“While you partake of Mrs Hudson’s cuisine – which, as we all know, is as good as any Scotchwoman’s, at least where breakfast is concerned – you might want to cast an eye over this.”
Holmes thrust an envelope across the table to me. It had already been unsealed and inside was a letter on Diogenes Club headed notepaper, along with a newspaper clipping.
“From your brother?” I said.
“Your powers of deduction do you credit.”
The letter was a terse covering note:
Sherlock
Thought you might be interested in the enclosed. The name Zachariah Conroy having bubbled to the surface of my brain during your visit the other day, I then belatedly recalled coming across a mention of it in the Arkham Gazette a couple of years back. It has taken some while to unearth the relevant article from my archives, a task undertaken during infrequent bulls between dealing with affairs of state. Not much to go on but I hope it is of some pertinence.
Mycroft
The clipping, slightly yellowed with age, was dated Saturday 11th February 1893, and read as follows:
M.U. UNDERGRADUATE MAKES STARTLING CLAIM
We at the Gazette have become accustomed to unconventional and indeed bizarre experiments being conducted in the science halls of Miskatonic University, and will no doubt be reporting on such to our readers for many years to come.
Here, however, for your delectation, is news of yet another singularity originating from that august institution of which we Arkhamites are so proud and by which we are often so baffled. One Zachariah Conroy, a freshman pursuing a degree in biology, asserts that he has successfully transplanted the consciousness of a parrot into the brain of a capuchin monkey.
Said primate now passes its days seated upon a perch in a cage, flapping its arms and pecking at sunflower seeds, all courtesy of a process which young Conroy has grandiosely dubbed “Intercranial Cognition Transference”. The practicalities of this method are unclear, beyond a reliance upon certain serums of its inventor’s own devising.
Conroy’s professors admit to being unconvinced both by the outcome of the experiment and by its instigator’s less than crystalline elucidation of its workings. One such eminent academic, an emeritus professor by the name of Nordstrom, has told this newspaper that he sincerely doubts Conroy has accomplished that which he asserts to have accomplished.
“It smacks to me of fraud,” says the venerable greybeard. “One can train a monkey to behave more or less however one wishes, even to the point of mimicking avian characteristics.
“Conroy is considered a bright student with good prospects,” Nordstrom adds, “but he has an unfortunate predisposition towards precocity, unorthodoxy, and even at times impertinence. He may well go far in his chosen discipline, but only if he learns to temper his more wilful inclinations.”
It sounds to us as though young Conroy is more prankster than prodigy. He certainly seems to be making a monkey out of faculty members!
“The tone is facetious,” Holmes said when I looked up after finishing the piece. “Nevertheless the content intrigues.”
“You do not believe Conroy actually did what he says? Inserted the consciousness of a bird into a monkey? It is preposterous.”
“Who is to say what is and is not preposterous these days, Watson? You and I have met with more than our fair share of situations to which the average member of the public would apply that adjective. Yet the reality of such events is not in question.”
“But that is the paranormal. Conroy alleges to have performed a miracle of science, which is not the same thing. Science deals in empirical absolutes, predicated upon the proving of theory by fact. Had Conroy said he had magically pulled off this bird-to-monkey transfer, I might at least have given it a second thought. But scientifically?”
“Such is the looking-glass world in which you and I find ourselves,” said Holmes with a smile. “We doubt science but have implicit faith in the supernatural. Ask yourself, though, what if Conroy did use eldritch means but passed them off as science, so as not to raise too many eyebrows?”
“No more eyebrows than he already raised. Granted, it is possible, but when all is said and done, what is the point of the whole exercise? What does anyone stand to gain from creating a birdlike monkey, beyond its curiosity value?”
“Which might be considerable. Such a unique animal could fetch a tidy sum from zoos or private collectors. Equally, as Conroy is ostensibly a scientist, might this experiment of his not be a prototype? A first step along the road to something greater and more ambitious? That is the way with science, after all. Demonstrate that it can be done under laboratory conditions, then widen one’s scope.”
