The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

by James Lovegrove

  The skipper was at a loss. He reached out several times half-heartedly to Charley, as though wishing to make contact then thinking better of it. The lines on his face doubled and deepened until it was a mask of furrows. This impassioned tableau lasted until the skipper abruptly turned on his heel and quit the cabin. I caught up with him outside, where he was taking great agitated draughts from his hipflask.

  “Is that my boy?” he said. “I mean, it’s Charley on the outside sure enough, but he ain’t a-holdin’ hisself like he used ter. He’s got that kinder forward lean, jus’ like Junior used ter have, an’ I kin tell he’s trying ter communicate, only the words ain’t comin’ aout. I’m not sure we done the right thing here, Mr Conroy.”

  I did what I could to reassure him. Uncharted waters, I said, reiterating Nate’s metaphor. Nobody had ever attempted a feat of this nature before. All we could do was monitor the patient’s progress and hope for the best.

  “Hope fur the best? That’s a tall order. You hed better be right, is all I kin say. Otherwise we’ve done gone damned my son’s mortal soul, sir, an’ I reckon as haow we may’ve damned our own inter the bargain.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “You Cunnin’ Fellas Went An’ Made Yerselves a Monster”

  CHARLEY, OR RATHER JUNIOR WHO NOW INHABITED Charley’s body, showed little sign of improvement the next day, or the day after. If anything, he worsened. He would not eat. He barely slept. He stayed in his cabin, sometimes groaning softly to himself, sometimes sobbing, but for the most part maintaining a silence that was disconcerting in its profundity. I could not help but think of this behaviour as signifying depression, even despair, although the blank affect that now typified Charley’s mien made interpretation of his emotions just so much guesswork.

  Obviously we could not keep Junior’s corpse aboard the Belle indefinitely, and so it was consigned to the waters of the Miskatonic, with a bed sheet serving as its shroud and rocks weighing it down. The skipper muttered such fragments of the funeral rites as he could remember while the body slipped below the surface and a tear trickled down his whiskery, thread-veined cheek. Nate, attempting a conciliatory note, suggested that this was not an end for Junior but a new beginning, at which the skipper rounded on him and looked as though he was going to subject him to a sharp rebuke. Instead, however, the old man merely shook his head sorrowfully and traipsed away. Moments later the steamer’s engine coughed into life and we were moving downriver once more.

  On the third day after the operation there came what we thought was a breakthrough. Charley (I still thought of him as Charley and had resolved to continue to do so until given incontrovertible proof of Junior’s tenancy) stepped out from his cabin and took a turn about the deck. His shuffling circuit of the superstructure was followed by a return to his quarters, where he remained for the rest of the day. He also drank a few sips of broth. I felt as though he was trying to establish some kind of normality for himself but was struggling. His movements were slow and heavy, uncoordinated, like a somnambulist’s.

  Nate said – and it seemed plausible – that he just needed time. After all, he pointed out, not all of the animals I had experimented upon had got used to their altered condition straight away. Some had undergone a quiescent period first, a kind of chrysalis stage.

  I refrained from reminding him that some had not adjusted at all, like the cat-in-a-rat that had gone crazy. I was desperate now for the Charley/Junior interchange to succeed. The pragmatic side of me had fully asserted itself. I wanted this leap in the dark, for all that I had not instigated it nor had the power to reverse it, to fulfil its promise. It would be a vindication of my life’s work and doubtless herald untold riches and renown. If my name was ever to go down in the annals of history, it hinged on Charley’s recovery, or rather on the ultimate ascendance of Junior’s consciousness within Charley.

  * * *

  A broken mirror was the first indication that things were unravelling. Charley drove his fist into the looking-glass that hung in his cabin, causing several deep lacerations to his hand, which I bandaged up as best I could. Prior to striking the mirror, I had watched him stare into it for minutes on end. I wondered if he had been trying to recognise himself.

  Later that same day he flew into a sudden rage while eating his dinner. In hindsight, I realised that what had provoked his outburst was catching sight of his reflection in the blade of a table knife. He threw his plate across the room and started thumping the wall hard enough to make the timbers shake. I spoke softly and soothingly to him, and he calmed down.

