Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) (3 page)

The interior was in shambles.

“Someone’s been here!” I exclaimed.

“Obviously,” Holmes murmured dryly, motioning me to silence, “Other than yourself, who has access to the house?”

“Just Carter,” I replied. “A housekeeper comes around twice a week, but she hasn’t been here since his disappearance. I’ve admitted the police and various detectives.”

“It is unlikely any of them ransacked the house.”

“They looked about but that was all.” I explained,

“Since there appears no sign of forced entry,” Holmes said, “it is likely whoever did this used your cousin’s key.”

I did not give voice to the dread thought that flitted through my mind.

“This house was searched rather thoroughly by at least two men,” Holmes declared after a moment. “One of them was taller than the average man, while the other was quite wide and probably a good deal shorter.”

I surveyed the disorder. “They must have found what they were looking for.”

“An unwarranted conclusion,” Holmes observed. “Your cousin must have known he was in some sort of danger and would surely have taken steps to safeguard anything of value. Is there any part of the house which your cousin held in higher regard than any other, perhaps where he carried out his research or studies.”

“That would have been his den,” I replied. “It was where he kept his library and research materials. He probably spent more time there than in any other part of the house.”

“Lead on, Phillips.”

I was aghast at the scope of the destruction in the den. Not a single book remained on the shelves that lined the walls; they were in great piles about the floor. The sight almost made me weep, knowing as I did how important these rare and ancient books were to my cousin.

“The vandals!” I growled.

Holmes sniffed the air. “An odd odor for a den, is it not?”

I sniffed and realized that a strange, fishy smell had met us upon first entering the house. I had not paid much attention to it, I admit, passing it off as nothing but the result of some spoiled food left unattended in the kitchen, but the odor was stronger here, and, as Holmes had pointed out, a den was an unlikely place to encounter spoiled food.

“What does it mean, Holmes?”

Holmes did not answer. Instead, he walked to the desk, which was empty save for a single book nearly centered upon it. The drawers had been pulled and dumped, but the top appeared not to have been touched at all.

“Odd that the book was left untouched,” I commented, “in the midst of so much vandalism.”

“Not untouched, but tossed back as being useless,” Holmes said. “Originally, if we may believe the faint lines of dust, the book was placed at the precise center of the desk, very deliberately.”

Holmes lifted the volume and read the printing embossed on the spine.

“Your cousin was an admirer of Poe?”

“As well as the more modern masters of fantasy and terror,” I answered. “Carter’s literary tastes were quite unique.”

Holmes’ gaze settled on the table of contents. “Ah, Carter Randolph was quite a clever man indeed.”

I moved closer.

“Observe,” Holmes said, pointing at one of the titles with a long, bony finger. “A shape has been drawn around the words ‘Ms. Found.’ This is a message to you or someone else who would be interested in more than just pulling books from the shelves.”

“But what does it mean?” I asked.

“Look at the shape of the design, man,” Holmes suggested.

The more I looked upon the blockish design, the more familiar it seemed. When I noticed the shape of the design and shape of the desk beyond. I felt incredibly stupid – they were the same, right down to the unique projecting leaves on either side of the desk.

“Exactly, the desk,” Holmes said, seeing the expression on my face. “Your cousin understood that religious fanatics tend to be unimaginative sorts, their thought processes crude and lacking even the rudiments of sophistication. A message of such subtlety would be totally incomprehensible to such people.”

“You speak as if you know these people, Holmes.”

“In a sense they are not unfamiliar to me,” Holmes said. “I have encountered members of many cults over the years, though some would not have recognized them as cults in every case. Devotees of such groups invariably abandon their own beliefs in favor of those of the leader of the group.” He began to examine the desk in detail. “Let us find what your cousin’s kidnappers could not. It would be wise if we were not long here.”

I searched too, but it was Holmes who made the discovery. With a cry of satisfaction he stood, a large dark envelope gripped in his right hand.

“This was taped to the underside of the desk’s right pedestal,” he explained. “The shadows, its color and the dark wood of the desk served to hide it from casual inspection. Shall we see what was so important?”

He sat at the desk and opened the thick envelope. Inside were three files.

The first file contained correspondence from people all over the world. As Holmes read them, he passed them to me. The more I read, the more impossible it seemed that Carter could have taken any of them seriously. Yet, his replies, evidenced by carbon replies affixed to the letters were earnest enough. A pattern began to emerge, one which I sought to deny because it seemed to reduce the ordinary work-a-day world to little more than a mask.

The second contained correspondence from a single writer, a certain Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island. I racked my brain. It seemed to me that Carter had once or twice mentioned him as a fabricator of tales of cosmic dread, and I mentioned that fact to Holmes.

“Judging from the letters, there seems to have been quite an intercourse between your cousin and this Lovecraft fellow,” Holmes observed. “Even a few visitations, it seems. My word, some of these letters are more than twenty pages long, and meandering in the extreme. I prefer short notes myself.”

The gist of the letters, we eventually discovered, was that Lovecraft had delved into some of the same areas of cult study and world mythology which had interested Carter Randolph. With the letters were clippings of Lovecraft’s short stories taken from pulp journals. Holmes read each of the clipped stories with more interest than I would have thought they warranted. After all, the themes of pulp fiction were hardly those of serious literature.

“Two of these stories,” Holmes said, “are built upon incidents which are familiar to me, but which were kept secret at the time because of the fear of public panic. True, they are sensationalized somewhat in these ’fictions’ but the basic incidents are more or less reported as they happened. Given the stations of the principals in the case, one has to wonder who Lovecraft’s informants were.”

