Professor George Edward Challenger stared down at the explorer, a grim expression on his face. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, and he had a quivering energy about him. “Quick! Get inside!”
Challenger gripped Burton by the front of his shirt and hauled him through the doorway, then stepped out past the dazed and startled explorer. Burton saw he had something in his left hand, a long length of curving brass that smelled strongly of kerosene. Burton’s eyes widened as he noticed a flame sputtering furtively from the device’s far end. Challenger took aim at the shoggoth and pulled a trigger, and the little spark grew into a jet of fire that enveloped the shoggoth. “Go back to hell, you putrescent bastard!” Challenger yelled, uttering a maniacal laugh as the shoggoth writhed in the flames that danced along its bulk. Its many bubble-like eyes puckered and popped along its length, and a noxious sea-stench mixed with burning kerosene assaulted Burton’s nostrils. He stood in the doorway as the shoggoth slid away from them, its volume slowly reduced by the destroying flames. It slipped into a storm drain on the opposite side of the street and they saw it no more.
Challenger dowsed his flame and spun toward Burton. “Get inside, damn your eyes! Before they see!” He pushed Burton inside and slammed the door, locking it with a heavy set of bolts made redundant by the sheer number of them. “Come on,” blurted Challenger, and Burton followed him up a winding staircase to the topmost floor of the building he occupied.
“Bismillah!” Burton found himself standing in Challenger’s infamous museum, where he displayed the unusual array of artifacts he’d collected on his much-publicized trip to South America, a trip cloaked as much in mystery as it was in outlandish blandishments. Burton now believed his story. A small triceratops skull sat across the room upon a broad pedestal, its empty eye sockets staring. A lump formed in Burton’s stomach as he realized it wasn’t a fossil, but actual bone. His eyes darted between display cases filled with similar finds and grainy photographs of Challenger’s black porters standing next to titanic creatures that had been shot. Creatures the world at large thought extinct. “This place is amazing.”
“Thank you,” said Challenger as he moved to a window to look down on the street below. His head moved warily from side to side, and he pulled the shades before turning toward Burton and tossing his strange flame gun onto the floor with a heavy thud. “Welcome to my museum.”
“What is that thing?” asked Burton, pointing to the exotic weapon.
“I call it a Shoggoth gun. It’s a flame-thrower. Fire is the only thing that seems to kill them.”
“You’ve encountered them recently?”
The burly zoologist stared at him grimly. “Oh yes. I used to hunt them at night in the Cauldron. When it was still safe to go out at night.”
“It has never been safe in the Cauldron.”
“I mean safe from them.” Challenger jerked a thumb at the window. “At first I thought they were a holdover from our adventure stopping Bulwer-Lytton’s cult. Now I think they are part of something new and equally sinister. Now the oily blighters hunt me. I saw you running up the lane, and I knew there was only one thing upon this earth that could make Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton run with such obvious terror.” He grinned, and it looked for all the world like a sneer. Challenger looked like he hadn’t slept.
“What’s wrong, old friend?”
“Nothing is what it seems,” Challenger said, moving to a mahogany sideboard where he poured himself and Burton a brandy. He handed Burton one with a shaky hand before downing his own and pouring himself another.
“You don’t look well,” Burton said.
Challenger laughed. “Why should I? I haven’t slept in days, and those bloody things are on the march again. Something is stirring, friend Burton. I just don’t know what yet.”
“Have you read the papers?”
Challenger arched an eyebrow. Burton glanced about the cluttered room, which looked as if he had been sleeping there, and found that morning’s edition of The London Mail. “Here,” he said, shuffling pages until he saw the latest story about the Awakened. Challenger took it and read, pacing the floor slowly.
“Gads! And this is what you were doing?”
“Following my friend, the poet Algernon Swinburne, and a barrister called Harrison Goforth.”
Challenger’s eyes shifted back and forth, and he ran his sausage fingers through his thick dark beard. “And you think your friend is no longer your friend.”
“In a manner of speaking. Yes, I think so.”
“See what I meant when I said nothing is as it seems?”
“What do you know about all this?” asked Burton after a beat.
Challenger regarded the floor. “Only that I am losing my mind. I see flashes of things that cannot be. People who are not people, at least temporarily. Things in the sky. Buildings transmogrify, then return to their rightful shapes.”
“Buildings?”
“Yes. Yesterday the Westminster clock tower became a pearlescent minaret, gleaming in the morning sun. It wavered, then the familiar clock was back. I haven’t been outside since. And the dreams, Burton. Never have I had such dreams. Not since our time with Nemo in that region of the ocean nearest that blasphemous, sunken landmass.”
Burton nodded, remembering the sea of bad dreams they had passed through on their way to the Arctic Circle. “I’ve had those dreams too. Visions, like you’re someone else?”
Challenger’s eyes bulged. “Yes! You too? Perhaps I am not insane after all.”
“They’ll have to cart us both off to Bedlam if that is the case,” said Burton. “You’ve been staying here? What of your wife?”
“I thought it would be safest for her out of the city with all these bloody shoggoths about. She is with her mother in Kent. And yes, I have been staying here. No place is safe. I can defend myself up here, like a king in his castle.” He laughed at that, and Burton wondered about his sanity.
“I assume you are working on this for Mycroft Holmes?”
Burton nodded. “You assume correctly.”
“That man is going to be your ruination.”
Burton regarded his friend for a long time. “I need to go. Do you think it’s safe?”
Challenger shrugged his broad shoulders. “As safe is it can be. That shoggoth took a great risk showing itself in the daytime. You were following your friend Swinburne when it came upon you?”
“Yes. It must have been protecting them.”
“If the shoggoths are in league with them, this can’t be good,” said Challenger.
“I must go. Can you make more of those shoggoth guns?”
Challenger shot Burton another of his sneering smiles. “Of course. How many did you have in mind?”
“As many as you can.”
8. An Extraordinary Stone
Burton returned to Gloucester Place wary and afraid, sticking to public places and availing himself of the city’s many carriage drivers until he was deposited safely upon his doorstep. He took one last look around to make sure no eyes—human or inhuman—were on him. Even with Challenger’s shoggoth-gun secreted beneath his coat, he felt on edge.
He took an early supper and ate ravenously, then retired upstairs to pen a letter to Isabel, telling her he thought it best if she remained at her family’s country estate until he sent for her. He hated to frighten her so, but she knew of his work with the Shadow Council and its often-sinister importance. Besides, his jangled nerves couldn’t take it if anything untoward happened to his beloved. Everything would be fine once he got to the bottom of this latest preternatural puzzle.
Burton drank and smoked, scowling as he remembered his promise to meet with his fellow Cannibals that night. He could not risk going out after dark. It wasn’t safe, at least for him. Then he thought of poor Professor Challenger, sleeping fitfully on the floor of his museum, his every thought haunted by shoggoths lurking around every corner. At some point, he dozed in his favorite chair—