“I have to say, Holmes, that your written statement on behalf of Mr. Jacobs certainly helped matters. Miss Switzer will also stand trial for the murder of Caroline Brown,” the Inspector added, much to Holmes’s satisfaction.
“The attempted murder of Mr. Jacobs should keep her imprisoned until death,” Holmes said. “His signed statement, as given to the Yard, should go a long way toward convicting her of Brown’s murder. She will hang for what she has done. Mr. Braithwaite, London does not treat its murderers well.”
With Holmes’s recommendation that Braithwaite be committed for life to the Whitechapel Lunatic Asylum, Dr. Sinclair’s killer would suffer a fate much better than that of Miss Switzer. Holmes argued that, by designing the Killer Eshocker with Willie Jacobs, Braithwaite would save many lives. Was this justice? It could be argued that Amy Switzer should also be committed to the asylum, for after all, aren’t all murderers insane in some way? To take another life—whether out of greed or jealousy or the perverse desire to watch someone die—required that a murderer ignore his or her basic humanity. We are human because we have consciences, we know right from wrong.
“Now let’s get this device onto the steamer,” Holmes said. “Men are waiting for us already. They’ve hammered the metal plates to the sides of the steamer. The dynamo is onboard. It’s time, gentlemen.”
We left Bligh Braithwaite with Miss Klune and the inmates, and this time, the three of us—Sherlock Holmes, Willie Jacobs, and I—clambered onto a police carriage and headed to the Thames. Carts loaded with the Killer Eshocker components followed us.
Passers-by gaped at the components and at our carriage, but steered clear of us. Tomorrow would be a new year, and tonight, any sane inhabitant of London would have cause for celebration.
Mid-afternoon, and dark clouds drooped over the city, threatening a storm. The river thrashed beneath the wind. Police guarded the dock where the steamer Puritani awaited us. At the riverside a strange crowd had assembled. Legless creatures, those with twelve arms waving Medusa-like above them; headless creatures with eyes bulging from naked purple flesh; froglike men with wings; wriggling wormlike things with suckers and with daggers for teeth; men who still looked like men yet had their faces beneath their necks—
“Holmes, these poor wretches look like the Dagonites at Swallowhead Spring in Avebury!” I exclaimed.
He nodded, but said nothing. His focus was on the Killer Eshocker components that the police were hoisting and loading onto the Puritani. The Dagonites themselves seemed to take little interest in our movements—their focus was on the turbid river and the monsters within, but they had amassed around the boat, too close for comfort, and had begun to chant.
“Ufatu maehha faeatai tuatta iu iu rahi roa cthulhu rahi atu daghon da’agon f’hthul’rahi roa.”
Jacobs shook. I put an arm around his waist and helped him, staggering, to the dock and past the Dagonites.
“Believers of the impure, of those from beyon’ who come an’ destroy us! Me father…” His voice hissed through his rotted jaw and now lipless mouth. He cringed and grew silent, but continued to shudder.
“Come,” I said gently, “we must board the ship, and we need you, Mr. Jacobs. You are our only hope in this matter. You are a master mechanic and expert electrician. Please, we must kill these creatures who come from the beyond—” I could barely believe I was saying these things!—“and as you say, killed your father.”
“Aye…” The word hissed through his broken mouth like wind through a tunnel. A hand quivered and rose to the infected scab around his nostrils. A finger poked, then a knuckle.
Marines lined the deck of the steamer. Holmes was already on the ship, outlining his plans to their captain.
“Ebb’yuh dissoth’nknpflknghreet!” a Dagonite shrieked above the general chant. A blob of green-scaled monstrosity, it kicked out with multiple legs, ramming a policeman with hammer toes and spike claws. The officer struck back with his truncheon, and the monstrosity shrieked more loudly.
The crowd screeched and moaned, chanting in a cacophonous drone that was like a razor to my ears. Several officers dropped their weapons and clamped their hands over their ears. Wondering how much more of the screeching I could handle, I pulled Jacobs more quickly through the crowd.
“Yog’fuhrsothothothoth ’a’a’a’memerutupao’omii!”
Gibberish oozed and trills soared, baritones rattled from the wormlike things.
