The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

by James Lovegrove

  The first thing I saw was Nate. He was poised in the doorway of his cabin, looking inquisitive but showing, too, a singular composure. I asked if he knew what the matter was, and he shook his head. Together in single file, Nate leading the way, we went aft, towards the screams.

  Would that I could forget the sight that greeted us as we reached the stern of the Innsmouth Belle. Would that there existed some sort of mental India-rubber eraser that could efface the memory wholly from my brain.

  Moonlight bathed the scene. At first, I could scarcely comprehend what I beheld. Junior lay prone upon the deck, under assault by a dark, pulsating shape that engulfed his legs up to the thighs. It was as though a dense swarm of flies had descended upon him. Then I perceived that actually it was pulling him, this dark shape, dragging the first mate helplessly towards the side of the boat adjacent to the shore. Its progress – a kind of slithering, rolling, oozing motion – was laborious but inexorable. Junior was clinging onto anything within reach to thwart his abduction, but to no avail. The dark shape was stronger than he, and remorseless.

  On the riverbank, ropes lay upon the grass in an empty tangle. The shoggoth had awoken, escaped its bonds, and clambered aboard the Belle to claim a victim. After those initial panic-wracked screams, Junior was concentrating his efforts on resisting. His teeth were clenched in grim fixity. He would not go gently.

  I knew I should help him somehow, yet I hesitated. The disgust engendered in me by the sight of the active shoggoth – the sheer wrongness of it, as its gelatinous body rippled and purled like black curdled cream – had me shrinking away. Every fibre of my being was repelled. Yet somehow I summoned up the courage to take a step forward.

  A hand seized my arm, and Nate hissed in my ear, “No, Zach. Don’t. Not if you value your life or your sanity.” I retorted that somebody must do something, to which he said, “Not you. Not my good friend. I would not have you risk your neck for an insignificant wretch such as Junior Brenneman. I have an idea what to do. But you must wait here. Do not go near that thing. Swear?” I nodded, feeling guiltily relieved. Nate had given me permission not to get involved. My inaction was therefore not cowardice; it was duty.

  As Nate hurried off back towards his cabin, a figure appeared from the other side of the steamer’s superstructure. It was Charley, and he took in Junior Brenneman’s plight at a glance and, seemingly without a second thought, snatched up a boathook and launched himself at the shoggoth, brandishing the implement above his head. I cried out to him, hoping to warn him against this rash impetuosity, but Charley must not have heard.

  At that same moment, the shoggoth gained the side of the boat and dropped straight over, still hauling Junior. The first mate grasped hold of the rail, but was pulled overboard with alarming swiftness, losing several fingernails in the process. The shoggoth hit the riverbank with a lumpen, dispersed thud, unscathed, whereas Junior landed altogether more sharply, his body snapping like a whip. There was a splintering crack, as of bones breaking, and the scream that the impact elicited from him was, unlike its predecessors, one of pure pain.

  Charley had arrived at the rail a fraction of a second too late to bring the boathook to bear upon the shoggoth. Still, he did not relent. He vaulted one-handed over the side of the boat, and no sooner had he alighted on the bank than he swung the boathook down hard onto the shoggoth’s carapace (or hide, or whatever name one might give its integument). This had little discernible effect on the creature, yet he persisted, pursuing the shoggoth even as it continued to slither across the ground with a glutinous, peristaltic motion like some huge spherical maggot, bearing the still-screaming Junior with it. The vile thing withstood the offensive, absorbing the blows with its soft, doughy resilience, until all of a sudden it seemed to decide it had had enough. Halting, it extruded a dozen tentacles simultaneously. These fleshy strands lashed outward, seizing the boathook and wresting it from Charley’s clutches as easily as though taking a lollipop from an infant. Not content with disarming its adversary, however, the shoggoth then generated more tentacles, wrapping these around Charley’s limbs. For a moment I thought it was going to start dragging the Negro away too, but the shoggoth appeared to have another fate in mind for him. It reeled Charley in until his face was mere inches from its flank. He strained and flailed, but the creature’s grasp was ineluctable.

