My eye was caught by a true aberration: a jellyfish whose greyish pulpy frame was studded with dozens of protruding spheres. Organelles or polyps, I thought, leaning in for a closer look.
Then one of the spheres split open along a fissure to reveal an eye.
I leapt back with a startled cry. In my shock I collided with one of the larger specimen jars. It rocked on its shelf, formaldehyde slopping around inside. I caught and steadied it, breathing hard.
Holmes chuckled darkly. “What gave you such a fright?”
“That… that abhorrent jellyfish thing,” I said. “It opened its eye. It… it looked at me.”
My companion approached the jar. “I doubt that. The creature is long dead. The pressure of your foot upon the floorboard disturbed the balance of the shelf, which in turn disturbed the jar and its contents.”
“I hope you are right.”
“It would seem friend Whateley is a collector of biological anomalies,” Holmes said, “and a follower of the Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, who also pursues the incongruous in nature and is renowned as the discoverer of the black crested mangabey of the Congo. Look.” He pointed to a workbench upon which sat several large leather-bound reference works. “Here is Oudemans’ book on sea serpents. It is well thumbed and, if the slips of paper sprouting from between the pages are anything to go by, well annotated by Whateley himself. And there beside it is a copy of Unaussprechlichen Tieren, or Unnameable Beasts, Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt’s lesser-known work, a companion volume to his Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Again, Whateley appears to have consulted the tome assiduously.”
Holmes commenced leafing through an assortment of papers, which littered the workbench alongside the books.
“Mrs Owen advised us not to touch anything,” I pointed out.
“You almost knocked over one of the specimen jars,” my companion replied. “Next to that sin, what I am doing is a mere peccadillo.”
“Hurry it up, at least.”
“Do you fear Whateley’s untimely return? Or is it that you dislike being in this room?”
“Principally the latter. Well, no, wholly the latter.”
“These corpses are not attractive, but their being dead presents an insurmountable obstacle to hurting us. I thought you were made of sterner stuff, Watson.”
Normally I was but, truth to tell, the way the jellyfish creature had “looked” at me had left me thoroughly discomfited. I could not help but think that at any moment another of the specimens might exhibit sudden locomotion. That one there, for instance, which was like some mutated elephant foetus; or that one, which was seemingly a hybrid of rat, centipede and eel and, according to the label, came from England’s own Severn Estuary. These misbegotten creatures should not exist, so by extension whatever hold death had over them could well be tenuous. Any of them could yet snap into life at the least provocation.
“A-ha!” exclaimed Holmes. “What is this?” From amongst the papers he withdrew a letter. “The handwriting is more than familiar. It is, in point of fact, familial. Do you recognise it? You should.”
“Even if you had not dropped such a heavy hint, Holmes, the heading on the notepaper gives the game away. The Diogenes Club, Pall Mall, St James’s. In light of that and your remarks, who else can the letter’s author be but your brother?”
“Quite so, Watson. You are not nearly the dullard you make yourself out to be in your tales. Now, what can Mycroft want with our American specialist in the extremities of the animal kingdom? Hum! That is interesting. The letter is inviting Whateley to the Diogenes to give a talk.”
“A talk? At the Diogenes?” The club, of course, was famous for the rule that speech was forbidden on the premises. Any member caught violating this directive three times was blackballed.
“I think we both know what that means,” said Holmes. “The talk was intended for the ears of that select subset of Diogenes members who belong to a certain clandestine club-within-a-club.”
“The Dagon Club.”
“Indeed. Brother Mycroft requested the pleasure of Nathaniel Whateley’s presence this April just past ‘to share with us your knowledge of non-Linnaean species and taxonomical deviations’.”
“Did Whateley accept the invitation?”
“There is one way to find out for certain.” Holmes consulted his watch. “But we must make haste. It is nearly eight, and Mycroft’s habits of punctuality are unbending.”
