Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) (20 page)

As Ithaqua passed over, Wilmarth and Emerson were once more buffeted by surging wind, blinded by dust and debris from the old path, chilled by physical and spiritual emanations colder than the spaces between the stars. This time, however, they did not fall, and saw the vague form of Ithaqua vanish into the misty curtain.

Holmes’ discordant incantations from his memory of the
Necronomicon
continued unabated. Penetrating the mist, Wilmarth and Emerson followed the sounds to the rear of the property, saw Holmes standing near shrubbery not far from where the ill-fated Aulay Camshronack had attempted to regain his birthright.

Wilmarth yelled, but his voice was lost in the roar of Ithaqua’s wings and the booming of Holmes’ words, which the very air seemed to echo and magnify. Ithaqua howled and raged in the space beyond the limiting wall, between the northern wastes of St John and the star-splattered sky, but Holmes neither paused nor faltered in his conjurations. Suddenly, Ithaqua surged forward and gripped the lean form of Sherlock Holmes in glinting ebony talons and soared into the airless firmament.

“No!” Wilmarth cried. He rushed forward, but he was too late to do anything but mourn his friend. He sobbed. “Holmes!”

Emerson grabbed Wilmarth as the old man collapsed toward the wall at the edge of the sheer cliff. They stared upward, tears in their eyes. Suddenly, a new star appeared in the sky. It expanded and brightened till it became painful to behold, but neither man could turn his eyes from the wondrous sight. The luminous object momentarily held motionless in the space into which Ithaqua and Holmes had vanished, then plummeted to Earth.

The astral fire writhed and screamed as it fell. At times the flames seemed to acquire the form of a phoenix, at other times that of a bat or a pterodactyl, but most of the time it merely seethed and twisted into shapes that no human eye could ever associate with a living earthly being.

The rapidly descending conflagration illumed the rugged hills and cliffs, the plateaus and wave-battered rocks in stark relief. When the falling flaming mass finally struck the ground it exploded with a force that shook the entire island, with a roar that nearly rendered them senseless. Waves of cold light shot outward and upward at the impact point. The illumination abruptly ceased and the blackness of night surged back.

So blinded by the light were Wilmarth and Emerson that they could see nothing when darkness enveloped the world. Gradually, the gentle light of moon and stars pushed back the blackness. In the midst of the island was a smoking crater.

“The end of Ithaqua,” Wilmarth murmured. “The final resting place of Mr Sherlock Holmes, the finest man I have ever known.”

“Thank you for the sentiment, Professor Wilmarth,” said a familiar voice from behind, “but your eulogy is premature.”

“Holmes!” Wilmarth broke free from Emerson’s consoling grasp and rushed across the lawn.

“But Mr Holmes!” Emerson protested. “We saw that monster snatch you up from the earth.”

Holmes had risen from a crouch and stood within the bushes near where they had first seen him. He stepped out of the brush and stood on the lawn. He was coatless and hatless.

“Yes, Holmes, we both saw Ithaqua grab you, just as it did poor Camshronack,” Wilmarth agreed. “It took you into the freezing night with the intent of shattering you against the earth. How could you possibly escape?”

“I did not escape, for the reason that Ithaqua never had me,” the detective explained. “And you never saw me. What you saw and what Ithaqua took was a frame of wire and wood adorned with my best overcoat and second-best hat.”

“And the explosion that destroyed Ithaqua?” Wilmarth asked, still stunned at the sight of his old friend.

“Thank Mr Emerson for that.”

Emerson looked up, startled. “Me?”

“Or, more precisely, your well stocked and highly organized laboratory,” Holmes said. “Had it not been so, I would not have been able to prepare a powerful and very volatile explosive so quickly and efficiently.”

“And the voice that…” Wilmarth started to ask.

“Crouched down in the shrubbery near my effigy, there was no way to tell the voice did not emanate from it,” Holmes said. “It has been many years since you introduced me to the
Necronomicon
, but I trust my recitation was accurate.”

“To the letter, Holmes,” Wilmarth replied. “The tones created the proper resonation to which Ithaqua could not resist responding. I marvel you were able to recall it so well after all these years.”

“It is not a book easily forgotten, no matter how much one may try,” Holmes said. “Besides, our time spent studying that tome was not quite my last encounter.” He saw the enquiring look on Wilmarth’s face. “But that is a tale for another time.”

“Holmes, how did you know Ithaqua could be destroyed by any explosive, no matter how powerful?” Wilmarth asked.

