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Writing is a risk. We must travel light, ready to fly at a moment’s notice, and having documents on our persons, however clever the cipher, may be considered rank foolishness. But it is write or go mad, and so I must write, for I will succumb neither to madness nor to the temptation of the morphine bottle and the forgetfulness it brings.
My companion, however, had need of the morphine tonight. He was at greater risk than I, and I fear he may yet come to grievous harm. He sleeps now, but fitfully. I wish I were able to give him more in the way of comfort.
How am I to begin?
There is much in this world that is terrible and strange, for all that there are many who would deem this to be the right way of things. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the world any other way: mankind has not been in charge of its own destiny for seven hundred years, many times the span of a human life yet but an eye-blink to Those who would place themselves above us.
They have many names, these would-be gods--their own true names unpronounceable by the human mouth; the titles we have bestowed upon them through the ages; the names whispered behind closed doors in the dark--but I and those who believe as I do would have them known as tyrants, monsters who have held mankind in their thrall for far too long, bleeding us dry in return for a peace and prosperity that is wholly dependent upon their inscrutable whims. I have no doubt they would plunge the world into war and chaos in one vast heartbeat if it so suited them; they would watch us destroy ourselves with as much dispassion as a man watching warring colonies of ants.
And yet. And yet...
Dreadful as they are, I am firm in my mind regarding these creatures from beyond imagining. I know what action I must take should I, and my knives, be given the hard-won opportunity. I am less easy about the humans who serve them--the ones in whom all traces of humanity have all but vanished in their fanatical devotion to the Great Ones. It is in the nature of monsters to be monstrous but what must one think of those who choose to become so?
There was the late Charles Augustus Milverton who, with his safe of documents, was responsible for many of the executions at Tyburn’s Triple Tree; the abominable Ricoletti and her husband also come to mind, as do Merridew and Morgan the poisoners; and no list of villains would be complete without Baron Adelbert Gruner, that vile cohort of Prince Franz Drago, wholly human and wholly monstrous. And it would be remiss of me not to mention the consulting detective of Baker Street who my companion considers the most dangerous of them all. He has dogged our steps for some years now, sending his agents after us from where he sits in the center of his spiderweb in London, and it has taken all of my companion’s considerable mental faculties to keep us from falling into his hands.
To this number, I must now add one Culverton Smith. He is a planter, a well-known resident of Sumatra who has made a hobby of the study of tropical diseases. Would that we had never heard of him! But we were in Sumatra, following the awful business of its Giant Rat--a story for which the world is not yet prepared--when word reached us from a young seditionist who wrote urgently about an outbreak of madness on his plantation. This Victor Savage was Smith’s nephew, and he suspected mischief of some kind, an ailment deliberately spread amongst the workers. Apart from his desperation in reaching out to agents unknown, I can say little more about Savage, for he was dead before our designated rendezvous, taken by the same madness and horrible, creeping death visited upon the natives.
We found him, or what remained of him, in his rooms: a stench beyond enduring and a body grown gray and dry, so dry, and brittle and falling to pieces before our eyes. I have seldom known horror such as that which I felt as I beheld the remains of that young man and the strange colors that glinted beneath the dry, brittle grayness of what had once been human skin.
To my companion, it was obvious that Culverton Smith had a hand in his death, and it was equally obvious that we had to take steps to curtail his activities. We intercepted his letters and learned that he was desirous of sharing a ‘discovery of great interest’ with the crowned heads of Europe, beginning with Victoria of Albion to whom he owed his first allegiance. And so we followed him from one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific to the teeming streets of London.
I must confess some apprehension at returning to the city where we so narrowly avoided capture and where our old enemy still dwelled, but it cannot be said that being back in the country of my birth did me ill. It was good to see familiar sights and to walk familiar streets after so long abroad. The fogs and darknesses of London took us in, my companion and I, he in the guise of a seafaring Captain Basil and myself as a salesman of artesian wells. We found rooms in Rotherhithe, in an alley near the docks, and from there we continued the pursuit of our quarry.
He was not difficult to find. Smith had made no secret of his movements and we quickly traced him to a house on Lower Burke Street, in the vague borderland between Notting Hill and Kensington. Being a creature of habit, he kept to much the same schedule as he did in the tropics, according to my companion’s conversations with his housemaid (she was new to the household and not much taken with her employer and my companion can be charming when he wishes it). Smith had brought with him his collection of cultures of tropical diseases and could be found every evening studying them, preparing for his upcoming audience with Victoria.
