Shadows over Baker Street

The Weeping Masks (1890) JAMES LOWDER

In looking back over the accounts I have written about the singular exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and remembering all those cases which I never set down upon paper, I recognize only now how foolish I was to deny him the chance to solve the greatest mystery I ever encountered. He would have welcomed the challenge, of course. His keen mind would have pierced the veil of strangeness surrounding those awful events in Afghanistan, and focused upon the true cause of the things I witnessed there. Then, with a glitter in his eyes akin to boyish mischief, he would have explained away the horrors, made them vanish under the intensity of his intellect like so much moor mist before a bright morning sun.

Now that sun has set, its fires doused by the torrent of the Reichenbach Falls, I am left to wonder why I did not allow its light to shine upon the darkness secreted within me while I had the chance. He recognized its presence; it was impossible to hide anything from Holmes completely. I suspect he saw the telltale signs of habitual dread upon me even at our initial meeting. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” he noted after he shook my hand that very first day. He later revealed the details about my manner and appearance that had led him to that conclusion—my medical knowledge, military air, tanned face, and stiff, obviously wounded left arm. But those things might just as well have marked me as an army doctor come from the Sudan or Zululand. No, he observed something else in my haggard face: The stunned stare common to those who serve in Afghanistan. No British soldier leaves that desolate land without it. And my features were all the more blasted for the extraordinary things I had witnessed in that hellish place.

In those early days of my friendship with Holmes, I sometimes hinted at the reason for my disquiet. The prompts were obscure and offered halfheartedly, I must admit. But the awful events were still fresh in my mind, and both my composure and my trust of Holmes too tentative to inspire a more direct disclosure.

The reason why Holmes never pursued the matter still eludes me. Perhaps he did not question me out of courtesy. He could be surprisingly kind at times, especially to me, and he often made it clear that he respected my privacy, beyond what his powers of observation made obvious to him. Or perhaps he never gave the subject a second thought, once he had correctly deduced the origins of my wound and my military bearing. He could be oblivious to such human concerns as fear and despair, too, even when they impacted on his tight circle of friends.

The rest of humanity is not so well armored against the more baneful emotions, and we must deal with them as best we can. Some transmute them into rage and lash out at the world. Others attempt escape. Memories of those Afghan experiences proved so insistent in their companionship, even after my return to England, that I myself took refuge in the bottle. Had Stamford not happened upon me at the Criterion Bar and taken me that same afternoon to meet Holmes—a meeting that resulted in adventures all but guaranteed to reassure me of the supremacy of reason over mystery—I would today be well along the path to gin-fueled dissolution. My only brother followed that same sad road to its inevitable terminus. When I learned of his death, just a year before I shipped out for the East, I could not understand how things could get so bad as to push a sane and well-to-do man to such an end. I pray now that whatever overwhelming unhappiness goaded him to self-destruction was born of more mundane hardships than the ones I faced in Afghanistan.

Maiwand provided me reason enough to take to the bottle. I was but a newly minted soldier when I took my place in the field as assistant surgeon for the Berkshires. I had traveled the East extensively in my younger days, so that I expected the conditions in Afghanistan to be far from inviting. Still, I was unprepared for the long marches across miles of barren ground, with temperatures reaching nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, were any such luxury to be had.

“Let this heat serve as a caution against an intemperate life,” noted Murray, my orderly, as we trudged toward our fateful meeting with Ayub Khan’s army. “If this weather strikes you as unbearable, imagine what the furnaces of hell are like.”

“Can you be so certain we are not there already?” I replied, hoping the scowl in my voice conveyed the expression my lips were too sun-seared to frame.

Murray gave me a look that surely has passed between veteran and green trooper on every battlefield since time began. “Begging your pardon, sir, but you’d be safer to reserve judgment about hell until after your first battle.”

“Have no fear for me, Murray. I shall acquit myself with distinction when the shooting starts.”

“No doubt, sir, no doubt. But the fighting will be unlike anything the officers described in your training or even the firsthand accounts published in the newspapers back home.”

