All of this meant we deviated again and again from true. That, in turn, required us to pause, reassemble the aerolite compass and take a fresh bearing. We must have done so at least a dozen times that afternoon. On each occasion Holmes was obliged to reopen the Necronomicon and chant the relevant portions of the text all over again.
“You must know the words by heart now, surely,” I said after the fifth or sixth rendition. “You do not need to keep taking out that damned book.”
“There is more to the incantation than mere language,” Holmes replied. “Immediate physical proximity of the Necronomicon to the lodestone is crucial. The one casts its influence over the other. My role is to facilitate the exchange verbally. By speaking aloud I awaken the book’s latent power, which in turn activates the compass.”
“In other words, you are fulfilling the function of a messenger boy conveying a telegram from post office to recipient.”
“If you must be so absurdly bathetic with your metaphors, Watson, then yes. Something like that.”
Onward we went, and as the afternoon wore on, the cloud cover that had settled above us with the first opening of the Necronomicon remained in place, acting as a lid over the land, sealing in the day’s heat. The atmosphere of the marshes became oppressive, and I began to resent it. I resented the squelching of my feet within my boots, which were sodden from repeated immersions in water. I resented the sweat that made my shirt cling to my armpits and my collar stick to my neck. I resented the vastness of the grey sky, which stretched high and wide over us to the distant horizon, and the unrelieved flatness of the landscape. I had no desire to be here, and the marshes left me under no illusion that the feeling was mutual.
Now and then we came upon an outpost of civilisation, be it a tiny crooked cottage or a wooden hovel with unglazed windows. The residents of these meagre dwellings eyed us with suspicion as we passed by. One shabbily clothed and shaggily bearded smallholder rushed out with an ancient blunderbuss, which he waved at us while barking threats. Holmes was amused. Once the fellow was out of sight, he said, “I would have loved to see what happened when he pulled the trigger. That weapon was so old, I will wager it would have blown up in his face.”
“It is not something I would like to have put to the test.”
“Well, perhaps not. At least we have established that the natives are unfriendly. I fancy Stanley and Livingstone met a warmer reception in Africa than we have met here.”
“I do not know how you can be in such a cheery mood, Holmes.”
“And I do not know how you can be so glum, Watson. The resolution to our little conundrum is close at hand. Surely a cause for celebration?”
“If we survive.”
“Pooh! We have confronted unnatural beasts before and lived to tell the tale.”
“Never a nightgaunt.”
“Think of it as a challenge, then. An assay of our worthiness.”
There was no reasoning with him when he was in one of his manically upbeat moods. All I could do was trudge on beside him and hope for the best.
Around six o’clock we took a break. Mrs Hudson had prepared us a picnic of ox-tongue sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, which we ate by the edge of a small lake. A pair of teal swam up to our feet. I fed them my crusts.
Then we were on our way again, Holmes insisting that we were homing in on our quarry. “The compass’s reactions are getting more definite,” he said. “Wherever the lodestone points, it points there swiftly, with less and less hesitancy.”
That had been my observation too, but I was conscious of time slipping away. We had perhaps two hours of decent daylight left.
“We know that a nightgaunt is nocturnal,” I said.
“The clue is in the name. Your point being…?”
“Well, it would be best if we were to locate it before sunset, would it not? I mean, one presumes it is sleeping at present. We stand a better chance against it if we encounter it before it is yet awake or when it is only just stirring.”
“Indeed, and had we embarked upon this escapade first thing, as I suggested last night, we would not be cutting things so fine. Still, we are near. We should be all right.”
Not long after that, we had our first glimpse of the farmhouse.
* * *
The farmhouse perched on a low rise, elevated perhaps no more than twenty feet above the surrounding marshland. Initially it was no more than a black dot on the horizon, and the rise the merest blister.
As soon as Holmes’s eye fell upon it, he halted and went through the rigmarole of taking yet another bearing. This time, the compass seemed to spring to attention. There was no vacillating, no indecision. It pointed straight towards the rise and the building atop it.