CHAPTER SIX
Arbiters Upon the Unspeakable
WE MADE IT TO THE DIOGENES CLUB WITH ONE minute to spare. Mycroft was in the lobby, collecting his belongings in readiness to leave at his usual time of departure, twenty past eight on the dot. He seemed disgruntled by our arrival, for he suspected – not without justification – that whatever business we were on would throw out the finely calibrated clockwork of his daily routine. His nod of greeting was of the most peremptory and unenthusiastic. Nonetheless he beckoned us to adjourn with him to the Stranger’s Room, the one corner of the club wherein conversation was permitted.
“To what do I owe the honour, Sherlock?” the corpulent older Holmes asked. “Does this have anything to do with the letter I received from you yesterday? You should know by now that I respond to such enquiries in my own good time. Not that I have a response for you in this instance. I know of no person such as you have described.”
“I have come on a not unrelated matter.”
“Well, get on with it. A working dinner awaits me at the Pugin Room. Westminster grandees require my direction on the questions of the annexation of Tongaland and the unrest in Borneo. If I do not tell them exactly what to do, doubtless they will formulate some foolish and inappropriate policy that will cost the nation dear.”
“Did, or did not, a Mr Nathaniel Whateley give a talk to the Dagon Club in April?”
“He did,” said Mycroft. “Had the nerve to demand payment for it, what’s more, but that is Americans for you. I threw a couple of pounds his way and he seemed content.”
“How did the talk go?”
“It was fairly interesting. Whateley, of course, had no idea he was addressing a secret inner circle of the Diogenes, a body of men dedicated to collating and cross-referencing every scrap of data we can about the Elder Gods, Old Ones and so forth. He might perhaps have wondered why we asked so many questions and made such copious notes, but I believe he took it to indicate fascination and was appropriately flattered.”
The Dagon Club, incidentally, was no mere intellectual exercise. Mycroft and his cohorts were not simply dedicated to compiling extensive files on all known materialisations of the cosmic gods and the activities of those who worshipped them. Each man also occupied a position of influence within a particular national sphere, be it the press, politics, or the judiciary. Each was therefore well placed to control how such arcane affairs were addressed at the highest levels.
In large part this consisted of preventing the public promulgation of details about the subject. Newspaper reports that even hinted at the existence of powerful, hostile interstellar entities were ruthlessly spiked. Should a rumour of a relevant nature begin to trickle through the halls of the Palace of Westminster, it was quashed. Criminals of the kind Holmes and I repeatedly ran up against, those individuals rash enough to truck with Cthulhu and his kin, never got to expound upon their deeds in court; either their defence barristers browbeat them into silence, or their cases never reached trial and they themselves were summarily consigned to penal servitude and more or less left to rot.
Mycroft had set up the Dagon in the early 1880s as a way of helping counteract the gods’ malign machinations. As he himself put it, “The aim is to create a hidden bulwark between ordinary citizens and the forces that threaten our world, so that the one remains oblivious to the other.” After the events detailed in The Shadwell Shadows, and being hardly a man of action, Mycroft resolved to do it on his own terms, in a manner that suited him and his proclivities. Siting the Dagon within the Diogenes was not just
a personal convenience, but also ironically fitting. A place where speech was forbidden, where a handful of men would arbitrate upon the unspeakable. The Dagon Club, alas, is no more; but I shall deal with the matter of its grim demise in the final volume of this trilogy.
“Whateley,” said Holmes now, “may have some connection with another American whose identity I have yet to establish but whose plight shows every sign of contact with Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones.”
Mycroft’s double chin sprouted a third fold as he lowered his head to look speculatively at his brother. “Tell me more.”
After Holmes had outlined our recent exploits, Mycroft said, “Well now, here’s a thing. I first heard of Whateley after a colleague drew my attention to an abstract of his work published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Up until two years ago Whateley was pursuing postgraduate research at Miskatonic University, his area of specialism being zoological oddities. Miskatonic University, as I am sure you are aware, is situated in Arkham, a town just north of Boston which happens to be the locus of a disproportionately high incidence of occult phenomena.”
