“There were no signs of Captain Pye’s disease on Rockaby’s body—which gave me some confidence that the stone was not carrying any common or garden-variety contagion—but his mind was utterly deranged. My questions got scant response, but Chevaucheux had slightly better luck. Rockaby recognized him, in spite of his madness, and seemed to feel some obligation to him, left over from a time when they were on better terms. ‘I shouldn’t of done it, Jacky,’ he said to Chevaucheux. ‘It warn’t my fault, really, but I shouldn’t of. I shouldn’t of let the blood have its way—an’ I’m damned now, blood or no blood. Won’t die but can’t live. Stay away, lad. Go away and stay away.’
“Chevaucheux asked him where the remainder of the stones could be found. I doubt that he would have told us, had he been well, but his condition worked to our advantage in that matter. Chevaucheux had to work hard, constantly reminding Rockaby of the ties that had bound them as children and shipmates, and in the end he wormed the location out of him. The place-names meant nothing to me, and probably meant nothing to anyone who had not roamed back and forth across the isle with the child that Rockaby once was, but Chevaucheux knew the exact spot near the sea cliffs that Rockaby meant. ‘Leave ’em be, Jacky,’ the madman pleaded. ‘Don’t disturb the ground. Leave ’em be. Let ’em come in their own time. Don’t hurry them, no matter how you burn.’ We did not take the advice, of course.”
Mycroft observed that Sherlock seemed to regret that now. “You went to St. Aldhelm’s Head,” he prompted. “To the sea cliffs.”
“We went by day,” Sherlock said, his eyes glazing slightly as he slipped back into narrative mode. “The weather was poor—gray and drizzling—but it was daylight. Alas, daylight does not last. Chevaucheux led us to the spot readily enough, but the old mine where the stoneworkers had tunneled into the cliff face was difficult to reach, because the waves had long since carried away the old path. The mine entrance was half blocked, because the flat layers of stone had weathered unevenly, cracking and crumbling—but Rockaby had contrived a passage of sorts, and we squeezed through without disturbing the roof.
“When your clubmen set to work with a will, one plying a pickax and the other a miner’s shovel, I was afraid the whole cliff might come down on us, but we were forty yards deep from the cliff face, and the surrounding rock had never been assailed by the waves. I never heard such a sound, though, as the wind got up and the sea became violent. The crash of the waves seemed to surge through the stone, to emerge from the walls like the moaning of a sick giant—and that was before your men began pulling the images out and heaping them up.
“You studied the one that Chevaucheux gave you by lamplight, and magnified its image as you did so, but you can’t have the least notion of how that crowd of faces appeared by the light of our lamps, in that godforsaken hole. More than a few were considerably larger than the one Rockaby sent to Captain Pye, but it wasn’t just their size that made them seem magnified: it was their malevolence. They weren’t carrying a disease in the same way that a dead man’s rags might harbor microbes, but there was a contagion in them regardless, which radiated from their features.
“Chevaucheux had shown me the stone faces built into the houses in Worth Matravers, but they’d been exposed for decades or centuries to the sun and the wind and the salt in the air. They had turned back into mere ugly faces, as devoid of virtue as of vice. These were different—and if they had stared at me the way they stared at poor Chevaucheux . . .”
Mycroft knew better than to challenge this remarkable observation. “Go on,” he prompted.
“Reason tells me that they could not really have stared at Chevaucheux—that he must have imagined it, in much the same way that one imagines a portrait’s gaze following one around a room—but I tell you, Mycroft, I imagined it, too. I did not perceive the eyes of those monsters as if they were looking at me, but as if they were looking at him . . . as if they were accusing him of their betrayal. Not Rockaby, although he had told Chevaucheux where to find them, and not you or I, although we were the ones who asked him to locate them on behalf of your blessed club, but him and him alone. Justice, like logic, simply did not enter into the equation.
“ ‘Do you see it, Mr. Holmes?’ he asked me—and I had to confess that I did. ‘It is in my blood,’ he said. ‘Sam was wrong to think himself any more a seaman than Dan Pye or Jacky Chevaucheux. There are stranger seas, you see, than the seven on which we sail. There are greater oceans than the five we have named. There are seas of infinity and oceans of eternity, and their salt is the bitterest brine that creation can contain. The dreams you know are but phantoms . . . ghosts with no more substance than rhyme or reason . . . but there are dreams of the flesh, Mr. Holmes. I have done nothing of which I need to be ashamed, and yet . . . I cannot help but dream.’
“All the while that he was speaking, he was moving away, toward the narrow shaft by which we had gained entry to the heart of the mine. He was moving into the shadows, and I assumed that he was trying to escape the light because he was trying to escape the hostile gaze of those horrid effigies—but that was not the reason. You saw what was happening to his torso when he was here, but his face was then untouched. The poison had leached into his liver and lights, but not his eyes or brain . . . but the bleak eyes of those stone heads were staring at him, no matter how absurd that sounds, and . . . do you have any idea what I am talking about, Mycroft? Do you understand what was happening in that cave?”
“I wish I did,” Mycroft said. “You, my dear brother, are perhaps the only man in England who can comprehend the profundity of my desire. Like you, I am a master of observation and deduction, and I have every reason to wish that my gifts were entirely adequate to an understanding of the world in which we find ourselves. There is nothing that men like us hate and fear more than the inexplicable. I do not hold with fools who say that there are things that man was not meant to know, but I am forced to admit that there are things that men are not yet in a position to know. We have hardly begun to come to terms with the ordinary afflictions of the flesh that we call diseases, let alone those which are extraordinary. If there are such things as curses—and you will doubtless agree with me that it would be infinitely preferable if there were not—then we are impotent, as yet, to counter them. Did Chevaucheux say anything more about these dreams of the flesh?”
“He had already told me that Dan Pye had been right,” Sherlock went on. “They were more than dreams, even when they were phantoms. Opium does not feed them, he said, but cannot suppress them. He had told me, very calmly, that he had already seen the deserts of infinity, the depths within darkness, the horrors that lurk on reason’s edge . . . and that he had heard the mutterings, the discordance that underlies every pretense of music and meaningful speech . . . but when he moved into the shadows of the cave . . .”
Sherlock made an evident effort to gather himself together. “He never stopped talking,” the great detective went on. “He wanted me to know, to understand. He wanted you to know. He wanted to help us—and, through us, to help others. ‘The worst of it all,’ he said, ‘is what I have felt. I have felt the crawling chaos, and I know what it is that has me now. St. Anthony’s fire is a mere caress by comparison. I have felt the hand of revelation upon my forehead, and I feel it now, gripping me like a vise. I know that the ruling force of creation is blind, and worse than blind. I know that it is devoid of the least intelligence, the least compassion, the least artistry. You may be surprised to find me so calm under such conditions as this, Mr. Holmes, and to tell you the truth I am surprised myself—all the more so for having seen Dan Pye upon his deathbed, and Sam Rockaby on a rack of his own making—but I have learned from you that facts must be accepted as facts and treated as facts, and that madness is a treason of the will. You might think that you and your brother have not helped me, but you have . . . in spite of everything. Take these monstrous things away, and study them . . . learn what they have to teach you, no matter what the cost. That’s better by far than Sam Rockaby’s way, or mine . . .” Sherlock trailed off again.