“Journey’s end,” said Holmes, evincing a grim pleasure.
I myself felt a mixture of relief and trepidation. Glad though I was that there was not much further to go, I was not exactly enthused by the thought of what might await us at the farmhouse. As the crow flies, we were perhaps three miles from the place. We could have covered the distance in less than an hour, had the going been level and uninterrupted.
In the event, we spent twice that amount of time getting there. Our first obstacle was a river, a tributary of the Thames’s lower reaches, at least twenty yards wide and fast-flowing. We attempted to wade across, but having slithered down the steep muddy bank into the water, we immediately found ourselves submerged to the waist, with the current tugging remorselessly at our legs, doing its best to sweep them from under us. A few steps further on, and the river was up to our chests. By mutual consent, we retreated, scrambling back up the bank. It would have been foolhardy to continue.
Upstream we came to a rickety footbridge. Little more than planks perched upon stilts, lashed together by ropes, it did not look much safer than the body of water it traversed. We went over one at a time, Holmes first. The structure wobbled precariously under him, and more so under me when my turn came, for I was the heavier of us by a couple of stone. At one point the footbridge lurched so far to one side, so abruptly, that I was nearly pitched headlong into the river. Thereafter, the rest of the way, I held on to its rudimentary handrail for dear life.
A further obstacle presented itself in the form of a field of cattle. Presiding over a herd of cows, like a pasha over his harem, was a bull who regarded any interlopers upon his domain as potential rivals, to be repelled with all available aggression. The hulking great quadruped charged at us, snorting hard, his eyes murderously crimson. We fled.
A third and final obstacle was an expanse of marsh so deep and slimy it surpassed even the Great Grimpen Mire. We ventured into this treacherous morass thinking it would be no worse than any of the other patches of marsh we had forged through earlier in the day. Within seconds we were stuck fast, like flies on flypaper. Not only that but we were sinking, getting sucked down through the grassy top layer into the saturated earth beneath.
The situation might have been amusing, were it not so serious: two grown men, up to their knees in the ground and descending by increments. Holmes and I looked at each other with a kind of weary bemusement. I think we may even have shared a laugh.
Then we set about the business of extricating ourselves, which we did by each simultaneously providing support for the other as he hauled one leg out of the marsh, lodged it on the nearest area of solid ground, and bore down upon it so as to lever the rest of him to freedom.
“I do believe,” I said, as we laboriously detoured around the marsh, “that this place hates us.”
“Think how much worse it must have been for the man we seek,” said Holmes. “Fleeing through this landscape in the dark, effectively blind.”
“That will be us too, if we do not make haste.” The sun was by now touching the horizon, a pale and hazy disc. The air had already cooled significantly, and a frog had begun croaking in anticipation of nightfall.
By the time we got our first close-up view of the farmhouse, several hundred other frogs had joined in. To t
he accompaniment of their rasping cacophony, and the occasional plaintive wail of a curlew, we crouched amongst a thicket of bulrushes, covertly surveying the premises from a few dozen yards away.
The farmhouse must have been a couple of centuries old, and its sagging roof and moss-clad walls spoke of long neglect. The same was true of its outbuildings, which consisted of a stables and a small barn. There were paddocks around it that had become overgrown, and enclosing these were a few rotted, tumbledown runs of post-and-rail fence that were more gap than barrier. Over the entire site hung an air of desolation. The house was the only abode for miles around, and even on a summer’s eve – admittedly, this was not a glorious one – it looked cold and lonely.
“Does anyone even live there?” I wondered.
“You have your answer,” said Holmes, gesturing at the chimney, from which a thin plume of smoke had just started to rise. Shortly afterwards, the glow of a lamp filled a downstairs window. I peered to make out movement within but saw none.
“How do you suggest we approach?” I said. “Walk up to the front door and introduce ourselves?”
Holmes overlooked the flippancy in my tone. “It is one option. We may assume that the occupant is he who has mastery over the nightgaunt and is our quarry’s captor. Presenting ourselves brazenly to him, rather than adopting subtler measures, might put him on the back foot. One should never underestimate the value of the element of surprise. Equally, we could…”
“Could what, Holmes? Holmes?”