“Ch’thgalhn fhtagn urre’h nyogthluh’eeh ngh syh’kyuhyuh. Cthulhu! Oh Deep Ones! Oh Great Old Ones! Dagon be all!”
They screamed in unison, in broken flurries that erupted randomly yet in a harmony that defied all logic. Interspersed with the gibberish and guttural rattling came human words: “Glory to Amelia and Maria, mothers of Dagon! Amelia, mother of the hordes that come from the sea! She gives birth at Half Moon Bay, where Cthulhu rose from the open sea!”
I shoved Jacobs onto the Puritani and jumped aboard after him.
A luminous fog rolled above the river, which heaved and raged against the shore. The Puritani, large and firm, held steady, and while part of me feared that the ship would suffer the same fate as the Belle Crown, I told myself that there was no choice but to ride the ship into the violent river and destroy the beasts.
As the fog gleamed an unearthly hue, it illuminated a tempest of creatures reeling along the water’s surface and swinging upon the tips of the waves. Dirty clouds hung low and grasped the fog, then shifted with the wind.
Supporting Willie Jacobs with both hands, I stumbled across the lurching deck until a Marine clutching a rifle motioned me toward the engine room. Jacobs and I clambered down the companion-ladder, our bodies hitting the walls and rails on either side of us as the ship jolted. Finding the engine room, we also found Sherlock Holmes.
Along with a dozen other men, he stooped and lifted one of two main AC cables coming out of the transformer we had built in the asylum. The men shoved the end of the first AC cable through a hole in the ceiling, where others grabbed it and pulled it onto the deck. Another cable branched off this first one, and Holmes and his men now rammed this one through the same hole. The final step was to shove the second main AC cable through a separate hole in the ceiling.
Cables already ran between the steam engine and a huge dynamo, and thence to the transformer.
Jacobs broke free of my grasp, lurched, and extended one arm to the transformer, an enormous unit with one hundred coils of copper on its left side and three thousand coils on its right. With Braithwaite, he had designed this unit based on Dr. Sinclair’s Eshocker. The killer version required no resistors to hold back the current that would blast out of the transformer. A slight grin flickered about the ruins of Jacobs’s mouth, and his eyes moistened. He looked at me, and with tight lips, I returned his smile.
“When you signal,” he rasped, “I’ll tell the men to turn off the voltage, the dynamo.”
“You can manage on your own down here?” I asked Jacobs.
When he nodded, I told him, “You see that red cord hanging from the hole where Holmes just pushed the cable? When you see the cord lift completely out of the hole, you’ll know I’m signaling you to switch off the voltage. Got it?”
“Aye.” Jacobs sank to the floor, head resting in cupped hands, shoulders hunched. While his mind was willing to do anything we needed, his body might not cooperate. Yet we could not trust anyone else with this task—only Willie Jacobs. He was the expert. The other men on this ship didn’t have any notion about how the Killer Eshocker functioned. We dared not depend on them for anything but following orders and throwing harpoons.
As if he had divined my thoughts, Jacobs spoke up. “Don’t worry, sir. I can manage. You’re needed on deck.”
I could not disagree. I turned and dashed up the stairs to the deck.
Wind blasted across the Thames and hit the Puritani, which slammed against the dock. The water wasn’t high enough to slosh overboard—not yet, anyway. As soon as we hit deeper waters, any
thing could happen.
The first lieutenant stopped by me as I looked over the scene. “I hope your new harpoon works, Dr. Watson. We’ve tried cannons and dynamite. Nothing works.” He appeared downtrodden, his eyes weary, his body slouched despite his military training.
“You’ve been out there, fighting those creatures all along?” I asked.
“Ever since the disaster with the Belle Crown.”
It hadn’t been that long ago that Holmes and I had taken a pleasure cruise on the Thames, only to nearly lose our lives to the… otherworldly beasts. Not sure if the harpoons would work either, I could say nothing to reassure the man. He took one look at my face and sagged even more. Then he wandered off, stumbling as waves hit the ship, to help his men throw one of the two large cables overboard.
Attached to the end of that cable was a copper pipe screwed to a large copper plate, which would ground the Killer Eshocker.