The last file consisted of many close-written pages in the same hand as the letters from H. P. Lovecraft. Holmes passed the pages to me as he read them. Their contents both thrilled and chilled me, and some struck hauntingly familiar notes as they recalled to mind certain bits of information which my cousin had questioned me about. Lovecraft was a writer of cosmic fictions, so were these pages nothing more than notes for a novel or a series of stories? Or were they much more? I looked to Holmes for some indication of how I should interpret these notes, but his brow was furrowed in intense concentration, and I felt I durst not disturb those mighty thoughts; I was under no illusion but that the survival of my poor cousin might depend upon that keen mind.

Finally, Sherlock Holmes put the file aside and looked at me, his clear eyes belying the white hair which crowned his head. Fire shone in those eyes. Again, I experienced a feeling that my intellect and poor skills in observation were hardly equal to the task of assisting Holmes in his investigation.

“Believe me, my dear Phillips,” he said gently, “you are more than equal to the task of helping me.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “What are you – how could you possibly know what was in my mind?”

Holmes chuckled and patted my arm in a most amiable and encouraging fashion,. “You all but shouted your doubts, Phillips,”

I frowned and started to protest.

“Throughout our inspection of this last file,” Holmes said, “you paid more attention to me and my reactions to the information than  you did to the information itself. Your cursory examination indicated some familiarity at least with that which was contained in the notes. You looked at me with all the trust and faith of a pilgrim before a prophet. Yet when I failed to give the expected revelation, you looked not at me but your own hands. Had you failed me in some fashion, you wondered. You then could not escape the natural corollary of such a thought – would you be of any help in the search for the whereabouts of Carter Randolph?”

“You now make me wonder more than ever, Holmes,” said I.

“Nonsense,” he said with a vague, quick smile. “There is nothing magical about me or my methods. I observe the world, and I observe those who live in it. Descartes was quite right about the mathematical nature of the world, you know. Truth to tell, Phillips, I have been observing and interpreting the world for so long that at times it is quite difficult for me to reconstruct the steps which led me to one conclusion or another, especially now that I have retired from active practice and am no longer called to give witness in a court of law, to make the blind see, as it were.”

“And you no longer have a biographer to amaze?” I ventured. “I am sorry, Holmes. That was unkind of me.”

“Poor old Watson,” Holmes sighed. “No, there is some truth in your words, Phillips. He was the truest friend I ever had, a dear and loyal comrade, but I can see all too clearly now I often took some measure of delight in confounding Watson with my deductions. My dear old friend Watson, he was very much a conductor of light, a way for me to collate my thoughts upon a subject.”

Holmes’ eyes softened and sparkled with remembrance of time past, friends lost. At that moment, Holmes seemed very old. Then he snapped out a laugh, shedding the burden of the years.

“Together we shall uncover the fate of your cousin,” Holmes told me. “We shall not fail.”

“I appreciate your confidence, Holmes.”

“And I yours, more than you know,” Holmes replied. He replaced the files in the dark envelope. “Our next move should be to call upon Mr. Howard Phillips Lovecraft,”

“To Providence then,” I said with a nod.

To Number Ten, Barnes Street, to be exact,” Holmes said. He fixed me with his penetrating gaze. “From this moment on, we must always be on our guard, Professor Phillips. Our adversaries are both desperate and ruthless. Our lives would mean less than nothing to these fanatics were they to believe we stand between them and the worship of their ‘gods,’ not to mention their ultimate goals.”

“Their goals, Holmes?”

He nodded, a grim look upon his face. “When it comes to cultists, no matter how outlandish the belief system, it is never just a matter of simple worship. There is always a goal sought by these people, whether its nature is transformational, as it was for the Thuggee,  or apocalyptic, as with the End Times Theosophists of 1897, which so greatly damaged the reputation of the parent group.”

After taking the three files to my house and hiding them in a place of Holmes’ choosing, which I thought supremely ingenious, we made arrangements for the trip to Providence, Rhode Island. The train trip was unexciting, and we found ourselves in that quaint metropolis late on the afternoon of July 18, 1927.

Ten Barnes Street proved to be a large wooden Victorian double-duplex house, three blocks north of the Brown University campus. A call from the station determined that Lovecraft was at home, and he was more than willing to see us.

The door was answered by an elderly woman who presented herself as Lovecraft’s aunt, Lillian Clark. She shared half the house with Lovecraft, she living on part of the upper floor and he part of the lower. She conducted us to Lovecraft’s rooms, and it took us a moment to become used to the abnormally dim lighting.

H.P. Lovecraft was a tall, gaunt, almost cadaverous man with a thin face, a longish jaw, and dark eyes. He was dressed in a clean but well-worn coat and tie, and it seemed to me that Lovecraft would not have been out of place in a funeral home.

The warm and cordial greeting he gave us, clasping our hands and uttering archaic words of welcome, completely dispelled any negative first impressions. He was utterly charming. He made me feel as if I were a long-lost friend rather than a stranger who had just arrived without notice from Arkham. He gushed embarrassingly over Holmes, speaking fondly of England, as if England were his native home. We sat down to discuss the purpose of our visit.

“This has been a very stimulating week for me,” Lovecraft said as he sank into an easy chair. “Friends have been popping in and out, including young Donald Wandrei and H. Warner Munn, both amateur scribblers of some note. And just three days ago I received word from Farnsworth Wright, that venerable editor of Weird Tales, a pulp journal highly respected and valued by followers of stories of the macabre and terrible. He has decided to use one of my trifling scribblings in a future issue, a story he had rejected previously, though that is a pattern I have come to expect of that man.”

“What story is that?” I asked.

“A minor piece of fiction which I entitled ‘The Call of Cthulhu’,” Lovecraft replied.