Shadows over Baker Street

Art in the Blood

BRIAN STABLEFORD

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

—A. CONAN DOYLE, “THE ADVENTURE OF THE GREEK INTERPRETER”

*

It was not yet five o’clock; Mycroft had barely sunk into his nook and taken up the Morning Post when the secretary appeared at the door of the reading room and gestured brusquely with his right hand. It was a summons to the Strangers’ Room, supplemented by a particular curl of the little finger which told him that this was no casual visitation but a matter in which the Diogenes Club had an interest of its own.

Mycroft sighed and hauled his overabundant flesh out of his armchair. The rules of the club forbade him to ask the secretary what the import of the summons was, so he was mildly surprised to see his brother Sherlock waiting by the window in the Strangers’ Room, looking out over Pall Mall. Sherlock had brought him petty puzzles to solve on several occasions, but never yet a matter of significance to any of the club’s hidden agendas. It was obvious from the rigidity of Sherlock’s stance that this was no trivial matter, and that it had gone badly thus far.

There was another man in the room, already seated. He seemed tired; his gray eyes—which were not dissimilar in hue to those of the Holmes brothers—were restless and haunted, but he was making every effort to maintain his composure. He was obviously a merchant seaman, perhaps a second mate. The unevenness of the faded tan that still marked his face—the lower part of which had long been protected by a beard—testified that he had returned to England from the tropics less than a month ago. The odors clinging to his clothing revealed that he had recently visited Limehouse, where he had partaken of a generous pipe of opium. The bulge in his left-hand coat pocket was suggestive of a medicine bottle, but Mycroft was too scrupulous a man to leap to the conclusion that it must be laudanum. Mycroft judged that the seaman’s attitude was one of reluctant resignation, that of a man determined to conserve his dignity even though he had lost hope.

Mycroft greeted his brother with an appropriate appearance of warmth, and waited for an introduction.

“May I present John Chevaucheux, Mycroft,” Sherlock said, immediately abandoning his position by the window. “He was referred to me by Dr. Watson, who saw that his predicament was too desperate to be salvageable by medical treatment.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” the sailor said, coming briefly to his feet before sinking back into his chair. The stranger’s hand was cold, but its grip was firm.

“Dr. Watson is not here,” Mycroft observed. It was not his habit to state the obvious, but the doctor’s absence seemed to require explanation; Watson clung to Sherlock like a shadow nowadays, avid to leech yet another marketable tale from his reckless dabbling in the mercurial affairs of distressed individuals.

“The good doctor had a prior engagement,” Sherlock reported. His tone was neutral, but Mycroft deduced that Sherlock had taken advantage of his friend’s enforced absence to carry this particular inquiry to its end. Apparently, this was one “adventure” Sherlock did not want to read in The Strand, no matter how much admiring literary embellishment might be added to it.

Given that Chevaucheux’s accent identified him as a Dorset man, and that his name suggested descent from Huguenot refugees, Mycroft thought it more likely that the seaman’s employers were based in Southampton than in London. If the man had come to consult Watson as a medical practitioner rather than as Sherlock’s accomplice, he must have encountered him some time ago, probably in India—and must have known him well enough to be able to track him down in London despite the doctor’s retirement. These inferences, though far less than certain, became more probable in combination with the ominous news—which was ominous news, although it had not been reported in the Post—of the sudden death, some seven days ago, of Captain Pye of the S.S. Goshen. The Goshen had dropped anchor in Southampton Water on the twelfth of June, having set out from Batavia six weeks before. Captain Pye was by no means clubbable, but he was known to more than one member of the Diogenes as a trustworthy agent.

“Do you know how Dan Pye died, Mr. Chevaucheux?” Mycroft asked, cutting right to the heart of the matter. Unlike Sherlock, he did not like to delay matters with unnecessary chitchat.

“He was cursed to death, sir,” Chevaucheux told him bluntly. He had obviously been keeping company with Sherlock long enough to expect that Holmesian processes of deduction would sometimes run ahead of his own.

“Cursed, you say?” Mycroft raised an eyebrow, though not in jest. “Some misadventure in the Andamans, perhaps?” If Pye had been about the club’s business—although he would not necessarily have known whose business he was about—the Andamans were the most likely spot for him to run into trouble.

“No, sir,” Chevaucheux said gravely. “He was cursed to death right here in the British Isles, though the mad hatred that activated the curse was seething for weeks at sea.”

