Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) (28 page)

When the ship entered the Thames, India Jack felt no elation at returning after so many years. He had told himself a homecoming was one of the reasons for accepting Bronislav’s employment, but home now brought only bitterness. To keep his thoughts from the fear he was being stalked by an unseen yet material menace he concentrated solely upon the gold he would receive from Bronislav, but he was not entirely successful. So, as the ship passed from the Blackwall Reach of the Thames into Blackwall Basin upon the Isle of Dogs, where it waited with twelve other ships for the rising tide and the opening of the lock, India Jack sat and brooded and felt very small in a dark cosmos. When the ship finally entered the protected waters of the West India Docks and made its berth, he remained behind his locked, barricaded door till near midnight when the ship was quiet and the docks all but deserted.

A fog thick with the dark scents of the Thames and the abyssal mysteries of the deep, acridly fouled by London’s innumerable coal-fires, swirled along the Docks. Naked masts of myriad docked vessels rose like finger-bones of dead giants. The warehouses, most of which were five stories high, were indistinct in the mist and just as easily could have been the cyclopean remnants of an earlier age. He did not linger, but moved hastily among the litter of cargo crates, ropes, pilings and cantered small boats undergoing repairs.

By the time he reached the West India Dock Road, which would quickly dogleg into Commercial Road, he was attended by doubt and despair and even a tinge of unadmitted fear. One thing he was certain of now was that he would need much more than sailor’s luck to put this heathen thing in Laslo Bronislav’s bloody grasp, receive his gold due and get out of this thing alive.

Feeling dire-fated and overloomed by gigantic death, India Jack plunged into the swirling miasmic mist, a dark pilgrim, solitary as far as he could see, in this unholy night. Away from the Docks and into Limehouse, warehouses and storage sheds gave way to low lodging houses for sailors and foreigners, taverns and opium dens, as he passed the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics he thought he saw a pale round face at a dirty window, but it vanished so quickly he could not be entirely certain.

Just past the Empire Memorial Hostel for Seamen, which marked the branching of Commercial Road and Salmon Lane, he passed very close to the Blue Mermayde Tavern, a haunt of his lost youth. It was the sort of ageless establishment that throve in the shadowed lanes and alleys of every seaport, thronged by sailors and memory-besotted old men who dreamed of the seas of their youth. The tavern’s leadened diamond-paned windows were encrusted with grime and smoke, yet the yellow wash of gaslight still spilled through. He paused but a moment in the muted glare, beset by a sudden and alien melancholia, idly considering the notion of escaping the choking night, and whatever lurked within it. He might gain at a respite, however brief, from the night, but whatever prowled the darkness would yet remain, waiting. Besides, there was no true companionship awaiting within, no meeting of kindred spirits, nothing that would not have its basis in fleeting silver. The nostalgia this place offered was both a lie and a trap for the likes of him. There was no escaping the blackness of the life he had sculpted from pain and avarice. The sense of security he might derive from the commonality of beings outwardly like himself would be entirely imaginary, as false as the safety felt by the clustered flock when came the hour of the wolf. The laughter and music from within the Blue Mermayde, however transient and delusionary, served only to lay bare a life at nadir, a life that not even the prospect of riches could keep from tasting of wormwood.

He exhaled a sharp snort of disgust not so much at the fools within, but at his own unwonted weakness, and hurried on. Another heartbeat, another few steps, and the ancient little tavern became distant and unreachable.

That there were other travelers abroad on this wretched night he was certain, for there was not any hour of the day or night when any London street was entirely untenanted. Even at the soul’s midnight, when the ancient city breathed fitfully like a great dark slumbering beast, its streets were not devoid of life, of the poor and those of illicit trades who throve in the nightland. But he could see little through the clotted night, barely the pavement beneath his blind feet and pale flickering ghosts that may have been the glares of struggling gaslamps.