Those cultures and his notes were our object and burglary, it seemed, was our best option. In the normal course of things we might have tried to play the long game, cultivating Smith’s acquaintance to quietly gain access to his research, but time was against us, as was Smith’s suspicious nature. He saw very few visitors and no one at all was admitted to the house during his hours of study.
I will not say it was a simple matter to break into Culverton Smith’s house. There was a certain amount of planning to be done, the rest of the household to consider, and, of course, we had to acquire the tools for the job. Fortunately, if one moves in criminal circles, it is possible to lay your hands on a diamond-tipped glass cutter, a nickel-plated jemmy, a set of adaptive keys, and a dark lantern without too much trouble and without raising too many questions.
It was a half moon on the night of our venture and by its crimson light, we made our way along the line of fine houses on Lower Burke Street until we came to Smith’s residence. We were over the iron railing in a matter of moments despite my bad leg, and I was soon cutting a hole in the pane of the French windows to Smith’s study.
We crept inside. I will not describe the horrors we found there, the photographs and drawings on the walls, the ghastly things in jars…yet it was to the seemingly innocuous vessels that my companion drew my attention, the ones merely filled with liquid or a thin layer of solid media.
“See, Watson,” he said, “among these gelatine cultivations some of the very worst offenders in the world are doing time. Have a care where you stand by that shelf: I would not have you contract Tapanuli fever or the black Formosa corruption from a broken culture.”
I tucked my arms closer to my sides and followed him through the dark room. He headed towards the safe against the far wall, where we reasoned the most valuable documents must be kept, and began to lay out his burglary kit with brisk efficiency. Safe-cracking was a task to which he was better suited than I, so I stood guard, on high alert for any noise or sign of movement from without.
It was difficult to stay still in that room. The hideous images on the walls weighed on me, and I am no stranger to disease or violence. I admired my companion’s ability to stay calm and focused in spite of all that was around us, and I strove to emulate his manner, trying to light my eyes on something that was not unspeakable in its awfulness.
That was how I noticed the little ivory box, pinkish in the moonlight, that sat upon a stack of papers on the desk. It was curiously carved but beautifully so, making it perhaps the one fair thing in the whole study. I moved closer, the better to see the figures dancing across its surface but I had to bite back a soft cry of amazement when I realized what it rested on.
It was luck such as we had not had for an age and that should have made me wary. There, upon the desk, unsecured save for the ivory box serving as a paper weight, were the very notes we sought.
“Holmes,” I whispered, “look here!”
Trusting me as he always did, my companion left his activities at the safe and came to stand next to me.
“Yes, these are the dates in question,” he said, cautiously focusing the light of the dark lantern on the papers without touching them. “And I can see he makes particular note of Victor Savage and the progression of his symptoms…”
“Then let us take this and quit this place!” I said, rashly reaching for the little ivory box with one hand and about to scoop up the papers with the other.
Holmes hissed a warning. I could not see why at first and turned to him to protest when the lid of the ivory box sprang open beneath my fingers. In that instant, Holmes threw himself at me, knocking us both to the floor, and I had time only to glimpse inside it a curious brittle globe set in a lump of soft metal before it shattered, struck by a spring in the hinge of the box.
There was a blast of color I cannot describe. To call it a color was wrong but I have no other word for it. It was not light, it was not sound, it was a hue that pressed against my very eyes, filling my vision, filling my mind, And it brought with it such terror and such pain as I have not felt for an age. For half a heartbeat, I was back in the hills of Afghanistan, lying in my own blood, the Jezail bullet having just torn through my leg, only the proportions of the men fighting and dying around me were altered in a queer way impossible to describe, and the whole sky was that same unbearable, impossible color…
Holmes cried out. It was a sound unlike any I had ever heard him make, and it brought me back to myself in that dark room. The color was gone, leaving only my frayed nerves and Holmes next to me, clutching at his head, the dark lantern forgotten. He would not respond when I called his name, and when I tried to help him stand—for we had to fly, and quickly after that disturbance—he would have folded to his knees had I not caught him.
I did not know what to make of it. I am familiar with injury—most of my medicine has been practiced on the battlefield—but this terrified me. I had never before seen Holmes laid low, and he was as weak as a kitten in my arms.
I have little recollection of how we left that place. I had enough sense to grab the papers from the desk, causing the accursed ivory box to fall to the floor. But I do not know how we got out of that house while the alarm was being raised, or how I got Holmes through the streets of London when my leg hurt as it had not done in years. It was, I think, not just the damp air. The old wound pained me as if it were fresh, as if the bullet had, in fact, just struck as it had in my brief vision. Yet somehow, limping, I got us back to our rooms where I conducted a more thorough examination of my companion.