“If you know the man responsible,” Mycroft said amiably, “where’s the mystery? Why did Watson refer you to my brother?” The real puzzle, of course, was why Sherlock had brought the seaman here, having failed to render any effective assistance—but Mycroft was wary of spelling that out. This could be no common matter of finding proofs to satisfy a court of law; the secretary’s little finger had told him that. This mystery went beyond mere matters of motive and mechanism; it touched on matters of blood.

Sherlock had reached into his pocket while Mycroft was speaking, and produced a small object the size of a snuffbox. His expression, as he held it out to Mycroft, was a study in grimness and frustration. Mycroft took it from him, and inspected it carefully.

It was a figurine carved in stone: an imaginary figure, part human—if only approximately—and part fish. It was not a mermaid such as a lonely sailor might whittle from tropic wood or walrus ivory, however; although the head was vaguely humanoid, the torso was most certainly not, and the piscine body bore embellishments that seemed more akin to tentacles than fins. There was something of the lamprey about it—even about the mouth, which might have been mistaken for human—and something of the uncanny. Mycroft felt no revelatory thrill as he handled it, but he knew that the mere sight of it was enough to feed an atavistic dream. Opium was not the best medicine for the kind of headaches that Chevaucheux must have suffered of late, but neither he nor Watson was in a position to know that.

“Let me have your lens, Sherlock,” Mycroft said.

Sherlock passed him the magnifying glass, without bothering to point out that the lamplight in the Strangers’ Room was poor, or that the workmanship of the sculpture was so delicate that a fine-pointed needle and the services of a light microscope would be required to investigate the record of its narrow grooves. Mycroft knew that Sherlock would take some meager delight in amplifying whatever conclusions he could reach with the aid of the woefully inadequate means to hand.

Two minutes’ silence elapsed while Mycroft completed his superficial examination. “Purbeck stone,” he said. “Much more friable than Portland stone—easy enough to work with simple tools, but liable to crumble if force is misapplied. Easily eroded, too, but if this piece is as old as it seems, it’s been protected from everyday wear. It could have been locked away in some cabinet of curiosities, but it’s more likely to have been buried. You’ve doubtless examined the scars left by the knives that carved it and the dirt accumulated in the finer grooves. Iron or bronze? Sand, silt, or soil?” He set the object down on a side table as he framed these questions, but positioned it carefully, to signify that he was not done with it yet.

“A bronze knife,” Sherlock told him, without undue procrastination, “but a clever alloy, no earlier than the sixteenth century. The soil is from a fallow field, from which hay had been cut with considerable regularity—but there was salt, too. The burial place was near enough to the sea to catch spray in stormy weather.”

“And the representation?” Mycroft took a certain shameful delight in the expression of irritation that flitted across Sherlock’s finely chiseled features: the frustration of ignorance.

“I took it to the museum in the end,” the great detective admitted. “Pearsall suggested that it might be an image of Oannes, the Babylonian god of wisdom. Fotherington disagreed.”

“Fotherington is undoubtedly correct,” Mycroft declared. “He sent you to me, of course—without offering any hypothesis of his own.”

“He did,” Sherlock admitted. “And he told me, rather impolitely, to leave Watson out of it.”

“He was right to do so,” Mycroft said. And to notify the secretary in advance, he added, although he did not say the words aloud.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the sailor, “but I’m rather out of my depth here. Perhaps you might explain what that thing is, if you know, and why it was sent to Captain Pye . . . and whether it will finish me the way it finished him. I have to admit, sir, that Rockaby seemed to have near as much hatred of me as he had of the captain toward the end, even though we were friends once and always near neighbors. I don’t mind admitting, sir, that I’m frightened.” That was obvious, although John Chevaucheux was plainly a man who did not easily give in to fear, especially of the superstitious kind.

“Alas, I cannot give you any guarantee of future safety, Mr. Chevaucheux,” Mycroft said, already fearing that the only guarantees to be found were of the opposite kind, “but you will lose nothing by surrendering this object to me, and it might be of some small service to the Diogenes Club if you were to tell me your story, as you’ve doubtless already told it to Dr. Watson and my brother.”

Sherlock shifted uneasily. Mycroft knew that his brother had hoped for more even if he had not expected it—but Sherlock and he were two of a kind, and knew what duty they owed to the accumulation of knowledge.

The seaman nodded. “Telling it has done me good, sir,” he said, “so I don’t mind telling it again. It’s much clearer in my head than it was—and I’m less hesitant now that I know there are men in the world prepared to take it seriously. I’ll understand if you can’t help me, but I’m grateful to Mr. Sherlock for having tried.”

Anticipating a long story, Mycroft settled back into his chair—but he could not make himself comfortable.