He paused to swipe away a large swarm of sand flies that had gathered around one of the wounded litters close by in the column. It was a seemingly pointless bit of kindness—the flies buzzed everywhere, and hung especially thick among the pack animals and the wounded—but an act typical of Murray. He went nowhere without pausing to do some little bit of good. He was a veteran of some years, but had long ago rejected the hardness of heart that so characterized the medical personnel drawn to the Queen’s service. To them, suffering was a fact of camp and campaign to be accepted or, worse still, ignored. Murray regarded all hardship as a test of character. To surrender to callousness or despair in the face of such sorrow was to be revealed as its accomplice.

“There’s just no way for anyone to explain what a battle is like,” he continued after he had more securely fixed the netting over the unconscious man. “The words don’t exist to describe the vastness and weight of even the smallest skirmish—not ones that can do it justice. You’ll find that out for yourself, if you’re ever called upon to describe one.”

As he was with so many things, Murray was correct about this. When I attempt to relate the events of that fateful day, the resulting narrative either scuffs along with the parched precision of our column on the way to the fight that morning, or swirls out of control, like the retreat of the survivors from the field a scant four hours later. Only fragments can be made clear—the awful shriek of the cavalry horses when a shell landed in their midst; the unearthly sight of a lone Afghan woman, veiled and ghostlike, moving among the massed enemy, exhorting the warriors to vengeance and glory; the palpable feeling of hatred that enwrapped the battlefield as each side did its utmost to annihilate the other.

Positioned as we were on the right flank, the Berkshires confronted the enemy in the form of Ghazis. Thousands of these religious zealots had joined with Ayub Khan in hopes of driving the hated British from the land or, failing that, hastening their own trip to the afterlife. To this end, they came to the fighting ready-clad in shrouds. Some even charged at us unarmed, so eager were these madmen to gain whatever eternal reward their mullahs had promised them. I still see them in my nightmares: fearsome white-wrapped figures emerging from the dry riverbed that ran alongside our position. Brilliant bit of strategy that, using the ditches to hide an advance. Their abrupt appearance had added impact in that it resembled nothing so much as shrouded corpses scrabbling up from some mass grave.

We did our best to put the Ghazis back in that hole as actual corpses. A blizzard of Martini-Henry rounds mowed them down by the score. For two hours we stood our ground, and might have held out all day had the British left flank not been overrun. The retreating infantry and artillery rolled into us like a wave, and we broke, too.

How I got cut off from the Sixty-sixth I cannot recall, at least not clearly. One moment I stood next to Murray; the next I found myself alone and surrounded by a small mob of zealots. The earlier fighting was orderly, well mannered even, when compared to the chaos that descended after the lines broke. It was no longer army against army, but man against man, a thousand savage brawls occurring within a stone’s throw of one another, but isolated by a choking soup of smoke and dust. Shrieks of victory commingled with the cries of the wounded, the thunder of onrushing Afghans with the clatter of the British retreat, until a single sound—a deafening, skull-shaking din—overhung all. Little wonder, then, that neither I nor my would-be murderers discerned the crash of the oncoming artillery limber until it was almost upon us. The galloping horses appeared as if from nowhere, scattering ally and enemy alike. Crazed Ghazis hung from the wagon in a dozen places, while the driver and a gunner, armed only with handspikes and Khyber knives, hacked madly at their hands and arms, anything to loosen their hold and keep them from the gun.

The passing of the limber broke up the mob. I escaped, only to find myself a moment later at the edge of the dry watercourse the enemy had used to such good effect. The haze was not so thick here, though that was nothing to be cheered. Bodies lay two and three deep at the bottom of the steep-sided ravine, men and animals together, as far as the eye could trace the rift. Here were the Ghazis we had cut down, and the British who had been slaughtered as they abandoned the field. Most were still. A few raised trembling hands to the sky or tried in vain to free themselves from the bloody tangle. A camel with shattered forelimbs thrashed about, moaning like a damned soul—which was appropriate, as the scene resembled nothing so much as an illustration of Dante.

I stood on the brink of the ravine, frozen by fear or mesmerized by the horrific scene before me—I cannot now say which—until a figure on the opposite bank drew my attention. Dazedly I noted that he wore an obsolete British uniform, the familiar red cloth tunic and dark blue trousers of our soldiers in the first Afghan war. But atop his head rested a turban, and the twin rifles slung across his shoulder were not Enfields or Sniders, but jezails. My own rifle was gone, fumbled and dropped in my scramble away from the runaway artillery wagon. I reached for my service revolver. Before my fingers even touched the holster, the Afghan soldier raised one of his long-barreled flintlocks and fired.