“After all,” Emerson added. “It was a god.”

Holmes raised querying eyebrows.

“It has always been considered a god,” Emerson corrected. “In the Professor’s books, it and others like it are treated as gods. And you yourself claimed that they thrive on worship.”

“Worship and faith provide sustenance to these beings, but that only makes such fare no more than strange food and drink,” Holmes clarified. “It is a source of strength for them that men consider them gods, cower in fear, and render what gods have always fattened upon. What men call gods, I call beasts. Whether they came down from the stars, up from the Earth, or out of dimensions which science have yet to reveal to us, they are merely creatures of another flesh. It is an alien flesh, but flesh nonetheless, and all flesh is heir to mortality.”

“Remarkable, Holmes,” Wilmarth breathed. He glanced back into the darkness. “But is Ithaqua really destroyed?”

“The being of flesh and ichor—yes, as dead as the poor devils it shattered against the earth,” Holmes replied. “As to the spirit that clothed itself in such alien flesh? No one can truly say, for with long aeons even death may die. But, for the moment at least, we need no longer fear the night when the north wind rises. And as it says in the
Necronomicon
, Professor, a moment may last a lifetime, or more.”

They turned and headed toward the manor house, into the light and away from the stygian night.

Poor Inspector Lestrade. Sherlock Holmes judged him “devoid of reason,” but noted the detective was “tenacious as a bulldog,” high praise for any Englishman. Though Lestrade was one of the top detectives at Scotland Yard, propelled to that position by the trait of tenacity Holmes admired so much, he is usually portrayed as a bumbler, a dullard unable to grasp a clue’s significance, inserted into a story only so Holmes can have someone other than Watson on hand to whom he can point out the obvious. Lestrade was, however, an astute detective. Moreover, as Lestrade points out, he did not have the luxury of picking and choosing his cases. He had to take them as they were assigned, the hard and the harder (a hazard of gaining a reputation through Holmes), the interesting and the dull-as-dishwater. Here, Lestrade finds himself up against forces beyond the comprehension of any man, resisting the ignominy of calling at 221-B Baker-street, his only assets being his own skill and the dubious talents of Detective Sergeant Jacket…plus the help of a few curious characters met along the way.

Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade stormed out of Superintendent Curberry’s office. His face was flushed, his eyes filled with wrathful lightning, and his bloodless hands were clenched tightly enough to bruise his palms. His jaws were clamped with teeth-shattering pressure, and his breaths rushed through distended nostrils as if he were a small maddened bull ready to charge, head down, wicked horns glinting, prepared to gore anyone in his path. Only a fool would have approached the Scotland Yard inspector when he was in such a state.

“It seems to me, sir,” Sergeant Jacket said, “there may be a bit of value in some of the Superintendent’s suggestions.”

Lestrade halted in the hastily deserted corridor and speared the young sergeant with a hot glare that would have withered a more perceptive man.

“I mean, sir,” Jacket continued obliviously, “we have no
real
evidence we could present in open court proving that a cabal of demon-worshipping cultists are involved with the murders or that the green stone idol found in the grip of the stark raving mad sailor in that Stepney rooming house is connected in any way. At best, all we can prove is that the cultists are preparing the way for the return of a race of monster-gods banished from Earth in prehistoric times, with the intent of achieving a worldwide apocalypse and enslaving humanity, but that’s hardly against the law, is it, sir?”

Jacket paused, awaiting acknowledgement or encouragement; receiving neither, he said:

“Even you must admit, sir, there could easily be other ways to explain our observations; as far as deductions…”

Lestrade glowered. “Do not mention the word ‘deduction’.”

“Well, the Superintendent’s suggestion to consult…”

“Stop!” The word came at Jacket like a blast from an elephant rifle. “Not another word!”

Jacket staggered back as if a gun blast had actually struck him. “But, sir, I was just going to say…”

“I
know
what you were going to say, Jacket, and you can save your breath to cool your porridge,” Lestrade snapped. “I am fully capable of…”

“I cast no aspersions upon your competence or intelligence, sir,” Jacket quickly interjected, finally sensing something of the fires he had ignorantly stoked. “You know I hold you in the highest respect, sir.”

Lestrade growled deep within his throat.

Jacket said: “And everyone knows the high regard in which the Superintendent holds you.”

Lestrade narrowed his eyes, cleared his throat and gave a very faint nod—the faintest of nods—as he considered Jacket’s words. Of course he was well-regarded by the high hats of Scotland Yard, and he thought there must often be times when his  name was quite favorably mentioned into the shell-like ear of the Commissioner, perhaps even the Home Secretary’s…or higher. Yes, he thought, all that Jacket was saying was quite undeniably true.

