Shadows over Baker Street

The Adventure of Exham Priory (1901) F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE

My friend Sherlock Holmes was never quite the same after his return from the dead. I refer, of course, to that long interruption in his detective career, after he vanished from the brink of the Reichenbach Falls and was presumed dead: an illusion which he maintained for a period of three years until the moment when he removed his disguise in my study in Kensington.

Yet the man who returned was transformed. Before his seeming death, Holmes had been disposed to occasional bouts of melancholy. After his return, I found him to be increasingly saturnine and grim: his periods of good humor became fewer and briefer. Of late, whenever Sherlock Holmes played his violin, he no longer performed barcaroles and waltzes, showing a newfound preference for the darker motifs of Beethoven and Wagner.

One evening in April of 1901, I was detained in my Harley Street consulting surgery with an urgent case. In consequence, I did not return to our rooms in Baker Street until well past sunset. I found Holmes clad in his old smoking jacket, seated near the sideboard with an expression of doom on his countenance whilst he peered at a strange ill-shapen object clutched between his long fingertips.

“Hallo, Watson,” said my friend, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “I see that you have been draining a patient’s mastoid infection.”

“Two infections,” I said, astonished. “But how did—”

“Never mind that, Watson. Come, what do you make of this?” As I seated myself, Holmes pressed the strange object into my hands.

It was a carved piece of stone, roughly nine inches long, of some black mineral resembling basalt. The object was highly polished and deeply curved—concave on one side, convex on the other—yet so thoroughly weathered as to suggest that this artifact was of an immense age. At one edge, the stone was broken and jagged. “It appears to be a fragment off the rim of a large bowl or dish,” I ventured.

“Exactly so, Watson. Observe that the rim’s curvature is uniform: this was part of a circular object, not an elliptical one. By measuring the fragment’s arc, I have established that this was once part of a dish some thirteen feet in diameter. And the object is exceedingly weathered, yet the broken edge is still sharp, and the jagged surface at the edge is still dark and glossy . . . so the original object is ancient, but this piece was broken off quite recently. What else do you see?”

I brought the fragment closer to the electrical lamp. The convex surface of the black stone was incised with weird hieroglyphs and runes. Then I turned over the broken stone so as to view the dish’s inner surface. And now I felt a sudden revulsion as I saw that the concave side of the bowl was crusted with a dark russet-colored stain resembling coagulated blood.

“Holmes,” I said. “Wherever did you get this?”

“Sent to me in the morning post,” said he calmly. “The parcel bore a postmark from Anchester, which my gazetteer identifies as a village of the Welsh Marches. It was enclosed with a most intriguing letter, concerning—wait, there is the door.”

Our housekeeper had brought us a visitor: a man above the middle height, sallow-faced and exceedingly distraught. His hair was dead white, his countenance haggard. His clothes were well tailored and immaculate, yet they hung from his frame as if there were a scarecrow within them.

The visitor’s face was an astonishment. He appeared to suffer from some congenital deformity, to a degree I had never encountered in my medical studies. His cranium was exceedingly narrow, with a receding forehead and chin, watery green eyes, and a flattened nose. Above his celluloid collar, there were several rows of oddly deep creases in the sides of his neck. The skin of his face and hands was peeling, as if from some cutaneous disease, and his fingers were strikingly short in proportion to his hands. “Came up to London as soon as I could, in spite of the engine change,” he gasped, in a breathless whisper which put me in mind of a fish out of water. The visitor spoke in a cultured voice which betrayed no regional accent. “And then the cab horse lost a shoe in Great Portland Street, so I got out and ran the rest of the way. Which one of you is Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”

“I have that honor, sir,” said my friend. “And it is clear to me that you are Jephson Norrys. Your family are from Cornwall, yet you reside in the Welsh Marches. You are a man of some prosperity, but in recent months you have been keenly agitated.”