The bullet bit into my left shoulder, spun me around so that I fell into the ravine backward. Chest aflame with pain, I slid down the embankment and came to rest atop the corpse river. The mass of bodies shifted slightly at my arrival. Cradled there among the dead and near dead, I felt the hot, wet mark of my wound spread. Feebly I tried to stanch the flow, all the while staring up at the red-coated assassin. Calmly he dropped his first rifle and raised the second. The jezail takes so long to reload that experienced Afghan warriors carry more than one, ready to fire, for just such eventualities.

But the fatal shot never came. The soldier suddenly threw his arms out. His mouth framed a startled gasp that never escaped his throat, and then he toppled, already lifeless, into the ravine. Standing in his place atop the embankment was Murray, a bloody Khyber knife in his hand. I gestured to him, called out weakly, anything to let him know I still lived. To my horror, he hurtled forward and tumbled down as if he, too, had been stabbed in the back. But it was haste that drove him on, not steel, and he quickly made his way to my side.

“Don’t try to move,” he said, taking in my condition at a glance. “Keep your hand in place on the wound. Stay still.”

Without another word, he lay down beside me, the Khyber knife clutched to his chest, then pulled the corpse of a Ghazi so that it rested atop us both. “Only until the stragglers pass,” he said, by way of an explanation.

I soon understood the meaning of that cryptic comment. From the din on the plain, it sounded as if the fighting had moved to the southwest. The Afghans were hard on the heels of our troops, even as they fell back upon the little villages of Mundabad and Khig to make their final stand. This left us rather far behind the enemy line.

From time to time a scavenging tribesman picked his way across the corpse river. The body of the Afghan atop us shielded us from the blows these savages sometimes dealt the British dead they encountered. So long as we remained still, the stragglers passed us by. Eventually we could hear shouting up on the plain, and then that, too, receded, until it became quiet enough for me to hear the steady buzzing of the sand flies over the distant clash of arms.

“Someone’s put them to collecting their dead farther up the riverbed,” Murray whispered. “Organizing them for burial.”

He shrugged off our fleshy shield and placed strong hands on me. “This will hurt, I’m afraid, but we’d best move. I’ll find someplace for us to hide. We’ll keep to the riverbed, head northeast—”

“Away from the regiment?” I asked weakly.

“It’s our only chance, sir,” he said as he did his best to secure a bandage in place over my shattered shoulder. Then he heaved me onto his back, adding, “I suspect that there’s little enough left of the Sixty-sixth for us to rejoin anyway.”

I recall only parts of our journey along the ravine. By then I was delirious from the pain and loss of blood. The hours passed as a series of half-understood incidents, dream melding with reality. The dead seemed to reach for us. Gray hands snatched at Murray’s boots until they tripped him, and we both fell onto the corpse river. Later, a shrouded figure rose up from the rest. Gore stained his clothes so completely that they might as well have been dyed crimson. His face, too, was smeared with it. And as I watched, that face contorted, mouth stretching impossibly wide to loose a shriek of alarm. Murray let me fall and, drawing his Khyber knife, buried the blade in the man’s throat. But that did not silence the cry, at least to my addled brain. The wound on his neck opened and, like a second mouth, added to the alarm. Even after the Afghan collapsed, his cry continued—only now from the lips of my orderly.

At last Murray let that wailing end. “I’ve countermanded that fellow’s alarm,” he said as he approached me. I shrank back, and received in return a kind, weary smile. “It helps to know a little of the enemy’s tongue, sir, but that doesn’t make me one of them.”

My head cleared enough then for me to recognize my friend. “Of course not,” I said. “Sorry. I thought I saw—thought that you—”

“No need to explain,” Murray interrupted. “The mind plays tricks under these circumstances.” Before he lifted me again, he removed a thin chain from his pocket and wrapped it around my right hand. In my palm rested the silver disk of a Saint Christopher medal. “If it’s not imposing, perhaps you might find this of help . . .”

“ ‘Marvel thou nothing, for thou hast borne all the world upon thee,’ ” I quoted, hearing the voice of my father as he told the story of the saint carrying the child Jesus safely across the brook. I closed my eyes and tried to hold on to that memory, long forgotten until that moment. I must have passed out then, for the next thing I knew a trio of Afghan villagers was hauling me into a barren orchard, the parched trees looking dead and withered. I struggled for a moment, until Murray laid a calming hand on me.