“You’ll doubtless have judged from my name that I’m of French descent,” said Chevaucheux, “although my family have been in England for a century and a half. We’ve always been seafarers. My father sailed with Dan Pye in the old clippers, and my grandfather was a middy in Nelson’s navy. Captain Pye used to tell me that he and I were kin, by virtue of the fact that the Normans who came to England with William the Conqueror were so called because they were descended from Norsemen, like the vikings who colonized the north of England hundreds of years earlier. I tell you this because Sam Rockaby was a man of a very different stripe from either of us, although his family live no more than a day’s ride from mine, and mine no more than an hour on the railway from Dan Pye’s.

“Captain Pye’s wife and children are lodged in Poole, my own on Durlston Head in Swanage, near the Tilly Whim caves. Rockaby’s folk hail from a hamlet south of Worth Matravers, near the western cliffs of St. Aldhelm’s Head. To folk like his, everyone’s a foreigner whose people weren’t clinging to that shore before the Romans came, and no one’s a true seaman whose people didn’t learn to navigate the Channel in coracles or hollowed-out canoes. Dr. Watson tells me that every man has something of the sea in his blood, because that’s where all land-based life came from, but I don’t know about that. All I know is that the likes of Rockaby laugh into their cupped hands when they hear men like Dan Pye and Jack Chevaucheux say that the sea is in our blood.

“Mr. Sherlock tells me that you don’t get about much, sir, so I’ll guess you’ve never been to Swanage, let alone to Worth Matravers or the sea cliffs on the Saint’s Head. You’re dead right—and then some—about the way the local people work the stone. They used Portland stone to make the frontage of the museum Mr. Sherlock took me to yesterday, but no one has much use for Purbeck stone because it crumbles too easily. These days, even the houses on the isle are mostly made of brick—but in the old days stone was what they had in plenty, and it was easily quarried, especially where the coastal cliffs are battered by the sea, so stone was what they used. They carved it, too, though never as small and neat as that thing, and you’ll not see an old stone house within ten miles of Worth Matravers that hasn’t got some ugly face or deformed figure worked into its walls. Nowadays it’s just tradition, but Sam Rockaby’s folk have their own lore regarding such things. When Sam and I were boys he used to tell me that the only real faces were those that kept watch on the sea.

“ ‘Some’ll tell ye they’re devils, Jacky boy,’ Sam told me once, ’an’ some’ll tell ye they’re a-meant for the scarin’ away of devils—but they ain’t. The devils in hell are jest fairy tales. Mebbe these are the Elder Gods, and mebbe they’re the Others, but either way they’re older by far than any Christian devil.’ He would never tell me exactly what he meant, though, so I always figured that he was teasing me. It was the same with the chapels. All along that coast there are little chapels on the cliff, where whole villages would go to pray when their menfolk were caught at sea by a storm. Even in Swanage the rumor was that it wasn’t just for the safe return of fishermen that Rockaby’s folk prayed, for they were wreckers even before they were smugglers, but Sam sneered at that kind of calumny.

“ ‘They rearranged the stones to build the chapels,’ he told me, ’An’ threw away the ones that scared ’em—but the stone knows what it was before your Christ was born, an’ fer what its eyes were set to watch. The Elders were first, but their watchin’ did no good. The Others came anyway, an’ printed their own faces in the stone.’ He was always a little bit crazy—but harmless, I thought, until the fire got him.

“Rockaby’s father and mine sailed together once or twice. So far as I know, they got on well enough with Dan Pye and each other. When I first signed on the Goshen Sam’s dad was still on the sailing ships, and I reckon Sam would have followed him if the age of sail wasn’t so obviously done. Sam never liked steam, but you can’t hold back the tide, and if you want to work you have to go where the work is. He was a seaman through and through, and if going under steam was the price of going to sea, he’d pay it. I don’t think he was resentful of my having got my mate’s papers by the time he joined the Goshen, even though he was older by a year or two, because he didn’t have an ounce of ambition. He was a good seaman—and the most powerful swimmer I ever saw—but he wasn’t in the least interested in command. I always wanted to be master of my own ship, but he never wanted to be master of anything, not even his own soul.