The newcomer had been pale, yet now he turned ashen. “Black magic!” he exclaimed. “You must have read my letter, but how could you have known my—”

“Simply a matter of deduction,” said Sherlock Holmes, pointing to our visitor’s waistcoat. “Your watch chain bears an ivory pin, in the shape of a black cross upon a white field: that is the flag of Cornwall. But the ivory is yellowed with age, indicating that the pin came to you as an heirloom . . . from your father perhaps, but at any rate from a Cornish forebear. If you had traveled here to London from Cornwall, your railway journey would have ended at the Great Western terminus in Paddington Station . . . but you mentioned Great Portland Street, which is in the opposite direction. The nearest railway station in that neighborhood is Euston . . . and the shortest route from Euston to Baker Street, along the Marylebone Road, passes through Great Portland Street. I need hardly consult my Bradshaw’s Railway Guide to know that most of the rail lines arriving at Euston Street station originate in Birmingham. Yet you mentioned an engine change, so your journey must have commenced before Birmingham: perhaps as far west as Shrewsbury, on the Welsh border. If you had traveled from as far away as Wales to get here, your journey would have required two engine changes . . . but you mentioned only one. So! East of Shrewsbury, yet west of Birmingham, eliminates all territory excepting the Welsh Marches. I have just received an urgent letter from Jephson Norrys of Anchester, and you are evidently he.”

“As for the rest, sir,” I suggested to Norrys, “your shirtfront and your suitings are expensive and new: tailored for a man of your own height but of wider girth, for they hang slackly on your body. You have clearly lost a great deal of weight in recent weeks, due to some nervous condition.”

Jephson Norrys mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Yes! It’s true, as you say. Mr. Holmes, I was told that you are the only man in England who can help me. Will you take my case?”

Sherlock Holmes nodded. “Your letter fascinates me.” Turning to myself, he remarked: “I may have need of a good medical man for some business in Anchester. What say you, Watson? Can I rely on you to suspend your Harley Street practice for some few days?”

I looked at our visitor, and I confess that my selfless desire to assist Jephson Norrys was mingled with my selfish urge to study his medical symptoms more closely. “I will gladly throw in with you,” I replied.

“Thank the heavens for that,” said our trembling visitor. Then the gaze of his watery eyes fell upon the dark basalt fragment which Holmes had left on the sideboard. “You have examined what I sent you, then?” asked Norrys, indicating the black stone. “Mr. Holmes, I’ll wager you’ve never seen such an object before.”

“On the contrary,” said Sherlock Holmes. He reached into his pocket and drew forth a hexagonal object roughly six inches across, and set this on the sideboard alongside the ancient fragment.

It was a dish of some sort, graven from black basalt and weathered with age. Along the outer rim of the six-sided dish, I beheld a weird series of hieroglyphs and runes from some alien script. The inner surface of the dish was flecked and caked with what appeared to be coagulated blood . . .

“Wherever did you get this, Holmes?” I asked him.

“That bloodstained dish has been in my possession these past ten years,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes. “Perhaps it is time that I told you, Watson, of my encounter with the Reichenbach Horror.”

The next few hours contained much activity. I sent a telegram to one of my Harley Street colleagues, urging him to take charge of my patients until my return. “It would be well for us to go armed, Watson,” said Holmes as he packed a valise. I retrieved my Webley Bulldog revolver and some of the recently invented 6.25-grain cordite cartridges while the housekeeper summoned a hansom to fetch us to Euston Street station. Holmes and Norrys and I caught the late train to Birmingham, securing a first-class compartment for ourselves.

Jephson Norrys showed symptoms of extreme exhaustion, so I gave him a sleeping draft. Before he quaffed this, Norrys pressed a loose-leaf memorandum book into my friend’s hands. “Read this, please. It will explain much,” said Norrys, in that peculiar gasping voice. As he fell deeply into slumber in a corner of our compartment, I stethoscoped him and was astonished to discover that his cardiac rate was in the bottom range of human limits. A man in such a state of nervous agitation should exhibit a heartbeat like a trip-hammer . . . yet the slow pulse of Jephson Norrys indicated a metabolism more appropriate to some cold-blooded amphibian. Still, his respiration was regular, and Norrys seemed safe for the moment. As he slept, his mouth opened and closed silently, suggesting the respiration of a fish.

