules of the club forbade him to ask the Secretary what the import of the summons was, so he was mildly surprised to see his brother Sherlock waiting by the window in the Strangers’ Room, looking out over Pall Mall. Sherlock had brought him petty puzzles to solve on several occasions, but never yet a matter of significance to any of the Club’s hidden agendas. It was obvious from the rigidity of Sherlock’s stance that this was no trivial matter, and that it had gone badly thus far.

  There was another man in the room, already seated. He seemed tired; his grey eyes—which were not dissimilar in hue to those of the Holmes brothers—were restless and haunted, but he was making every effort to maintain his composure. He was obviously a merchant seaman, perhaps a second mate. The unevenness of the faded tan that still marked his face—the lower part of which had long been protected by a beard—testified that he had returned England from the tropics less than a month ago. The odors clinging to his clothing revealed that he had recently visited Limehouse, where he had partaken of a generous pipe of opium. The bulge in his left-hand coat pocket was suggestive of a medicine bottle, but Mycroft was too scrupulous a man to leap to the conclusion that it must be laudanum. Mycroft judged that the seaman’s attitude was one of reluctant resignation: that of a man determined to conserve his dignity even though he had lost hope.

  Mycroft greeted his brother with an appropriate appearance of warmth, and waited for an introduction.

  “May I present John Chevaucheux, Mycroft,” Sherlock said, immediately abandoning his position by the window. “He was referred to me by Doctor Watson, who saw that his predicament was too desperate to be salvageable by medical treatment.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” the sailor said, coming briefly to his feet before sinking back into his chair. The stranger’s hand was cold, but its grip was firm.

  “Doctor Watson is not here,” Mycroft observed. It was not his habit to state the obvious, but the doctor’s absence seemed to require explanation; Watson clung to Sherlock like a shadow nowadays, avid to leech yet another marketable tale from his reckless dabbling in the mercurial affairs of distressed individuals.

  “The good doctor had a prior engagement,” Sherlock reported. His tone was neutral but Mycroft deduced that Sherlock had taken advantage of his friend’s enforced absence to carry this particular enquiry to its end. Apparently, this was one “adventure” Sherlock did not want to re-read in The Strand, no matter how much admiring literary embellishment might be added to it.

  Given that Chevaucheux’s accent identified him as a Dorset man, and that his name suggested descent from Huguenot refugees, Mycroft thought it more likely that the seaman’s employers were based in Southampton than in London. If the man had come to consult Watson as a medical practitioner, rather than as Sherlock’s accomplice, he must have encountered him some time ago, probably in India—and must have known him well enough to be able to track him down in London despite his retirement. These inference
s, though far less than certain, became more probable in combination with the ominous news—which was ominous news, although it had not been reported in the Post—of the sudden death, some seven days ago, of Captain Pye of the S.S. Goshen. The Goshen had dropped anchor in Southampton Water on the twelfth of June, having set out from Batavia six weeks before. Captain Pye was by no means clubbable, but he was known to more than one member of the Diogenes as a trustworthy agent.

  “Do you know how Dan Pye died, Mr. Chevaucheux?” Mycroft asked, cutting right to the heart of the matter. Unlike Sherlock, he did not like to delay matters with unnecessary chitchat.

  “He was cursed to death, sir,” Chevaucheux told him, bluntly. He had obviously been keeping company with Sherlock long enough to expect that Holmesian processes of deduction would sometimes run ahead of his own.

  “Cursed, you say?” Mycroft raised an eyebrow, though not in jest. “Some misadventure in the Andamans, perhaps?” If Pye had been about the Club’s business—although he would not necessarily have known whose business he was about—the Andamans were the most likely spot for him to run into trouble.

  “No, sir,” Chevaucheux said, gravely. “He was cursed to death right here in the British Isles, though the mad hatred that activated the curse was seething for weeks at sea.”

  “If you know the man responsible,” Mycroft said, amiably, “where’s the mystery? Why did Watson refer you to my brother?” The real puzzle, of course, was why Sherlock had brought the seaman here, having failed to render any effective assistance—but Mycroft was wary of spelling that out. This could be no common matter of finding proofs to satisfy a court of law; the Secretary’s little finger had told him that. This mystery went beyond mere matters of motive and mechanism; it touched on matters of blood.

  Sherlock had reached into his pocket while Mycroft was speaking, and produced a small object the size of a snuffbox. His expression, as he held it out to Mycroft, was a study in grimness and frustration. Mycroft took it from him, and inspected it carefully.

  It was a figurine carved in stone: a chimerical figure, part-human—if only approximately—and part-fish. It was not a mermaid such as a lonely sailor might whittle from tropic wood or walrus ivory, however; although the head was vaguely humanoid the torso was most certainly not, and the piscine body bore embellishments that seemed more akin to tentacles than fins. There was something of the lamprey about it—even about the mouth that might have been mistaken for human—and something of the uncanny. Mycroft felt no revelatory thrill as he handled it, but he knew that the mere sight of it was enough to feed an atavistic dream. Opium was not the best medicine for the kind of headaches that Chevaucheux must have suffered of late, but neither he nor Watson was in a position to know that.

  “Let me have your lens, Sherlock,” Mycroft said.

  Sherlock passed him the magnifying-glass, without bothering to point out that the lamplight in the Strangers’ Room was poor, or that the workmanship of the sculpture was so delicate that a fine-pointed needle and the services of a light microscope would be required to investigate the record of its narrow coverts. Mycroft knew that Sherlock would take some meager delight in amplifying whatever conclusions he could reach with the aid of the woefully inadequate means to hand.

  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 towards 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 Doctor 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 has 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 Saint 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. Doctor 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.r />
  “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.