“The unholy tendrils had ceased their explorations now, and all hands—or rather, all tongues—seemed to be devoting full attention to their liquid refreshment. Moriarty’s voice had gone silent. Slowly, carefully, I slipped the heavy object into my pocket and I crept toward light: the one thin gleam in all that stygian dark. The chittering cries were well behind me as I crawled into another chamber of the cavern, lined with more of those luminescent fungi. I looked back for one instant, and against the eerie glow of the fungoids I beheld the shadowed outlines of an immense silhouetted figure with a weird star-shaped head. I turned ’round from this, and dared not look back a second time. As soon as I could see well enough to risk standing erect, I fled uphill along the slope of the cavern, and soon reached the familiar curtain of vines and the outer world beyond. It was nightfall when I emerged, but at least I had the light of a full moon. Watson, believe me when I tell you that I ran from that place at all speed.”
From his pocket now, Holmes withdrew the hexagonal dish. “This is the object which I found in the cave beneath the Reichenbach Falls. At my first opportunity, I had this dish treated with carbolic acid, to disinfect it and eliminate the stench. But I have never cleaned off these stains, intending to have them analyzed. Nine different chemists—all sworn to secrecy—have examined the stain on this dish.”
“Is it blood, Holmes?” I asked. “Human blood?”
“There is the stain of human blood, yes. But there is also a second stain . . . a layer of coagulated blood from a species unknown. It has some traits of human blood, yet it more closely resembles the blood groups of aquatic vertebrates. The blood is both manlike and fishlike.”
I shuddered again, and looked at Jephson Norrys while he slept. His mouth opened and closed silently.
“Come, Watson, have a look at this.” Sherlock Holmes drew forth a folded sheet of foolscap. “Here is the letter which our friend Norrys sent me. You are in this as deep as I am, so you ought to read it.”
For brevity’s sake, I shall not divulge the full text. Suffice it to say that Norrys was the landholder of Exham Priory, a medieval estate in Anchester. In recent months he had grown aware of curious incidents in the priory, combined with peculiar changes in his own health.
Holmes was examining the loose-leaf notebook which Norrys had given him. On its cover, I recognized the royal emblem of Her late Majesty Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, of four years past. “Whatever else our friend Norrys might be, he is clearly a patriotic Englishman,” said Holmes. “You see, Watson? This memorandum book is one of the innumerable pieces of merchandise—most of them worthless cheapjack—which greedy souvenir merchants foisted upon the British populace in 1897 as mementos of the Jubilee. Look here.” From a slipcase inside the notebook’s cover, Sherlock Holmes withdrew a hand-colored square of pasteboard. It bore two photographic studies, side by side, like a stereopticon. The first image depicted Victoria Regina in her youth, with Prince Albert and some of the royal children. The second image showed our late queen as she was in ’97, in her widow’s weeds, wearing the crown of the Empire.
“Observe, Watson,” said my friend. “This pasteboard portrait of Her Majesty was included with the notebook during its manufacture, to justify the notebook as a Jubilee souvenir. The pasteboard is creased and dog-eared, yet still in its original slipcase. Clearly, Jephson Norrys has taken this card out of its case many times to gaze upon the likeness of his monarch and then returned the portrait to its rightful place in the notebook despite its long wear. The notebook’s leather cover is split and stained, yet the gilt of the royal Jubilee emblem is like new: it has been lovingly polished and cleaned, even though it has no pecuniary value. Our man Norrys is a loyal subject of the Crown, come what may. Hmm! Let us see what he wanted us to find in these pages.”
Holmes began reading the loose-leaf book which Norrys had lent him, and he passed each page to me in turn. Pasted into the notebook’s frontispiece was a tintype photograph, dated to Jubilee month of 1897. The portrait displayed a clear-eyed handsome man in a Norfolk jacket, and I felt a shiver through my spine when I realized that this was Jephson Norrys. I glanced at the slumbering deformity in the corner of our compartment: he seemed barely human now. How could any man have degenerated so thoroughly in so short a time?
The papers were all written in the same hand, which I took to be that of Norrys . . . yet, as I viewed the pages in their sequence, the handwriting gradually devolved from a neat schoolboy cursive into a clumsy scrawl. It took much the length of our railway journey for me to peruse the lot. In brief, Norrys had been a respectable Cornishman of good family and prospects until he was summoned to Anchester to assist his uncle Habakuk Norrys in the management of Exham Priory. The eleventh Baron Exham had quit this estate during Stuart times and fled to the Virginia colony without explanation: the priory had been Crown property ever since, until the elder Norrys had purchased it in 1894. The priory was not electrified, nor even gas-fitted, and Habakuk Norrys had begun the sorely needed task of renovation . . . until he acquired some peculiar malady which seemed to be progressively deforming him. Now the same ailment had afflicted Jephson, and it was steadily worsening.
I looked back at the letter posted to Holmes and scanned again its last paragraph. Several days earlier, with a paraffin-lantern and an electric torch, Jephson Norrys had descended into the subcellar of Exham Priory to discover the source of certain “eldritch sounds” (as he deemed them) which he had heard there at night: the rapid scrabbling of clawed feet, and eerie intonations like the chanting of obscene acolytes. The cellar was dark in full daylight. During his descent, Norrys had stumbled on the limestone staircase: his torch and lantern were extinguished, and he fell headlong down the staircase. In the darkness (Norrys wrote), his outflung hand touched something cold as stone, and circular and damp. A fragment of this broke away in his grasp. Without light, he made his way up the staircase as rapidly as his deformity permitted, and fled to one of the outbuildings on the priory’s grounds. He sought aid from the residents of the neighboring village: they spurned him, and the local constabulary refused to enter the priory. The district magistrate declined to take action.
The testament of Jephson Norrys ended in a demented scrawl that was barely legible: I had thought that the sounds might be rats in the walls: now I know they are something far worse. The whispering voices in the subcellar seemed human at first; I had feared that they might be burglars, or tramps, or smugglers evading the Welsh tariffs. But now I have seen the blood-caked dish, and I know: the lurkers in the priory’s cellar have no right to call themselves human . . .
“Come, Watson!” said Sherlock Holmes briskly. “Here we are at Birmingham, and the engine change for Anchester. I’ll collect our luggage while you see to wakening our companion.”
It was past midnight when the spur line brought us to an obscure railway station in northwestern Shropshire. A single brougham stood vigil in the cab rank, and—although the cabman glanced sharply at Norrys—Holmes persuaded him to convey us to Anchester. As the cabman took up his reins, Holmes returned the memorandum book to Norrys, who concluded his narrative: