New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (30 page)

“Found what?” He handed me the lantern and took up a small box of polished black wood. Undoing a latch, he opened the lid. I reached for the small obsidian dagger that nestled on red velvet. “What is this?”

“Feels creepy, don’t it? You see, Justin Geoffrey wasn’t the only lunatic to visit the black monolith of Stregoicavar. Over the decades foolhardy souls have taken ax and hammer to that stone, but they never did much damage. Around the base is a litter of shards, and from one good-sized piece our sea captain had this ritual weapon forged. God alone knows what he used it for.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, closing the lid of the box. Winfield watched as I placed the weapon in my coat pocket. He followed me out the door and onto the porch that was his homeless residence.

“Listen, man. This old town ain’t just a seaport. It’s a portal. Things can be summoned from the other side. Wouldn’t surprise me if that crazy old coot initially called up this woman, whatever she is. If she’s linked to the Black Stone and Geoffrey’s mad verse, carrying that thing with you is a bad idea.”

“I want to study it. There’s some symbols carved onto the handle that look familiar. I think I remember them from a book I saw in the library at Miskatonic. Maybe I can find some answers about this woman.”

“This avatar, you mean. You’re bloody mad.”

Calmly, I smiled, and then I turned and walked into the fog.

III.

I walked past Water Street, toward the ocean, to the wharves. Dropping the façade of calm that I had faked so as to disguise my true emotional state from my inebriated friend, I walked the lonely place until I found the pathetic shanty that was my destination. Breathing deeply the unwholesome fog, I pushed the crooked door of disjointed wood. He was sitting on his crate, eating fish that had been wrapped in newspaper. Flickering light from one single candle illuminated the place. Looking at one corner, I saw the mound of blankets wherein his squat companion slept, next to a wall on which had been scrawled, in yellow chalk, curious glyphs.

“Hello, Enoch.”

He looked at me with rheumy eyes, a shred of fish hanging from one corner of his mouth. “Evening.”

“Are you okay?”

His eyes blinked. “Never better.” I watched his gnarled hand reach for a place on his face, which he thoughtfully scratched. From outside I could hear a boat’s forlorn call, and as if in answer I heard a low moan which I took to be the wind on water. This latter sound increased and became a gale that shook the edifice of wood and metal and thick cardboard. I looked at one of the trembling cardboard walls, at what I took to be papier-mâché masks that had been fastened to its surface. Stepping to the wall, I carefully touched one of the pale faces. Its thin membrane pushed inward at the force of my fingering.

“What are these, Enoch?”

“Oh, aspects of she and her kindred. They like their false faces, aye.”

I reached to touch another of the ghastly things, gently poking a finger into the hollow eye socket. Hideous as they were, I was strangely seduced. So soft. Perhaps, if I was very careful, I could peel one of them from the wall and slip it over my own visage.

The old man began to hum, as outside the wind blew roughly against the shack. Enoch’s tune became a low chanted song. “Across black gulfs toward us they dance, to mock our insignificance.” From a corner of the room, fluted music accompanied the old man’s singing. I turned to glance at the malformed gnome. Still wrapped in many blankets, he glowered at me with glistening black eyes. A cracked flute was pressed against the mouth of the shredded mask.

Something soft touched my shoulder. I turned my face to hers. Her cool mouth pressed against my forehead, and her tongue—so strangely soft, so warm and heavy—fastened to my flesh. When she backed away, I knew that it had not been her tongue that had tickled me, for I could feel it still upon my face, the soft weighty thing. Reaching to my face, I touched the fungous growth upon it. Her diamond eyes beamed as shadows shifted the contour of her inhuman visage. She bent to me a second time and touched her lips to mine. As we kissed, my hand went into my pocket and found the dagger. Joyfully, I pushed the tiny blade into her face, below one eye. How easily the flesh tore, like mushroom. Sediments of her sardonic physiognomy spilled to me, onto my eyes, into mouth and nostrils.

I pushed the creature from me and fled that haunted place. Wild tempest tore at my hair, my clothing. It had pushed away the noisome fog, and I saw a dark sky laced with silver starlight, with gems that remorselessly winked at me. I watched the roiling storm clouds that gathered at the jutting edge of Kingsport Head, and listened to the waves that crashed against ports of rotting wood. From behind came an odd scuttling sound, and turning I saw the assemblage of large leaves that followed me, pushed by wind along the ground.

No, not leaves. Rather, they were soft hollow faces moving in a moaning wind. I groaned into that gale, as beneath its noise I heard that other sound. I saw them dimly in the distance, two figures that had followed from their shabby abode. One played an antique accordion. About his feet his masked companion frolicked, a flute at its mouth. Behind them, in spreading darkness, she emerged, gliding toward me. Windstorm whirled around her, lifting the faces to the she-devil in a whorl of spinning air. Reaching out, she took hold of one face. How easily it covered her split countenance.