My companion did not respond. I assumed that he had become distracted, until I noticed that his eyes had grown wide and his jaw had slackened. He was staring fixedly past me, and at that moment a surge of dread flooded my belly. The sensation worsened as Holmes’s mouth set in a tight, narrow line. His entire body had gone rigid. Whatever lay over my shoulder, just to the right of me, he could not tear his gaze from it.
“Watson,” he hissed.
“Please do not say it, Holmes. Please do not.”
“The nightgaunt, Watson.”
“Oh my God.”
“The nightgaunt. It is here. It is right here.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Attack of the Nightgaunt
THE NIGHTGAUNT HAD ARRIVED SILENTLY, WHILE Holmes and I were busy spying upon the farmhouse. Without a sound it had descended beside us, touching down amongst the bulrushes. Its wingbeats were no louder than a breath of wind. It had stalked us from on high with all the lethal stealth of an owl.
I did not want to turn.
I dared not turn.
I had to turn.
I turned.
Turning brought me face to face with it – or rather, face to no face. The nightgaunt’s featureless visage loomed over me, black and smooth with a kind of rubbery, oily sheen. The creature canted its head, as though regarding me with curiosity, much the same way the woodcut image in the Necronomicon had. Its wings were outstretched, spanning some fifteen feet from tip to tip. Even in my state of abject terror I noted the small nick in the lower edge of the left one, where the nightgaunt had caught itself on the shard of windowpane at Bethlem.
Now a hand came up, each finger twice the length of a man’s and crowned with a wickedly curving talon, as shiny as obsidian. The nightgaunt brought one of these talons to my trembling cheek and dragged it slowly down the skin. The action was somewhere between a scratch and a caress, both gentle and painful. The talon scored a furrow just deep enough to draw blood.
The sting of the wound galvanised me. I had been frozen, too scared to move, but the banal reality of pain had a rousing effect. I stumbled away from the nightgaunt, almost colliding with Holmes.
The creature made no effort to pursue me. Rather, it raised its hand to that empty oval face and examined the bloodied talon. I say “examined” because that at least was what it appeared to do. Whether it was looking at the talon, sniffing it, tasting it, or even listening to it, I have no idea. How a nightgaunt perceives the world is a mystery.
“Watson,” Holmes whispered in my ear, “I am unprepared. I have the means to stop this creature, but I need time to get it ready.”
“How much time?”
“Five minutes should suffice.”
He did not need to say any more. He was asking me to buy him those five minutes. Somehow I had to distract the nightgaunt for that long. And somehow I had to manage to do so without getting myself killed.
While Holmes delved into the portmanteau, I delved into my jacket pocket. Out came my service revolver. The gun was slippery in my grasp. Before crossing the river earlier I had transferred it temporarily to the portmanteau, which Holmes had taken care to hold above the surface of the water. Thus had he kept the revolver and everything else in the bag dry. Since then, however, the gun had resided in my pocket once again and had picked up some of the moisture that permeated my clothing.
I prayed that the cartridges in the cylinder were unimpaired. The last thing I needed was for the powder to have become damp and cause a misfire.
I was already fairly certain that the rounds – standard Eley’s – would be unable to penetrate the nightgaunt’s hide. Holmes himself had averred as much that morning, before we left Baker Street for Purfleet. He had added that no method of necromantic doctoring, such as daubing them with a Seal of Unravelling, would enhance their effectiveness against this particular monster. At best the bullets would cause it pain and give it pause for thought, but in all other respects the nightgaunt – unlike, say, a byakhee – would be impervious to them. Its sole weak spot was the membranous skin of its wings, as proven by the tear inflicted by the shard of glass, but a gunshot wound there was hardly likely to be mortal, or even debilitating.
All the same, the revolver was the only defence I had, and the only means of offence. There was no doubt in my mind that I must use it.