“Where—?” I croaked

“Safe,” he said. “I left the watercourse when it reached the foothills, and came across these fellows searching for some goats that had wandered off. Their headman fought on our side in the last war.”

“You help our sick,” one of the tribesmen interrupted in heavily accented, but comprehensible English. “No more weep.”

Murray nodded and said something in Persian. Then he turned to me and explained: “When we first met up, I managed to get them to understand we’re medical staff. They’ll hide us from Ayub Khan’s followers, if we help them with some sickness that’s got their families by the throat. I can’t quite understand what he means by ‘weep,’ though. Tears for the dead, perhaps. Or running sores. It’s a symptom common to a half-dozen native maladies.”

I marveled at the equanimity my friend displayed in discussing this unpleasantness, even as I wondered at his strength and stamina. He had carried me for miles in that unbearable heat, yet walked beside me then as if it were still the calm hours before the battle. His military experience, or his faith, or a combination of the two had so well prepared him that no trial seemed beyond his capabilities. I would learn how wrong I was about that later, but at that moment, as we made our way to the largest of the grim, mud-walled houses in that Afghan village, I believed Murray a match for anything we might encounter.

A wizened old man met us at the door. He was clad in typical native dress, save for his ancient Western-style boots, which looked as if they had not left his feet since they were issued to him during the last war. At his side was a small boy, who snapped Murray a salute. The elder slapped the boy’s arm down and growled something in Persian.

“You are right to correct him,” Murray said. “We come as guests, not conquerors.”

The old man eyed Murray, as if he could discern the sincerity of a stranger by look alone. Finally he nodded. “As guests be welcome, then.”

He directed the villagers to carry me to a communal sickroom at the back of the house. The long, low-ceilinged room stank of disease and despair. Two men occupied mats on the floor. Despite the stifling heat, they were wrapped in blankets. Places for three more lay ready for the newly afflicted or abandoned by the recently dead. It was hard to tell which.

They placed me at the opposite end of the room from the door and, at the prompting of the old man, hung a ragged, gauzy sheet to separate me from the others. Murray immediately stripped away the makeshift bandage from my shoulder. Jezail bullets are often composed of bent nails, bits of silver, and any other metal scrap to hand, so that the wounds they create fester quickly. Such was the case with my shoulder. Though the bullet had passed right through my collarbone and out my back, infection had already set in.

Murray had managed somehow to hold on to his field medical kit, and he attended to the wound and the infection as best he could. “You’re going to have to carry on the fight from here, sir,” he said after he had finished his work.

I nodded and let him guide a cup to my lips. After a swallow of tepid water, I opened my right hand. The Saint Christopher medal shone dimly in the light of the candle by my sleeping mat, for night had come while Murray bled away what he could of the infection and closed as much of the gash as he dared. “You can carry me no farther,” I whispered. “Take it, in case you need someone to shoulder your burdens awhile.”

He took the chain from my hand. “If you want it back, just say the word. In the meantime, try to get some rest.” After one final check on the new bandage, Murray carefully lifted the candle and pushed through the curtain.

Several times that night I awoke to find my friend close by, either at my side or tending to the others in the room. Even when he was kneeling by the natives, his shadow on the curtain seemed to be ministering to me, a hunched and wavering form that hovered like some guardian angel. His voice filled the dead hours of the night as he offered gentle words to quiet the ranting of the sick men. I heard the old Afghan in the gray time before dawn, too. He spoke with Murray about the nature of the disease that had swept through the village, all the time using English. He hoped, no doubt, to keep the gravity of the situation from his people.

My fever rallied with the sun, and by noon I became as incoherent as the shivering natives. As with our trek from the corpse river, the days and nights that followed reside in my memory as fragments only: Murray as shadowy protector; the awful heat that washed over me, wave upon wave; the moans and shrieks of the sick Afghans. The latter remain especially vivid, as the incessant chattering of their teeth gave their cries an inhuman, almost insectlike quality.

It was that eerie sound which woke me on the night I first saw the masked priests.

I came awake slowly, but soon realized that my fever had broken. The throbbing ache in my shoulder had lessened, and I could actually feel the chill of the evening air on my sweat-soaked skin. The respite from the fever heat was most welcome, but any relief I felt turned to panic after I thought to call out to Murray and found myself unable to speak or move. I could only stare at the curtain, now a sickly yellow green from some strange light on the other side, and at the tall, unfamiliar shadow that loomed, dark as a mine pit, at its center.