Holmes reached for his clay pipe and the Persian slipper in which he kept his tobacco.
“At any rate,” he said, stuffing strands of coarse black shag into the pipe bowl with practised ease, “Zachariah Conroy has become decidedly more interesting than he was previously.” He struck a match. “I am looking forward more than ever to our expedition this afternoon, should the object of it turn out to be that selfsame young man.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Book and the Compass
ALIGHTING FROM THE TRAIN AT PURFLEET STATION, we hired a dog-cart and drove out into the marshes. The afternoon sun beat down upon our heads, its rays occluded now and then by the passage of a thick cloud. Holmes seemed in high spirits, gazing at the scenery with a lively eye and a hint of a smile. I, by contrast, still toiled under the after-effects of the Triophidian Crown. I found the lurching motion of the dog-cart, as it trundled along rutted lanes, nauseating. Even the warm breeze on my face was disagreeable, like ants crawling.
Added to that, we were heading into potential danger. There was every likelihood that somewhere in these marshes lurked a nightgaunt, one of the deadliest beasts ever to walk the earth. Moreover, we might have to confront it. We had come appropriately equipped, but all the same, I was hardly relishing the prospect.
“Gentlemen,” said our driver eventually, reining in his horse. “This here’s as good a spot as any. Plenty for you to see: lapwings, redshanks, godwits, pipits, avocets – you name it, chances are there’ll be one flying about.”
“Thank you, my good fellow,” Holmes said, leaping nimbly down from the cart. He had told the driver we were ornithologists, an unimprovable pretext for two men visiting a bird-rich area such as this.
“Will you be wanting picking up later?”
“No. We shall make our own way back to Purfleet.”
“Right you are. Happy spotting! Or whatever it is you bird fanciers say.”
As the dog-cart clattered out of sight, Holmes inhaled and exhaled. “Nothing like a lungful of fresh country air, is there, Watson? Gets the blood pumping and clears away the cobwebs. One of these fine days I shall make myself a home in a place like this, away from the tumult of the city. There surely has to come a time when our war is done and I can depart from the battlefield to a well-deserved rural rest.”
“You will not live to see that day, Holmes, if you continue to fight so intensely.”
“Can I help it if the enemy harries constantly? I must meet their every incursion without fail. If I let up for one moment, all is lost. I guard the gate. I am virtually the only thing standing between mankind and unimaginable chaos and depravity. It is not a responsibility I take lightly.”
So saying, he began to rummage around in the same leather portmanteau he had used to transport the Triophidian Crown to the Isle of Dogs. From it he extracted various items – trinkets, one might call them if one knew no better – which he laid out carefully atop a flat rock. Last came a large book swaddled in an oilcloth. He unwrapped the tome with a distinct delicacy of touch, and handled the book itself similarly. Even though it had been in his possession for several years and he had had recourse to consult it upon many an occasion, it was not something to be treated casually or with disrespect; nor could one ever be comfortable in its presence or claim a sense of familiar
ity with it.
It was the Necronomicon, that dread grimoire first set down during the eighth century by the half-crazed poet and mystic Abdul Alhazred and considered ever since to be the key text in matters pertaining to the cosmic gods. In the view of some it was, in fact, a conduit between their realm and ours, a route by which one might gaze into the abyss and see the abyss gaze back.
This edition had previously been the property of the British Museum, contained within that institution’s cache of proscribed books, the little-known and little-frequented Sequestered Volumes section. There it would have remained, had it not been stolen in 1879 by Professor Moriarty right under the nose of the section’s guardian, the librarian Miss Chastity Tasker. After we wrested the Necronomicon from Moriarty’s clutches, Holmes had duly returned it to her. When, however, that venerable lady took retirement seven years later, the museum board made the decision to close down Sequestered Volumes. So few people availed themselves of its contents that it was considered not worth the money spent maintaining it.
