Bearding the Lion in His Den
EFFORTS HAD BEEN MADE TO RENDER THE INTERIOR of the farmhouse more homely than its ramshackle exterior. The sitting room into which Whateley escorted us had a Turkish rug covering the bare floorboards and curtains which, if not brand new, were not the moth-eaten rags one might have expected. The furniture likewise, though clearly second-hand, or even third-hand, was of decent quality. The arms of the sofa were somewhat threadbare and its springs creaked as I lowered myself onto it, but I had sat in far less accommodating chairs while visiting households that considered themselves perfectly genteel.
“It’s customary in England to offer guests tea,” said Whateley. “What do you say?”
“A cup of tea would not go amiss,” Holmes replied brightly. “How about you, Watson?”
Taking my cue from him, I smiled and nodded. “I have never knowingly refused one.”
Whateley disappeared to an adjoining kitchen, whence we shortly heard the rattle of water gushing from a tap and then the clank of a kettle being set upon a stove.
I took advantage of his absence to whisper to Holmes, “Is this wise? I appreciate we did not have much choice, but still. Surely we have walked straight into the lion’s den.”
“Where better to beard the lion?” came the reply. “Besides, I am keen to learn more about friend Whateley, and this is as good an opportunity as I am likely to get.”
“I do not trust the man.”
“Never was a more justified statement uttered. Nathaniel Whateley, for all his breezy colonial charm, is a liar. Did you set any store by his tale of sending the nightgaunt out to confront us because he found us suspicious? Or his assertion that he thought we were spying on him?”
“Well, we were.”
“Yet the nightgaunt was already in the air before we even reached the house. Otherwise we would have seen it take flight while we were conducting our surveillance.”
“Yes, unless he is not keeping it here. What if it has a lair elsewhere?”
“You do not allow a creature like a nightgaunt free rein, if it is your thrall. You keep it close at hand at all times so that the bond between you and it is maintained. Distance weakens the Liquor of Supremacy’s effect. Separation for too long a period can erode the psychical connection altogether. No, the nightgaunt resides here at the farm, almost certainly in the barn. You observed, of course, how the barn’s windows were boarded up.”
“As a matter of fact, I did. What of it? Is that definitive proof that the nightgaunt is kept there?”
“It is if you consider the fact that the planks are new. They are light-coloured, fresh from the timber yard, and show almost no weathering. I would estimate they were purchased and nailed over the windows not more than a couple of months ago. The barn door, likewise, has been patched up with new planks. Every hole and rotten section has been painstakingly mended, and there are two bolts upon it that betray not a speck of rust.”
“One presumes Whateley is renting the property. Perhaps it is the landlord’s handiwork.”
“It does not matter whose the handiwork is – the landlord’s, Whateley’s, or the man in the moon’s,” said Holmes. “What matters is that nowhere else on the premises have repairs of that sort been carried out, at least not so far as we have seen, and these ones have made the barn the perfect daytime hideout for a nightgaunt: dark, dry and roomy.”
He had more to say, but just then, Whateley returned.
“The water is coming to the boil,” the American said. “It shouldn’t be long now. Perhaps the two of you are hungry as well. I have some ham, some cheese, a loaf of bread. The bread is a tad stale but still edible. Obtaining supplies out here in the boondocks is not easy. I am able, however, to purchase milk and eggs from a local dairy farmer, and the nearest village has a grocery store. The walk takes a couple of hours each way, but I enjoy the exercise.”
“All rather a far cry from Pimlico, eh?” said Holmes.
“Pimlico?” Whateley frowned briefly. Then his expression cleared. “Yes, Pimlico. Well, much though I appreciate the conveniences of city life, I am able to do without them. I travel a great deal, often to remote and inhospitable places, and am not unfamiliar with privation. In many ways I am better adjusted temperamentally to this mode of living than to a softer, more sophisticated environment.”
“In a place like this, too, one may hide away a beast the size of a nightgaunt without fear of arousing curiosity, or for that matter inadvertently terrorising the neighbours.”
“Is it the only specimen of exotic fauna you have here?”
“What do you mean?”
“At your Pimlico address you keep a host of zoological anomalies in jars. Dead ones. I was merely wondering whether this farmhouse serves as a repository for others. Live ones. Large ones. Like your nightgaunt.”
“Oh no. It’s just Nordstrom here. Nothing else.”
“And how long have you been using the house for that purpose?”
“Long enough. Long enough. Is that the kettle I hear? Excuse me. I shall be right back.”
“Holmes,” I whispered as soon as Whateley had exited, “what is behind this line of interrogation? You are probing with purpose, I can tell. You are onto something.”
“As yet, I have only the vaguest inkling of how things stand, Watson. There are undercurrents at work beneath the surface. I am beginning to grasp their direction of flow.”
“Care to enlighten me?”
“Not while I myself remain largely in the dark. If there is anything more useless than a theory, it is a half-formed theory.”