The figure was certainly not Murray. It was taller and thinner, with a vague outline that suggested robes, not a British uniform. Where my friend had knelt close to the sick men, this visitor stood with a straight back, aloof and disdainful. Where Murray had answered their cries with kind words, the stranger remained silent as he stood near first one bawling invalid, then the other. Over each he leaned forward slightly and bowed his head, as if in prayer, all the while keeping his arms rigid at his side.

Finally the shadow on the curtain grew larger, and I knew that the silent visitor was coming for me. Again I tried to call out. Again my shout died, stillborn, in my throat. The shadow now filled the curtain. A hand gloved in bleached leather drew back the ragged cloth, revealing a tall, solemn figure dressed in white robes and a turban. I assumed him to be male from his build, for his dress concealed his gender utterly, just as a porcelain mask hid his features. The mask was plain, the nose and mouth suggested by curves, not revealed by details. A small arcane symbol, yellow against the winter white of the porcelain, lay upon each cheek. Of human features, only his eyes were visible.

Those dark orbs seemed lifeless at first, as if they, too, were part of the mask. The illusion fell away when the silent stranger tilted his head. Only then did I see the tears. So copious were they that the liquid welled up at the bottom of each eyehole until it was ready to spill over the rim. Then, as he had done with the two natives, the masked priest leaned forward. I braced inwardly for those tears to fall on me. Somehow I knew even then to dread their touch.

“Get away from him!”

Murray followed this shout with words in Persian. The first command had been enough to startle the priest, though. The silent figure straightened and turned away, so that his tears spattered the yellow sigils upon his mask and not me. I found myself able to move, too. A long-suppressed cry of horror escaped my lips as I sat up and pushed the curtain aside.

A second masked priest stood near the door. He held an oddly shaped lantern, the source of the weird yellow-green light that suffused the room. Murray strode past him, toward the priest who had loomed over me. He got halfway to his goal when he noticed that the two natives had fallen silent. The men lay still upon their mats, staring up at the ceiling, eyes fixed upon something we could not see.

Murray pointed to the sick men, then asked the priest a question. The masked figure remained silent, but an answer came nonetheless: “What have they done? They’ve prayed for these men to be cured by sunset tomorrow or released from their suffering,” growled the village elder, now standing framed by the doorway. “I welcomed you as guests, even tolerated your failure to help our sons. But I will not allow you to insult these holy men.”

Murray apologized, but the priests did not respond. Still silent, they crossed to the door. There, each took one of the old man’s hands in his own, then bowed over it. Though he tried, the elder could not hide his discomfort. Again, the priests appeared not to notice. They passed from the sickroom, the old man trailing in their wake, surreptitiously wiping his hands on his cotton trousers.

“The villagers fear the priests,” Murray noted as he cleaned my wound and set a new bandage. “ ‘The Weeping Ones,’ they’re called. The natives think of them as harbingers of bad luck. But their own mullah was one of the first carried off by the plague, so—”

“Plague? Is it that serious?”

“It’s claimed at least three nearby villages in the past year or so.”

I glanced in the direction of the two natives. Murray had thrown the curtain back; we could see the two men shivering under their heavy blankets and staring up at the ceiling. “What of them?”

Murray rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep. “Dead before morning,” he said. “At least, that’s been the pattern every other time the priests have come. I would suspect them of poisoning the poor fellows, but their presence alone seems sufficient to frighten them over the brink.” He settled me back on my sleeping mat. “We’ll need to move on tomorrow, sir. You should get as much rest as you can tonight.”

“And you?”

“No rest for me.” That familiar, kind smile flashed across his face. “If those poor souls are going to die, they should pass their last hours without pests hovering about.”

“Those priests aren’t sand flies,” I said. “You can’t just brush them away. Besides, there’s something uncanny about them. Something . . . unnatural.”

The dismissive laugh that comment elicited from Murray, gentle though it was, alarmed me. I could not put into words the specific cause of my unease, but I knew better than to deny so cavalierly what I had just witnessed. Yet Murray would not admit even the genuine weirdness of the priests. He cast them as unsavory mystics or dubious fakirs, as common in the East as fleas on a camel. He could not imagine the Weeping Ones as anything more sinister. His view of the world simply did not admit such possibilities. While I took some comfort from his certainty, I drifted off to sleep that night troubled by more than my wound or our immediate plight.

