The Book and the Compass
ALIGHTING FROM THE TRAIN AT PURFLEET STATION, we hired a dog-cart and drove out into the marshes. The afternoon sun beat down upon our heads, its rays occluded now and then by the passage of a thick cloud. Holmes seemed in high spirits, gazing at the scenery with a lively eye and a hint of a smile. I, by contrast, still toiled under the after-effects of the Triophidian Crown. I found the lurching motion of the dog-cart, as it trundled along rutted lanes, nauseating. Even the warm breeze on my face was disagreeable, like ants crawling.
Added to that, we were heading into potential danger. There was every likelihood that somewhere in these marshes lurked a nightgaunt, one of the deadliest beasts ever to walk the earth. Moreover, we might have to confront it. We had come appropriately equipped, but all the same, I was hardly relishing the prospect.
“Gentlemen,” said our driver eventually, reining in his horse. “This here’s as good a spot as any. Plenty for you to see: lapwings, redshanks, godwits, pipits, avocets – you name it, chances are there’ll be one flying about.”
“Thank you, my good fellow,” Holmes said, leaping nimbly down from the cart. He had told the driver we were ornithologists, an unimprovable pretext for two men visiting a bird-rich area such as this.
“Will you be wanting picking up later?”
“No. We shall make our own way back to Purfleet.”
“Right you are. Happy spotting! Or whatever it is you bird fanciers say.”
As the dog-cart clattered out of sight, Holmes inhaled and exhaled. “Nothing like a lungful of fresh country air, is there, Watson? Gets the blood pumping and clears away the cobwebs. One of these fine days I shall make myself a home in a place like this, away from the tumult of the city. There surely has to come a time when our war is done and I can depart from the battlefield to a well-deserved rural rest.”
“You will not live to see that day, Holmes, if you continue to fight so intensely.”
“Can I help it if the enemy harries constantly? I must meet their every incursion without fail. If I let up for one moment, all is lost. I guard the gate. I am virtually the only thing standing between mankind and unimaginable chaos and depravity. It is not a responsibility I take lightly.”
So saying, he began to rummage around in the same leather portmanteau he had used to transport the Triophidian Crown to the Isle of Dogs. From it he extracted various items – trinkets, one might call them if one knew no better – which he laid out carefully atop a flat rock. Last came a large book swaddled in an oilcloth. He unwrapped the tome with a distinct delicacy of touch, and handled the book itself similarly. Even though it had been in his possession for several years and he had had recourse to consult it upon many an occasion, it was not something to be treated casually or with disrespect; nor could one ever be comfortable in its presence or claim a sense of familiarity with it.
It was the Necronomicon, that dread grimoire first set down during the eighth century by the half-crazed poet and mystic Abdul Alhazred and considered ever since to be the key text in matters pertaining to the cosmic gods. In the view of some it was, in fact, a conduit between their realm and ours, a route by which one might gaze into the abyss and see the abyss gaze back.
This edition had previously been the property of the British Museum, contained within that institution’s cache of proscribed books, the little-known and little-frequented Sequestered Volumes section. There it would have remained, had it not been stolen in 1879 by Professor Moriarty right under the nose of the section’s guardian, the librarian Miss Chastity Tasker. After we wrested the Necronomicon from Moriarty’s clutches, Holmes had duly returned it to her. When, however, that venerable lady took retirement seven years later, the museum board made the decision to close down Sequestered Volumes. So few people availed themselves of its contents that it was considered not worth the money spent maintaining it.
Miss Tasker, having learned that the books were to be auctioned off, proposed that Holmes should be the keeper of the most infamous volumes, the ones which should never fall into the hands of the mentally unstable or the congenitally feeble. She smuggled over thirty books out to Baker Street, hidden in her Gladstone bag, before leaving her post.
Now, as Holmes exposed the Necronomicon to the open air of the marshes, two things happened. The first was that the sun went in. The clouds, which had been intermittent, all at once seemed to fuse together into a single whole. The light grew hazy, as though dusk were descending several hours prematurely.
The other thing was that the countryside around us fell silent. There had been the breeze and the sound of insects – flies buzzing, bees droning, dragonflies whirring. There had been, above all, birdsong; a continuous chorus of whistles and chatters, almost deafening in its stridency.
Then nothing. Was this coincidence? I think not. Nothing is coincidental where the Necronomicon is concerned.
The book’s jet-black binding and page edges made it look like an oblong of absolute darkness, a chunk of void, as though someone had excised a piece of the world. It was the absence of all that was bright and good. It was the antithesis of life.
As Holmes opened the cover, a bird of prey – I think it was a marsh harrier – shot up from a reed bed close by. The flutter of its wings was shockingly loud, more so the shriek the harrier gave as it soared into the firmament. I cannot deny that I jumped in surprise, nor can I describe that shrill ululation as anything other than a cry of alarm.
One might wonder how a book, a mere concatenation of paper, ink and leather, could cause such a preternatural silence and induce panic in wildlife. But then the Necronomicon is a book like no other. Each copy is imbued with the very essence of evil. Even the title, which translates from the Greek as “an image of the law of the dead”, resonates with wrongness, although not perhaps as much as its original Arabic title, Al Azif, a phrase commonly held to refer to the sound of insects at night which, in Middle Eastern tradition, is equated with the howling of demons. Then one must consider the trail of misery and death the book has left in its wake, with almost anyone who has been involved in printing, translating or using it meeting a grisly end. To call it cursed would be to sell it short. The Necronomicon is truly something any sensible person would shun.