Holmes looked at me ruefully. “Watson, old friend, how long have you known me?”

“This past January, when Queen Victoria died, also marked twenty years since you and I first clasped hands at St. Bart’s,” I reminded him.

“And yet I fear that you have never truly known me.” Holmes drew a black perfecto from his cigar case while the train carried us through the dark network of railway tunnels northwest of London. “You may recall, Watson, our encounter with the Sussex Vampire. I remarked at the time that I disbelieved in ghosts or supernatural agencies. I implied that I have always disbelieved.”

For a long moment, Sherlock Holmes merely lighted his uncut cigar and paused reflectively. “What do you recall of my encounter at the Reichenbach Falls?”

“There were two different versions of the truth,” I said. “You and Professor Moriarty went over the precipice together, and died. Later, it transpired that only Moriarty fell, and you chose to counterfeit your own death.”

“And now I must present a third version,” said Holmes, while our express train rattled through Watford without stopping. “Neither I nor Moriarty went over the falls. At the brink of the falls, Moriarty brandished a pistol and urged me toward a nearby footpath. At gunpoint, he ushered me downhill to the waterfall’s lowest cataract. Here we encountered a cliff face of solid granite, curtained with overgrown vines. Moriarty urged me forward, and I discovered that the solid cliff was actually two separate walls of rock, with a narrow passage between them concealed by a membrane of vines. Passing between the vines, and still held at gunpoint, I found myself entering a cavern . . . utterly dark, except for the weird glow of phosphorescent lichens oozing from the cavern’s walls. Moriarty followed at my heels. It was clear to me that he knew in advance of this place’s existence, and had brought me here for some grim purpose.”

Sherlock Holmes extended his cigar case to me. I accepted a torpedo cigar and took out my cigar cutter as Holmes resumed his narrative: “Inside the cavern, three robed and hooded figures stood awaiting us. Moriarty addressed them in a tongue unknown to me, although I fancy it resembled ancient Chaldean. Moriarty pointed at me, and by his gestures and intonations, I grasped his general meaning: ‘Here is the man whom I agreed to give you.’

“But then, in the half dark, one of the hooded figures reached out with inhumanly long limbs and snatched Moriarty’s revolver while another of the figures pinioned my enemy’s arms. I heard Moriarty cry out in English: ‘No! Not me, too! Your master promised that I would go free if I gave you this man!’

“Something coshed me. I awoke in darkness, with a throbbing headache, and found myself lying supine on cold stone. Something unseen was probing my face: weird tendrils pressed against my features, oozing across my eyelids and my mouth. Watson, my nostrils detected an odor of utter obscenity. From nearby in the darkness, strange chittering voices assailed my ears with high-pitched cries: ’Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!’ Beneath these sounds, I heard the low whimpering moans of a human voice: Moriarty’s voice. Did I say a human voice? Watson, in that dark cavern I heard something in Moriarty’s voice which told me that his mind had cast off the moorings of sanity, and was no longer human. Beneath Moriarty’s anguished tones, in counterpoint, I heard a damp rapid noise which sounded like dozens of tongues, lapping some unknown liquid repast.”

I shuddered, and nearly burned myself attempting to light my cigar. “Great heavens, Holmes!”

“Heaven had no embassy in that dark place, Watson. I had the sense to lie still, hoping my eyes would grow accustomed to the darkness. They did not. Yet by a little whiles, the procession of tendrils across my face slowed and became less frequent while the tongue-lapping sounds attained their hideous crescendo. Something was giving less attention to me, and more heed to the consumption of that unknown liquid. The fingers of my right hand touched something in the dark: something cold and hard, with sharp corners. It came away easily in my hand, yet it was heavy enough that it might serve as a weapon.

