The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

by James Lovegrove

  “Then why has he not done so already?”

  “The ghoul has a full belly. He is waiting until it is hungry again.”

  “A fair point. But there is more to it, I would suggest. What if R’luhlloig has struck the same deal with Conroy as he did with Whateley? What if Conroy has succumbed to the Hidden Mind just as his former friend did? Conroy is eminently suggestible, is he not? His journal presents ample evidence of a rather weak-willed individual, for all his intellectual prowess. I would be far from surprised if he has not kowtowed to R’luhlloig as readily as he did to Whateley back in Arkham. In a sense he was already in thrall to R’luhlloig, if we are right in thinking that R’luhlloig was behind Whateley’s uncanny charisma all along. All that has happened is that Conroy is now directly under R’luhlloig’s sway, rather than at one remove through Whateley. It is hardly a great shift from the one to the other.”

  “And R’luhlloig has convinced him that you and I must die.”

  “The Hidden Mind has perceived that we stand in opposition to him and his kind and that we would not have them gaining any sort of toehold in this world. If he did not know it beforehand, he would have discerned it from my attempted use of the Liquor of Supremacy to seize control of the nightgaunt. We are a threat to him, he believes – rightly, I trust – and must be eliminated.”

  “Then were we meant to read Conroy’s journal,” I said, “so that we might fathom all of this out for ourselves?”

  Holmes nodded. “Just as, no doubt thanks to R’luhlloig, we were meant to experience that Dreamlands vision of conquest.”

  “But to what end?”

  “R’luhlloig is so confident that we are doomed, he does not care if we know the full story. Indeed he wants us to. He wants us to understand how badly we have failed. It is the terrible arrogance of gods. As far as they are concerned, it is not sufficient merely to crush us mortals. We must be humiliated first.”

  “You make it sound as though you have given up all hope, Holmes.”

  “Do I? By God, I won’t deny that ennui has set in, Watson. I have become tired of this constant struggle. I find myself pining for the life I have in your fictions, where I glide with sublime ease from case to case, confronting nothing worse than blackmailers, murderers, jewel thieves and the odd blackguard with designs upon some hapless, blushing female. I am able to resolve every problem balletically, and with barely any risk to my sanity or my soul. Nobody could blame me for wanting it all to be over. But!” He wagged the rusty nail in the air, rather like an orator illustrating a point with a forthright forefinger. “If this current business has shown me anything, it is that I must forge on. R’luhlloig is a danger to the future of mankind and must be stopped. For that to happen, of course, we need first take steps to escape.”

  I could not suppress a grin. “By the living Jingo! I thought you would never get round to it. You have devised a method, yes? Some clever stratagem?”

  “Clever? Perhaps. I cannot vouch for its wisdom, however, for it may as likely kill us as liberate us.”

  After a moment’s thought, I shrugged. “Since the only alternative is death anyway,” said I, “I am content to try the thing that does not guarantee that fate over the thing that does. Tell me more.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  A Betrayer Betrayed

  IT WAS NOT QUITE DAWN WHEN WHATELEY CAME for us. Holmes and I had waited patiently, I feeling more than a smidgeon of unease at the escape plan my friend had outlined but trying to console myself that, for all its hazardousness, it could not be worse than anything Whateley – or R’luhlloig – might have in mind. Also, I myself could not think of a better plan, and that was not for want of trying.

  A key turned in the lock. Holmes and I swiftly took up the positions that he had previously specified. We affected nonchalance as the barn door swung open and in stepped Whateley.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “I bid you good morning.”

  Hovering just behind him was the nightgaunt, a black silhouette like his own shadow enlarged and horrendously distorted.

  My Webley was in his hand, and he waved it at both of us. “You will see that I have come armed. You will see, too, if you look carefully at the cylinder of the revolver, that there are rounds in the chambers. I found your box of ammunition, Doctor, in Mr Holmes’s portmanteau. I have no desire to shoot either of you. I will as a last resort, but to kill you so mundanely would be a disappointment.”

