The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

by James Lovegrove

  “I did not. It was his own choice.”

  “Then you convinced Zachariah Conroy to follow him to these shores.”

  “That, yes, I had a hand in,” said R’luhlloig. “Conroy wished to visit revenge upon Whateley, and since Whateley happened to be living in London, your stamping ground, it seemed serendipitous. Conroy would go after Whateley, and I would capitalise on that situation by using it to go after you. I am not one to turn down a convenient opportunity when it presents itself.”

  “Doubtless you also arranged for Whateley to tell the Dagon Club about the expedition up the Miskatonic River. What seemed like foolish indiscretion on Whateley’s part was in fact artful contrivance.”

  “After hearing such a confession, your brother and the other members of his silly little cabal would be apt to remember Whateley, while at the same time dismissing him as a garrulous dilettante. The name Nathaniel Whateley would be fixed in their minds, and by association that of Zachariah Conroy, so that should your investigation happen to hit the doldrums, there was dear Mycroft primed with this puff of wind to send you on your way again. Whateley himself had no idea why he mentioned the expedition. It was simply in answer to some instinctive inner prompting.”

  “From you.”

  “All part of laying the groundwork. It has been inevitable that I must despatch you at some point. I have striven to bring about that end in a way that is as entertaining as possible to myself, and perhaps also, in some manner, to you.”

  “You insist upon making little of it, R’luhlloig,” said Holmes, “but the distinct impression remains that I matter to you. That is why you created such a well-woven web to enmesh me. You see in me someone who can hamper you in your broader objectives.”

  “No, Mr Holmes!” R’luhlloig declared, but the vexation in his tone belied the denial. “Not in the least. I am in no way troubled by you.”

  “You showed Watson and me your subjugation of Cathuria in the Dreamlands. Was that simply to impress upon us how potent and bellicose you are?”

  “Yes!”

  “And not the act of someone insecure about his accomplishments? A swaggering bully who masks his lack of self-worth by boasting about the number of his victims? Watson has had me dub you ‘the Napoleon of crime’ in one of his stories, and I am wondering if the Napoleon comparison is not apt. The real Napoleon, after all, compensated for his shortcomings by conquering half of Europe. He was a posturing popinjay, a man who behaved less like a general and more like a boy pushing tin soldiers back and forth across the sitting-room carpet, until Wellington came along and made him tidy them away.”

  “Mr Holmes!” R’luhlloig boomed.

  But Holmes was not to be shouted down. “And I see abundant similarities between him and you. You have begun waging a war. You have marshalled the Outer Gods and aligned them against the Great Old Ones, cementing their loyalty to you by giving them an enemy upon whom to direct their ire. You have thrown down a gauntlet, and it will surely be picked up. The open challenge the Outer Gods have delivered to the Old Ones – Watson and I saw it in our vision of the Dreamlands – is too inflammatory to be ignored. Like sleeping bears, the Old Ones will not care for being prodded and will surely lash out. Is becoming divine not enough for you? It seems you will not rest until you have sparked all-out, cosmos-wide conflict.”

  “And won it and established myself as supreme god of all.”

  “For what? To make up for some fundamental inadequacy within your being. Where does it end? You would tear apart the entire universe in the hope of filling this gnawing emptiness inside, but where will that leave you? You will be emperor of ruins. Somewhere in your heart – a black, shrivelled organ, to be sure – there is a voice, and it is telling you that you will never be content. Even after your war is over and you have everything you could wish for, it will still whisper to you that you are James Moriarty, failed academic, failed occultist, failed human, failed divinity…”

  “My name is not—”

  “Failed everything. The kindest thing you can do for yourself, Moriarty, is abandon this course. Look at you. You stand there fuming. If I, a mere man, can render you thus – you, a god – then you must truly fear me. And if you fear me, then you cannot be a god.”

  R’luhlloig looked fit to burst. His entire frame was quivering. To say that Holmes had struck a nerve would be an understatement. He had struck oil, and the stuff was gushing to the surface, propelled by tremendous pressures.

