“Mr. Chevaucheux was a brave man,” Mycroft said, after a moment’s pause.
Sherlock met his eyes then, with a gaze full of fear and fire. “Am I damned, Mycroft?” he demanded harshly. “Is the disease incubating in me, as it was in him? Are my own dreams worse than dreams?”
Mycroft had no firm guarantees to offer, but he shook his head. “There was something in Chevaucheux, as there was in Pye, which responded to the curse. You and I are a different breed; the art in our blood is a different kind. I cannot swear to you that we are immune, or will remain so, but I am convinced that we are better placed to fight. Those effigies you took to Lewes may have the power to make some men see a terrible truth, and to make some human flesh turn traitor to the soul, but they are not omnipotent, else the human race would have succumbed to their effect long ago. At any rate, there is no safety in hiding them, or in hiding from them. Whatever the risk, they must be studied. Such studies are dangerous, but that does not excuse us from our scholarly duty. We must try to understand what they are—what we are—no matter how hateful the answer might be.”
“You believe that we are safe from this contagion, then—you and I?”
Mycroft had never seen Sherlock so desperate for reassurance. “I dare to hope so,” he said judiciously. “The Diogenes Club has some experience in matters of this sort, and we have survived thus far. The entities that men like Rockaby term the Others have proved more powerful in the past than those he calls the Elder Gods, but the blood of Nodens is not extinct; it flows in us still and it has its expression. The gift that was handed down to men like us is not to be despised. You sometimes suspect that I think less of you because you have become famous instead of laboring behind the scenes of society, as I do, but I am glad that you have become a hero of the age because the age is direly in need of your kind of hero. Our art is in its infancy, and many more confrontations such as this one will expose our incapacity in years—perhaps centuries—to come, but we must nurture it regardless, and store its rewards. What else can we do if we are to be worthy of the name of humankind?”
Sherlock nodded, seemingly satisfied.
“Tell me, then,” Mycroft said, “what happened in the cave. I know that you and my faithful servants succeeded in taking the artifacts to Lewes, but I know that Chevaucheux was not with you. Rockaby has been committed to a lunatic asylum, where an agent of ours will be able to interrogate his madness, but I gather from the tone of your account that Chevaucheux will not be available for further study. Do you feel able now to tell me what became of him?”
“What became of him?” Sherlock echoed, fear flooding his eyes again. “What became? Ah . . .” As he paused, he put his hand into his pocket and took out a bottle. Mycroft had no way to be sure, but it seemed to him to be an exact match to the outline he had observed in John Chevaucheux’s clothing a few weeks before. The label on this bottle, scrawled in a doctor’s unkempt hand, confirmed that it was laudanum.
Sherlock put his hand to the cork, but then he stopped himself and put the unopened bottle down on the side table. “It does no good,” he said. “But they are only dreams, are they not? Mere phantoms? There is no necessity that will turn them into dreams of my flesh. That is what Chevaucheux told me, at any rate, when he reached forward to give me the bottle, before he ran away. I think that he was trying to be kind—but he might have been kinder to remain in the shadows. He had faith in me, you see. He thought that I would want to see what he had become . . . and he was right. He ought to have been right, and he was. Before he ran to the end of that makeshift corridor of stone, and hurled himself into the thankless sea, where I hope to God that he died . . .
“That brave man wanted me to see what the crawling chaos had done to him, as it turned his flesh into a dream beneath the evil eyes of those creatures we had excavated from their hiding place . . .
“And I did see it, Mycroft.”
“I know,” Mycroft answered. “But you must tell me what it was you saw, if we are ever to come to terms with it.” And he saw his brother respond to this appeal, seeing its sense as well as its necessity. All his life, Sherlock Holmes had believed that when one had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained—however improbable—must be the truth. Now he understood that when the impossible was too intractable to be eliminated, one had to revise one’s opinion of the limits of the possible; but he was a brave man, in whom the blood of Nodens still flowed, after a fashion, still carrying forward its long and ceaseless war against the tainted blood of the Others.
“I saw the flesh of his face,” Sherlock went on, stubbornly bringing his tale to its inevitable end, “the texture of which was like some frightful, pulpy cephalopod, and the shape of which was dissolving into a mass of writhing, agonized worms, every one of them suppurating and liquefying as if it had been a month decaying . . . and I met his eyes . . . his glowing eyes that were blind to ordinary light . . . which were staring, not at me, but into the infinite and the eternal . . . where they beheld some horror so unspeakable that it required every last vestige of his strength to pause an instant more before he hurled himself, body and soul, into the illimitable abyss.”
The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone
POPPY Z. BRITE AND DAVID FERGUSON
I came down to breakfast one morning and found Sherlock Holmes still in his dressing gown, contemplating a note written in a large, straggling hand. He waited for me to pour my first cup of coffee, then passed the note across the table to me.
Mr. Holmes:
Please, sir, may I come and see you. I fear for the life of my dear sister. I will come after luncheon today. Please, Mr. Holmes, I do not know where else to turn.
Thomas Stone
“What do you make of it, Watson?” he asked when I had had time to peruse the childish scrawl.
“Not much. I suppose you already know all about him, though.”
“No more than appears in the note,” Holmes said, though I was well aware that even such a short note might speak volumes to his practiced eye. “A fact or two, nothing more. Let us wait and see what the man himself has to say.”
The morning had dawned clear and mild, but by midday a loathsome yellow fog rolled through Baker Street, pressing like a greasy face against the windows and filling our cozy rooms with a damp chill. Holmes was stoking the fire when the bell rang and Mr. Thomas Stone was shown in.
I could not determine his age at once, for he was a young man who seemed somehow old. His features did not appear particularly aged—in fact, he was fair-haired and handsome, with dark determined eyes and a set to his jaw that suggested a tendency toward stubbornness. His shoulders were broad, but something in his posture and bearing made me think at first glance that he might almost be a pensioner. Then I looked again and determined that he could not be more than twenty-five. The cuffs of his trousers were dark with some grime heavier than that of the London streets.