“You mean that he was being constantly reincarnated?” I admit this surfacing of this Tibetan belief in the prosaic hill country of Wales startled me considerably.
Carnaki shook his head. “That the spirit—the consciousness—of Rupert Grimsley passed from body to body, battening like a parasite upon that of the heir and driving out the younger man’s soul, as the human portion of each Lord of Depewatch died.”
The young antiquarian looked so serious as he said this that again I was hard put to suffocate a laugh; Carnaki’s expression did not alter, but his eyes flicked from my face to Holmes’s. “I suppose,” said the young man after a moment, “that this had something to do with the fact that each of the gentlemen in question were rumored to be involved with mysterious disappearances among the coal miners of the district: Gerald, Viscount Delapore, who is reputed to have undergone so terrifying a change in personality at his accession to the title that his wife left him and fled to America . . . with the young Gaius Delapore himself.”
“Indeed?” Holmes leaned forward eagerly in his chair, his hand still resting on the Catalogue, which he had been examining with the delighted reverence of a true lover of ancient volumes. He had hardly taken his eyes from the many tomes that were stacked on every table and most of the corners of Carnaki’s little study, some of them the musty calf or morocco of Georgian bookbinders, others the heavier, more archaic black-letter incunabula of the early days of printing, with not a few older still, handwritten in Latin upon parchment or vellum and illuminated with spidery marginalia that even at a distance disturbed me by their anomalous bizarrerie. “And what, precisely, is the evil that is ascribed by legend to Depewatch Priory, and for what purpose did Rupert Grimsley and his successors seek out those who had no power, and whom society would not miss?”
Carnaki set aside his history and seated himself on the oak bookcase steps, his long, thin arms resting on his knees. He glanced again at me, not as if I had offended him with my earlier laughter but as if gauging how to phrase things so that I would understand them; then his eyes returned to Holmes.
“You have heard, I think, of the six thousand steps, that are hinted at—never directly—in the remote legends of both the old Cymric tribes that preceded the Celts, and of the American Indian? Of the pit that lies deep at the heart of the world, and of the entities that are said to dwell in the abysses beyond it?”
“I have heard of these things,” said Holmes quietly. “There was a case in Arkham, Massachusetts, in 1869 . . .”
“The Whateley case, yes.” Carnaki’s long, sensitive mouth twitched with remembered distaste, and his glance turned to me. “These legends—remembered only through two cults of quite shockingly degenerate Indian tribes, one in Maine and the other, curiously, in northeastern Arizona, where they are shunned by the surrounding Navajo and Hopi—speak of things, entities, sentient yet not wholly material, that have occupied the lightless chasms of space and time since the days before humankind’s furthest ancestors first stood upright. These elder beings fear the light of the sun, yet with the coming of darkness would creep forth from certain places in the world to prey upon human bodies and human dreams, through the centuries making surprising and dreadful bargains with individuals of mankind in return for most hideous payment.”
“And this is what Gaius Delapore and his son believe they have in their basement?” My eyebrows shot up. “It should make it easy enough for us to assist young Mr. Colby in freeing his fiancée from the influence of two obvious lunatics.”
Holmes said softly, “So it should.”
We remained at Carnaki’s until nearly midnight while Holmes and the young antiquarian—for so I assumed Carnaki to be—spoke of the appalling folkloric and theosophical speculations that evidently fueled Viscount Delapore’s madness: hideous tales of creatures beyond human imaginings or human dreams, monstrous legends of dim survivals from impossibly ancient eons, and of those deluded madmen whose twisted minds accepted such absurdities for truth. Holmes was right in his assertion that the visit would supply the palette of my knowledge of London with hitherto unsuspected hues. What surprised me was Holmes’s knowledge of such things, for on the whole he was a man of practical bent, never giving his attention to a subject unless it was with some end in view.
Yet when Carnaki spoke of the abomination of abominations, of the terrible amorphous shoggoths and the Watcher of the Gate, Holmes nodded, as one does who hears familiar names. The shocking rites engaged in by the covens of ancient believers, whether American Indians or decayed cults to be found in the fastnesses of Greenland or Tibet, did not surprise him, and it was he, not our host, who spoke of the insane legend of the shapeless god who plays the pipe in the dark heart of chaos, and who sends forth the dreams that drive men mad.
“I did not know that you made a study of such absurdities, Holmes,” I said, when we stood once more on the fog-shrouded Embankment, listening for the approaching clip of a cab horse’s hooves. “I would hardly have said theosophy was your line.”
“My line is anything that will—or has—provided a motive for men’s crimes, Watson.” He lifted his hand and whistled for the jehu, an eerie sound in the muffled stillness. His face in the glare of the gaslight seemed pale and set. “Whether a man bows down to God or Mammon or to Cthulhu in his dark house at R’lyeh is no affair of mine . . . until he sheds one drop of blood not his own in his deity’s name. Then God have mercy upon him, for I shall not.”
All of these events took place on Monday, the twentieth of August. The following day Holmes was engaged with turning over the pages of his scrapbooks of clippings regarding unsolved crimes, seeming, it appeared to me, to concentrate on disappearances during the later part of the summer in years back almost to the beginning of the century. On Wednesday Mrs. Hudson sent up the familiar elegantly restrained calling card of the American folklorist, the man himself following hard upon her heels and almost thrusting her out of the way as he entered our parlor.
“Well, Holmes, it’s all settled and done with,” he declared, in a loud voice very unlike his own. “Thank you for your patience with old Delapore’s damned rodomontade, but I’ve seen the old man myself—he came down to town yesterday, damn his impudence—and made him see reason.”
“Have you?” asked Holmes politely, gesturing to the chair in which he had first sat.
Colby waved him impatiently away. “Simplest thing in nature, really. Feed a cur and he’ll shut up barking. And here’s for you.” And he drew from his pocket a small leather bag which he tossed carelessly onto the table. It struck with the heavy, metallic ring of golden coin. “Thank you again.”
“And I thank you.” Holmes bowed, but he watched Colby’s face as he spoke, and I could see his own face had turned very pale. “Surely you are too generous.”
“ ’S blood, man, what’s a few guineas to me? I can tear up little Judi’s poor letter, now we’re to be wed all right and tight . . .” He winked lewdly at Holmes and held out his hand. “And her old dad’s damned impudent note as well, if you would.”
Holmes looked around him vaguely and picked up various of his scrapbooks from the table to look beneath them: “Didn’t you tuck it behind the clock?” I asked.