“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:

“My agony grows steadily worse, gentlemen. Each morning, I waken to find myself slightly less human. At night, my desperate efforts at sleep are invaded by queer dreams: nightmares, in which I hear dark voices whispering obscene promises.” Norrys trembled, and there was a dampness in his eyes. “The police will not help me; my telegrams to the Home Office receive no reply. Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson: you two are my very last hope.”

“What do you hope to achieve?” I asked as gently as I could. “Your medical condition may well be irreversible, and—”

“I want the voices in the dark to go away,” Norrys quavered. “The voices and . . . and the sound of the rats in the walls!” Norrys clamped his hands over his ears, although his ears by now had dwindled to mere vestigial slits on his scaled flesh. “My life is nothing to me now. I have not entered the priory these last three days . . . yet I can still hear the whispering voices, and the rats in the walls!”

Our cab stopped abruptly, and the cabman informed us that he “warn’t going no nearer that there priory.” We paid him and alighted on a Shropshire country road, lined with high bushes of yellow gorse. Looming ahead of us was a dark tower, weirdly silhouetted in the moonlight, which Norrys assured us was our destination. Holmes switched on his battery lamp whilst I slid back the safety catch on my revolver.

Jephson Norrys had difficulty keeping up with us: he walked with a shambling gait, as if his legs were determined to fuse together and had to be forcibly separated with each stride.

The priory was a moss-crusted dilapidation at the edge of a limestone precipice. The grass all around the verge of the estate was blighted and yellow, and the night beasts which are so common to the countryside of England’s Salopian region—the bats, the owls, the voles—were strangely absent. I saw some broken headstones on the priory’s outermost grounds. Norrys produced an old brass ring with several warded church keys, and he used these to unlock the outer gate, then the inner gate, and then he finally unlatched the door leading into the priory itself.

A strange odor assailed us. Motioning for me to keep my weapon ready, Holmes led the way through the priory’s antechamber to a half-open doorway. Here we beheld a crumbling limestone stairway, descending into the depths of the priory’s cellars. To Norrys, I gently suggested: “Perhaps you should wait here . . .”

Jephson Norrys shook his head grimly and clenched the remnants of his teeth. “I will see this thing through, Doctor.”

We began our descent. I felt a maddening certainty that we were not alone in the cellar. All around us in the dark were muffled sounds, like the scurrying of tiny unseen creatures. I fancied I heard voices whispering nearby me, plucking at my mind as though seeking entrance. Voices accosted me, proclaiming themselves as denizens of many centuries and climes. I understood only some few of them. A voice speaking French introduced himself to me as Montagny, a courtier of Louis XIII. Another sentience, speaking in baroque dialects of English, professed to be the disembodied intellect of James Woodville, a merchant of Cromwell’s time. My grasp of Latin was sufficient to perceive another voice which claimed to be the mind of Titus Sempronius, quaestor palatii of the Roman Empire. All of these voices, and others, beseeched me to heed them.

“Can you hear it, Watson?” There was awe in my friend Sherlock’s voice. “A parliament of minds! There seem to be many intelligences here: a harvest of intellects, gathered from several millennia. I recognize one voice’s speech as predynastic Chinese, and another employs a Greek dialect. Like shadows out of time, projected into our midst. ’Pon my word, Watson, this is astonishing!”

“How is it possible, Holmes?” I asked while we descended the staircase.

“Perhaps these voices somehow transcend time itself. Watson, have you read the works of Henri Bergson, or Loubachevskii? They postulate a fourth dimension of space, enabling instantaneous communication across vast gulfs of distance and vast intervals of time. I wonder if—”

“You always did talk too much, Holmes,” said a harsh voice, somewhat louder and nearer than the others.