Miss Tasker, having learned that the books were to be auctioned off, proposed that Holmes should be the keeper of the most infamous volumes, the ones which should never fall into the hands of the mentally unstable or the congenitally feeble. She smuggled over thirty books out to Baker Street, hidden in her Gladstone bag, before leaving her post.
Now, as Holmes exposed the Necronomicon to the open air of the marshes, two things happened. The first was that the sun went in. The clouds, which had been intermittent, all at once seemed to fuse together into a single whole. The light grew hazy, as though dusk were descending several hours prematurely.
The other thing was that the countryside around us fell silent. There had been the breeze and the sound of insects – flies buzzing, bees droning, dragonflies whirring. There had been, above all, birdsong; a continuous chorus of whistles and chatters, almost deafening in its stridency.
Then nothing. Was this coincidence? I think not. Nothing is coincidental where the Necronomicon is concerned.
The book’s jet-black binding and page edges made it look like an oblong of absolute darkness, a chunk of void, as though someone had excised a piece of the world. It was the absence of all that was bright and good. It was the antithesis of life.
As Holmes opened the cover, a bird of prey – I think it was a marsh harrier – shot up from a reed bed close by. The flutter of its wings was shockingly loud, more so the shriek the harrier gave as it soared into the firmament. I cannot deny that I jumped in surprise, nor can I describe that shrill ululation as anything other than a cry of alarm.
One might wonder how a book, a mere concatenation of paper, ink and leather, could cause such a preternatural silence and induce panic in wildlife. But then the Necronomicon is a book like no other. Each copy is imbued with the very essence of evil. Even the title, which translates from the Greek as “an image of the law of the dead”, resonates with wrongness, although not perhaps as much as its original Arabic title, Al Azif, a phrase commonly held to refer to the sound of insects at night which, in Middle Eastern tradition, is equated with the howling of demons. Then one must consider the trail of misery and death the book has left in its wake, with almost anyone who has been involved in printing, translating or using it meeting a grisly end. To call it cursed would be to sell it short. The Necronomicon is truly something any sensible person would shun.
Holmes found the page he sought. On it, alongside several paragraphs of text in a dense Gothic typeface, was a woodcut illustration of a nightgaunt. The creature was depicted in a hunched posture, its batlike wings spread out and its barbed, devilish tail curling behind it like a cat’s. A pair of backward-pointing horns capped its head, and its limbs were long and etiolated. Where a face should have been there was only blankness.
The illustration was crudely rendered, almost childlike in its simplicity. It had a certain raw impact nonetheless. The more one looked at it, the more vivid it became. Indeed, after several seconds of staring I thought I saw the nightgaunt move. Its head shifted upon its neck, as though it were turning towards me, and it articulated one set of prehensile, talon-tipped fingers, somewhat in the manner of a concert pianist warming up before a recital.
With a start, I tore my gaze away from the picture. When I dared look again, the nightgaunt was back in its original pose. I told myself it had only been a trick of the mind. The page had stirred in the breeze. Yes, that was it. Stirred, giving the illusion that the nightgaunt had stirred too.
Holmes, meanwhile, had been devoting attention to the other items from the portmanteau. Amongst these was a circular brass dial with the cardinal and intercardinal directions engraved around its perimeter. Upon the centre of this he placed a conical fulcrum and upon that, in turn, he set a sliver of rock, adjusting the balance of it until it attained equilibrium. The sliver was shaped roughly like a teardrop and was composed of a metallic ore that was a dull brownish colour, shot through with streaks of some shinier, iridescent substance.
Essentially he had constructed a compass, but this was no commonplace version of the device. Far from it. The teardrop-shaped sliver of rock was a magnetised lodestone, formerly part of a meteorite that fell to earth at a place called Clark’s Corners in Massachusetts, not far from Arkham, in the early 1880s.