“So, it is obvious, sir, that when the Superintendent suggested a fresh perspective on the case might be advisable, he did not…”

“No!” the Inspector snapped, sweeping away all the flummery the Detective Sergeant had showered upon him.. “Absolutely not!”

“But where’s the harm in a quick visit to…”

“In a quick visit to 221-B Baker-street?”

“Yes, sir,” Jacket gulped.

“Caper up those stairs, hat in hand?”

“Well, I don’t know that I would…” Jacket murmured.

“Enter a room thick with a toxic miasma of sailor’s shag?”

“It would just be a quick…” Jacket offered weakly.

“And saying, ‘I’m at my wit’s end and can’t find my arse with both hands, so please have pity on a poor Scotland Yard johnnie, Mr Sherlock-bloody-Holmes.’ Is
that
the way you see my visit to Baker-street, Detective Sergeant Jacket?”

Sergeant Jacket regarded his superior with wide innocent eyes, a guileless watery blue stare that made even old lags nervous and tight accomplices sometimes nark on each other. Lestrade always found Jacket’s limpid gaze disconcerting, like looking into the endless reflections of a carnival mirror-house. As far as Lestrade was concerned, that blank stare was his only skill as a copper, and he hardly counted it a skill at all.

“Sir, I can only assume the strain of this case has made you a bit more snappish than usual,” Jacket said mildly. “I certainly am not immune from it, nor do I carry anything so great as the burden that has been placed upon
your
shoulders, such as would weary great Atlas himself.”

Inspector Lestrade frowned even as one eyebrow forced itself up. He fought the urge to defenestrate the young detective sergeant. There was, however, such sincerity in his words that he felt a bit guilty, even as he glanced at a nearby open window.

“You know, Jacket,” Lestrade said, forcing himself to look away from the window, “Holmes is not such big a noise as everyone thinks, if you know what I mean.”

“No , sir,” Jacket replied. He wondered what the Inspector had seen out the open window, but some instinct for self-preservation kept him from leaning out to see. “What do you mean, sir?”

“Well, you hardly hear about his failures, do you?” Lestrade explained. “Dr Watson is very careful to write up those cases what make Holmes appear as the Lord Almighty’s nemesis of crime.”

“Well, there were those three cases where…”

“Never mind about that, a real detective shouldn’t waste time reading lurid magazines, Jacket,” Lestrade interrupted, sneering. “The point is, Jacket, he picks and chooses his cases, doesn’t he? If I could do the same thing, I would have the best record in Scotland Yard, even better than that fop Gregson’s. But, no, I take what comes my way, no matter how hard a nut it is to crack. And can I just work on crackling puzzlers, the sort of cases that make people say, ‘What a brilliant piece of detective work that was, revealing a mind keen as mustard and wise as Solomon’?”

“Obviously not every case is complex enough to…”

“No I can’t, boy-o,” Lestrade said, answering his own query to spare himself one of Jacket’s inevitable inanities. “Sherlock Holmes will jump right into a case that involves orange pips, dancing men, or a hound from Hell, but will he take a case where a wife weary of getting the cuff finally feeds his husband a breakfast of arsenic porridge? You bet not! Where’s the cleverness in seeing what’s right before your nose, or the acclaim in nicking a poor woman for killing a man what should have been done in long ago?”

“Our current case is quite a puzzler, sir,” Jacket pointed out. “I am sure it was assigned to you because it was felt no one else had a chance in blazes of solving the mystery.”

Caught on the verge of a full-blow tirade on the inequalities of life, Lestrade closed his mouth and was forced to nod in agreement. No other ‘tec at the Yard stood a chance of solving these East End murders, what with ritual killings, gibbering madmen, heathen idols, sinister foreigners, and a degenerate cult calling itself the Order of the Eldritch Gate—all right up Lestrade’s street, so to speak. They were all connected, tied together by lines of madness and blood, or so his gut told him, but if he tried to make an arrest now some clever barrister would have his gut for garters. Much as it galled him to admit Jacket was right about anything, they had no evidence against Lord Alathon, the toff who headed up the sheep of the cult. Thinking of Lord Alathon’s smirk at their last encounter, Lestrade now wondered whether the summons from Superintendent Curberry had less to do with his lack of progress and more to do with weasels scampering through the Hallways of Power.