In the pale glow of Holmes’s battery lamp, I beheld a strange man. He was exceedingly tall and thin, round-shouldered, with a high-domed forehead and a protuberant face punctuated by two deeply sunken eyes. As there was something fishlike in the appearance of Jephson Norrys, there was much in this man that seemed reptilian. He stood midpoint along the flight of steps on the limestone staircase beneath us, glowering malevolently upward at Holmes.

“Dr. Watson, I have the honor of presenting Professor Moriarty,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes. “Although it had been my understanding that Moriarty long ago gave quits to this earthly realm, and changed his forwarding address to the realm of the dead.”

“Merely a temporary inconvenience, I assure you, Mr. Holmes,” said Moriarty. From the darkness behind him, there came the chanting unison of many unseen throats:

I raised my revolver, but Holmes’s hand on my arm restrained me. “Steady on, Watson. Professor Moriarty has been killed at least once already . . . or perhaps twice, if those rumors I encountered in Kowloon are accurate.” Gesturing for Jephson Norrys to draw closer, Holmes spoke: “Come, Moriarty! What is your unholy interest in this man?”

“None whatever,” Moriarty replied. “Norrys is merely the tenant of this place. It is the priory itself which we covet. Of all places on Earth, this priory’s subcellar is uniquely suited to our needs. By we, of course, I mean myself and the Elder Gods.”

Behind Moriarty, the chanting grew louder.

“I have long suspected, Moriarty, that I am your true prey,” said Sherlock Holmes. “This unfortunate fellow Norrys was merely your bait. Now that I am here, will you release Jephson Norrys and restore him to his manly condition?”

Moriarty spread his long spidery hands, palms upturned. “You wrong me, Holmes. I am innocent of any crime against Norrys. The taint which you behold is in his blood. The Norrys bloodline is obliquely descended from the house of de la Poer, the ancestral heirs to this estate . . . and the inheritors of its curse. By returning to these ancient grounds, first Habakuk Norrys and then his nephew Jephson have awakened the long-dormant taint in their ancestral blood.”

“Tekeli-li!” said the voices, as if in agreement with Moriarty.

“What do you want of me?” Sherlock Holmes asked.

“That’s better,” said Moriarty, rubbing his thin hands together. “You will join me, Holmes, in a long journey . . . a one-way passage, without a return ticket. A voyage to Yith.”

“Where’s that when it’s at home, then?” asked Jephson Norrys.

Moriarty waved a hand airily. “Yith is the home of the Old Ones, countless millions of miles from here . . . yet, when the stars are right, and the dimensions of space can be bent to the Elder Gods’ whim, Yith lies only a few inches beyond Shropshire’s realm in this cellar.” Beckoning us to draw nearer, Moriarty pointed into the darkness behind him at the base of the stairs. “This way.”

And now a most peculiar violet-colored glow appeared at the foot of the stairs. It began as a single point of light, then it rapidly swelled and enlarged until it formed a glowing sphere, then it suddenly flattened into a hexagon of violet-colored light in midair. The hexagon’s vertical axis expanded until it became coffin-shaped.

A wind sprang up in the still air of the priory’s cellar. I felt a breeze rush headlong past me down the stairway toward the hexagon of light. The wind clutched at my sleeves, at my coattails and cravat. A piece of lichenous moss suddenly tore loose from the wall near my elbow: I saw the moss whirl through the air, borne on the current of wind, until it was suddenly and awfully pulled into the violet-colored aura, where it vanished. In a paroxysm of horror, I observed that the peculiar glowing hexagon was a vortex of some sort . . . siphoning air and life from this catacomb to some hideous place.

And now I heard the voices again. Beneath the strange alien chant, I heard the whispers of human dialects: French, Latin, Old English, and others . . . beckoning within my mind.

“D’you hear them, Watson?” said Holmes beside me. I saw the look on his face, and I shuddered. Sherlock Holmes was trembling with a rapture that seemed nearly spiritual. “Hear them, Watson! All the minds that have preceded me into this place: intellects out of time, from Earth’s past and Earth’s future. Some snatched unwillingly, some abducted, yet all of them awaiting me on the far side of that vortex . . . and gloriously sentient! Think of all the secrets . . . all the mysteries which their abducted wisdom can reveal to us! Come, Watson! Let us visit to Yith, and pay a call on the Old Ones.”

“No, Holmes!” I cried. “It’s a trick! We daren’t . . .” And then, as I spoke, I heard one other whisper joining the alien chorus. This voice was gentle, and fair, and familiar . . . and I heard her sweet words easily above the growing howl of the wind.

“John,” said the beckoning voice. “Darling John, here I am . . .”

I knew that voice, though I have not heard it for these past seven years. The voice came from the center of the vortex. I knew I must not turn toward it. I knew I must not raise my head to see. And yet . . . I looked.

Within the glowing hexagon I beheld my dear departed wife, Mary, exactly as I had known her before her last consumptive illness carried her off. With all my intellect, I knew the truth: she was dead, she is buried in Nunhead Cemetery. No power in the universe could restore life to my beloved Mary Morstan and convey her, smiling and complete, to the other side of the unearthly portal from which she now stood beckoning me. And yet she was there . . .

Suddenly a memory from my university days broke the surface of my consciousness. I recalled one of my professors demonstrating a peculiar rhizomatous flower, native to certain American swamps. Insects are lured to the deadly leaves of this plant by the sweet nectar which it exudes from its flowers to entice unsuspecting prey. It is Dionaea muscipula, or Venus’s-flytrap. But why was I suddenly reminded of . . .

Sherlock Holmes had a death grip on my arm. I felt him pulling me, step-by-step, down those limestone stairs toward the beckoning vortex. I tried to resist him, as I tried to resist the enticements of my departed wife, whom I knew to be not my wife at all. “Come to me, John . . .” she whispered. “Hurry to me, for the vestibule between the worlds cannot stay open much longer.” And I knew that I could not resist . . .

“I am coming, Mary.” The words escaped my lips, despite myself.

Somewhere far away, yet very close, I heard Moriarty’s laughter.

“Can’t you see it’s a trap?” Someone rushed past me on the stairs. I saw Jephson Norrys fling himself headlong at Moriarty. For a moment they grappled at the brink of the grim vortex: Moriarty within it, Jephson still outside it on the bottom stair of the subcellar. I saw the two men struggle, yet it was clear that Moriarty was the stronger. Laughing dementedly, he gripped Norrys by the throat and bent him easily backward, threatening to snap his spine. With Moriarty’s hands ’round his throat, I saw Jephson Norrys gasping for air like a fish out of water while the wind of the vortex clutched and tore at Norrys’s coat.

Something fell from his pocket. I saw that it was Norrys’s memorandum book. It struck the staircase, and the gray limestone split it open. I saw loose-leaf pages scattered by the wind, whirling in spirals of air. I saw the tintype photograph of Jephson Norrys in his younger days, snatched by the gale force and sucked into the vortex. I saw something else fall from the memorandum book. In the dim glow of the battery lamp, I saw a glimpse of color . . .

Moriarty saw it, too. I saw him release his grip on Jephson Norrys, who fell sprawling while Moriarty looked toward the foot of the limestone staircase. As Norrys fell, I saw Moriarty’s face change. His features softened; his expression of leering cruelty became almost wistful. I saw the face of a man who had suddenly glimpsed something precious which he feared was lost forever. I saw Moriarty bend, and reach down to pick it up . . .

With an oath, Jephson Norrys struggled to his feet and lunged forward. With all his strength, he snatched Moriarty and plunged pell-mell with him into the mouth of the vortex. I heard a strangled cry. And then, abruptly, the edges of violet-colored aura contracted. Of a sudden the jaws of the vortex snapped shut . . . with Moriarty and Norrys within. I heard a hideous crunching sound, and then something flew past my head and landed on the limestone steps above me.

In the gleam of the lamp, I saw Jephson Norrys’s hand with some few inches of his severed forearm in a bloodstained coat sleeve. The broad paddled mass of his finlike appendage pointed accusingly toward the bottom of the staircase. The rest of Norrys, and the whole of Moriarty, had quite vanished. The interdimensional vortex had closed while Jephson Norrys’s arm was inside the aperture . . . and his hand had been neatly sheared off.

The whispering voices fell silent. But now I heard again the muffled scurryings, like the sounds of unseen rats within the walls. And from somewhere nearby, in the dark, it resumed: the faint whisper of “Tekeli-li . . .”

“Really, Holmes,” I ventured, “I see no point in our tarrying here.”

“Just a moment, Doctor.” My friend reached down with one of his long arms to retrieve something, then we ascended the stairs with all speed, and soon—not soon enough for my tastes—we were in the moonlit graveyard of the priory. Not until we were well past that shunned place and safely on the road to Anchester did Holmes consent to speak.

“Evidently, Bergson and Loubachevskii were correct,” said Sherlock Holmes, pausing briefly to light his pipe before we continued down the road. “It is possible to bridge the gulf between distant points in the dimensions of space. Some unknown factor in the cellar of that priory enables it to serve as the terminus for a viaduct between Earth and elsewhere: perhaps the limestone deposits, or some peculiar mixture of the minerals which have seeped through them for centuries. Moriarty spoke of the stars being ‘right’ for his intentions: but the stars in the heavens move constantly, and bring their gravitational fields along with them . . . which may explain why Moriarty could keep the viaduct open for only such a brief time.”

We walked in silence for a moment whilst I lighted a cigar, and then Sherlock Holmes spoke again: “That vortex, Watson, is the most fiendish thing I have ever encountered, with the possible exception of the giant rat of Sumatra. Something within that vortex seemed to promise us the thing we most desired, although the promise was certainly false. I was offered a chance to commune with intellects nearly the equal of my own. Watson, I heard you cry out the name of your late beloved wife, so I can guess what you were offered. I can but hope that Jephson Norrys has found some measure of peace, and that he entered the vortex of his free will. As for Moriarty, I believe that he found his final temptation on this side of that hideous gulf between the worlds.”

“What do you mean, Holmes?”

“The Elder Gods, or whatever they were, made an unholy bargain with Moriarty,” said Sherlock Holmes. “They have snatched away his humanity, and given him darker things in return. But there is one thing that the Elder Gods cannot offer. It is something which Moriarty gave up willingly, before our encounter at the Reichenbach Falls. And yet it is something which Moriarty clearly desired, and he repented having lost it. Did you mark the expression of longing on his face? Permit me one deduction, Watson: I deduce that, in those final moments in the vortex, Moriarty was suddenly reminded of what he had lost when he squandered his humanity, his life, his very soul.”

We were nearing an inn, where two coach lamps stood sentinel in the front window. Now Sherlock Holmes held something in his outstretched hand, and by the light of the coach lamps I saw in his grasp what had fallen from Jephson Norrys’s pocket. It was the object which had momentarily distracted Moriarty, and which he had sought to retrieve: the hand-tinted Jubilee portrait of Queen Victoria.

“For one moment, Professor Moriarty remembered what it meant to be an Englishman,” said Holmes, pocketing the pasteboard as we approached the inn. “That is what Moriarty gave up in his bargain with the Old Ones . . . and not even all the infinite realms of the Elder Gods could make up for that loss. Come, Watson! I hear piano music in the saloon bar, and voices singing . . . not ‘Tekeli-li’ this time, but rather ‘Knocked ‘Em in the Old Kent Road’ . . . so it is elementary to me that this tavern is open all hours, and we shall find glad company within. Would a pint of bitter go welcome?”