  Then something in its side opened up, like a sphincter dilating. It was one of those pores that I had hypothesised was a stoma or a spiracle. Now I reckoned it to serve an altogether different function. It was some kind of portal, a means of interface between the shoggoth and the world around it, a breach allowing access from its environment to its inmost self and vice versa. One might term it mouth or eye or ear, or even nostril, but one would be wrong. It was all of those at once and more besides, and it gaped in front of Charley and he stared deep into its hollowness, and then he began to shriek, a high-pitched, quavering wail quite at odds with the low rumble of his normal speaking voice. It was an aria of horror, as though his very spirit was escaping like steam from a boiling kettle. His body shuddered, his eyes rolled up until only the whites showed, and even Junior, for all his abject distress, fell silent, rendered dumbstruck by the greater, more heartfelt torment of another.

  How long Charley shrieked like that, cutting the night air with his stark threnody, I cannot state with any accuracy. All I know is that the hideous, ear-splitting keen ended only when Nate reappeared. With him he had the Necronomicon, and he began reading aloud. The words were unintelligible to me, all viscous syllables and glottal stops, and I presumed them – a presumption Nate would later verify – to be R’lyehian that had been transliterated phonetically on the page into the Roman alphabet. They constituted a chant – indeed, as again Nate later verified, a spell – which had a profound effect on the shoggoth. As Nate uttered it over and over, so the creature relinquished its hold on both Charley and Junior. It seemed to flinch and shrivel, as though in discomfort. Gradually, with palpable reluctance, the shoggoth began to squirm away, leaving Junior lying broken on the ground and Charley next to him, on his knees, arms dangling limp by his sides. In short order the creature had reached the treeline, and then it was gone into the blackness of the forest, swallowed up by nocturnal shadow.

  In the hush that ensued, the only sound was Junior Brenneman’s whimpering, until a loud curse emanated from beside me and I turned to find that the skipper had at last stumbled from his bed. How he had managed to sleep through all the commotion I do not know, although the reek of liquor emanating from him was a clue. He stared blearily at his injured son and incapacitated deckhand, then looked at Nate and said, “You, Mr Whateley, are a-havin’ some questions ter answer. Help me fetch those two back onto the board, an’ then we’re settin’ sail, an’ never mind the haour. I ain’t spendin’ one minute longer here.”

  * * *

  The skipper got up steam and turned the Belle hard about, leaving Nate and me to care for the injured. Junior was in bad shape. His pelvis was fractured, one shoulder was dislocated, but worst of all several of his ribs were shattered and, to judge by the gobbets of blood he kept coughing up, the splintered end of one of them had been driven inward and pierced a lung. Charley, meanwhile, was in good physical condition, as far as I could tell. His mind, however, was a different matter. He lay on his bunk where we had deposited him, staring blankly up at the ceiling. Now and then he might move his mouth as though attempting to speak, but no words came out, only meaningless wet clicks. His eyes were as vacant and glassy as a porcelain doll’s.

  Come daybreak, we were several miles downstream from the scene of the shoggoth’s attack, and the skipper was steaming as fast as he dared along that winding, obstacle-strewn stretch of the river, halting the boat every now and then to go down to the engine room and re-stoke the furnace. Charley’s condition remained unchanged, but Junior was ailing. I dosed him with morphia to ease his pain but he was coughing up increasing quantities of blood. Though not a doctor, I was sure he would die with
in hours if he did not receive proper medical attention, and even if by some miracle a hospital suddenly appeared on the horizon, I would not have rated his chances highly. In short, because we were several days’ travel from the nearest civilisation, Junior was doomed.

  That was when Nate aired his proposition.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Uncharted Waters

  “FATE,” SAID NATE, “HAS PRESENTED US WITH A fortuitous opportunity.” Thus, with that offhandedly euphemistic remark, did he broach the topic with me. We had everything we could have hoped for, he continued, right here on the boat – more or less the exact criteria we had earlier discussed.

  I was punch-drunk with tiredness and still reeling from the events of the night gone by. My brain seemed unable to grasp what Nate was driving at. Then the import of it filtered through.