  “You have something else in mind,” said Holmes, “something more elaborate.”

  “Something positively Gothic,” said Whateley with relish. “A death so harrowing, even Mr Poe might have blanched at the thought of it.”

  “Involving the ghoul, no doubt.”

  “A shame not to exploit the beast’s peculiar talent, if I can. It craves flesh and is none too fussy where that flesh comes from, or what condition it is in.”

  “You refer to our flesh.”

  “The meat of two fine Englishmen. A delicacy, I’m sure. But there will be little point feeding you to it all in one go. As you can see from the leftovers in the cage, a ghoul can consume only so much at a single sitting. It makes sense to eke out the meals over a span of time. A leg one day, an arm the next, and so on. I will start with you, Mr Holmes, naturally.”

  “Naturally?” my friend queried.

  “Well, what is the good of having a licensed medical practitioner to hand if one does not take advantage of him? Dr Watson will perform the amputations and nurse you through the ordeal. As your oldest and dearest friend, he is sure to give you the very best care. It will be interesting to see how long you last. I cannot imagine you giving up the ghost easily, even as you are forced to watch yourself being eaten piece by piece. Let’s think… At the rate of one limb per day, that’s four days until you become a torso with a head. Then, on the fifth day, I shall lift you into the cage and let the ghoul have at you. If the good doctor rises to the challenge and you display sufficient stamina, that is the lifespan remaining to you: five very unpleasant days.”

  “You utter fiend!” I cried. In my hot-temperedness, I forgot all about our escape arrangements and took a step towards Whateley. He levelled the revolver at me.

  “You could still carry out your surgical duties with a bullet lodged in your leg, Doctor,” he said, “although I suspect you might prefer not to.”

  “I would kill Holmes rather than allow you to inflict such a protracted torment upon him,” I said, reverting to my former position.

  “It will be a test of your Hippocratic oath, that much is certain. I wonder if your impulse to keep a patient alive at all costs will override your desire to put him out of his misery. At any rate, for what it’s worth, your own death will be swifter. Once Mr Holmes is gone, what is the point in leaving you alive? I will probably just shoot you. It might take a few days for the ghoul to polish you off, but if by the end you have become a bit gamey, so what?” Whateley shrugged. “You will be that much more tender.”

  “This is a particularly nasty finale you have lined up for us,” said Holmes, sounding remarkably sanguine. If what Whateley was proposing perturbed him at any level, he gave no indication. “There is a downright sadistic aspect to it which I find hard to reconcile with the facts as they stand. What have Watson and I done to deserve such a vicious Grand Guignol execution? Granted, we are capable of exposing you as a murderer, but if you intend to ensure our silence by killing us, would it not be far less bother simply to shoot us? Delaying our deaths means there is always a chance we might turn the tables on you. I see no tactical benefit in it for you, only the pleasure of watching us suffer.”

  “Is that not enough?” said Whateley.

  “Frankly, no. You are an intelligent man. You would not be allowing us to live, even for just a few days, unless you had some specific reason for prolonging our agony. A personal reason.”

  Whateley looked cagey. “Perhaps I have, perhaps not.”

  “I cannot think of a reason why Nathaniel Whateley might hate W
atson and me so intently.” Holmes paused. “Nor, for that matter, can I think of a reason why Zachariah Conroy might.”

  “Why bring him into it?”

  “Conroy? I think you know full well why, Mr Whateley. I think you know that I have deduced by now who you really are.”

  A small smile appeared upon our captor’s face. “I could scarcely have made it more obvious, Mr Holmes.”

  “We read the journal, as you clearly wished us to. The rest was easy. I suppose congratulations are in order. Your procedure works after all. Not only that but you have used it to wreak a peculiarly apposite revenge upon Whateley. You are he now. You have his money, his looks, everything you envied about him. You have his body, moreover, which is as immaculate as your former body was flawed. All that Whateley took from you, you have taken back. Bravo, Mr Conroy. Bravo.”