The sun was well up in the sky when I awoke the next day. Murray was gone, and in his place a pair of women tended to the natives. The two men lay uncovered, still staring heavenward. Dead, I realized. The women sobbed quietly beneath their veils, while outside, the more traditional keening for the departed could be heard in the distance. The smell of rosewater permeated the room.

I wanted to help them, but knew so little of their rituals that I feared offending them. The villagers were already angry with us for failing to save the young men. So I simply watched as the women first bathed the dead men, then, with heavily scented water, anointed the welts and oozing sores that covered the bodies. What I had taken for sobbing was, in fact, a prayer for the dead. They repeated the words over and over as first they cleansed the corpses, then dressed them from head to foot in new white clothes.

No sooner had they finished dressing the second figure than one of the masked priests entered. The village elder followed a few paces behind, the distance not born of respect, but exhaustion. As the priest signaled for the women to depart, the old man slouched against the wall. He shivered, despite the heavy winter clothes he wore. Now and then, the sudden chattering of his teeth interrupted his recitation of the simple prayer for the dead. I knew then that he would soon be confined to the sickroom himself, awaiting with dread the final visit of the Weeping Ones.

A full dozen more of the masked priests came in to retrieve the bodies. They hoisted the corpses onto litters and carried them from the room with the same cold efficiency displayed by the priest visiting the sick men the night before. For all their silent tears, they did not act like sorrowful men. If the weight of those deaths pressed heavy upon their hearts, it did not show in their bearing. They were interchangeable in appearance save for the yellow symbols upon the mask of their leader and the silver chain he now wore wrapped around his wrist. I thought nothing of that detail then, though its significance came clear to me soon after the Weeping Ones departed with the dead and someone finally answered my calls for Murray.

“The other soldier left?” I repeated, incredulous. The elder was even then being made comfortable in one of the sickroom beds, his thin form so racked with shivering that he could not speak to me. That left the villager who, in his broken English, had asked Murray that first day to stop the weeping. The meaning of that phrase was chillingly clear to me now.

“He go last night,” the young man said. “Not come back.”

I could not imagine Murray deserting me. Neither would he leave without some explanation. I remembered his comments about keeping the pests from bothering the dying men. Had he gone to the Weeping Ones to convince them to stay away? It seemed a foolhardy thing to do, but on reflection, so did carrying a wounded and possibly dying comrade along the corpse river after Maiwand.

It was at that moment I recalled the silver chain. It had not been there the previous night, and seemed out of place on the priest’s person. Even so, it looked familiar.

The Saint Christopher medal. If Murray had left to confront the Weeping Ones, he would have taken it with him . . .

The natives looked on in puzzled amusement when I pushed myself out of bed and struggled into my clothes. It proved a difficult task, my left arm still all but useless to me. But I managed somehow to dress, rig a sling, and check to see that my service revolver was fully loaded. If the priests held Murray hostage, I would free him. If they had murdered him, I would recover his body for Christian burial. I never bothered to consider how either task might be accomplished by one man with an Adams .450 and a wound that threatened to reopen at any moment. After all that Murray had done, the obligation was upon me to do for him anything, everything that I could.

The only directions I could extract from the young man were rudimentary. He pointed down a path that led toward the mountains, and said only “cave” and “golden sign.” I secured a torch, which I carried as a cudgel during my long walk, and hoped to catch up with the Weeping Ones on the road.

Despite the burdens in their care, the priests managed to stay so far ahead of me that I never caught them. Fortunately, the road proved easy to follow. Even the weather cooperated, with a thick, steel-gray blanket of clouds covering the sky from horizon to horizon. The heat remained oppressive, of course, but without the lash of the sun, it was almost bearable.

Full dark was upon the world when I found the entrance to the cave. I knew it to be the correct one by the yellow sigil engraved in the stone to either side. I lingered at the mouth, staring into the maw and squinting at the gloom within. Oddly, the darkness of the cavern was less absolute than that of the land beneath the moonless, cloud-choked night sky. Far into the mountain, at the limits of my vision, a faint luminescence lit the interior. This was not the wavering light of torches, but a steady glow. Still, I set fire to my torch before venturing inside, and felt the more secure for doing so.