“I can’t put my finger on any one incident that first set Rockaby and Captain Pye at odds. It’s in the nature of seamen to grumble, and they always find a scapegoat on the bridge. I wasn’t aware that anything new had crept into the scuttlebutt when the Goshen set out, although the talk grew dark soon enough when the weather wouldn’t let up. Landlubbers think that steam’s made seafaring easy, but they don’t know what the ocean’s like. A steamship may not need the wind for power, but she’s just as vulnerable to its whims. Sometimes, I could swear that the wind tries twice as hard to send a steamship down, purely out of pique. We had a rough ride out, I can tell you. I never saw the Mediterranean so angry, and no sooner were we through the canal and into the Red Sea than the storms picked us up again. Rockaby was the only man in the crew who wasn’t as sick as a pig—and that, I suppose, might be why things between him and Dan Pye began to get worse. Rockaby said he was being picked on, given more than his fair share of work—and so he was, because he was sometimes the only man capable of carrying out the orders. The captain did more than his own share, too, and I tried, but there were times when we were all laid low.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being sick at sea. They say Nelson took days to find his sea legs. But the ordinary kind of seasickness was only the beginning—laudanum got us through the fevers and the aches, until we were far enough east to buy hashish and raw opium. You might disapprove of that, Mr. Mycroft, but it’s the way things work out east, at least among seafaring men. You have bad dreams, but at least you can bear to be awake. Or so it usually goes. But this time was different; the ocean seemed to have it in for us. We were carrying mail for the company, so we had to make a dozen stops on the Indian mainland and the islands, and somewhere along the way we picked up the fire. St. Anthony’s fire, that is.

“Dr. Watson told that he’d encountered similar cases while he was in India—I first met him in Goa thirteen years ago, while I was an able seaman on the Serendip—and that the cause was bad bread, contaminated with ergot. Maybe he’s right, but that’s not what seamen believe. To them, the fire is something out of hell. The men who took it worse said they felt as if crabs and snakes were crawling under their skin, and they had blinding visions of devils and monsters. This time, Rockaby was affected just as badly as anyone else, and he took it very bad indeed. He began blaming Dan Pye, saying that the captain had ridden him too hard, and brought the affliction on the ship by the insult to his blood.

“We lost two more men before we made port in Padang and laid in fresh supplies. That was when Rockaby disappeared—overboard, we thought, though he was too strong a swimmer to drown so close to shore, raving or not. We nearly shipped out without him, but he got back to the ship just in time, unfortunately. He was over the fire, didn’t seem any worse for wear than the rest of us, physically speaking—quite the reverse, in fact—but we soon found out that his mind hadn’t made the same recovery as his body. No sooner were we under way that he began twitching and jabbering away, sometimes mumbling away as if in a foreign language, stranger than any I’d ever heard. He did his work, mind—there was no lack of strength in him—but he was a changed man, and not for the better. Captain Pye said that his mumbling was nonsense, but it really did sound to me like a language, though maybe one designed for other tongues than human. There were names that kept cropping up: Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu, Azathoth. When he did speak English, Rockaby told anyone who would listen that we didn’t understand and couldn’t understand what the world was really like, and what it will become when the Others return to claim it.

“Captain Pye could see that Sam was ill, and didn’t want to come down hard on him, but ships’ crew are direly superstitious. That kind of ill-wishing can make any trouble that comes along a thousand times worse. No one likes to be part of a jittery company even at the best of times, and when a ship’s already taken a battering and there are typhoons to be faced and fought . . . well, a captain has no alternative but to try to shut a Jonah up. Dan tried, but it only made things worse. I tried to talk some sense into Sam myself, but nothing anyone could say had any effect but to make him crazier. Perhaps we should have dropped him off in Madras or Aden, but he was a Purbeck man when all was said and done, and it was our responsibility to see him safely home. And we did, though I surely wish we hadn’t.

“By the time we came back into Southampton Water, Rockaby seemed a good deal better, though we’d dosed him with opium enough to keep an elephant quiet and maybe taken any unhealthy amount ourselves. I thought he might make a full recovery once he was back home, and I traveled with him on the train to Swanage to make sure that he got back safely. He was calm enough, but he wasn’t making much sense. ‘Ye’re a fool, Jacky,’ he said to me, before we parted. ‘Y’ think you can make it right but y’ can’t. The price has to be paid, the sacrifice made. The Others never went away, y’ know, when they’d seen off the Elder Gods. They may be sleeping, but they’re dreaming, too, and the steam filters into their dreams the way sails never did, stirrin’ an’ simmerin’ an’ seethin’. Ain’t no good hopin’ that they’ll let us all alone while there’s tides in the sea an’ the crawlin’ chaos in our blood. Y’ can throw away the faces but y’ can’t blind the eyes or keep the ears from hearin’. I know where the curses are, Jacky. I know how Dan Pye’ll die, an’ how it has to be done. Cleave to him an ye’re doomed, Jacky. List to me. I know. I’ve the old blood in me.’

“I left him at Swanage station, waiting for a cart to take him home, or at least as far as Worth Matravers. He was still mumbling to himself. I heard no more from or about him—but less than two weeks later I got a letter from Dan Pye’s wife begging me to come to their house in Poole. I caught the first train I could.