  My immediate response was rejection. He was talking about Intercranial Cognition Transference. He was proposing we take it to the next level and conduct the procedure upon human beings. To wit: we remove Junior’s consciousness from his dying body and insert it into the traumatised brain of Charley.

  After all, Nate said, Charley was almost entirely bereft of his senses. Whatever the shoggoth had done to him – whatever awfulness he had been exposed to via that opening in its exterior – it had robbed him of his wits. His mind was now a tabula rasa upon which we could write anew, imprinting it with Junior’s cerebral essence. We might never get another chance like this. The very scenario Nate had outlined not so long ago had, through a stroke of extraordinary good fortune, come into being. We would be foolish – no, mad – to pass it up.

  “Look at it this way,” he insisted. “At the rate he’s going, Junior Brenneman is unlikely to last the day. Charley is lost to us, even while his physical self remains in fine fettle. In granting the one a continued existence within the vacant, healthy frame of the other, as a hermit crab takes up residence inside the discarded shell of another mollusc, we may give Junior a new lease of life.”

  I replied that we did not know whether Charley’s state of trancelike delirium was temporary or permanent, and until it could be established which, we would be acting pre-emptively. Then, too, there was the matter of dignity. How could we imbue his body with the consciousness of someone who so openly despised him? It was like some cruel jest, a final insult after all the copious other abuses he had suffered at Junior’s hands. I had found Charley to be an utterly honourable man, and even to contemplate subjecting him to the procedure was egregiously disrespectful.

  Furthermore, I added, we would surely need the permission of Junior’s next of kin before we could begin – the man himself was insensible – and I doubted the skipper would grant it.

  As to that, Nate said, he didn’t think it would be a problem. He could present the case in such a way that the skipper would see the sense in it and give his consent. My own refusal, he avowed, was more of a hindrance, but nothing that could not be got around.

  So saying, he strode off insouciantly to the pilothouse, leaving me to carry on tending to the unconscious Junior. When he returned some while later, he looked satisfied. Skipper Brenneman’s compliance had been secured, it seemed. He had been reluctant at first, and deeply sceptical too, but Nate – silver-tongued Nate, who could charm the birds from the trees – had won him round. Above all else the skipper did not want to lose his son. If Nate could really help Junior live on, even in the body of another, then as far as the skipper was concerned there was nothing else for it. Especially since the alternative for Junior was a protracted, painful death.

  I went to remonstrate with the skipper, but his mind was made up and it was like arguing with a block of adamantine. He was fairly drunk, what’s more, and became belligerent when I persisted. “Git gone with you, you bleatin’, lily-livered b–––––––!” he thundered, shaking a coal-blackened fist at me. “Mr Whateley knows what’s what, if’n you don’t. He has some backbone, that fella, some gumption. You made a cat act like as it were a dog, din’tcha? You used yer Ivy League smarts fur that. Naow use ’em ter save my boy!”

  Had Junior Brenneman been one iota more decent a human being, and Charley one iota less so, I might well have capitulated and gone along with Nate’s scheme. But I simply could not bring myself to, and I thought that my continued steadfast demurral would leave it stillborn. I thought that I had some say in the matter.

  It turned out that I did not. When I informed Nate that, the skipper’s wishes notwithstanding, I would still not undertake the procedure, my friend merely laughed derisively.

  “What makes you think I need you?” he said. “I have been privy to the evolution of your experiments, their every up and down, their every in and out. I know as much about the omnireticulum and Intercranial Cognition Transference as you do. You are, to put it bluntly, Zach, surplus to requirements. Now, you can either help me or get out of my way. Which is it to be?”

  His face was stony, his tone condescending and contemptuous. This was a Nate Whateley I did not recognise, a Nate Whateley who appeared to have cast aside all semblance of friendship and civility. I have likened him elsewhere in this memoir to a hurricane, and now I saw that I was just another of those obstacles that he could ride roughshod over and smash to smithereens. Any notion that I had been special to him, a younger brother, a soulmate, seemed illusory. Had I been kidding myself ? Had Nate been kidding me?