  “DAMN YOU, SHERLOCK HOLMES!” R’luhlloig roared. He seemed to be growing before our very eyes, the body of Nathaniel Whateley swelling, unable to trammel the full wrath of a god. Veins stood out. Sinews strained. There were a few seconds in which I wondered whether he might actually explode.

  The nightgaunt appeared to think this a possibility. The creature began backing warily away from R’luhlloig.

  That was when Holmes gave the signal: a downward-chopping motion of his hand. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye. I was so distracted by R’luhlloig, I almost missed it.

  Now, while R’luhlloig was lost in a trembling paroxysm of fury, were we presented with our greatest likelihood of success.

  We had our opening. We seized it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  A Terrible Tug-of-War

  HOLMES HAD PLACED THE LANTERN ON THE BARN floor, out of direct line of sight from the door, and left it burning low. Together we had distributed the spare straw so as to form a scattered line leading from the lantern to the ghoul’s cage. We had doused the straw in excess lantern oil.

  Holmes called it a fuse.

  I now lit the fuse by knocking the lantern over with my foot. Its glass chimney shattered. The little oil that was left in its reservoir spilled out. Its flame ignited this dribble of oil and spread quickly to the straw. No less quickly, fire rippled along the fuse, reaching the cage in a heartbeat.

  Holmes, meanwhile, lunged for R’luhlloig. The god in human guise was slow to anticipate the attack. Too late did he realise that his captives were staging an escape. We had been awaiting the crucial moment when the attention of our opponent – whether that was Conroy or, as it transpired, R’luhlloig – was unfocused. Holmes had been confident that this moment would come, as long as he was able to play the role of gadfly with sufficient aplomb. Now, taking three swift steps, he grasped R’luhlloig’s gun arm. The gun went off, R’luhlloig squeezing the trigger by reflex. The bullet buzzed past my ear and ricocheted off the barn wall, taking a chunk out of the brickwork. The report brought the ghoul snapping awake. The creature had already been stirring, disturbed by the sound of raised voices. All at once it was on all fours, fully alert, eyes wide, ears erect.

  Holmes yanked R’luhlloig forwards, all the way into the barn. He spun him round and at the same time, with a twist of his wrist, disarmed him, plucking the gun free.

  I, for my part, was making for the door. Not only was the barn rapidly filling with smoke, the “bomb” to which our fuse was attached was about to detonate. The straw that lined the bottom of the ghoul’s cage had started to smoulder. The ghoul, registering this, let out a shriek of panic, even as fingers of flame began flickering up from its bedding. The creature hurled itself bodily against the bars of the cage. Panic became blind terror. Three times it struck the inside of its iron prison before, abruptly, the door sprang open.

  As part of our preparations, Holmes had removed the pins from the cage door’s hinges. Stealthily, every movement slow and steady so as not to rouse the ghoul, he had levered out each pin using, for a jemmy, the rusty nail he had found on the floor. For ten very tense minutes – while I kept an ear to the barn door in case someone should approach – he had worked on the hinges, at pains not to cause any untoward sound or vibration. Since then, the cage door had merely been resting in its frame, with only the lock holding it in position. Had the ghoul awoken sooner and somehow discovered that it was not properly confined, it would no doubt have savaged us. I am sure we would not have survived the encounter.


  As it was, the ghoul sprang free from its cage and made straight for the nearest living being. Like any terrified animal, it reacted to danger by going on the offensive.

  R’luhlloig was closest; Holmes had manoeuvred him directly between himself and the ghoul. R’luhlloig half turned, sensing the onrush of the beast behind him. He gave a cry that could have been a command or a yell of protest. Either way, it did not deter the ghoul. Jaws clamped around his head. Fangs sank in. Now R’luhlloig screamed. So did Zachariah Conroy. Both of them, in the body they shared that was neither’s original, howled at once, their two voices emanating from the same throat, a duet of pain with one providing the melody, the other a descant, although which was whose, I cannot say.

  The nightgaunt, sensing its master’s distress, rushed into the barn. Barging past both me and Holmes, it threw itself upon the ghoul and tried to pry that creature free from R’luhlloig. The ghoul resisted strenuously, lashing out backwards at its assailant. Blood was pouring out around its jaws and it would not let go of its prey. The three of them, monsters all, were engaged in a kind of terrible tug-of-war, as the nightgaunt pulled at the ghoul and the ghoul bit harder into R’luhlloig.