“The captain was confined to his bed, and fading fast. His doctor was with him, but didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with him, and had nothing to offer by way of treatment save for laudanum and more laudanum. I could see right way that it wouldn’t be enough. All laudanum can do is dull the pain while your body makes its own repairs, and I could tell that the captain’s body was no longer in the business of making repairs. It seemed to me that his flesh had turned traitor, and had had enough of being human. It was changing. I’ve seen men with the scaly disease, that makes them seem as if they’re turning into fish, and I’ve seen men with gangrene rotting alive, but I never saw anything like the kind of transformation that was working in Dan Pye. Whatever kind of flesh it was that he was trying to become, it was nothing that was ever ancestor to humankind, and no mere decay.

“He had breath enough left in him to tell me to get rid of the doctor and to send his wife away, but when we were alone he talked fast, like a man who didn’t expect to be able to talk for long. ‘I’ve been cursed,’ he told me. ‘I know who did it, though he isn’t entirely to blame. Sam Rockaby never had the least vestige of any power to command, though he’s a good follower if you can get mastery over him, and a powerful swimmer in seas stranger than you or I have ever sailed. Take this back to him, and tell him that I understand. I don’t forgive, but I understand. I’ve felt the crawling chaos and seen the madness of darkness. Tell him that it’s over now, and that it’s time to throw it off the Saint’s Head, and let it go forever. Tell him to do the same with all the rest, for his own sake and that of his children’s children.’ The thing he gave me to give back to Rockaby was that thing your brother just gave you.

“He said more, of course, but the only thing relevant to the story was about the dreams. Now, Dan Pye was a seaman for forty years, and no stranger to rum, opium, and hashish. He knew his dreams, Dan did. But these, he said, were different. These were real visions: visions of long-dead cities, and creatures like none that Mother Earth could ever have spawned, whether she’s been four thousand or four thousand million years in the making. And there were words, too: words that weren’t just nonsense, but parts of a language human tongues were never meant to speak. ‘The Elder Gods couldn’t save us, Jack,’ he said. ‘The Others were too powerful. But we don’t have to give ourselves up—not our souls, not our will. We have to do what we can. Tell Rockaby that, and tell him to throw the lot into the sea.’

“I tried to do what Dan asked me to, but when I went to Worth Matravers I found that Rockaby had never arrived home after I left him at Swanage station. I didn’t throw the stone off the cliff because I found out that the curse that killed Dan had already started in me, and I thought it best to show it to whoever might be able to help me. I knew Dr. Watson from before, as I said, and I knew he’d been in India. I wasn’t certain that he’d be able to help, but I was sure that there wasn’t a doctor in Dorset who could, and I knew that any man who’s been long in India has seen things just as queer and just as bad as whatever has its claws in me. So I found Dr. Watson through the Seamen’s Association in London, and he sent me to see Mr. Sherlock Holmes—who has promised to find Sam Rockaby for me. But he wanted to come here first, to ask your advice about the cursing stone, because of what this chap Fotherington told him at the museum. And that’s the whole of it—apart from this.”

While he completed this last sentence John Chevaucheux had unbuttoned his coat and the shirt he wore beneath it. Now he drew back the shirt to display his breast and abdomen to Mycroft’s gaze. The seaman’s eyes were full of horror as he beheld himself, and the spoliation that had claimed him.

The creeping malaise appeared to have commenced its spread from a point above Chevaucheux’s heart, but the disfiguration now extended as far as his navel and his collarbone, and sideways from one armpit to the other. The epidermal deformation was not like the scaly patina of icthyosis; it seemed was more akin to the rubbery flesh of a cephalopod, and its shape was slightly reminiscent of an octopus with tentacles asprawl. It was discolored by a multiplicity of bruises and widening ulcers, although there seemed to be no sign yet of any quasi-gangrenous decay.

Mycroft had never seen anything like it before, although he had heard of similar deformations. He knew that he ought to make a closer investigation of the symptoms, but he felt a profound reluctance to touch the diseased flesh.

“Watson has no idea how to treat it,” Sherlock said unnecessarily. “Is there any member of the Diogenes Club who can help?”

Mycroft pondered this question for some moments before shaking his head. “I doubt that anyone in England has a ready cure for this kind of disease,” he said. “But I will give you the address of one of our research laboratories in Sussex. They will certainly be interested to study the development of the disease, and may well be able to palliate the symptoms. If you are strong, Mr. Chevaucheux, you might survive this, but I can make no promises.” He turned to Sherlock. “Can you honor your promise to find this man Rockaby?”

