The source of the light proved to be a dripping, noisome mold, which grew in patches at irregular intervals all along the course of the cavern. The yellow-green glow it produced was identical to that of the strange lanterns the Weeping Ones carried. Despite the eerie natural lighting, I was still glad for my torch. In many places the mold light shone only weakly. In others, where the priests had harvested the slime, darkness reigned.
The tunnel twisted and turned, but never forked, as if it had been excavated for the sole purpose of leading men to the huge central chamber into which it emptied. I soon found myself on the brink of that vast room, at the top of a broad stair that descended to a floor patterned with shattered and gouged mosaics. Towering walls hemmed in the chamber on all sides, with the stone made to resemble the facades of some ancient city. These carvings might have been beautiful once, but now mold obscured their magnificence. For three stories or more the walls stretched up, to where my eye should have met a ceiling or a dome, but instead found the night sky.
Far below this expanse of star-dotted emptiness, at the very center of the chamber, a group of altars squatted on the floor like mushrooms. Twoscore or more of the Weeping Ones stood amongst the altar stones, their attention focused on their leader and the two corpses that had been carried from the village that afternoon. The dead men were laid out on their backs so that their scabrous faces stared up into the night. And as I watched, the head priest rested a porcelain mask upon each of those disease-ravaged faces and began to chant.
Voices unused to speech took up the prayer, until they filled the chamber with a horrible wailing, like the cries of drowned men at the bottom of a lake. I dropped my torch and covered my ears in hopes of blocking out the sound. But the prayer of the Weeping Ones rang clear, scoring itself upon my memory as indelibly as the sight of those two dead villagers even then rising up and adding their voices to the chorus.
“They were never dead,” I whispered, my mind struggling to maintain its hold on sanity. “Only catatonic, or mesmerized . . .”
I did not have time to decide which, for at that instant a gloved hand closed over my right shoulder and pushed me, face first, into the wall. The grip was firm, yet somehow also disgustingly soft, as if the flesh yielded too much when I pushed back against it. I tore myself free and turned on my attacker. The masked priest leaned close, tears brimming in his eyes.
I lashed out with a fist, possibly the worst thing I could have done at that moment. The sudden exertion ripped open my wound, while the blow tore the porcelain mask from the face of the priest. The mask did not fall, though. It hung at his chest, suspended on clear, ropy strands that secured it to the remains of what had once been a human face.
Staggering back, I managed somehow to draw my revolver and fire three times. The bullets bit into his body. Clear stains spread out from each impact, but the bullets, though well placed for such hasty shooting, seemed to do him no serious harm. It was as if his entire form were gelatinous beneath those robes.
My own wound had driven me to the ground, and in the fall, I lost my revolver. I slid my back to the wall, tried to push myself to my feet, but it was useless. I could only watch in horror as the priest pressed his mask back into place with a wet sound, then advanced upon me with that unhurried, mechanical gait.
He stood over me, tilting his head so that the ooze of his decaying face welled up under his eyes like tears. I knew then how the plague was spread from village to village, knew, too, that I would not let him infect me. I felt the ground around me for anything I might employ as a weapon. My fingers closed upon the abandoned torch.
The blow I struck was feeble, hardly enough to make him stagger a step. But the dying torch did the work neither my arm nor my revolver could complete. The flame leaped up the white robes and engulfed the priest as if his decaying flesh were oil. He screamed only once with that terrible, liquid voice of a drowned man, then collapsed into a still-burning heap.
My victory was short-lived. From within the temple came the sounds of movement, the slow, steady approach of the fifty or more Weeping Ones gathered there. I thought to escape back down the tunnel. Even if my wound had not prevented me from putting that desperate plan into action, the commotion that echoed along the stony corridor dashed any hopes I had of retreat. They had caught me. I wiped my blood-slicked fingers on my jacket and retrieved my revolver, ready to fight to the end.
It is fortunate I lacked the strength to pull the trigger when the first figures rushed toward me from the tunnel. It was not more priests that were arriving from the direction of the cave entrance, but a small band of Ghurkas led by my orderly, my friend, Murray.
The Ghurkas carried torches of their own, and even an oil lantern or two. Once they knew what to do, the lads made short work of the priests. As Murray field-dressed my shoulder, we saw the smoke from their burning bodies rise up through the open roof of the chamber into the starry night sky. After that, we left the cave in silence.
Murray later explained that he had indeed gone off from the village, but only after hearing one of the goatherds tell of spotting a small British expeditionary force the previous day. Given the mood of the natives and the trouble with the masked priests, Murray knew we had to depart as soon as possible. He could not pass up a chance to secure some assistance for us, uncertain as he was of my ability to make the long trek back to Kandahar on my own. The village elder would have been able to explain where Murray had gone, had the old man not been struck down by the plague.
And the silver medal that prompted my foolhardy assault on the temple of the Weeping Ones? Murray had left it with one of the sick men before he went to search out the patrol. The priest must have taken it from the unfortunate fellow before his corpse was prepared for burial.
The simplest explanation for the medal ending up in the hands of the priest eluded me; that is hardly a surprise. Even now, after all my lessons in deductive reasoning from the one true master of that science, I cannot claim with any confidence that, given the same evidence, I would not reach the same wrong conclusion, or perhaps a different, but equally faulty one. Still, I trust in logic. With it I can explain away the masked priests as victims of some rare form of leprosy, as damaging to the mind as it is to the body. The rites I saw enacted did not raise the dead, merely roused the sick men from a catatonic state, one rather similar to the sleep paralysis I myself suffered the night I first saw the priests. These are explanations of which Holmes would have approved. And if I cannot imagine how he would have explicated what I saw through the roof of the temple chamber, it is because I lack his talent for deduction.
I wonder now more than ever how he would have explained it: a roof opening onto a clear night sky when clouds were all anyone could observe outside the cave. The scene might have been painted on the rock, and yet I witnessed the smoke from the burning priests curl up and out of the chamber, not gather at the roof as it surely must do were the sky mere decoration. Or perhaps the cloudless vista seen by the visitors to that chamber resulted from some freak weather condition, like the eye of a hurricane, only lacking the storm. I can almost bring myself to believe those explanations. What I cannot describe away is the thing that I saw move against that starry sky: a mammoth . . . being, all boneless limbs and writhing darkness, with a face more horrible than the decaying visages of its priests. Even as the last of the Weeping Ones fell, I lay on the cold stone floor at the entrance to the chamber, staring up at the sky much like the initiates did from their position on the altars. I watched the thing blot out Aldebaran and, turning, the constellation of Taurus. And in that same instant, I knew that it was looking back at me.