  I was unnerved, however. Nate dismissed the incidents as temper tantrums, but to me they were evidence of a deeper disorder. Beneath the surface, pressures were building within Charley. Nate suggested that the pupa was breaking out of its cocoon, often a tortuous process. The arrival of the imago, he said, would validate the tribulations of its emergence.

  In the middle of the night, Charley smashed up his cabin. Every stick of furniture was left in pieces. The porthole was put out. We took him to what had been Junior’s cabin, and he seemed more at home there, surrounded by the younger Brenneman’s few meagre keepsakes such as a faulty brass alarm clock and a faded tintype of his mother.

  The lull, though, did not last long. The rages came and went, but the intensity of each amplified and the intervals between shortened. Still no cogent speech had come from Charley. He might growl as he stormed about the cabin, or mewl piteously in his quieter moments, but language appeared alien to him, a forgotten skill. Nate and I took the time to show him various everyday items – a shoe, a book, a fountain pen – and rehearse their names loudly and clearly, in the hope of reigniting the spark of intelligence within him, but it was useless. Often these elementary tutorials would simply stir him to anger again, as though he felt we were mocking his inability to talk, and we would beat a hasty retreat until the fit abated.

  In the end there was nothing for it but to sequester him in the cabin under lock and key. Both Nate and I felt in physical danger from him. So far Charley had restricted himself to taking his frustration out upon inanimate objects, or upon himself, clawing at his face and beating his flanks and thighs, but how soon before he turned his ire on someone else?

  All the while, Skipper Brenneman grew more embittered and disconsolate, resorting to his hipflask with ever greater dependency. He had been promised his son back. What he had got instead was a dumb, brutish hulk of a man in whom very little of Junior, indeed almost nothing, could be detected. From dawn to dusk the skipper stationed himself in the pilothouse and drove the Innsmouth Belle hard, pausing only to shovel fresh coal into her furnace. It was as though he was fleeing something, and yet, in a Tartarean twist, that which he was fleeing was on board the steamer with him. No matter how he tried, he could not get away from it.

  The boat did not take kindly to the treatment being meted out to her. Smoke spewed out in increasingly thicker, blacker gouts from her funnel, while her engine developed a wheeze and a bronchitic rattle. Our stop-start progress was contributing to her malaise, it seemed, her aged machinery not enjoying having to work in short bursts rather than functioning evenly over a long period. In order to help matters I volunteered to serve as coal shoveller, but Skipper Brenneman merely cast an eye over my soft, slender hands and narrow, stooped shoulders and scoffed. A lad like me had never done a day’s hard labour in his life, he said (not inaccurately). He would wager good money on me not lasting “a half-haour” in the engine room. The job demanded a workhorse, not a prancing show pony.

  And so the Belle toiled laboriously onward, downstream.

  * * *

  It was on the evening of the sixth day after the operation, when the Innsmouth Belle had just moored up for the night, that Charley went all-out berserk.

  Nate was on observation duty at the time and, by his account, barely got out of the cabin alive. One moment, Charley was sitting on the bunk, gazing into the middle distance. The next, he was a roaring madman, his hands clamped around N
ate’s neck. Nate fought him off with all his might, but it wasn’t until his groping fingers found Junior’s alarm clock that he gained a weapon that evened the odds. He pounded Charley’s skull with the brass timepiece, the third blow both destroying the clock and stunning Charley sufficiently that he let go. Nate wasted no time in vacating the room and locking the door behind him.

  The commotion brought me and the skipper running, and we stood outside the cabin listening to Charley pummel on the door hard enough to make it rattle within its frame. The vocalisations coming from the other side were appalling – howls of unbridled fury interspersed with low slobbering growls.

  Skipper Brenneman wrung his hands impotently while Nate and I debated what to do. If Charley continued to subject the door to punishment, sooner or later he would break it down. In the end we decided we had no alternative but to corral him more securely inside the cabin, and this, with the aid of planks and nails, we set about doing. As if in response to the sounds of our impromptu carpentry outside, Charley redoubled his efforts. The doorjamb began to splinter, then the door itself. The planks we fastened across it provided reinforcement, and his escape bid was thwarted, but we knew this was only a stopgap measure. Unless he gave up – and there was no indication of him doing that any time soon – he would demolish his way through eventually. Clearly something within Charley had snapped. He was pure animus, no longer even close to rational. The berserker frenzy might pass of its own accord, but then again it might not, and either way it would doubtless not be satisfied until he had inflicted dire harm upon one or all of us.

  I proposed that we chloroform him, but Nate shot the idea down. How would we apply a handkerchief soaked in the chemical to Charley’s face? The skipper tendered the most straightforward solution. “We got ter kill him,” he said. “It’s the only thing for it. Kill him afore he kills us. Whatever that creature in there makin’ all that ruckus is, it ain’t Charley and it ain’t my Junior neither. You cunnin’ fellas went an’ made yerselves a monster. He’s got ter go, and if neither of you’s got the sand ter do the deed, I guess it’s up ter me.”

  Against our protests, the skipper went to fetch the Winchester from Nate’s cabin. We knew we had less than a minute to salvage the situation somehow. I for one did not want Charley killed, for his destruction would signal that the experiment was an abject failure. Yet, unless he could be pacified by some non-lethal means, what choice was there?

  All at once Nate grabbed hold of one of the planks barricading the door, leaned back and started wrenching it off. “Quick! Help me!” he urged. “Charley is a sitting duck if we leave him where he is. The skipper has only to shoot him through the door, and it’s done. If we let him out, however, he stands a chance of survival.”

  “You would free him?” I said, aghast. But then I saw the sense in it. Freed, Charley might escape. He might abandon the Belle and hare off into the wilderness, whence we could retrieve him later after he had calmed down, assuming he did. As long as Charley lived, Intercranial Cognition Transference between humans remained a viable possibility. As long as he lived, the experiment was not yet over, and neither were my prospects of a brilliant future.

  I can see, in retrospect, the rank illogicality of this train of thought. The phrase “clutching at straws” has rarely been so apt. Nevertheless, in that moment of crisis, my desperate, fevered brain wished nothing more than to keep the flame of hope alight, at whatever cost, even if it risked the deaths of us all. Success mattered more to me than life. Somewhere along the course of that journey up and down the Miskatonic I had, it would seem, lost all perspective. I had, too, perhaps lost a portion of my sanity.

  I joined Nate in prying loose the planks. The door continued to shudder under assault from Charley. It would not hold out much longer.

  The skipper reappeared, brandishing Nate’s Winchester. We had by then pulled the last plank free. He beheld our handiwork and knew in a flash what had motivated it. Cursing us, he took up a shooting stance in front of the door, rifle butt lodged in the crook of his shoulder. He cocked the lever and aimed at a spot where Charley’s torso would be on the other side.

  “Don’t even try ter stop me,” he snarled at us. “Either o’ you does, an’ the next bullet’ll be fur him. This ends right here an’—”

  He never did finish the sentence. The door burst outwards, shattering free from its frame, crashing to the deck. Startled, off balance, the skipper loosed off a round, but the shot went wild. Next instant, out Charley came. His face was contorted in pure mindless ferocity. His lips were flecked with spittle. He lunged straight for the skipper, who frantically pumped the lever of the Winchester but not in time. Charley seized the rifle, tugged it from his grasp with terrible ease, and struck him with it. The blow sent the skipper sprawling to the deck, whereupon Charley began clubbing him mercilessly with the repeater. Down the gun went with an unremitting, almost metronomic regularity, each impact sounding softer and wetter than the last as Skipper Brenneman’s cranium disintegrated beneath the onslaught. At some point he ceased to cry out in distress. Then there was only the thud of the rifle butt striking the hideous, pulpy ruin his head had become. Charley continued to beat away until the wood of the rifle was making contact with the wood of the deck, and he halted only when the Winchester began to fall apart in his hands, stock and barrel parting company, bolt mechanism coming to pieces.