“Arkham is not unknown to me,” said Holmes, “nor is Miskatonic University. One can hardly delve into the mysteries we do and fail to have heard of either place.”
“Likewise. Arkham crops up again and again in the Dagon Club’s files. That whole corner of Massachusetts is a hotbed of Outer God and Old One manifestation. It is almost as though there is some sort of eldritch faultline there, a crack in the world that draws the gods to it.”
“London is not so dissimilar.”
“One might argue that the metropolis – any metropolis – is likely to yield a greater than average quantity of uncanny events due to its concentration of human beings. Arkham, by contrast, is a relatively small conurbation with a population of no more than twenty thousand, yet the per capita rate of weirdness is extraordinary, far in excess of that found anywhere else. You should read the Arkham Gazette some time. I have copies sent over, and it is a veritable treasure trove of the abnormal. And what is true of Arkham is true of neighbouring towns such as Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport, and true too of its rural environs; the forests, hills and swamps that sprawl for miles around, dotted here and there with small farms and lonely villages but otherwise sparsely populated and largely uncivilised. But I digress. Nathaniel Whateley. Amongst the many subjects he touched upon in his talk was a journey he undertook by paddle steamer up the Miskatonic River in ’93. His stated goal was to discover and bring back a shoggoth.”
Both Holmes and I were taken aback.
“A madman!” I declared. “The very idea of it! How would one go about capturing one of those protoplasmic giants? How could one hope to corral and contain it?”
“Not a madman,” said Mycroft. “Whateley struck me as quite a clever and enterprising young individual. Ambitious though misinformed. To him a shoggoth was just another semi-mythical wild beast, like the yeti of the Himalayas or its North American counterpart the sasquatch. ‘I hear of shoggoths everywhere,’ he said to us, ‘and was keen to bag one for myself.’ He thought reports of the creature’s enormous size and amoeboid propensities, not to mention its vicious rapacity, were exaggerated. At any rate, the expedition did not end well; something to do with an attack upon the boat by Red Indians, which he was lucky to survive. His companions did not, all save one, a fellow student, name of…” Mycroft frowned, rifling through the extensive filing cabinets of his brain for the morsel of information. “Conroy. That’s it. Zachariah Conroy. He too made it out alive but, sad to say, not without receiving horrendous injuries at the hands of the savages.”
“Horrendous how?” said Holmes.
“Dismemberment or mutilation of some kind. Again, Whateley did not go into specifics. I was later to discover, via a contact at Miskatonic University, that the failure of the expedition led to his being stripped of his research funding and expelled.”
“I wonder that he mentioned the expedition at all to you and your fellow Dagon Club members,” I said. “Given its outcome, would he not have been wiser to keep quiet about it, especially before such an august audience?”
“I thought so myself, Doctor,” said Mycroft, “but there struck me as being a certain shamelessness about Whateley, along with a deep-seated iconoclastic streak. He seemed almost to revel in the audacity of the enterprise and to feel that its dark conclusion somehow justified rather than invalidated it. At any rate, it is clear that he was obliged to leave Arkham under a cloud and relocate to London where he continues to conduct his studies, with a whole ocean dividing him from the ignominy. I believe an inheritance keeps him solvent financially.”
“One presumes no shoggoth was found,” I said.
“I doubt, if Whateley had managed to track one down, any of the expedition would have lived to tell the tale,” said Mycroft. “So, Sherlock, with the revelation about Zachariah Conroy, have I furnished you with the identity of the unknown American about whom you wrote to me? Or is there another badly mutilated young Yankee scientist we know nothing about?”
“It is at least feasible that Conroy is the man in Bethlem.”
“Perhaps I ought to have made the connection myself, but Whateley was vague on the nature of Conroy’s wounds. ‘Injuries inflicted by savages’ could cover a multitude of sins. I presumed he had been scalped or burned with hot coals, as is the usual fate of the Red Indian’s captured enemies. A missing hand and a half-melted face seem just as liable to be the result of accident as of deliberate action.”