Once more Whateley re-entered the room, now bearing a tray of tea things, which he held somewhat queerly. One hand gripped the tray’s handle, while the other, his left, supported the tray from underneath, although nothing appeared to be amiss with the handle on that side. This meant that, when he set the tray down upon an occasional table, he did so with some awkwardness.
“I am cold,” said he. “Are you not cold, gentlemen? In those damp clothes you must be. The nights get chilly quickly out here, even during what passes for summer in England. While the tea steeps, I shall light a fire.”
He busied himself at the hearth, soon kindling a small blaze from the logs laid in the grate. Then he proceeded to pour out the tea, handing a cup to Holmes and me. Once again I noticed that there seemed to be a problem with his left hand; he used it to keep the teapot lid in place as he poured, but with little dexterity. The fingers seemed stiff and unwieldy. I wondered whether the hand was afflicted by some sort of mild paralysis.
After milk and sugar were dispensed, Whateley raised his cup to his lips. “Your health,” he said.
I made to copy him, but then a thought occurred. What if the tea were poisoned?
I tried to console myself with the fact that Whateley had said he intended us no harm. Still, there was something about this whole situation that did not sit right with me. Whateley had made such a song and dance about preparing the tea and playing the good host, it inclined me to believe that he had an ulterior motive. Had he spared us from death at the hands of the nightgaunt only to inflict another kind of death, one that was more intimate and perhaps more excruciating?
I gave my tea a surreptitious sniff. It smelled fine, but then many poisons were odourless, and indeed tasteless. I glanced across at Holmes. He was holding cup and saucer but had yet to drink. Was he thinking as I was?
Whateley too had not yet drunk. There was a moment when all three of us were in stasis, each poised as if waiting for another to make a move. I was put in mind of gunslingers facing off in the main street of some dusty town in the American West. Instead of six-guns, we had teacups.
Then the impasse was broken as Whateley, with a queer, secretive smile, took a sip. When he had swallowed it down, Holmes duly followed suit. Only then did I feel it was safe to drink.
“It is remarkable to me,” said Holmes to Whateley, “that you are so adept when it comes to a creature like a nightgaunt and the methods required to tame one. You are more than a mere devotee of zoological oddities, it would seem.”
“And, by the same token, sir, you are more than a mere solver of crimes. We each of us have hidden depths.”
“I have had cause, at times in my career, to investigate mysteries that lie outside the mundane. I have, accordingly, developed a certain level of expertise in that sphere.”
“One would not know it from Dr Watson’s published oeuvre.”
“Such cases go unrecorded. You can perhaps appreciate why.”
“That I most assuredly do. Your reputation rests on pragmatism, and you fear you might be cold-shouldered by polite society were any occult dabblings made known.”
“You sound as though you speak from experience.”
“A little. My interest in exotic beasts has led me further afield than I first thought it might.” Whateley flicked a lock of hair away from one eye. He wore it collar-length, in the manner of an aesthete. “Initially I was fascinated only by the wilder, weirder fringes of natural history. As a child I loved to read about duckbilled platypuses, Tasmanian devils, mole rats, manatees and the like – all those reports brought back from the far-flung corners of the earth by naturalists, explorers and missionaries about animals so bizarre and misbegotten, one could hardly believe they were real. From there grew a curiosity about legendary creatures, of which there are a plethora in the United States alone: Bigfoot, the thunderbird, the wendigo, along with any number of swamp men and lake monsters. To me, there was a correlation. There had to be. What most would dismiss as folklore or superstition, I regarded simply as things that science had yet to discover and classify. I knew that that was to be my life’s work, creating a taxonomy of the semi-mythical, and I devoted all my energies in that direction. I graduated from Miskatonic University with a degree in biology and duly stayed on to pursue studies in more recondite areas of that discipline. I fancied myself a latter-day Linnaeus, building upon the foundations he laid to unite the worlds of the natural and the supernatural into one.”
“Which led you eventually to mount an expedition up the Miskatonic River in ’93 to catch a shoggoth.”
“Now how would you know about that, Mr Holmes?” said Whateley with bemusement.
“I should have thought it was obvious. The talk you gave.”
“The talk I gave?”
“A few months back.”
“I give talks all the time. You will have to be more specific.”
“To members of the Diogenes Club.”
“Ah yes. That one. You were there? I am sure I would have remembered if you were.”
“Not I. My brother.”
“Oh right,” said Whateley. “Yes. Your brother. Whose name is…?”
“Mycroft.”
“Yes. Mycroft Holmes. And he told you about the expedition?”
“He did. Both its purpose and its rather ignominious end.”
Whateley flinched. “Yes. One could hardly call it my finest hour.”
“By your own account, Indians beset you and your team as you were journeying upriver. There was a slaughter from which only you and another escaped, one Zachariah Conroy, a university colleague of yours.”