  All the while, the fire was spreading rapidly. The barn’s ancient, tinder-dry timber framework was the perfect fuel. Flames were reaching for the rafters. The smoke was becoming impenetrably thick.

  Holmes hastened outside to join me. The three struggling figures within the barn were silhouettes amidst the inferno. R’luhlloig’s screams were just audible above the mounting din of the flames, and they reached a new pitch of agony as the nightgaunt at last succeeded in separating him from the ghoul. The ghoul was hauled off him, but not without taking a large chunk of his neck with it. R’luhlloig sank to his knees, his head lolling horrifically to one side. Ragged tendons and torn musculature stood exposed, and blood jetted from his severed carotid.

  “Enough gawping,” said Holmes. “The door, Watson.”

  He and I bent to the task of shutting the barn door. A last glimpse through the narrowing aperture showed me the nightgaunt and the ghoul wrestling in the midst of the conflagration, the latter snarling, the former imperiously silent. They were two wild animals locked in bitter conflict, oblivious to all else, and I cared not which won. I wished the both of them would rend each other to pieces.

  The door slammed. Holmes turned the large key.

  We staggered back, away from the barn, and watched it burn.

  * * *

  It burned for three hours. By the end, it was a crumpled, skeletal hulk, with a few stalwart flames still licking along spars of timber that jutted out at all angles, mottled black and ash-grey. A tremendous heat still radiated from the smouldering debris, and an immense plume of smoke hung in the morning sky, drifting slowly westward across the marshes under the prevailing wind. Now and then something snapped or creaked loudly amidst the wreckage, and there would rise the occasional flurry of embers like a column of glowing gnats circling one another.

  We had stayed in order to make sure that the raging inferno consumed everything. I had feared that the nightgaunt, at least, might prove resistant to immolation and somehow break free, but my concerns were not borne out by events. Once the barn’s roof came down – in a sudden, thundering collapse – it seemed indisputable that none of the three beings trapped inside the structure could have survived. Nonetheless, we had to be certain.

  As the smoke dwindled, we ventured as close as we could to the ruin and peered in. The first charred corpse we were able to distinguish was that of the ghoul. It had been sundered in two by the nightgaunt, ripped at the waist, and the halves lay side by side, limbs distended and brittle-looking. The nightgaunt was comparatively intact. It was hunched over, prostrate, like a Mussulman praying, and there was no question that it was dead; but its leathery hide had not so much burned as shrivelled. Its wings were tattered parodies of their former selves, but the rest of it seemed baked rather than incinerated, as though it had cooked within its skin.

  After a moment or so I perceived that there was something beneath it. The nightgaunt was crouching over the remains of Nathaniel Whateley. I remarked upon this fact to Holmes, who said, “Fascinating. The nightgaunt was trying to protect its master even in extremis. It was hoping to shield him from the flames with its body. Such devotion.”

  It had failed in the attempt, of course, for the corpse it sheltered was as charcoal-black as that of the ghoul, and as motionless. The body had been drawn into a foetal position by the tightening of its sinews as they burned. The mouth hung open in a grinning, lipless rictus, and the eye sockets were rimmed with a crust of boiled vitreous humour.

  “Is that the end of him?” I said.

  “Of Whateley? Yes,” said Holmes. “Conroy too. But R’luhlloig? Can one kill a god?”

  It was then that the head of the corpse moved.

  It rolled on what remained of its neck, turning towards Holmes and me, as though reacting to the sound of our voices. Those empty eye sockets fixed upon us, and it spoke. A thin, papery rustle issued from its scorched throat, just discernible above the crackling of the dying conflagration.

  “Mr Holmes,” it said. “You cannot think… that you are rid of me… so easily.”

  Just about every hair I had upon my person stood erect. I had seen some ghastly sights, but this talking carbonised cadaver surpassed them all.

  Holmes himself, if not dumbstruck, certainly seemed to need a moment to gather his wits before responding.

  “One could be forgiven for hoping,” said he.