“Of course,” Sherlock said stiffly.

“Then you must do so, without delay—and you must persuade him to lead you to the store of artifacts from which he obtained this stone. I shall keep this one, if Mr. Chevaucheux will permit, but you must take the rest to the laboratory in Sussex. I will ask the secretary to send two of the functionaries with you, because there might be hard labor involved and this is not the kind of case in which Watson ought to be allowed to interest himself. When the artifacts are safe—or as safe as they can be, in human hands—you must return here, to tell me exactly what happened in Dorset.”

Sherlock nodded his head. “Expect me within the week,” he said, with his customary self-confidence.

“I will,” Mycroft assured him, in spite of his inability to echo that confidence.

Sherlock was as good as his word, at least in the matter of timing. He arrived in the Strangers’ Room seven days later, at four-thirty in the afternoon. He was more than a little haggard, but he had summoned all his pride and self-discipline to the task of maintaining his image as a master of reason. Even so, he did not rise from his seat when Mycroft entered the room.

“I received a telegram from Lewes this morning,” Mycroft told him. “I have the bare facts—but not the detail. You have done well. You may not think so, but you have.”

“If you are about to tell me that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy . . .” Sherlock said, in a fractured tone whose annoyance was directed more at himself than his brother.

“I would not presume to insult you,” Mycroft said, a trifle dishonestly. “Tell me the story, please—in your own words.”

“The first steps were elementary,” Sherlock said morosely. “Had Rockaby been in London, the irregulars would have found him in a matter of hours; as things were, I had to put the word out through my contacts in Limehouse. Wherever Rockaby was, I knew that he had to be dosing himself against the terrors of his condition, and that was bound to leave a trail. I located him in Portsmouth. He had gone there in search of a ship to carry him back to the Indian Ocean, but no one would take him on because he was so plainly mad, and he had given up sometime before, in favor of drinking himself into oblivion. Chevaucheux and I went down there posthaste, and found him in a wretched condition.

“There were no signs of Captain Pye’s disease on Rockaby’s body—which gave me some confidence that the stone was not carrying any common or garden-variety contagion—but his mind was utterly deranged. My questions got scant response, but Chevaucheux had slightly better luck. Rockaby recognized him, in spite of his madness, and seemed to feel some obligation to him, left over from a time when they were on better terms. ‘I shouldn’t of done it, Jacky,’ he said to Chevaucheux. ‘It warn’t my fault, really, but I shouldn’t of. I shouldn’t of let the blood have its way—an’ I’m damned now, blood or no blood. Won’t die but can’t live. Stay away, lad. Go away and stay away.’

“Chevaucheux asked him where the remainder of the stones could be found. I doubt that he would have told us, had he been well, but his condition worked to our advantage in that matter. Chevaucheux had to work hard, constantly reminding Rockaby of the ties that had bound them as children and shipmates, and in the end he wormed the location out of him. The place-names meant nothing to me, and probably meant nothing to anyone who had not roamed back and forth across the isle with the child that Rockaby once was, but Chevaucheux knew the exact spot near the sea cliffs that Rockaby meant. ‘Leave ’em be, Jacky,’ the madman pleaded. ‘Don’t disturb the ground. Leave ’em be. Let ’em come in their own time. Don’t hurry them, no matter how you burn.’ We did not take the advice, of course.”

Mycroft observed that Sherlock seemed to regret that now. “You went to St. Aldhelm’s Head,” he prompted. “To the sea cliffs.”

“We went by day,” Sherlock said, his eyes glazing slightly as he slipped back into narrative mode. “The weather was poor—gray and drizzling—but it was daylight. Alas, daylight does not last. Chevaucheux led us to the spot readily enough, but the old mine where the stoneworkers had tunneled into the cliff face was difficult to reach, because the waves had long since carried away the old path. The mine entrance was half blocked, because the flat layers of stone had weathered unevenly, cracking and crumbling—but Rockaby had contrived a passage of sorts, and we squeezed through without disturbing the roof.

“When your clubmen set to work with a will, one plying a pickax and the other a miner’s shovel, I was afraid the whole cliff might come down on us, but we were forty yards deep from the cliff face, and the surrounding rock had never been assailed by the waves. I never heard such a sound, though, as the wind got up and the sea became violent. The crash of the waves seemed to surge through the stone, to emerge from the walls like the moaning of a sick giant—and that was before your men began pulling the images out and heaping them up.