“I concur, yet it is not impossible that a tormentor might derive satisfaction from harming a victim thus.”
“The question remains, though, what is Conroy doing over here too? Does it have something to do with Whateley?”
“Assuming the inmate is Conroy, it is knowledge I can endeavour to tease out of him. The very mention of his own name might well snap him out of his fugue state. Do you not agree, Watson?”
“It might serve as a key to the door, as it were,” I said.
“What puzzles me somewhat,” said Mycroft, “is the term that both he and Whateley have employed – r’luhlloig – and that serves to link the two of them. You are sure Whateley’s landlady had it right?”
“Mrs Owen seems a reliable witness,” said Holmes. “It is possible that Whateley was uttering something else altogether and she misconstrued it as an Irish surname, which we in turn have misconstrued as the word Conroy used. The odds are against, however. The simpler explanation is the more persuasive.”
“And you say it means ‘hidden mind’?”
Holmes and I both nodded.
“I shall take your word for it,” said Mycroft, “not being as well versed in R’lyehian as you two. What can it signify?”
“Mrs Owen said that Whateley appeared to be addressing his comments to ‘Reilly-Logue’, hence she took it to be a name. She might be correct in that surmise, but if so, it is not a name that I have come across before.”
“Nor I.”
“On the other hand, she might be mistaken. R’luhlloig could be some abstract concept, hitherto unrecorded in any of the literature. I did search for instances of it last night in my reference library but turned up none.”
“What if it were a phrase concocted by Whateley and Conroy together? A kind of secret code shared between them? That would account for their both uttering it. Did that not occur to you, Sherlock?”
One could easily forget that Mycroft, by Holmes’s own admission, was the cleverer of the two. His bulk and apparent indolence belied a keen intellect and it was always surprising when he set forth a hypothesis that had escaped his younger sibling. It was also, from my vantage point, refreshing to see my friend put on the back foot for once.
“It did not,” Holmes confessed, with a smidgeon of chagrin, “and that is a line of investigation I shall pursue. Good work, Mycroft.”
His brother dismissed the compliment with a wave. “Our lives may not dovetail much, brother, but it is always a
pleasure to have an opportunity to collaborate directly. The struggle we are engaged in exacts a heavier toll upon you than upon me, but rest assured I am your staunch ally. Speaking of which, are you in need of a small subscription by any chance? The hems of your trouser cuffs are starting to look a little frayed and the knees a touch shiny, while your boots are definitely showing their age.”
“I keep body and soul together,” Holmes said stiffly.
“I realise that the good doctor supports you, but I have deep pockets and low overheads. We could call it a loan.”
“No.” My companion lowered his gaze. There was upon his features a ghost of embarrassment, which he exorcised with a sudden laugh. “No indeed! Corporeally, materially, I subsist, but the mind still flourishes.” He turned to me. “Watson, come. We find ourselves armed with fresh intelligence. Let us put it to good use.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back to Bedlam
OUR HANSOM CROSSED THE THAMES AT WESTMINSTER Bridge and rumbled south-east towards St George’s Fields. Night was falling and I was growing weary. Holmes, on the other hand, who by now had not slept for forty-eight hours, remained buoyant. His reserves of energy – boosts of cocaine notwithstanding – seemed all but inexhaustible. At forty-one, he had the stamina of someone half that age. He also had the greyish pallor and sunken cheeks of someone far older. Wrinkles wreathed his eyes and there were vertical grooves on either side of his mouth so entrenched they looked as if they had been carved with a blade, while the hair at his temples bore more than a smattering of silver. I could see an old man lurking within him, closer to the surface than he ought to be. It was not difficult to predict how Sherlock Holmes would look twenty years hence. It was as though, in order to keep going at the furious pace he set himself, he was burning through his allotted lifespan faster than most, like a quick-match fuse.
The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Page 6