  Nate and I had stood as mute, stupefied witnesses to this act of butchery. Now, as Charley dropped the broken Winchester, we began belatedly to back away. The Negro’s eyes, which had once been so lively and full of compassion, contained nothing but murderous malignance. There was no trace of Charley in them, and if it was Junior who now glared out through those wild, vein-webbed orbs, it was a Junior bereft of all reason and morality.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  A Foretaste of Damnation

  WE FLED AFT, AND THE MADDENED CHARLEY lumbered after us. The stern of the boat was not quite a dead end, for the gangplank was available. It had been shipped for the night but we could have slid it out over the rail into position, had we had the time and leisure. In the event, our choices were to leap ashore, at the risk of breaking an ankle; consign ourselves to the Miskatonic and swim to safety; or make a stand.

  I was all in favour of swimming. There was no telling whether Charley would pursue us into the water. Perhaps, in his deranged state, he no longer had the power of natation. He might baulk at diving in, or he might sink straight under and drown.

  Nate – bravely, or perhaps rashly – elected to confront Charley. He snatched up a small barrel and hurled it at the marauding giant with some force. The barrel rebounded off Charley’s sternum, throwing him off balance. As he reeled, I spied an opening. I will say, in all modesty, that what I did then was the boldest thing I have ever done, and to this day I do not know what possessed me. In the heat of the moment my natural timorousness took flight. I may speculate that it was a combination of self-interest and altruism. Not only was I in mortal danger but Nate too. One often has more courage when defending others rather than just oneself.

  At any rate, I charged at Charley, head down like a linebacker in the scrimmage. I struck him side-on. He lost all remaining equilibrium and went tumbling off the boat. As luck would have it, this happened on the side adjacent to the bank, so that he landed on solid ground, not in the river. He hit hard but was up on his feet in no time. He leapt for the rail, with the obvious intention of hauling himself back aboard, but tall though he was, its rim was just too high. He kept trying, hollering all the while in indignation, but his efforts were for naught.

  I had won us a reprieve, and Nate did not waste it. He untied the mooring rope and cast the Innsmouth Belle adrift. The steamer began to draw away from the bank, borne by the Miskatonic’s slow but insistent current. Charley gave voice to a screech of outrage and began dogging us along the bank. It was not difficult for him to keep pace with the boat, and even when he came to rocks or overhanging trees he was not waylaid for long.
Scrambling, wading, diverting around, he fell behind but soon caught up again once he came to an uninterrupted stretch of shoreline.

  Simply by floating along, it seemed we would not outpace him. I feared Charley would keep harrying us indefinitely, tireless in his pursuit. And at present we had no control over the steamer. What if some quirk of the current rammed us into the bank, or stranded us in shallows?

  I announced that we must get the Belle started and drive her. It was our only hope. Nate said that he had watched the skipper in the pilothouse. There was a rudder wheel and a lever that regulated the steamer’s speed and another lever that switched the paddle wheel between forward and reverse. Mastering these controls would surely not be much of a challenge, and the moon, which had just arisen, was on the wane but still shedding enough light to navigate by.

  Accordingly, we went below decks to the engine room and set about firing up the boiler. Then I at last got to learn how arduous the life of a coal shoveller was – and it was arduous indeed. Stripped to my shirtsleeves, I was soon filthy, my skin caked in a paste made of coal dust and sweat. My arms ached. My back hurt. My lungs rasped. Nevertheless the furnace was raging and the Belle was moving under her own steam, with Nate as captain, manning the controls.

  I thought we had done it. With the boat picking up speed, and the current assisting, we would soon be going fast enough to leave Charley far behind.

  How foolish of me, how naïve, to believe that we could escape Nemesis so easily.

  * * *

  I reckon it was an hour, no more than that, before problems set in – an hour of plain sailing before the beleaguered engine began to sputter and groan. I wonder if we did something wrong, if we inadvertently mistreated the steamer in our eagerness to be under way. I do not know. All I know is that the Innsmouth Belle was voicing complaint. Every inch of her from stem to stern was creaking and shuddering. Whatever was amiss, it was acute and it was worsening. She had, it would seem, taken as much abuse as she could bear. Cumulatively, over days and weeks, she had been pushed to her limit of endurance, and we were forcing her past it.