The color had leached out of all his garments where the blast had touched him, the dull browns and grays of his workman’s costume replaced by that unearthly color we had seen. He had clearly borne the brunt of the blast for his whole back was tainted while only the elbow and shoulder of my coat were tinged. It hurt my eyes to look at that color, and my companion clutched at the fabric as though it pained him. I pushed up his sleeves to ascertain that the blemish was on the cloth alone and not on his skin.
“The oysters,” he babbled in between great gasps for breath, “oysters all over the sunken ruins…R’lyeh…he sleeps…” There was much and more of this, of new gods and the old moon, of half-crowns at blood price, of natural predators and the rights of man…
“Holmes, do you hear me?” I asked, frightened. I have seen madness. I have seen what the Great Ones can do to a human mind, even one so strong as my companion’s. “Speak sense, if you can!”
“That’s you, Watson?” He grasped at the front of my shirt, fingers tight in the cloth. I could see the stark, staring scars on his arms where Black Peter had seized him in his death throes. I saw the innumerable marks on his hands—what could have been musician’s hands—from even more experiments and sparring sessions. It was safer to look at these; I could not bear to look at his face and not see sense there. “It is you. Help me. You won’t fail me. You never did fail me.”
His words alarmed me. Holmes has asked much of me over the years, and I have often had to do what he has needed of me blindly, trusting only in his ability to reason out any problem to its end. But this has all been in the service of the Restoration. He has hardly ever asked me for anything for himself.
Close to distress, I peeled off his tainted clothing. This was made difficult by Holmes pulling frantically at his coat and shirt but I managed it in the end. The clothes were dry—so dry, in fact, that they had become brittle and the cloth cracked beneath my hands. This brought to mind the corpse of poor Victor Savage, all brittle and crumbling. That, I promised, would not be my companion’s fate, and, once I had him free from the contaminated garments and wrapped in a blanket, I had time to calm myself and apply my own skills at reasoning.
My first thought was to look for answers in the papers I had taken but I quickly learned that they were useless. The first page did indeed mention the madness at the plantation and Victor Savage’s death, but it must have been a copy from another document for the rest of the papers contained nothing but details of crop yields and seasonal profits. It could only be surmised that Culverton Smith had suspected we were on his tail, and had thus set for us a devastating trap.
Cursing the impulsiveness that had led me to play into his hands, I tossed the papers aside and went for my doctor’s kit. It is much reduced, but I will always be a medical man and travel at all times with some essentials. There was morphine there, and, after some hesitation, I administered the smallest dose to Holmes to help calm him. He was already as one drugged, his pupils dark dots in the center of the broad gray iris, but his mumblings about oysters and half crowns and mighty R’lyeh were reaching a fever pitch and I feared for his reason.
As I washed my hands after giving him the drug, some drops of water happened to fall on the bundle of contaminated clothing. I’d had a mind to burn it, but we had only the smallest grate in the room and I did not wish to leave Holmes alone for long. This turned out to be fortunate, for otherwise I would not have had the chance to observe the unearthly color lifting from the cloth where the water had touched it. What was left behind were spots that were still brittle and discolored, but they were an ordinary mottled gray rather than that terrible impossible hue.
I sprang into action. One cannot get truly pure water in London but I rushed to the pump behind the house and fetched a pail. With that water, I washed Holmes as gently as I could while still being meticulously thorough. It was cold for I dared not take the time to have it heated, and he protested but I persisted until at last he looked upon me with a sparkle of his old wit dancing in his mercifully clear eyes.
“That’s you, Watson?” he said again, his voice weak.
“Yes,” I said, lowering the cloth I had been using to wipe his brow. “It is I.”
“You and I, Watson,” he whispered, reaching for me, “we have done our part, have we not?”
I clasped his hand. “And we are not done yet.”
“No—but there is so much to be done. So much…” His eyes fell closed and his voice fell into a nearly inaudible mumbling, but this time the murmurings were of Culverton Smith, and how we must act, and soon, though here and there I thought I still caught a vague reference to oysters. I laid him in the bed and watched him for a few moments before taking up pen and paper.
He breathes easier now than when I began to write, and shifts in his sleep as he does normally. I am hopeful.
But we have not yet finished our business with Culverton Smith. I will not lightly forget the trap he laid for us, or the condition to which he reduced my companion.
My knives are ready.