Holmes found the page he sought. On it, alongside several paragraphs of text in a dense Gothic typeface, was a woodcut illustration of a nightgaunt. The creature was depicted in a hunched posture, its batlike wings spread out and its barbed, devilish tail curling behind it like a cat’s. A pair of backward-pointing horns capped its head, and its limbs were long and etiolated. Where a face should have been there was only blankness.
The illustration was crudely rendered, almost childlike in its simplicity. It had a certain raw impact nonetheless. The more one looked at it, the more vivid it became. Indeed, after several seconds of staring I thought I saw the nightgaunt move. Its head shifted upon its neck, as though it were turning towards me, and it articulated one set of prehensile, talon-tipped fingers, somewhat in the manner of a concert pianist warming up before a recital.
With a start, I tore my gaze away from the picture. When I dared look again, the nightgaunt was back in its original pose. I told myself it had only been a trick of the mind. The page had stirred in the breeze. Yes, that was it. Stirred, giving the illusion that the nightgaunt had stirred too.
Holmes, meanwhile, had been devoting attention to the other items from the portmanteau. Amongst these was a circular brass dial with the cardinal and intercardinal directions engraved around its perimeter. Upon the centre of this he placed a conical fulcrum and upon that, in turn, he set a sliver of rock, adjusting the balance of it until it attained equilibrium. The sliver was shaped roughly like a teardrop and was composed of a metallic ore that was a dull brownish colour, shot through with streaks of some shinier, iridescent substance.
Essentially he had constructed a compass, but this was no commonplace version of the device. Far from it. The teardrop-shaped sliver of rock was a magnetised lodestone, formerly part of a meteorite that fell to earth at a place called Clark’s Corners in Massachusetts, not far from Arkham, in the early 1880s.
Certain professors at Miskatonic University took a sample of the meteorite for study. The sample vanished a week later, as did the space-borne rock itself, destroyed by a lightning strike and leaving no trace but the crater it had gouged in the earth upon impact. Rumours had abounded thereafter of poisoned vegetation and livestock in the crater’s vicinity, of farmers gone missing, and of explosions and strange lights in the night sky, none of which I would for a moment discount, yet which were regarded by most outside the region as the idle yarn-spinning of rural Yankee folk with too much time on their hands and plenty of home-brewed liquor to fire their imaginations.
Similar charges might be levied against the Miskatonic University professors. The rock sample they took did not, after all, simply vanish from the lead-lined container in which it had been deposited. What actually became of it was much less inexplicable. Some light-fingered undergraduate purloined it and broke it up into smaller pieces, which he sold as “rare aerolite fragments”. To cover up the theft – and their own incompetence when it came to laboratory security – the academics put about a story that the sample had gradually shrunk until it disappeared altogether, through some chemical or physical process as yet unknown to science. In a place like Arkham, where the unusual was the everyday, such a lie seemed more than plausible and was readily swallowed.
The aerolite fragments brought their purchasers little but suffering and calamity. All who owned them rapidly fell ill, succumbing to various cancers or organ failure that in nearly every instance precipitated an early death. One by one the pieces of rock found their way onto the black market that exists for curios of this kind, kept thriving by a fraternity of collectors with a penchant for artefacts that carry the taint of morbidity. The specimen that lay before us had come to Holmes after the resolution of a case involving a goose that had discovered the fragment upon a ground-floor windowsill, mistaken it for food and heedlessly gobbled it up, thereafter developing grotesque physical abnormalities and a homicidal temperament. My long-time readers, in the event that any were to be privy to the content of this manuscript, would recognise here the raw material out of which I wove an altogether more whimsical, Christmas-themed tale about a stolen gemstone, property of a fictitious countess.
Holmes was punctilious about keeping the sliver in a lead-lined box at all times, so as to mitigate its malign emanations, and whenever he took it out for use, he made sure to expose himself to it for brief periods only. With his compass now complete, he let the lodestone revolve freely upon its fulcrum until it came to rest pointing to magnetic north, as was its natural wont. He aligned the dial below accordingly. Then, with reference to the text of the Necronomicon, he began to chant in R’lyehian. The words seemed to pollute the pristine rustic air, like an aural miasma. They filled the preternatural stillness around us much as algal growth fills a millpond.
The R’lyehian for nightgaunt – n’ghftzhryar – recurred in his invocation, and slowly, twitchily, the compass took its cue and began to respond. The “needle” of aerolite swerved away from north, swivelling back and forth upon its fulcrum, now clockwise, now anticlockwise, as though questing. Holmes was inviting it to indicate in which direction the nightgaunt lay.
As the sliver of rock rotated, the streaks of iridescence within its brownish surface changed. Whereas before they had reflected the dimmed sunlight in shimmering prismatic sparkles, now they adopted a uniform hue. The colour defies my powers of description. It was not like this shade or that; it was unlike all shades. No artist’s palette could ever reproduce it. It had no analogue in the standard visible spectrum.
Nor could it be beheld easily. The eye perceived it as something inimical, an affront to the retina. By dint of great willpower one could force oneself to look at it, but the act provoked a kind of vertigo, as though one were falling down a bottomless hole.
It was, simply put, a colour that should not be.
The needle abruptly halted, locked in position, quivering. Its sharper end, which could be considered its “point”, was aimed north-north-west.
“There,” said Holmes. “We have a bearing.”