“Come on, you abomination,” I snarled at the nightgaunt. “Come and get me.”
I darted clear of the bulrushes, giving the creature an open invitation to follow by tossing a few further choice insults its way. The nightgaunt hesitated. It seemed to be trying to decide which of us to attack. Holmes was directly in front of it and making no effort to flee. I, on the other hand, was running away and doing my utmost to antagonise it. The creature was nonplussed. Should it go for the easy, stationary prey or the noisier and more active?
I made up its mind for it. I aimed at its chest and fired.
The bullet ricocheted off that leathery torso, whining past Holmes, mere inches from his head. He cast me a look of reproof, then resumed pulling items from the portmanteau.
With the echoes of the gun report rippling across the marshes, the nightgaunt swung towards me. I cannot pretend that I saw anything even approaching an expression upon its obscenely blank face, but I inferred that it was irritated. An assault that would have ended an ordinary man’s life had, at the very least, piqued it. Now it had no alternative but to retaliate.
It came at me, and it was fast, so fast! Propelling itself into the air with wafting wingbeats, it closed the distance between us, body parallel with the ground, taloned fingers to the fore.
I reacted purely on reflex. I threw myself flat on my face.
The nightgaunt whirred above me, borne by its own momentum. I rolled over and came up to a crouching position, resting on one knee. The nightgaunt swerved in mid-air and darted back. Sighting down the gun barrel, I gave it a bullet straight in the face. The creature recoiled at the impact, deviating to one side.
Without a moment’s delay I sprang upright and took to my heels, racing to the edge of the farmhouse’s rise. The nightgaunt gave chase. I knew I could not outrun it, but ahead lay a thick, stunted tree – an alder, I think – behind which I was able to take cover.
From this vantage point I got off two more shots. One rebounded off the bony portion of one wing. The other passed straight through the same wing’s skin, leaving a clean, bloodless hole.
The nightgaunt settled upon the tree and began clawing at its leafy
boughs, tearing them apart as though they were made of spun sugar. It was not so much trying to get at me as offering a display of raw might. What it was doing to the alder, it could likewise do to John Watson. The one was as easy for it to rend limb from limb as the other.
By wounding the nightgaunt, however slightly, I had succeeded in making a deadly otherworld beast, already irked, downright enraged. Whereas before it might have been content with simply slaying me, now the nightgaunt wished me to suffer. My death at its hands would be prolonged and messy.
Had I had the leisure to pat myself on the back, I would have.
Instead, like the gambler I am, I elected to double down. I loosed off my last two rounds at the creature, aiming up through the thrashing tree branches. The range was no more than five yards, and bulletproof or not, the thing did not enjoy being hit twice at such proximity. If it had had a mouth, I imagine it would have screamed.
The nightgaunt swooped down from the tree and padded towards me with an air of unmistakable menace. The setting sun was at its back, so that the creature became a silhouette of pure blackness, a demonic cameo.
I retreated, fumbling in my pocket for spare cartridges.
That was when I remembered that the box was still in the portmanteau. I had neglected to retrieve it when taking back the revolver.
I was out of ammunition.
“Oh, you absolute dolt, Watson,” I murmured.
Had I given Sherlock Holmes his five minutes yet? I did not think so. I reckoned I had side-tracked the nightgaunt for two minutes only, three at most. Now I was facing it unarmed, vulnerable, and with still a couple of minutes left until Holmes could implement his method of stopping it.
One might think that, under the circumstances, I would have fallen prey to despair.
One might be right.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy
THE NIGHTGAUNT SEEMED AWARE THAT I HAD, AS it were, shot my bolt. Its pointed tail twitched from side to side in a manner that evoked both the eagerness of a dog and the fierce concentration of a prowling cat. Its horned head was cocked suggestively, and I could readily picture a grin splitting that absent face, a leering gleam in those non-existent eyes. Talons once more to the fore, the nightgaunt continued to tread towards me, sublimely confident, or so it appeared, secure in the knowledge that I was as good as dead.
The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Page 12