“The unspeakable one,” the priests called him. “He Who Is Not to Be Named.” At least that is how the scholars at the British Museum translated the parts of the prayer I could pronounce. Again, Murray was correct: it helps to know a little of the enemy’s tongue. But a little is enough. Although I remember the entire incantation, I have no desire to make my mouth pliable enough to form the other blasphemous words, even if it will help those scholars to recover a language that was old when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt.
What name would Holmes have given the beast? I will never know now, and I suspect that is for the best. I had opportunities enough to tell him about the thing in the night sky, to make him understand that it was not my experiences at Maiwand or the enteric fever I contracted in hospital at Peshawur, after my escape from the Weeping Ones, that forced me to be shipped back to England. So why did I hesitate?
The answer to that is simple enough, even for my flawed powers of deduction: Elementary, my dear self. You do not wish to end up like Murray.
He might have pulled through if he had not asked me to confirm what he, too, saw that night. So long as he could tell himself that it was a delusion, like the screaming wound I saw on the Ghazi he killed during our escape from the battlefield, he could bear the burden. He could dismiss it, then, or ignore it, and keep his too-rigid view of the world intact. The moment I confirmed his fears, though, he was undone. And when the Catholic priest at Peshawur could not frame that impossible experience within the tenets of the Church, Murray walked to the most isolated part of the hospital, so as to disturb as few people as possible, and shot himself through the heart.
Yes, that is why I never shared this tale with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. After I described the awful events, he might have leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and solved the mystery. Or perhaps there are things logic cannot conquer. Holmes knows the truth or falsity of that, now that he has taken that fateful plunge at the Reichenbach Falls. Reason tells me that the very fact of his death provides my answer: The thing in the Afghan caves remains, while Holmes is gone, all hope with him. Then again, I could be coming to the wrong conclusion. I have been known to be wrong before. In this case, I am counting on it.
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.