“You studied the one that Chevaucheux gave you by lamplight, and magnified its image as you did so, but you can’t have the least notion of how that crowd of faces appeared by the light of our lamps, in that godforsaken hole. More than a few were considerably larger than the one Rockaby sent to Captain Pye, but it wasn’t just their size that made them seem magnified: it was their malevolence. They weren’t carrying a disease in the same way that a dead man’s rags might harbor microbes, but there was a contagion in them regardless, which radiated from their features.

“Chevaucheux had shown me the stone faces built into the houses in Worth Matravers, but they’d been exposed for decades or centuries to the sun and the wind and the salt in the air. They had turned back into mere ugly faces, as devoid of virtue as of vice. These were different—and if they had stared at me the way they stared at poor Chevaucheux . . .”

Mycroft knew better than to challenge this remarkable observation. “Go on,” he prompted.

“Reason tells me that they could not really have stared at Chevaucheux—that he must have imagined it, in much the same way that one imagines a portrait’s gaze following one around a room—but I tell you, Mycroft, I imagined it, too. I did not perceive the eyes of those monsters as if they were looking at me, but as if they were looking at him . . . as if they were accusing him of their betrayal. Not Rockaby, although he had told Chevaucheux where to find them, and not you or I, although we were the ones who asked him to locate them on behalf of your blessed club, but him and him alone. Justice, like logic, simply did not enter into the equation.

“ ‘Do you see it, Mr. Holmes?’ he asked me—and I had to confess that I did. ‘It is in my blood,’ he said. ‘Sam was wrong to think himself any more a seaman than Dan Pye or Jacky Chevaucheux. There are stranger seas, you see, than the seven on which we sail. There are greater oceans than the five we have named. There are seas of infinity and oceans of eternity, and their salt is the bitterest brine that creation can contain. The dreams you know are but phantoms . . . ghosts with no more substance than rhyme or reason . . . but there are dreams of the flesh, Mr. Holmes. I have done nothing of which I need to be ashamed, and yet . . . I cannot help but dream.’

“All the while that he was speaking, he was moving away, toward the narrow shaft by which we had gained entry to the heart of the mine. He was moving into the shadows, and I assumed that he was trying to escape the light because he was trying to escape the hostile gaze of those horrid effigies—but that was not the reason. You saw what was happening to his torso when he was here, but his face was then untouched. The poison had leached into his liver and lights, but not his eyes or brain . . . but the bleak eyes of those stone heads were staring at him, no matter how absurd that sounds, and . . . do you have any idea what I am talking about, Mycroft? Do you understand what was happening in that cave?”

“I wish I did,” Mycroft said. “You, my dear brother, are perhaps the only man in England who can comprehend the profundity of my desire. Like you, I am a master of observation and deduction, and I have every reason to wish that my gifts were entirely adequate to an understanding of the world in which we find ourselves. There is nothing that men like us hate and fear more than the inexplicable. I do not hold with fools who say that there are things that man was not meant to know, but I am forced to admit that there are things that men are not yet in a position to know. We have hardly begun to come to terms with the ordinary afflictions of the flesh that we call diseases, let alone those which are extraordinary. If there are such things as curses—and you will doubtless agree with me that it would be infinitely preferable if there were not—then we are impotent, as yet, to counter them. Did Chevaucheux say anything more about these dreams of the flesh?”

“He had already told me that Dan Pye had been right,” Sherlock went on. “They were more than dreams, even when they were phantoms. Opium does not feed them, he said, but cannot suppress them. He had told me, very calmly, that he had already seen the deserts of infinity, the depths within darkness, the horrors that lurk on reason’s edge . . . and that he had heard the mutterings, the discordance that underlies every pretense of music and meaningful speech . . . but when he moved into the shadows of the cave . . .”

Sherlock made an evident effort to gather himself together. “He never stopped talking,” the great detective went on. “He wanted me to know, to understand. He wanted you to know. He wanted to help us—and, through us, to help others. ‘The worst of it all,’ he said, ‘is what I have felt. I have felt the crawling chaos, and I know what it is that has me now. St. Anthony’s fire is a mere caress by comparison. I have felt the hand of revelation upon my forehead, and I feel it now, gripping me like a vise. I know that the ruling force of creation is blind, and worse than blind. I know that it is devoid of the least intelligence, the least compassion, the least artistry. You may be surprised to find me so calm under such conditions as this, Mr. Holmes, and to tell you the truth I am surprised myself—all the more so for having seen Dan Pye upon his deathbed, and Sam Rockaby on a rack of his own making—but I have learned from you that facts must be accepted as facts and treated as facts, and that madness is a treason of the will. You might think that you and your brother have not helped me, but you have . . . in spite of everything. Take these monstrous things away, and study them . . . learn what they have to teach you, no matter what the cost. That’s better by far than Sam Rockaby’s way, or mine . . .” Sherlock trailed off again.