Certain professors at Miskatonic University took a sample of the meteorite for study. The sample vanished a week later, as did the space-borne rock itself, destroyed by a lightning strike and leaving no trace but the crater it had gouged in the earth upon impact. Rumours had abounded thereafter of poisoned vegetation and livestock in the crater’s vicinity, of farmers gone missing, and of explosions and strange lights in the night sky, none of which I would for a moment discount, yet which were regarded by most outside the region as the idle yarn-spinning of rural Yankee folk with too much time on their hands and plenty of home-brewed liquor to fire their imaginations.
Similar charges might be levied against the Miskatonic University professors. The rock sample they took did not, after all, simply vanish from the lead-lined container in which it had been deposited. What actually became of it was much less inexplicable. Some light-fingered undergraduate purloined it and broke it up into smaller pieces, which he sold as “rare aerolite fragments”. To cover up the theft – and their own incompetence when it came to laboratory security – the academics put about a story that the sample had gradually shrunk until it disappeared altogether, through some chemical or physical process as yet unknown to science. In a place like Arkham, where the unusual was the everyday, such a lie seemed more than plausible and was readily swallowed.
The aerolite fragments brought their purchasers little but suffering and calamity. All who owned them rapidly fell ill, succumbing to various cancers or organ failure that in nearly every instance precipitated an early death. One by one the pieces of rock found their way onto the black market that exists for curios of this kind, kept thriving by a fraternity of collectors with a penchant for artefacts that carry the taint of morbidity. The specimen that lay before us had come to Holmes after the resolution of a case involving a goose that had discovered the fragment upon a ground-floor windowsill, mistaken it for food and heedlessly gobbled it up, thereafter developing grotesque physical abnormalities and a homicidal temperament. My long-time readers, in the event that any were to be privy to the content of this manuscript, would recognise here the raw material out of which I wove an altogether more whimsical, Christmas-themed tale about a stolen gemstone, property of a fictitious countess.
Holmes was punctilious about keeping the sliver in a lead-lined box at all times, so as to mitigate its malign emanations, and whenever he took it out for use, he made sure to expose himself to it for brief periods only. With his compass now complete, he let the lodestone revolve freely upon its fulcrum until it came to rest pointing to magnetic north, as was its natural wont. He aligned the dial below accordingly. Then, with reference to the text of the Necronomicon, he began to chant in R’lyehian. The words see
med to pollute the pristine rustic air, like an aural miasma. They filled the preternatural stillness around us much as algal growth fills a millpond.
The R’lyehian for nightgaunt – n’ghftzhryar – recurred in his invocation, and slowly, twitchily, the compass took its cue and began to respond. The “needle” of aerolite swerved away from north, swivelling back and forth upon its fulcrum, now clockwise, now anticlockwise, as though questing. Holmes was inviting it to indicate in which direction the nightgaunt lay.
As the sliver of rock rotated, the streaks of iridescence within its brownish surface changed. Whereas before they had reflected the dimmed sunlight in shimmering prismatic sparkles, now they adopted a uniform hue. The colour defies my powers of description. It was not like this shade or that; it was unlike all shades. No artist’s palette could ever reproduce it. It had no analogue in the standard visible spectrum.
Nor could it be beheld easily. The eye perceived it as something inimical, an affront to the retina. By dint of great willpower one could force oneself to look at it, but the act provoked a kind of vertigo, as though one were falling down a bottomless hole.
It was, simply put, a colour that should not be.
The needle abruptly halted, locked in position, quivering. Its sharper end, which could be considered its “point”, was aimed north-north-west.
“There,” said Holmes. “We have a bearing.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
To the Farmhouse
OF COURSE THE MATTER WAS NOT AS SIMPLE AS following a single bearing until we reached our destination. For one thing, the pathways through the marshes did not run in a straight line. They meandered and twisted, sometimes doubling back on themselves. For another, our course did not lead exclusively over dry land. There were tracts of boggy ground to be negotiated, deep pools to be circumvented, reed beds to be ploughed through, drainage ditches to be vaulted over.
The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Page 11