  “Only fools… hope,” said R’luhlloig, “and you… are no fool. You have… incommoded me. That is… inarguable. You have caused me… considerable suffering.”

  “Then today has not been a waste.”

  “But you have not… defeated me. Not even… close.” It was apparent that to speak in this manner required the expenditure of a great deal of power by R’luhlloig. Animating the seared, inert shell of Nathaniel Whateley took effort, even for a god. “All you… have done is… harden my resolve. I shall not… deviate from my plans. And you? You shall be the… object of them. I shall be… coming for you… and I shall… bring hell with me.”

  I shot him.

  Holmes had returned my Webley to me shortly after we escaped the burning barn. I had had my fill of R’luhlloig’s invective and could stomach no more. I unleashed round after round at that vile, blackened head. From a range of half a dozen yards the bullets blasted it to bits. Nothing was left but a shattered brainpan and lumps of grizzled cerebral tissue.

  “That’s enough from you,” I said, my ears ringing from the gunshots. “You have made your point.”

  I turned to Holmes, whose grey eyes twinkled with amusement.

  “Mere hollow threats,” I said, pocketing the revolver. “An attempt by R’luhlloig to save face.”

  Holmes shrugged. “Well, we shall see, Watson. We shall see.” He rubbed his hands together. “At any rate, we have a long walk ahead of us, back to civilisation. Let us gather what victuals we can from the farmhouse, and be on our way.”

  * * *

  The farmhouse had not been touched by the fire, save for the odd singed roof tile. The barn was just sufficiently far from it that the flames had not spread. We rummaged in the kitchen for food. We found also, in an upstairs bedroom, the Necronomicon. This Holmes slipped into his portmanteau alongside his own copy, purloined from the British Museum.

  “They make a nice matching pair,” he said.

  The sun was high, the sky was bright. Together, Sherlock Holmes and I struck out across the marshes along a raised pathway. Birds trilled in the hedgerows. Holmes whistled a tune. A stranger might be forgiven for thinking us simply a pair of friends out for a country stroll, neither of us with a care in the world.

  Yet, at our backs, a pall of smoke hung on the horizon; a legacy of horrors past and a sobering portent of things to come.

  EPILOGUE

  FIVE YEARS LATER, ON A DARK AND S
TORMY NIGHT upon Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes and I were once again running for our lives.

  It was our second attempt to banish the phantom hound, and we were using the same method as before, that of offering ourselves as bait. I shall not rehearse the details herewith. I shall simply summarise. Where before we failed, this time we succeeded. The beast entered, unawares, the portal we had conjured in the Great Grimpen Mire, was swallowed up, and was thus returned whence it had come.

  Not long afterwards, Holmes informed me that I was entitled, if I so wished, to write further stories about him. This Holmes, at the turn of the new century, was a different man from the beleaguered, haunted Holmes of 1895, when he had been at his nadir. This Holmes was sprightlier, shot through with a steely sense of purpose, altogether invigorated. He saw no harm in my resuming the lucrative practice of penning sanitised versions of our adventures together, and neither, in the event, did I. I had recovered sufficiently from my grief over Mary and could see now that neither I nor The Sign of Four was to blame for her death; the guilt lay solely and squarely with the three Sikhs.

  I duly turned in a novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was serialised in The Strand in 1901 and collected as a bound volume the following year. It received great acclaim and healthy sales, and I continued thereafter producing – intermittently – a string of further such narratives, both long and short. I ceased in 1927 and my only literary output since then consists of this trilogy. These books I consider my final testament, in which I offer a rendition of the truth about Sherlock Holmes after all the fictions I have published, much as Zachariah Conroy’s journal served to set straight the lies he had told about the Miskatonic expedition.

  The simple fact is that the resurrection of Professor Moriarty as R’luhlloig, far from cowing Holmes, had a galvanising effect upon him. It sharpened him, as the whetstone does the blade. A man like him needed a nemesis, it seems, even if he had not realised it, or indeed wanted it. Holmes now had a specific focus for his talents. He had an enemy with a name and an agenda. R’luhlloig had declared war not merely on the Great Old Ones but on Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes rallied to the cause and rose to the challenge.