“Let’s go, Jacket,” Lestrade suggested sharply. “Things always seem clearer when viewed through a pint glass.”

“But, sir, Superintendent Curberry expects…”

Anyone else would have cringed at Lestrade’s baleful glare and purpling face, but Jacket merely affected a cherubic smile and blinked his blue, mirror-like eyes. He murmured a soft “Yes, sir,” then shrugged and followed after the inspector, casting back one last puzzled look at the open window, wondering what he had missed.

They ended up in The Fair Wind, a dark and dingy pub near St Katherine’s Docks. It was as likely to attract gaggers, dollymops and nobblers as it was unlikely to be frequented by members of genteel society or, more importantly, anyone from Scotland Yard. Lestrade took a far table, his back to the wall and put Jacket across from him, to spare the guilty masses his vacuous stare.

Detective Sergeant Jacket attempted several times to break in on Lestrade’s cloistered thoughts, but the Inspector would have none of  it. He sat slumped in the shadows, an untouched pint of bitters before him on the worn deal table. Lestrade’s eyes, touched now and then by stray gleams when a door opened or closed, were a wonderment to Jacket, like watching storm clouds roiling over a flat greenish-blue sea, lightning flickering now and then.

Since Lestrade was reluctant to budge from his introspective mood, Jacket reviewed the elements of the case in his own mind. It started five weeks earlier, with the murder of Joe Slatters, a porter in Stepney. He was found by a watchman, throat slit, an odd-shaped star carved in his forehead, and left hand gone. The murder raised a small commotion locally, for Slatters was a bully-boy unlikely to be missed, and none at all among the knights-errant in Fleet Street. Just three nights later, this time across the river in Bermondsey, another victim was found, this time by a rag-and-bone man, one Mabel Berringer. The elements were the same—a slit throat, a starlike design carved on the forehead, and an amputated left hand—but what set off a flurry of editorials and lurid journalistic reports was that the victim was a woman. That she was a woman despised even by streetwalkers, addicted to gin and opium, was immaterial. All it took to raise the blood-lust of the City’s scribes was that she was a woman, any woman, for with their words they could wash her whiter than could the Blood of Gentle Jesus.

Then Michael Whittaker, a costermonger, met his end in the dark streets of Whitechapel, also with his throat opened, a bloated star carved on his forehead, and sans left hand. The press had a field day with that one. Not only could they raise a hue and cry against the present danger, but they could resurrect the bloody ghost of the Ripper, still a vivid memory for most of London’s masses, even if it had become something of a bogeyman for the young.

Whittaker’s murder was followed closely by that of a Balkan tailor named Oskar Lazarus, also in Whitechapel, but close to Stepney. Once again—cut throat, carved star, left hand amputated cleanly at the wrist.

After Whittaker’s murder, but before Lazarus’, there came an odd twist, one which put Lestrade’s dander up. Jacket, however,  was dubious about its relevancy and sided, silently of course, with Superintendent Curberry when Lestrade was told to drop the line of inquiry. A Norwegian sailor named Olaf Jensen was dragged out of a Stepney rooming house, gibbering mad and trying to batter his own brains out upon the walls. It was none of Lestrade’s concern, nothing really at all to do with the case they had been saddled with, Jacket thought ruefully, but somehow the Inspector found out about the green stone idol discovered in the mad sailor’s tiny room, a loathsome heathen monstrosity—a fantastic beast-god with masses of tentacles, vesperian wings, and limbs like a long-dead saurian. What connected it to the series of murders, at least in Lestrade’s mind, was the bloated star symbol on the four sides of the plinth upon which the beast crouched. It was identical to that which had been carved into each victim’s forehead.

Jacket fought back a sigh as he thought of all the blind alleys the wretched little glyph had taken them. An ethnologist at the British Museum had told them from the beginning that the star with an eye at the center was a frequent motif among woggish tribes, found the world over, from the Esquimaux of the northern wastes to the dusky savages of central Africa, from the sands of Arabia to the islands of the Malay Archipelago. It was commonly called the Elder Sign and was nothing more than a oft-used magical symbol. It was Lestrade’s preoccupation with the symbol, intensified after Lazarus’ murder, that led them to the Brethren of the Eldritch Gate, and of course to… (and here Jacket
did
vent a long-suppressed sigh) …to Lord Alathon. No wonder the Superintendent had been so cross and suggested consulting Sherlock Holmes.

“What is it, Jacket?” Lestrade demanded,
sotto voce
.