A kiss unlike any other; sweet at first, then impassioned, then nearly overwhelming, then a taste in my mouth, not unfamiliar, startled me to my senses. It was blood. I looked at the two of us reflected in the mirror—and caught my breath. This was not Sarah Cookson in my arms but a hideous and shocking creature carved in slick, black, whalelike flesh, a face devoid of features save a gaping mouth hole, entangling me now with several writhing coiled limbs.
I hurled the awful thing away and again it was Sarah; her beauty restored, but now tarnished by a most disturbing grimace. She reached for me; I raised my hands in defense. Upon contact with the silver band across my finger she recoiled, shrieking, and fled from the room with netherworldly speed.
I shouted an alarm, then rushed headlong toward Princess Mina’s room, my heart pounding with each pace, fearing I might be too late. From down the corridor, I heard Mina issue one terrified and prolonged scream. I arrived in time to find the girl caught between a menacing, flaming-candelabra-wielding Holmes and an open window. Holmes forced her backward toward the ledge, where she dove outward and disappeared from view.
Peering down, we saw no evidence of her landing. Princess Mina crouched beneath her bed, apparently unharmed.
An extensive search of the grounds provided no further clues. Holmes sent a messenger to Captain Gent announcing there had been another attack and requesting he meet us back at the sanatorium as quickly as possible. Leaving the princess with her mother under guard, Holmes commandeered a coach and lashed the horses forward as I scrambled aboard, still shaken with disbelief. (To think I had actually embraced the bloody thing!) We rode like the devil through the deserted streets. Arriving at our destination, Holmes pushed the night clerk aside and we raced to Miss Cookson’s cell.
She chuckled nervously as Holmes slammed the door.
“Your daughter Sarah has been arrested and charged with the attempted murder of the Princess Wilhelmina,” Holmes told her. “If you would save her—I’d have you call off that creature this instant!”
Her humor quickly left her. “You must release my daughter; she’s no part of this!” she pleaded.
“That’s up to you now,” Holmes replied, unmoved.
“But—I have no power to halt what’s begun!”
“Then instruct us,” I said, stepping forward.
“It were the princes, not I, that planted the damned thing. Sarah knew nothing of it, she was but a child,” she moaned, quaking.
“Planted? Do explain!” Holmes demanded.
“No, I mustn’t! Het wordt mij verboden!”
“Forbidden by whom?” At this, Holmes drew forth the locket, unclasped it, and held it forth. “Take this back as a token of my word that you’ll be protected. And think now of Sarah above yourself!”
She grasped the locket and gazed upon the photograph, quieting. “When they received word that Mina was born, they were furious. Alexander was schooled in the Pnakotic ways and damned his knees at the altar of Yog-Sothoth, invoking the forbidden rites from the stolen book and setting the thing to grow. He took my Sarah’s blood from her against my wish.”
“Blood, you say? How much blood was taken?”
“A pint,” the crone whispered. “One pint per month for a year from my dear one. Siphoned with the cruelest of tools. She were helpless, sir!”
“To what purpose was this blood put?”
“So the Shoggoth might grow to bear her likeness—this slave of their revenge.”
The strange word birthed terror within me, for I knew it to be coupled to the dream.
“How might this Shoggoth be stopped?” Holmes demanded, his voice tripping on the alien word, confirming my dread that it was not of Dutch origin. “Speak now. I hear the captain’s coach approaching!”
The woman shriveled up against the stone in the corner as Holmes’s broad cloak enveloped her.
“Find the root. Sever the thing at the root, lest it grow back, God allemachtig!”
“Where do I find it?”
“Where it was begun,” she whispered hoarsely. “The southernmost tip of De Veluwe.” At the last she collapsed, blathering. We left her there, staring into the locket, to join Captain Gent.
We took Gent’s coach, as it was more fortified, and we three, accompanied by five guardsmen, sped off for the Veluwe, a dense wooded area several hours’ journey east. The sheer insanity of all that had transpired nearly overwhelmed me, and I struggled to keep my wits, saying little, but fearing much.
“I trust Sarah Cookson’s name will be cleared,” Holmes said to Gent, “seeing that this last attack came whilst she was held in your custody.”
“The girl will be released, Mr. Holmes, when I’m sure that the princess is safe, not before.”
The damp and evil sounds of the night increased tenfold as the road gave way to forest trails. The hooting of several large gray owls announced our passage as if telegraphing danger, and Gent’s men began preparing their rifles with ammunition.
“If this is a trick of the old woman, she shall pay dearly,” Gent said.
The southernmost tip of the Veluwe was an odd bit of woodland. We stepped from the coach in silence, enthralled by the milky-black stillness. The captain’s men used kerosene lamps to light torches, and passed one to me.
“See how the trees grow so densely in that patch,” Holmes directed our attention. “Most unnatural.”
We approached the cluster of trees and circled its perimeter. “Holmes,” I said, clasping his elbow as we moved, “Do you smell that? The same scent as from the palace.”
He nodded affirmation as I supressed my urge to run.
Holmes was correct: this was no natural formation of trees. The trunks were gnarled with great tumors, their limbs woven together like incestuous lovers, the flaking bark of the wood cold and slick to the touch, like the skin of a reptile. The thorned branches thrust sharply outward like claws, and the whole growth gave one the impression of many black entities congealed into a single one. Each step I took was laborious, each outthrust root a cause for alarm.
Holmes beckoned me with a wave of his torch to a dark cavity carved in the wood.
“An orifice,” he whispered, reaching out to touch the lip of the opening. His hand came back wet. He brought down my torch to inspect the viscous red fluid on his fingers, then called out, “Captain, come at once!”
All torches were brought to bear; we gazed into the hole and beheld the unspeakable.
There, burrowed in the wet wood, entwined with bloodied vines like throbbing veins, the girl was nestled. A perfect doppelgänger of Sarah in every detail, save the insidious expression on its carved face as it slumbered.
“God allemachtig!” Gent cried out, visibly shaken.
“The Shoggoth,” I whispered with twin dread and awe at the alien word on my lips. “Holmes, touch your ring to the wood.”
Holmes touched his left hand to the trunk for a moment. The girl-thing writhed.
“Wells, how do we kill this thing?” Holmes asked, deferring to my sudden display of intuition.
All eyes fell on me as I shivered and surrendered myself to details of my dangerous vision—how the Dark Things would exterminate their land-born slaves. “It’s fire,” I proclaimed. “Burn the tree and it dies along with it!”
“Are you quite sure, Wells?”
“How can I be sure, Holmes? But it’s clear that this tree is the nest.”
Captain Gent stood guard before the hole as his men retrieved kerosene from the coach whilst Holmes and I dragged up huge mounds of dead needles and dry twigs to ring the base of the tree. Then Holmes pulled his pipe, struck a match, took a draw, and knelt to light the kindling.
We stepped back and watched the tree catch fire and burn as hideous, soul-wrenching screams emanated from the very wood itself—screams that would haunt me the rest of my days.