  I was crestfallen, shattered, but I stood my ground regardless. I told Nate I would not help him perform the procedure. In fact, if he insisted on going ahead with it, I would actively prevent him from doing so.

  When he scornfully asked how I intended to make good on that threat, I committed the mistake of telling him. I said I would go to the laboratory and destroy the necessary chemicals and utensils. My notes as well, if it came to that. There would be an end to the affair.

  “Oh, Zach, Zach, Zach,” Nate said, with a pitying shake of the head. His expression hardened. “You really think you can give me an ultimatum? Me, Nathaniel Whateley? You would really be that rash?”

  Drawing myself up to my full height, which was a couple of inches shy of his, I unleashed a defiant “yes”.

  Next thing I knew, there was pain, an explosion of lights in my vision, and then a profound and all-encompassing blackness.

  * * *

  When I came to, my jaw was aching, my head was spinning, and I felt nauseous. It was some while before I could raise myself from the bed I was lying on, some further while still before I managed to stagger upright. I was in my cabin. I tried the door. It was locked from the outside. I hammered upon it with my fists and called out. No one came.

  I retreated back to the bunk and took stock. The Innsmouth Belle was still chugging eagerly eastward, downriver. Scenery scrolled past the porthole window. It was gone three o’clock in the afternoon. I had been out for five hours. My best friend had knocked me out cold, and all because I had had the temerity to stand up to him.

  Five hours was more than enough time for Nate to have carried out the operation on Charley and Junior Brenneman. Had it been a success? I must confess to feeling a certain sneaking curiosity as to the outcome. A part of me was appalled at what Nate was attempting, but another part – the rational scientist in me, never far from the surface – had its ears pricked and its tail raised. There was knowledge in the offing. There was the tantalising prospect of an unprecedented accomplishment.

  Eventually, shortly before six, Nate came to unlock the door and release me. He eyed me with concern, registering the egg-sized bruise that swelled my jawline and offering an apology that sounded not a million miles from sincere.

  I could not help myself. I wanted to rail angrily at him, but all I could say was: “Did it work?”

  “Come and see, Zach. Come and see what we’ve done.”

  * * *

  Junior was dead. His corpse lay in his bunk, a sheet drawn up over the face. Charley, conversely, was up and about – and bewildered. He stood in his cabin staring at his ha
nds, brow furrowed, turning the twin appendages over and over, backs then palms, palms then backs, as though seeing them for the very first time. When I addressed him, he seemed not to recognise his own name. When Nate addressed him as “Junior”, his head twitched, as though he were hearing a snatch of a familiar song issuing from a distant window.

  The operation had gone smoothly, Nate told me. There had been no complications. Both patients (neither having much say in the matter) had submitted passively to being chloroformed. Gauging the requisite composition of the three separate Conroy’s Solutions had seemed a daunting challenge, but my notes were thorough – admirably so – and left little scope for misconstruction. Now all that remained for us to do was to keep the patient under observation and see how things developed.

  We left Charley – or was it Junior? – to recuperate, and went to Nate’s cabin for a celebratory glass of wine. As twilight descended over the Miskatonic, Skipper Brenneman hove to shore and joined us. Nate’s patently ebullient mood answered the question he seemed poised to ask.

  “So it come aout all right, eh? Well, there’s a relief. I sorta wanted ter know and sorta didn’t, if’n that makes sense. Kin I go an’ see him naow?”

  “Why not?” said Nate. “Remember, he may still be disorientated. His mind is having to adapt to an entirely new physiological schema. His body is not the one he had been accustomed to for thirty-odd years. There are no hard and fast rules for a situation like this. We are in uncharted waters. Him seeing your face may be beneficial, however. A lighthouse to guide him out of the mists of confusion.”

  It did not go quite like that. No sooner did Charley’s dark brown eyes fix upon the skipper than a moan escaped him. He gesticulated at the older man, even as the moaning continued, a thick, guttural, animalistic noise like the lowing of a cow crossed with the grunting of a hog. He held out his hands, as though asking a question. I could see it etched in his face: What has happened? Who am I?