The source of the light proved to be a dripping, noisome mold, which grew in patches at irregular intervals all along the course of the cavern. The yellow-green glow it produced was identical to that of the strange lanterns the Weeping Ones carried. Despite the eerie natural lighting, I was still glad for my torch. In many places the mold light shone only weakly. In others, where the priests had harvested the slime, darkness reigned.

The tunnel twisted and turned, but never forked, as if it had been excavated for the sole purpose of leading men to the huge central chamber into which it emptied. I soon found myself on the brink of that vast room, at the top of a broad stair that descended to a floor patterned with shattered and gouged mosaics. Towering walls hemmed in the chamber on all sides, with the stone made to resemble the facades of some ancient city. These carvings might have been beautiful once, but now mold obscured their magnificence. For three stories or more the walls stretched up, to where my eye should have met a ceiling or a dome, but instead found the night sky.

Far below this expanse of star-dotted emptiness, at the very center of the chamber, a group of altars squatted on the floor like mushrooms. Twoscore or more of the Weeping Ones stood amongst the altar stones, their attention focused on their leader and the two corpses that had been carried from the village that afternoon. The dead men were laid out on their backs so that their scabrous faces stared up into the night. And as I watched, the head priest rested a porcelain mask upon each of those disease-ravaged faces and began to chant.

Voices unused to speech took up the prayer, until they filled the chamber with a horrible wailing, like the cries of drowned men at the bottom of a lake. I dropped my torch and covered my ears in hopes of blocking out the sound. But the prayer of the Weeping Ones rang clear, scoring itself upon my memory as indelibly as the sight of those two dead villagers even then rising up and adding their voices to the chorus.

“They were never dead,” I whispered, my mind struggling to maintain its hold on sanity. “Only catatonic, or mesmerized . . .”

I did not have time to decide which, for at that instant a gloved hand closed over my right shoulder and pushed me, face first, into the wall. The grip was firm, yet somehow also disgustingly soft, as if the flesh yielded too much when I pushed back against it. I tore myself free and turned on my attacker. The masked priest leaned close, tears brimming in his eyes.

I lashed out with a fist, possibly the worst thing I could have done at that moment. The sudden exertion ripped open my wound, while the blow tore the porcelain mask from the face of the priest. The mask did not fall, though. It hung at his chest, suspended on clear, ropy strands that secured it to the remains of what had once been a human face.

Staggering back, I managed somehow to draw my revolver and fire three times. The bullets bit into his body. Clear stains spread out from each impact, but the bullets, though well placed for such hasty shooting, seemed to do him no serious harm. It was as if his entire form were gelatinous beneath those robes.

My own wound had driven me to the ground, and in the fall, I lost my revolver. I slid my back to the wall, tried to push myself to my feet, but it was useless. I could only watch in horror as the priest pressed his mask back into place with a wet sound, then advanced upon me with that unhurried, mechanical gait.

He stood over me, tilting his head so that the ooze of his decaying face welled up under his eyes like tears. I knew then how the plague was spread from village to village, knew, too, that I would not let him infect me. I felt the ground around me for anything I might employ as a weapon. My fingers closed upon the abandoned torch.

The blow I struck was feeble, hardly enough to make him stagger a step. But the dying torch did the work neither my arm nor my revolver could complete. The flame leaped up the white robes and engulfed the priest as if his decaying flesh were oil. He screamed only once with that terrible, liquid voice of a drowned man, then collapsed into a still-burning heap.

My victory was short-lived. From within the temple came the sounds of movement, the slow, steady approach of the fifty or more Weeping Ones gathered there. I thought to escape back down the tunnel. Even if my wound had not prevented me from putting that desperate plan into action, the commotion that echoed along the stony corridor dashed any hopes I had of retreat. They had caught me. I wiped my blood-slicked fingers on my jacket and retrieved my revolver, ready to fight to the end.

It is fortunate I lacked the strength to pull the trigger when the first figures rushed toward me from the tunnel. It was not more priests that were arriving from the direction of the cave entrance, but a small band of Ghurkas led by my orderly, my friend, Murray.

