“I left him at Swanage station, waiting for a cart to take him home, or at least as far as Worth Matravers. He was still mumbling to himself. I heard no more from or about him—but less than two weeks later I got a letter from Dan Pye’s wife begging me to come to their house in Poole. I caught the first train I could.
“The captain was confined to his bed, and fading fast. His doctor was with him, but didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with him, and had nothing to offer by way of treatment save for laudanum and more laudanum. I could see right way that it wouldn’t be enough. All laudanum can do is dull the pain while your body makes its own repairs, and I could tell that the captain’s body was no longer in the business of making repairs. It seemed to me that his flesh had turned traitor, and had had enough of being human. It was changing. I’ve seen men with the scaly disease, that makes them seem as if they’re turning into fish, and I’ve seen men with gangrene rotting alive, but I never saw anything like the kind of transformation that was working in Dan Pye. Whatever kind of flesh it was that he was trying to become, it was nothing that was ever ancestor to humankind, and no mere decay.
“He had breath enough left in him to tell me to get rid of the doctor and to send his wife away, but when we were alone he talked fast, like a man who didn’t expect to be able to talk for long. ‘I’ve been cursed,’ he told me. ‘I know who did it, though he isn’t entirely to blame. Sam Rockaby never had the least vestige of any power to command, though he’s a good follower if you can get mastery over him, and a powerful swimmer in seas stranger than you or I have ever sailed. Take this back to him, and tell him that I understand. I don’t forgive, but I understand. I’ve felt the crawling chaos and seen the madness of darkness. Tell him that it’s over now, and that it’s time to throw it off the Saint’s Head, and let it go forever. Tell him to do the same with all the rest, for his own sake and that of his children’s children.’ The thing he gave me to give back to Rockaby was that thing your brother just gave you.
“He said more, of course, but the only thing relevant to the story was about the dreams. Now, Dan Pye was a seaman for forty years, and no stranger to rum, opium, and hashish. He knew his dreams, Dan did. But these, he said, were different. These were real visions: visions of long-dead cities, and creatures like none that Mother Earth could ever have spawned, whether she’s been four thousand or four thousand million years in the making. And there were words, too: words that weren’t just nonsense, but parts of a language human tongues were never meant to speak. ‘The Elder Gods couldn’t save us, Jack,’ he said. ‘The Others were too powerful. But we don’t have to give ourselves up—not our souls, not our will. We have to do what we can. Tell Rockaby that, and tell him to throw the lot into the sea.’
“I tried to do what Dan asked me to, but when I went to Worth Matravers I found that Rockaby had never arrived home after I left him at Swanage station. I didn’t throw the stone off the cliff because I found out that the curse that killed Dan had already started in me, and I thought it best to show it to whoever might be able to help me. I knew Dr. Watson from before, as I said, and I knew he’d been in India. I wasn’t certain that he’d be able to help, but I was sure that there wasn’t a doctor in Dorset who could, and I knew that any man who’s been long in India has seen things just as queer and just as bad as whatever has its claws in me. So I found Dr. Watson through the Seamen’s Association in London, and he sent me to see Mr. Sherlock Holmes—who has promised to find Sam Rockaby for me. But he wanted to come here first, to ask your advice about the cursing stone, because of what this chap Fotherington told him at the museum. And that’s the whole of it—apart from this.”
While he completed this last sentence John Chevaucheux had unbuttoned his coat and the shirt he wore beneath it. Now he drew back the shirt to display his breast and abdomen to Mycroft’s gaze. The seaman’s eyes were full of horror as he beheld himself, and the spoliation that had claimed him.
The creeping malaise appeared to have commenced its spread from a point above Chevaucheux’s heart, but the disfiguration now extended as far as his navel and his collarbone, and sideways from one armpit to the other. The epidermal deformation was not like the scaly patina of icthyosis; it seemed was more akin to the rubbery flesh of a cephalopod, and its shape was slightly reminiscent of an octopus with tentacles asprawl. It was discolored by a multiplicity of bruises and widening ulcers, although there seemed to be no sign yet of any quasi-gangrenous decay.
Mycroft had never seen anything like it before, although he had heard of similar deformations. He knew that he ought to make a closer investigation of the symptoms, but he felt a profound reluctance to touch the diseased flesh.
“Watson has no idea how to treat it,” Sherlock said unnecessarily. “Is there any member of the Diogenes Club who can help?”
Mycroft pondered this question for some moments before shaking his head. “I doubt that anyone in England has a ready cure for this kind of disease,” he said. “But I will give you the address of one of our research laboratories in Sussex. They will certainly be interested to study the development of the disease, and may well be able to palliate the symptoms. If you are strong, Mr. Chevaucheux, you might survive this, but I can make no promises.” He turned to Sherlock. “Can you honor your promise to find this man Rockaby?”
“Of course,” Sherlock said stiffly.
“Then you must do so, without delay—and you must persuade him to lead you to the store of artifacts from which he obtained this stone. I shall keep this one, if Mr. Chevaucheux will permit, but you must take the rest to the laboratory in Sussex. I will ask the secretary to send two of the functionaries with you, because there might be hard labor involved and this is not the kind of case in which Watson ought to be allowed to interest himself. When the artifacts are safe—or as safe as they can be, in human hands—you must return here, to tell me exactly what happened in Dorset.”
Sherlock nodded his head. “Expect me within the week,” he said, with his customary self-confidence.
“I will,” Mycroft assured him, in spite of his inability to echo that confidence.
Sherlock was as good as his word, at least in the matter of timing. He arrived in the Strangers’ Room seven days later, at four-thirty in the afternoon. He was more than a little haggard, but he had summoned all his pride and self-discipline to the task of maintaining his image as a master of reason. Even so, he did not rise from his seat when Mycroft entered the room.
“I received a telegram from Lewes this morning,” Mycroft told him. “I have the bare facts—but not the detail. You have done well. You may not think so, but you have.”
“If you are about to tell me that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy . . .” Sherlock said, in a fractured tone whose annoyance was directed more at himself than his brother.
“I would not presume to insult you,” Mycroft said, a trifle dishonestly. “Tell me the story, please—in your own words.”
“The first steps were elementary,” Sherlock said morosely. “Had Rockaby been in London, the irregulars would have found him in a matter of hours; as things were, I had to put the word out through my contacts in Limehouse. Wherever Rockaby was, I knew that he had to be dosing himself against the terrors of his condition, and that was bound to leave a trail. I located him in Portsmouth. He had gone there in search of a ship to carry him back to the Indian Ocean, but no one would take him on because he was so plainly mad, and he had given up sometime before, in favor of drinking himself into oblivion. Chevaucheux and I went down there posthaste, and found him in a wretched condition.