“Mr. Chevaucheux was a brave man,” Mycroft said, after a moment’s pause.

Sherlock met his eyes then, with a gaze full of fear and fire. “Am I damned, Mycroft?” he demanded harshly. “Is the disease incubating in me, as it was in him? Are my own dreams worse than dreams?”

Mycroft had no firm guarantees to offer, but he shook his head. “There was something in Chevaucheux, as there was in Pye, which responded to the curse. You and I are a different breed; the art in our blood is a different kind. I cannot swear to you that we are immune, or will remain so, but I am convinced that we are better placed to fight. Those effigies you took to Lewes may have the power to make some men see a terrible truth, and to make some human flesh turn traitor to the soul, but they are not omnipotent, else the human race would have succumbed to their effect long ago. At any rate, there is no safety in hiding them, or in hiding from them. Whatever the risk, they must be studied. Such studies are dangerous, but that does not excuse us from our scholarly duty. We must try to understand what they are—what we are—no matter how hateful the answer might be.”

“You believe that we are safe from this contagion, then—you and I?”

Mycroft had never seen Sherlock so desperate for reassurance. “I dare to hope so,” he said judiciously. “The Diogenes Club has some experience in matters of this sort, and we have survived thus far. The entities that men like Rockaby term the Others have proved more powerful in the past than those he calls the Elder Gods, but the blood of Nodens is not extinct; it flows in us still and it has its expression. The gift that was handed down to men like us is not to be despised. You sometimes suspect that I think less of you because you have become famous instead of laboring behind the scenes of society, as I do, but I am glad that you have become a hero of the age because the age is direly in need of your kind of hero. Our art is in its infancy, and many more confrontations such as this one will expose our incapacity in years—perhaps centuries—to come, but we must nurture it regardless, and store its rewards. What else can we do if we are to be worthy of the name of humankind?”

Sherlock nodded, seemingly satisfied.

“Tell me, then,” Mycroft said, “what happened in the cave. I know that you and my faithful servants succeeded in taking the artifacts to Lewes, but I know that Chevaucheux was not with you. Rockaby has been committed to a lunatic asylum, where an agent of ours will be able to interrogate his madness, but I gather from the tone of your account that Chevaucheux will not be available for further study. Do you feel able now to tell me what became of him?”

“What became of him?” Sherlock echoed, fear flooding his eyes again. “What became? Ah . . .” As he paused, he put his hand into his pocket and took out a bottle. Mycroft had no way to be sure, but it seemed to him to be an exact match to the outline he had observed in John Chevaucheux’s clothing a few weeks before. The label on this bottle, scrawled in a doctor’s unkempt hand, confirmed that it was laudanum.

Sherlock put his hand to the cork, but then he stopped himself and put the unopened bottle down on the side table. “It does no good,” he said. “But they are only dreams, are they not? Mere phantoms? There is no necessity that will turn them into dreams of my flesh. That is what Chevaucheux told me, at any rate, when he reached forward to give me the bottle, before he ran away. I think that he was trying to be kind—but he might have been kinder to remain in the shadows. He had faith in me, you see. He thought that I would want to see what he had become . . . and he was right. He ought to have been right, and he was. Before he ran to the end of that makeshift corridor of stone, and hurled himself into the thankless sea, where I hope to God that he died . . .

“That brave man wanted me to see what the crawling chaos had done to him, as it turned his flesh into a dream beneath the evil eyes of those creatures we had excavated from their hiding place . . .

“And I did see it, Mycroft.”

“I know,” Mycroft answered. “But you must tell me what it was you saw, if we are ever to come to terms with it.” And he saw his brother respond to this appeal, seeing its sense as well as its necessity. All his life, Sherlock Holmes had believed that when one had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained—however improbable—must be the truth. Now he understood that when the impossible was too intractable to be eliminated, one had to revise one’s opinion of the limits of the possible; but he was a brave man, in whom the blood of Nodens still flowed, after a fashion, still carrying forward its long and ceaseless war against the tainted blood of the Others.

“I saw the flesh of his face,” Sherlock went on, stubbornly bringing his tale to its inevitable end, “the texture of which was like some frightful, pulpy cephalopod, and the shape of which was dissolving into a mass of writhing, agonized worms, every one of them suppurating and liquefying as if it had been a month decaying . . . and I met his eyes . . . his glowing eyes that were blind to ordinary light . . . which were staring, not at me, but into the infinite and the eternal . . . where they beheld some horror so unspeakable that it required every last vestige of his strength to pause an instant more before he hurled himself, body and soul, into the illimitable abyss.”