  The man who was outwardly Nathaniel Whateley but inwardly Zachariah Conroy preened. “Justice has been done,” he said. “Nate has got what he deserved, and so have I.”

  “You must have toiled hard on your Intercranial Cognition Transference, in order to make it work on human beings.”

  “Actually it was easier than you might think.”

  “Really? Well, at the least, you must have had help carrying out the operation on yourself and Whateley.”

  “I did. Superlative help. A surgical assistant of unparalleled quality.”

  “Let me guess. R’luhlloig.”

  Now the small smile became a large one. “Well done, Mr Holmes,” said Whateley, whom I shall hereafter refer to as Conroy, just as Holmes himself had taken to doing. “Well done indeed. You are piecing everything together exactly as I hoped you would.”

  “Is that not the aim of this little game?” said Holmes. “For me to tease out the truth and for you to chart my progress?”

  “It is entertaining, I must say, watching the cogs turn in that formidable brain of yours. Quite the spectator sport.”

  “So you threw yourself upon the mercy of Whateley’s otherworldly confederate, the Outer God whom you had already identified as his motivator. That, I would submit, is where you have been directing your efforts since you were discharged from the Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts. Your focus has not been on furthering your scientific researches but your arcane ones.”

  “I returned to Arkham from Boston in the spring of last year and paid a series of visits to the university library,” said Conroy. “Nate, perhaps not surprisingly, had not returned the Necronomicon, for all his assurances that he would. However, there were other books in the library’s darker, dustier corners that could furnish me with the information I sought. You will be familiar with them. Von Junzt. Prinn. The Pnakotic Manuscripts. None quite as encyclopaedic as Alhazred’s tome, nor as steeped in eldritch power, but I took detailed notes and cumulatively they provided me with a framework upon which to build.”

  “Then came rituals. Prostration before idols. Nights of incantation and obeisance.”

  “You speak with weary disdain, as though it is an old, old story to you,” said Conroy, “but to me it was new and exciting. I treated it like a scientific discipline. I followed the wording of the rites to the letter, much as though they were the protocols of a laboratory experiment. The night I first made contact with R’luhlloig…” The American’s eyes blazed. “How terrifying it was, yet how thrilling too, in all its blasphemous transgressiveness, its glorious obscenity. Though I hail from devout Episcopalian stock, I had never had much time for God. And there I was, communing with a deity – a divine being that was not a forgiving father figure but rather a thing of calculation and appetite and cool resolve, a thing whose nature I actually found estimable. I knew R’luhlloig to be at least partly to blame for the disasters that had befallen me, but somehow that did not matter. To turn the tables on Nate by using the very same god who had been his ally – how delicious! Some nights it was all I could think about: how I would take everything from him, even R’luhlloig. Such thoughts kept me warm.”

  “You embraced that which had been the agent of your downfall,” said Holmes. “There is a peculiarly self-destructive streak in you, Conroy.”

  “Perhaps, Mr Holmes. Perhaps. But the moment when R’luhlloig’s voice flowed through me, as icy as the gulfs of space – it felt right. R’luhlloig seemed to know just what I wanted. I felt that he had been waiting for me to make contact, and moreover that I had, without knowing it, been waiting my entire life to contact him.”

  “And that is how they ensnare you, these alien cosmic entities,” I said. “They gull you into believing you matter to them, when all they are after is whatever they can get from you. They prey upon the weak and the obsessive, and the price is eventually, inevitably, madness and death.”

  “R’luhlloig is not like that,” Conroy shot back. “He is not as other gods, Outer or Old Ones or otherwise. He is not subject to cruel whims, nor is he motivelessly malignant. He is ambitious. He has plans.”

  “Destructive plans.”

  “Not for those who would be his acolytes.”

  “But R’luhlloig already had, in Nathaniel Whateley, a loyal servant,” I said. “What would he gain from you standing in Whateley’s stead? Why help you commandeer Whateley’s body?”