Mindlessly, I laughed. I mumbled some snatches of lunatic verse that fumbled in my brain. The bumps of substance that stained my mouth and forehead began to expand, as drops of moisture dripped from the black cosmos. Baptized, I gazed once more at the daemon that swam toward me through the liquid air; and then I shut my eyes and awaited her final kiss.

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.

“The Call of Cthulhu” · H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

“One other thing, Lestrade,” he added, turning round at the door: “ ‘Rache’,” is the German for ‘revenge’; so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.”

“A Study in Scarlet” · A. Conan Doyle (1887)

• A STUDY IN EMERALD •

Neil Gaiman

1. The New Friend.

It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.

But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.

I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.

“Astonishing.” I said.

“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab-coat, who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave-folk, tortured.”

Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut-brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.

The gods and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the ___th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.

I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.

That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leech-like mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog-white, into the skin of my now-withered shoulder. I had once been a crack-shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world-beneath-the-world akin to panic which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a Hansom cab, rather than a penny to travel underground.

Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.

“I scream in the night,” I told him.

“I have been told that I snore,” he said. “Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”

I smiled, and I shook my head, and extended my hand. We shook on it.

The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone-white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveler, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors, many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied. He was a mystery to me.

We were partaking of one of our landlady’s magnificent breakfasts one morning, when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. “There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes,” he said. “We will need another place at table.”

“Very good,” she said, “I’ll put more sausages under the grill.”

My friend returned to perusing his morning paper. I waited for an explanation with growing impatience. Finally, I could stand it no longer. “I don’t understand. How could you know that in four minutes we would be receiving a visitor? There was no telegram, no message of any kind.”

He smiled, thinly. “You did not hear the clatter of a brougham several minutes ago? It slowed as it passed us—obviously as the driver identified our door, then it sped up and went past, up into the Marylebone Road. There is a crush of carriages and taxicabs letting off passengers at the railway station and at the waxworks, and it is in that crush that anyone wishing to alight without being observed will go. The walk from there to here is but four minutes.

He glanced at his pocket-watch, and as he did so I heard a tread on the stairs outside.

“Come in, Lestrade,” he called. “The door is ajar, and your sausages are just coming out from under the grill.”

A man I took to be Lestrade opened the door, then closed it carefully behind him. “I should not,” he said. “But truth to tell, I have had not had a chance to break my fast this morning. And I could certainly do justice to a few of those sausages.” He was the small man I had observed on several occasions previously, whose demeanor was that of a traveler in rubber novelties or patent nostrums.

My friend waited until our landlady had left the room, before he said, “Obviously, I take it this is a matter of national importance.”

“My stars,” said Lestrade, and he paled. “Surely the word cannot be out already. Tell me it is not.” He began to pile his plate high with sausages, kipper fillets, kedgeree and toast, but his hands shook, a little.

“Of course not,” said my friend. “I know the squeak of your brougham wheels, though, after all this time, an oscillating G sharp above high C. And if Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard cannot publicly be seen to come into the parlor of London’s only consulting detective, yet comes anyway, and without having had his breakfast, then I know that this is not a routine case. Ergo, it involves those above us and is a matter of national importance.”

Lestrade dabbed egg yolk from his chin with his napkin. I stared at him. He did not look like my idea of a police inspector, but then, my friend looked little enough like my idea of a consulting detective—whatever that might be.

“Perhaps we should discuss the matter privately,” Lestrade said, glancing at me.

My friend began to smile, impishly, and his head moved on his shoulders as it did when he was enjoying a private joke. “Nonsense,” he said. “Two heads are better than one. And what is said to one of us is said to us both.”

“If I am intruding—” I said, gruffly, but he motioned me to silence.

Lestrade shrugged. “It’s all the same to me,” he said, after a moment. “If you solve the case then I have my job. If you don’t, then I have no job. You use your methods, that’s what I say. It can’t make things any worse.”

“If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend. “When do we go to Shorediteh?”

Lestrade dropped his fork. “This is too bad!” he exclaimed. “Here you were, making sport of me, when you know all about the matter! You should be ashamed—”

“No one has told me anything of the matter. When a police inspector walks into my room with fresh splashes of mud of that peculiar mustard yellow hue on his boots and trouser-legs, I can surely be forgiven for presuming that he has recently walked past the diggings at Hobbs Lane, in Shoreditch, which is the only place in London that particular mustard-colored clay seems to be found.”

Inspector Lestrade looked embarrassed. “Now you put it like that,” he said, “it seems so obvious.”

My friend pushed his plate away from him. “Of course it does,” he said, slightly testily.

We rode to the East End in a cab, Inspector Lestrade had walked up to the Marylebone Road to find his brougham, and left us alone.