A scream came to him, thin and muted, the cry of steam and steel, and he knew he must be out of Limehouse and near the Stepney Railway Station. He veered toward it, intending to hire one of the hansoms that were always queued at the curbway, even at this ungodly hour. It would be pricey to hire one all the way to Kensington, but it was better than sloughing himself across all the chartered streets of London. Besides, he had the money, and there was plenty more on the way. He neared the station.

At least he thought he was heading toward the Stepney Station. While he was an old hand at getting an absolute bearing upon the limitless ocean using nothing but stars, current and wind, the city’s clinging sooted muck was fouling his senses. His footfalls were muffled and small in the stygian immensity. For all he could discern through the strangling darkness he might as well have been in the midst of a remote savage-infested jungle rather than the charted environs of the greatest, most populous city on Earth.

He paused in his journey, listening intently, hoping to catch the sound of metal on metal, the faintest whisper of a railyard’s life, but the sounds that came to him in that moment had nothing to do with steam or steel or sanity. He sensed something huge in the dark, then heard slithering and sucking noises drawing near.

Suddenly the air carried a stink more noxious than any London night-fog, a taint that could have welled from the belly of Jonah’s leviathan, or from out of the mouth of Dagon himself. It conjured visions of ocean-rooted boneyards and secret tritonic grottoes, of dead things washed upon lonely shores beneath burning jungle suns. The miasma held something of the primal earth and had nothing to do with the habitations of man.

When he could no longer deny the frigid sensation worming its way along his spine, he smiled thinly, mirthlessly. Fear had always been as much a stranger to him as conscience, or, until recently, regrets. He had brawled without regard at ports of call, in heathen cities and upon nameless islands; he had faced down cannibals and red-fingered cultists set to avenge ancient gods of desecrated shrines, had faced even more savage white men ready to murder for a half-empty bottle, his last two coppers, or for no reason at all.

After all he had seen of the terrors of the occulted world, all that he had seen of savagery, how queer that fear should finally come to him in civilization’s ultimate redoubt.

He began moving again, this time away from the Stepney Station and the dark Thames beyond, for the odor seemed strongest in that direction. The hellish sounds however seemed all about him, closing in from every quarter.

Squeezing his precious bundle under this arm, he whipped a wickedly curved knife from a concealed sheath, wielding it with a practiced ease. Unfortunately, the mist hid the danger that lurked nearby, so his steel had no target.

But something
did
surge just beyond sight, vast and vague, something slithering ever nearer. He broke and ran, blind but trying to keep to the center of Commercial Road, away from the many treacherous alleys and doorways. He could almost see the oily shapes writhing about him, or at least could in his mind’s eye. He slashed at them, jabbed at the shadowy shapes that seemingly possessed little more substance than the foetid air, but only rarely did his blade seem to hit anything.

Another barrage of sucking noises sounded before him, apparently approaching from the direction of the London Docks. He immediately veered northward, up narrow Jamaica Street. He saw the steeple of the Arbour Square church rising beyond a mist-black mass, but he kept moving—his bones would soon enough find their way to stately St Dunstan’s, for it was a very old tradition that all children born at sea were parishioners of Stepney. Whatever the true nature of the menace stalking him, it was clearly huge, so perhaps Stepney’s warrened lanes would hinder it long enough to allow him to seek an escape, perhaps even time enough to make it to Bronislav and pass on this hellish burden.

He darted up Oxford to tiny Sidney Lane. Just ahead was shadow-infested Raven Grove Place and, beyond that, Whitechapel High Road. He knew that if he could attain that great thoroughfare he could at least hope for a measure of safety, for neither the lateness of the hour nor any night-fog could ever cleanse that road of the humanity infecting it.

The sounds of pursuit were still with him, but they were faint now. He started past a doorway surmounted by the grime-encrusted image of a raven, centuries-old, when something long and leathery lashed out at him from the gloom, cutting diagonally across his chest. Looking down he saw into the mysteries of his body, his own bones and pulsating organs.