The Ghurkas carried torches of their own, and even an oil lantern or two. Once they knew what to do, the lads made short work of the priests. As Murray field-dressed my shoulder, we saw the smoke from their burning bodies rise up through the open roof of the chamber into the starry night sky. After that, we left the cave in silence.

Murray later explained that he had indeed gone off from the village, but only after hearing one of the goatherds tell of spotting a small British expeditionary force the previous day. Given the mood of the natives and the trouble with the masked priests, Murray knew we had to depart as soon as possible. He could not pass up a chance to secure some assistance for us, uncertain as he was of my ability to make the long trek back to Kandahar on my own. The village elder would have been able to explain where Murray had gone, had the old man not been struck down by the plague.

And the silver medal that prompted my foolhardy assault on the temple of the Weeping Ones? Murray had left it with one of the sick men before he went to search out the patrol. The priest must have taken it from the unfortunate fellow before his corpse was prepared for burial.

The simplest explanation for the medal ending up in the hands of the priest eluded me; that is hardly a surprise. Even now, after all my lessons in deductive reasoning from the one true master of that science, I cannot claim with any confidence that, given the same evidence, I would not reach the same wrong conclusion, or perhaps a different, but equally faulty one. Still, I trust in logic. With it I can explain away the masked priests as victims of some rare form of leprosy, as damaging to the mind as it is to the body. The rites I saw enacted did not raise the dead, merely roused the sick men from a catatonic state, one rather similar to the sleep paralysis I myself suffered the night I first saw the priests. These are explanations of which Holmes would have approved. And if I cannot imagine how he would have explicated what I saw through the roof of the temple chamber, it is because I lack his talent for deduction.

I wonder now more than ever how he would have explained it: a roof opening onto a clear night sky when clouds were all anyone could observe outside the cave. The scene might have been painted on the rock, and yet I witnessed the smoke from the burning priests curl up and out of the chamber, not gather at the roof as it surely must do were the sky mere decoration. Or perhaps the cloudless vista seen by the visitors to that chamber resulted from some freak weather condition, like the eye of a hurricane, only lacking the storm. I can almost bring myself to believe those explanations. What I cannot describe away is the thing that I saw move against that starry sky: a mammoth . . . being, all boneless limbs and writhing darkness, with a face more horrible than the decaying visages of its priests. Even as the last of the Weeping Ones fell, I lay on the cold stone floor at the entrance to the chamber, staring up at the sky much like the initiates did from their position on the altars. I watched the thing blot out Aldebaran and, turning, the constellation of Taurus. And in that same instant, I knew that it was looking back at me.

“The unspeakable one,” the priests called him. “He Who Is Not to Be Named.” At least that is how the scholars at the British Museum translated the parts of the prayer I could pronounce. Again, Murray was correct: it helps to know a little of the enemy’s tongue. But a little is enough. Although I remember the entire incantation, I have no desire to make my mouth pliable enough to form the other blasphemous words, even if it will help those scholars to recover a language that was old when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt.

What name would Holmes have given the beast? I will never know now, and I suspect that is for the best. I had opportunities enough to tell him about the thing in the night sky, to make him understand that it was not my experiences at Maiwand or the enteric fever I contracted in hospital at Peshawur, after my escape from the Weeping Ones, that forced me to be shipped back to England. So why did I hesitate?

The answer to that is simple enough, even for my flawed powers of deduction: Elementary, my dear self. You do not wish to end up like Murray.

He might have pulled through if he had not asked me to confirm what he, too, saw that night. So long as he could tell himself that it was a delusion, like the screaming wound I saw on the Ghazi he killed during our escape from the battlefield, he could bear the burden. He could dismiss it, then, or ignore it, and keep his too-rigid view of the world intact. The moment I confirmed his fears, though, he was undone. And when the Catholic priest at Peshawur could not frame that impossible experience within the tenets of the Church, Murray walked to the most isolated part of the hospital, so as to disturb as few people as possible, and shot himself through the heart.

Yes, that is why I never shared this tale with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. After I described the awful events, he might have leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and solved the mystery. Or perhaps there are things logic cannot conquer. Holmes knows the truth or falsity of that, now that he has taken that fateful plunge at the Reichenbach Falls. Reason tells me that the very fact of his death provides my answer: The thing in the Afghan caves remains, while Holmes is gone, all hope with him. Then again, I could be coming to the wrong conclusion. I have been known to be wrong before. In this case, I am counting on it.