“‘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 one another. 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 like 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 sea-sickness 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. Saint Anthony’s fire, that is.
“Doctor 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, although 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’s 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, although 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 travelled 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 ta
lk 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, but 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 whomever might be able to help me. I knew Doctor 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 Doctor 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 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.
Mycroft had never seen anything like it before, although he had heard of similar deformations. He knew that he ought to make a closer investigation of the symptoms, but he felt a profound reluctance to touch the diseased flesh.
“Watson has no idea how to treat it,” Sherlock said, unnecessarily. “Is there any member of the Diogenes Club who can help?”
Mycroft pondered this question for some moments before shaking his head. “I doubt that anyone in England has a ready cure for this kind of disease,” he said. “But I will give you the address of one of our research laboratories in Sussex. They will certainly be interested to study the development of the disease, and may well be able to palliate the symptoms. If you are strong, Mr. Chevaucheux, you might survive this, but I can make no promises.” He turned to Sherlock. “Can you honor your promise to find this man Rockaby?”
“Of course,” Sherlock said, stiffly.
“Then you must do so, without delay—and you must persuade him to lead you to the store of artifacts from which he obtained this stone. I shall keep this one, if Mr. Chevaucheux will permit, but you must take the rest to the laboratory in Sussex. I will ask the Secretary to send two of the functionaries with you, because there might be hard labor involved and this is not the kind of case in which Watson ought to be allowed to interest himself. When the artifacts are safe—or as safe as they can be, in human hands—you must return here, to tell me exactly what happened in Dorset.”
Sherlock nodded his head. “Expect me within the week,” he said, with his customary self-confidence.
“I will,” Mycroft assured him, in spite of the fact that he could not echo that confidence.
* * * *
Sherlock was as good as his word, at least in the matter of timing. He arrived in the Strangers’ Room seven days later, at four-thirty in the afternoon. He was more than a little haggard, but he had summoned all his pride and self-discipline to the task of maintaining his image as a master of reason. Even so, he did not rise from his seat when Mycroft entered the room.
“I received a telegram from Lewes this morning,” Mycroft told him. “I have the bare facts—but not the detail. You have done well. You may not think so, but you have.”
“If you are about to tell me that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy....” Sherlock said, in a fractured tone whose annoyance was directed more at himself than his brother.
“I would not presume to insult you,” Mycroft said, a trifle dishonestly. Tell me the story, please—in your own words.”
“The first steps were elementary,” Sherlock said, morosely. “Had Rockaby been in London, the Irregulars would have found him in a matter of hours; as things were, I had to put the word out through my contacts in Limehouse. Wherever Rockaby was, I knew that he had to be dosing himself against the terrors of his condition, and that was bound to leave a trail. I located him in Portsmouth. He had gone there in search of a ship to carry him back to the Indian Ocean, but no one would take him on because he was so plainly mad, and he had given up some time before, in favor of drinking himself into oblivion. Chevaucheux and I went down there post haste, and found him in a wretched condition.
“There were no signs of Captain Pye’s disease on Rockaby’s body—which gave me some confidence that the stone was not carrying any common-or-garden contagion—but his mind was utterly deranged. My questions got scant response, but Chevaucheux had slightly better luck. Rockaby recognized him, in spite of his madness, and seemed to feel some residual obligation to him, left over from a time when they were on better terms. ‘I shouldn’t of done it, Jacky,’ he said to Chevaucheux. ‘It warn’t my fault, really, but I shouldn’t of. I shouldn’t of let the blood have its way—an’ I’m damned now, blood or no blood. Won’t die but can’t live. Stay away, lad. Go away and stay away.’
“Chevaucheux asked him where the remainder of the stones could be found. I doubt that he would have told us, had he been well, but his condition worked to our advantage in that matter. Chevaucheux had to work hard, constantly reminding Rockaby of the ties that had bound them as children and shipmates, and in the end he wormed the location out of him. The place-names meant nothing to me, and probably meant nothing to anyone who had not roamed back and forth across the isle with the child that Rockaby once was, but Chevaucheux knew the exact spot near the sea-cliffs that Rockaby meant. ‘Leave ’em be, Jacky,’ the madman pleaded. ‘Don’t disturb the ground. Leave ’em be. Let ’em come in their own time. Don’t hurry them, no matter how you burn.’ We did not take the advice, of course.”
Mycroft observed that Sherlock seemed to regret that, now. “You went to Saint Aldhelm’s Head,” he prompted. “To the sea-cliffs.”
“We went by day,” Sherlock said, his eyes glazing slightly as he slipped back into narrative mode. “Th
e weather was poor—grey and drizzling—but it was daylight. Alas, daylight does not last. Chevaucheux led us to the spot readily enough, but the old mine where the stone-workers had tunneled into the cliff-face was difficult to reach, because the waves had long since carried away the old path. The mine-entrance was half-blocked, because the flat layers of stone had weathered unevenly, cracking and crumbling—but Rockaby had contrived a passage of sorts, and we squeezed through without disturbing the roof.
“When your clubmen set to work with a will, one plying a pickaxe and the other a miner’s shovel, I was afraid the whole cliff might come down on us, but we were forty yards deep from the cliff-face, and the surrounding rock had never been assailed by the waves. I never heard such a sound, though, as the wind got up and the sea became violent. The crash of the waves seemed to surge through the stone, to emerge from the walls like the moaning of a sick giant—and that was before your men began pulling the images out and heaping them up.
“You studied the one that Chevaucheux gave you by lamplight, and magnified its image as you did so, but you can’t have the least notion of how that crowd of faces appeared by the light of our lamps, in that Godforsaken hole. More than a few were considerably larger than the one Rockaby sent to Captain Pye, but it wasn’t just their size that made them seem magnified: it was their malevolence. They weren’t carrying a disease in the same way that a dead man’s rags might harbor microbes, but there was a contagion in them regardless, which radiated from their features.
“Chevaucheux had shown me the stone faces built into the houses in Worth Matravers, but they’d been exposed for decades or centuries to the sun and the wind and the salt in the air. They had turned back into mere ugly faces, as devoid of virtue as of vice. These were different—and if they had stared at me the way they stared at poor Chevaucheux....”
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels Page 7