A calmness settled softly upon him. He had never been a man of gentle sentiments or much imagination, but it seemed to him as if the air were a-swirl with rose petals spewing from his veins. Titanic death, who had always whispered the names of others around him, finally whispered his name. His old fear became as zepheryered dust, blown away by a realization of his own mortality. Perhaps for the first time in his life he saw clearly.

He understood something of the nature of his attackers, but even now he could not admit the futility of struggling. The lamb’s path was not his, not while he held a blade in his hand, or sinewy fists, and the will to wield them.

The darkness lashed out with myriad talons.

Fell doom attended his every staggering step.

No gold, he thought grimly, his hopes for an easier life flowing away with his blood. And Bronislav would never grasp what he coveted so greatly. A wave of bitterness washed over him—it was Bronislav’s fault that death’s fire-green eyes rushed at him from the misty night’s every quarter. India Jack Neville was no angel, but he should have never thrown his lot in with a man even Satan would have avoided.

Hovering at the threshold between light and dust, if indeed there was an undiscovered realm from which no traveler returned, he felt everything of hate and nothing of fear. There was no pain, only a great coldness. Yes, this fate was one of his own making, but his hand had not been the only one.

Driven by an inner fire, he escaped the writhing, grasping death, lashing with his ichor-stained knife. It was, he knew, nothing more than a momentary reprieve. It was too late to save either life or soul, for his life was spewing across the dirty cobbles and he was sure he had lost his soul long ago, if he had ever possessed one. But it was not too late for revenge, to thwart plans for more evil than his simple villainies.

He recalled the words of a one-time lascar shipmate, a dark brute of Goa who respected neither man nor god, but who spoke a single name with soft simple-minded wonder.

Breaking into Whitechapel High Road, India Jack nearly collided with a hansom plowing through the midnight fog. In an instant, he clambered inside, tossed the cabby his only crown and called out an address in St Marylebone. For an instant, the driver, whose name was Alfred Paisley, gazed at the silver coin, stunned into immobility. He quickly pocketed it when his horse suddenly tried to bolt, startled by something in the night.

Paisley managed to control the animal and wheel the hansom toward Cheapside. The horse was barely controllable, odd for an animal old in the ways of London’s thronging traffic. It was panicked. Frowning, he glanced back.

What Paisley saw, or thought he saw, looming out of the clotted mist ripped a cry of terror from his throat and made him give his horse free rein, at least at first. The hansom plunged into the swirling night, and inhuman peals of rage ripped across the tenements of Whitechapel.

Chapter Two

“We live in an age of science,” asserted Professor George Edward Challenger in a voice that even in its most conversational tone resembled rolling thunder. His bullish shoulders and muscular frame matched his voice, and the fullness of his black beard would have been the glory of an Assyrian monarch in the days when kingships descended from the gods. “New discoveries are announced daily—marvels of mechanics, chemistry and electricity, secrets wrested from the bowels of the earth and the depths of the sea—new elements and minerals, new species.”

“Ah, established species of creatures not yet catalogued by science,” interjected Inspector Henry Wilkins.

“No doubt of that, considering the sparsity of our knowledge,” Challenger agreed. “On the other hand,” he continued, “it is obvious to me that some of the creatures recently brought to light could be survivals of earlier ages previously known only as fossils, as might yet exist in remote regions of South America. But it seems equally obvious that a few recently discovered animals might be new visitors tossed onto the shores of our world by the evolutionary processes described by Darwin and Lytton.”

“Charles Darwin is a scientific anarchist!” the Scotland Yard official exclaimed. “Where the social and political anarchists spread terror and indiscriminate death with their internal devices, Darwin spreads chaotic ideas in an attempt to destroy established religious tenants with unfounded and unprovable unscientific dogma.”

“All the sciences, but especially biology, have for too long been fettered by unfounded and unprovable religious dogma.” Challenger asserted. “I have traveled quite widely in the world, Inspector, and have seen far too many things than cannot be explained away by any number of Sunday sermons.”