Ocean salt water would have conducted the electricity well, but even in these tidal reaches of the river, the Thames didn’t contain sufficient salt—its waters alone would not conduct enough current to kill the creatures. The Eshocker required two harpoons to be fired: one into the head of a creature and the other into its tail or the rear of its body, depending on the physical attributes of the creature in question. How did one hit a tiny creature’s head? How did one hit the rear of a blob that lacked a tail or hindquarters? How did one hit a creature with writhing tentacles? How did one hit anything that flitted in and out of reality?
The two harpoons lay on the deck. One connected directly to a cable attached to the transformer in the engine room. We’d wound the copper coil loosely around the cable and then tightly around the harpoon, which was crafted of brass and steel. Braithwaite had explained that copper was too soft, that the harpoon should be strong, of hard metal. Jacobs had agreed with him, and also told us to use steel clamps to hold the coil tightly to the harpoon. Holmes and I had done as he suggested, and ten clamps secured the coil to the weapon. We had constructed the second harpoon in the same way, except that this harpoon’s cable was attached to the main cable leading to the copper tube and the copper plate.
Holmes scrambled up the stairs to join me on the deck as the Puritani got under way.
“Holmes,” I shouted above the roar of the engine and the fury of the wind and water, “do you think she’ll hold better than the Belle Crown?”
“There is no way of knowing,” he yelled back. “If our method succeeds in killing the largest beasts before they turn on us, then we might survive. Otherwise, we could end up as before—in the water, freezing to death, dying as our former shipmates did.”
Bobbing across the choppy waves into the middle of the Thames, the Puritani slowed, and two officers lifted the harpoons and aimed them at the water. Holmes and I swiveled, holding onto the rails behind us as we watched the men on the other side of the ship. Again, my mind flashed back to the Belle Crown, when a huge tentacle had risen over Holmes’s head, ready to drill his brains into his body.
Beyond the ship, not close enough to smash a man’s head but within reach of the cabled harpoons, a creature rose.
Dozens of eyes glittered through the fog, and bat wings unfolded over a mouth drilled into the middle of a bulbous body. The mouth opened, and phosphorescent teeth jutted out like claws.
Over the roar of the engine and the machinery, the creature screeched up tuneless scales and back down them, its voice clacking at the highest notes.
“Throw the harpoons!” Holmes yelled.
Spurred into action, one man launched his harpoon at the thing’s mouth, while the other harpoon snapped through the wind and skewered the lower part of the bulbous body.
The first harpoon snared the creature’s mouth, dropped off, and fell into the waves. The bat wings descended and folded over the mouth, and they scraped the other harpoon into the water, as well.
“A disaster,” Holmes muttered, pulling me from the rails and across the lurching deck, where I pulled the red rope from the hole leading to the engine room.
The cables on the deck ceased vibrating, and with a loud grunt, the Killer Eshocker switched off. Thank you, Willie Jacobs, I thought.
“Pull them in,” Holmes commanded, and the men pulled the harpoons and cables out of the water.
Stooping by the red rope, I noticed that the harpoon that had pierced the beast’s mouth was coated in a film of grease, or pus. I shoved the red rope back down the hole, and Jacobs switched the machine back on. When I rose, holding the harpoon, I saw that Holmes had hoisted up the second harpoon and aimed it at the beast’s mouth.
“Launch it, Watson,” he cried, “and aim low!”
The creature disappeared beneath the surface. Holmes backed up a few steps, and I did the same.
“Get ready,” he hissed, his sharp eyes upon the water, scanning for a rupture in the waves.
Small glowing blobs with tendrils floated in clusters along the surface. Some broke free, rose up into the wind, and burst, spraying green splotches that spread like spilled paint over the water. I squinted, seeking the giant creature—a tentacle, a sucker, a glittering eye.
“There!” Holmes cried, pointing with his free hand.
The creature erupted from the water mere yards from the Puritani. The men behind me shouted.
“Kill it!”
“Kill the infernal beast!”
“Throw the harpoons!”
Holmes’s harpoon streaked through the air and pierced the creature right beneath its bat wing. As the beast rose and shrieked, it unfurled its wings further to catch the wind, and before it could re-fold them, I shot my harpoon with all my strength and it punctured the bulbous hide nearest the water.