“So you are truly a consulting detective?” I said.

“The only one in London, or perhaps, the world,” said my friend. “I do not take cases. Instead, I consult. Others bring me their insoluble problems, they describe them, and, sometimes, I solve them.”

“Then those people who come to you . . . ”

“Are, in the main, police officers, or are detectives themselves, yes.”

It was a fine morning, but we were now jolting about the edges of the rookery of St. Giles, that warren of thieves and cutthroats which sits on London like a cancer on the face of a pretty flower-seller, and the only light to enter the cab was dim and faint.

“Are you sure that you wish me along with you?”

In reply my friend stared at me without blinking. “I have a feeling,” he said. “I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes. I want you with me.”

I blushed, or said something meaningless. For the first time since Afghanistan, I felt that I had worth in the world.

2. The Room.

It was a cheap rooming house in Shoreditch. There was a policeman at the front door. Lestrade greeted him by name, and made to usher us in, and I was ready to enter, but my friend squatted on the doorstep, and pulled a magnifying glass from his coat pocket. He examined the mud on the wrought iron boot-scraper, prodding at it with his forefinger. Only when he was satisfied would he let us go inside. We walked upstairs. The room in which the crime had been committed was obvious: it was flanked by two burly constables.

Lestrade nodded to the men, and they stood aside. We walked in.

I am not, as I said, a writer by profession, and I hesitate to describe that place, knowing that my words cannot do it justice. Still, I have begun this narrative, and I fear I must continue. A murder had been committed in that little bedsit. The body, what was left of it, was still there, on the floor. I saw it, but, at first, somehow, I did not see it. What I saw instead was what had sprayed and gushed from the throat and chest of the victim: in color it ranged from bile-green to grass-green. It had soaked into the threadbare carpet and spattered the wallpaper. I imagined it for one moment the work of some hellish artist, who had decided to create a study in emerald.

After what seemed like a hundred years I looked down at the body, opened like a rabbit on a butcher’s slab, and tried to make sense of what I saw. I removed my hat, and my friend did the same.

He knelt and inspected the body, inspecting the cuts and gashes. Then he pulled out his magnifying glass, and walked over to the wall, examining the gouts of drying ichor.

“We’ve already done that,” said Inspector Lestrade.

“Indeed?” said my friend. “Then what did you make of this, then? I do believe it is a word.”

Lestrade walked to the place my friend was standing, and looked up. There was a word, written in capitals, in green blood, on the faded yellow wallpaper, some little way above Lestrade’s head. “Rache . . . ?” said Lestrade, spelling it out. “Obviously he was going to write Rachel, but he was interrupted. So—we must look for a woman . . . ”

My friend said nothing. He walked back to the corpse, and picked up its hands, one after the other. The fingertips were clean of ichor. “I think we have established that the word was not written by his Royal Highness—”

“What the Devil makes you say—?”

“My dear Lestrade. Please give me some credit for having a brain. The corpse is obviously not that of a man—the color of his blood, the number of limbs, the eyes, the position of the face, all these things bespeak the blood royal. While I cannot say which royal line, I would hazard that he is an heir, perhaps . . . no, second to the throne, in one of the German principalities.”

“That is amazing.” Lestrade hesitated, then he said, ”This is Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia. He was here in Albion as a guest of Her Majesty Victoria. Here for a holiday and a change of air . . . ”

“ . . . For the theatres, the whores and the gaming tables, you mean.”

“If you say so.” Lestrade looked put out. “Anyway, you’ve given us a fine lead with this Rachel woman. Although I don’t doubt we would have found her on our own.”

“Doubtless,” said my friend.

He inspected the room further, commenting acidly several times that the police, with their boots had obscured footprints, and moved things that might have been of use to anyone attempting to reconstruct the events of the previous night.

Still, he seemed interested in a small patch of mud he found behind the door.

Beside the fireplace he found what appeared to be some ash or dirt.

“Did you see this?” he asked Lestrade.

“Her majesty’s police,” replied Lestrade, “tend not to be excited by ash in a fireplace. It’s where ash tends to he found.” And he chuckled at that.

My friend took a pinch of the ash and rubbed between his fingers, then sniffed the remains. Finally, he scooped up what was left of the material and tipped it into a glass vial, which he stoppered and placed in an inner pocket of his coat.

He stood up. “And the body?”

Lestrade said, “The palace will send their own people.” My friend nodded at me, and together we walked to the door. My friend sighed. “Inspector. Your quest for Miss Rachel may prove fruitless. Among other things,
Rache
is a German word. It means revenge. Check your dictionary. There are other meanings.”

We reached the bottom of the stair, and walked out onto the street. “You have never seen royalty before this morning, have you?” he asked. I shook my head. “Well, the sight can be unnerving, if you’re unprepared. Why my good fellow—you are trembling!”