  “To gain himself a servant even more loyal than Whateley,” Holmes interjected. “Is that not so, Mr Conroy? A servant who has given himself wholly over to R’luhlloig, body and soul, since he has benefited so much in return. Tell me how you were able to perform the exchange, with R’luhlloig’s aid.”

  “It was not so hard,” said Conroy. “Painful, yes, but not hard.”

  “First you lured Whateley out of London with that journal of yours.”

  “That part was ridiculously straightforward. R’luhlloig furnished me with Nate’s London address. I posted him the journal with a covering letter. ‘You had better meet with me if you know what’s good for you.’ Something to that effect. I also enclosed a map providing directions to this location. Nate fell for the ploy. He inferred that I was after money, because that was the first thing he said upon arriving. It was late in the afternoon, and he looked to have had a hard, difficult journey getting here. ‘How much did you think you might get, you pathetic little worm?’ he barked, brandishing the journal. ‘Because I warn you, I shall not pay a single penny. If extortion is what you were hoping to achieve by sending me this worthless piece of trash, then you are sorely mistaken. I would burn the damn thing if I didn’t think you had another copy squirrelled away somewhere.’ This exchange took place by the front door to the farmhouse.”

  “I presume you rented this retreat and stocked it with a nightgaunt and a ghoul?”

  “Correct.”

  “Creatures furnished you by R’luhlloig.”

  “R’luhlloig guided them to me. I taught myself the methods necessary to control the nightgaunt, while the ghoul requires somewhat less in the way of husbandry. As long as it is fed, it is content, and the cage will keep it contained. Do you or do you not want to hear about the meeting with Nate?”

  “By all means continue. I apologise for the interruption.”

  “Even as Nate fulminated,” Conroy said, “I played the part of meek, importunate Zachariah Conroy, claiming that I had fallen upon hard times and money was indeed my object. ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘A couple of hundred dollars perhaps, to set me back on my feet.’ This drove Nate to greater heights of indignation. ‘You have come all this way,’ said he, ‘to ask for an outrageous sum, which you must know I am not going to hand over. You have wasted your time. I always thought you naïve but never, until now, did I think you an idiot. Here, take your damn book. Never presume to trouble me again.’ Thinking me cowed, he turned to go. That was when I struck him down from behind.”

  “He should not have turned his back on you.”

  “He should also have looked more closely and asked himself why I was keeping my hand behind my back – a hand that held a leather sap.”

  “Often the crudest met
hods are the most effective.”

  “I coshed him hard, and down he went like a sack of coal. I dragged him indoors. When, an hour later, he came to, he was so groggy and enfeebled that I almost felt sorry for him. But I could also not help feeling triumphant. I was the dominant one in our relationship now. As I watched him writhe on the floor, I wondered why I had ever thought him so great. How could this vain peacock have dazzled me the way he did? He was all surface and no substance. Then the work commenced.”

  “The operation,” said Holmes. “I am going to put forward my theory as to how R’luhlloig contributed. He took over Whateley, yes? Exerted power over him until Whateley became his puppet.”

  “It was an extraordinary act of possession,” said Conroy with a nod of acknowledgement. “Nate was unable to resist. R’luhlloig infused him from crown to heel, gaining full mastery over his motor functions. Jerkily Nate rose to his feet. He could not speak. He could not do anything R’luhlloig did not want him to. And the best part of it all? The abject terror in his eyes. Nate was fully aware what was happening to him, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. It must have been like being trapped in a nightmare. I saw hurt in his expression, too. His god had turned on him. He had no idea why. How delicious I found that anguish of his. It giddied me to my core.”

  “Your vengeance upon Whateley was complete.”

  “Almost. Almost. First of all, I extracted the essence of Nate’s omnireticulum. I had him lie down prone and bored a drill into the base of his skull, then inserted four hypodermic needles one after another, three to inject and the last to extract. He was, of course, conscious throughout the entire procedure. R’luhlloig kept him stock-still, paralysing his muscles, so there was no screaming or squirming, but I am sure he felt every ounce of the agony.” Conroy grinned with awful relish.