A screech shattered the wind—skittered up sharp scales, crashed like a tidal wave down multiple octaves.
“We have it!” Holmes clapped me on the back, and the men cheered.
Glittering eyes bored down at us, and the bat wings glowed over our heads. The creature spasmed, puffed its hide out, as if trying to expel the lances but failing, then puffed in and out while a greenish ooze poured from the two wounds. Yards from the boat, the mouth yawned open, wide enough to consume a man in one gulp, the claw-like teeth snapping—clicking shut, whipping open, clicking shut again. Everyone on the steamer cowered against the far rail of the boat, except for Holmes, who stood rooted, staring in fascination at the beating wings and snapping teeth.
The beast’s eyes glittered, dozens of them, like a single sheet of ice, and then exploded. Green pus and gelatinous eye fluid spattered across Holmes’s hair and coat. He wiped his face clean with a hand and grimaced. A smell of rot and mold saturated the air—a stench of fetid decay that seemed a thousand years old.
The Killer Eshocker cables hummed on the deck, sending huge amounts of voltage into the thing—the Old One, the Deep One, whatever the Dagonites called these creatures.
It sagged into the water, its wings drooped, its mouth closed. It whined, long and low, a keening that sent the tiny green blobs and their tendrils skittering across the waters as dandelion fluff flies on the breeze. Still the voltage sizzled into the beast, crackling now along the skin, shooting orange along its wings, burning the flesh and whatever beat inside this creature from beyond.
It faded—briefly, it faded and almost disappeared into the rift that led… elsewhere. But it flickered back into view, still attached to the harpoon and its deadly cable. The voltage pumped into the bulbous thing, and it bloated with red-hot fire, bulging and bulging until finally, it burst. An explosion of hide and organs and blood of all forms and colors rankled the air with a smell unlike anything I’d ever encountered. It was as if all the corpses in the world were rotting beneath my nose. I gasped, choked, clasped a hand over my nostrils, pinching them shut. Slime rained upon us and slicked the deck. Gore spewed up, and as the Puritani jerked, the wind caught the bloody muck and carried it off.
“Watson,” Holmes choked, “the signal!” I yanked up the red rope, and dow
n in the engine room, Jacobs switched off the machine.
We’d slammed the creature with a devastatingly high voltage, enough to kill it before it could retreat to its realm. But it was only one creature, and by killing it as it faded slightly into the otherworld, we’d sealed one large rift, or so I hoped.
The Marines and the seamen alike were in a sorry state. One vomited over the rail into the Thames, another hung his head, retching on the deck.
“Gentlemen,” Holmes said, “prepare yourselves. We are still far from the end.”
“But,” I said, “the newspapers indicated that only a few large beasts have been seen in the river. If we dispatch a few more, can we not safely assume that the infestation has been cleared?”
“No, Watson. The Puritani will cruise these waters for as long as it takes to hunt these creatures down and kill them.”
The boat spasmed. Several men slipped on the gore that had exploded from the beast. Holmes and I stared at each other.
“We’ll work for a few hours,” he told me, “and then another crew should come onboard and continue this task.”
By the time we’d killed two more creatures, our current team of men could do no more. We were all coated in gore and stank to high heaven.
We dragged ourselves down to the engine room, where we found Willie Jacobs, as close to death as a man can be. He was on the floor by the Killer Eshocker transformer unit. He would die beside the giant machine that he had built, just as his father had died by the giant tram machine they’d built together. Thankfully, Willie Jacobs’s body was intact, whereas his father had suffered a much worse fate. Still…
“Not this, too,” I whispered sadly.
Holmes crouched by Jacobs and grasped his hand.
“You’re a good man, Willie,” he said, “and an even better friend.”
“Aye,” the dying man said, “an’ so are you, Mr. ’olmes, an’ also Dr. Watson.”
Did I see tears in Holmes’s eyes?
I, too, crouched by Willie Jacobs, who had saved Mary and Samuel from an assault in my own home. His eyes were dead but for a pinprick of light. His breathing was shallow and slow. His fingers dabbed at his nostrils.
Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu Page 29