“Zachariah. A good man. It… it pains me to recall how he suffered.”
“You and Mr Conroy have had no dealings since?” Holmes asked.
I had been trying my best to fathom the approach Holmes was taking. At first it had seemed as though he was simply sounding Whateley out. Now I apprehended that his goal was to catch Whateley out. He was laying careful snares for him, with a view to establishing once and for all that Conroy was the inmate at Bethlem and Whateley behind his abduction.
I settled back in my seat, feeling oddly calm, as though a spectator at some sporting event watching two opponents vie for a trophy and knowing that my man was surely the more skilled of the two. The scent of woodsmoke in the room was sweetly pungent, almost perfumed. Whateley must have laid the fire with logs from some sort of resinous evergreen, I thought. The blaze itself was soothingly warm, and I welcomed its heat.
“Why do you ask, Mr Holmes?” said Whateley. “Why the interest in poor Zachariah?”
“Because unless I am much mistaken, Mr Conroy has been a visitor to England of late. Did you not know?”
“I… I believe I may have heard something to that effect. Yes, come to think of it, a mutual acquaintance mentioned it to me the other day. It was a case of: ‘I bumped into someone you might know from your alma mater. Name of Conroy. Remember him?’ A passing reference, is all.”
“You did not pursue the connection?”
“I guess, given what had happened, I felt Zachariah might not be best pleased to see me again. He was hurt quite badly, you know, and blames me for his injuries. It wasn’t my fault, of course. I told him that over and over. I couldn’t have predicted that our boat would be attacked by Red Indians, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. Boy, those savages were terrifying. They came at us in the night, out of nowhere, whooping like banshees, tomahawks flashing in the moonlight…”
Whateley shook his head sombrely at the memory. I, meanwhile, had a sudden lucid vision of the scene he was describing. I imagined the Indians swarming over him and his cohorts, their faces striped with war paint, their heads adorned with feathers, and the carnage that ensued. For a second or two I was seeing the event as though it were taking place right there before me, and I the Indians’ next victim whose scalp they would slice clean off the skull before they hacked me to pieces.
I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself. The woodsmoke was reassuringly pleasant in my nostrils.
“It sounds appalling, Mr Whateley,” said Holmes. “You have my commiseration. I can see why you might not have wished to renew acquaintance with Mr Conroy, if he felt such animus towards you. Then again, one must speculate upon his reasons for coming to England in the first instance. He surely must have been aware that this is where you had fetched up.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what might be going through his head.”
“You do not suppose he was seeking you out?”
“If so, he never found me.” Whateley stroked his cheek in a manner that seemed not so much contemplative as self-regarding.
“That strikes me as singular,” said Holmes, “in as much as I would have thought he would have no difficulty locating your whereabouts in London, if he wished.”
“London is a big city.”
“But an enterprising, reasonably intelligent man would need only spend a day or two making enquiries to yield a result.”
“Perhaps he didn’t want to. Perhaps he didn’t even know I was over here.”
Holmes leaned forward, setting his teacup aside. “What also strikes me as singular is this: you, Mr Whateley, have not once queried Watson’s and my presence here in Rainham Marshes. You seemed, if I may say, almost to have been expecting us.”
“Did I?” Whateley waved a hand dismissively. “Could it be just that I am a phlegmatic person, able to take all manner of unusualness in my stride? My vocation has taught me, if nothing else, to expect the unexpected. So perhaps—”
“Do that again,” I said. I was startled to hear myself voice the demand. Normally politeness would have hindered me from interrupting someone mid-sentence. Yet for some reason the inhibition was not there.
“Do what again?”
“Your hand. Wave it.”
“Like so?” Whateley repeated the gesture.
Something was awry. The hand left a trail behind it as it moved, a kind of sparkling rainbow studded with hand-shaped afterimages.
“What is it, Doctor?” he said, peering at me intently. “What do you see?”
“I… I am not sure.” I rubbed my eyes. “Some optical phenomenon. I am tired. That might account for it.”
“Are you experiencing distortions of vision?”
“No. I don’t…”
Whateley’s face had started to sag. The flesh of it was melting, dripping downwards with glutinous slowness, like tallow. One of his eyes bulged larger than the other. His mouth pulsed like a sea anemone.
I blinked hard. Normality returned. Except that now the floor was distending. Its rectangle became a parallelogram, which in turn became a diamond. The floorboards warped. The patterns on the Turkish rug came alive, chasing one another round in circles, while the rug’s tasselled ends rippled like millipede legs. The walls bowed inward like wind-billowed sails.
“Watson?” said Holmes.
“Holmes?” I said, although it sounded as though I was hooting.
“Watson, why dun hair plea fan?”
“Holmes, I can’t understand you. What are you saying?”
Another stream of nonsense syllables issued from my companion’s lips, and then his face, as Whateley’s had, began to melt. I clutched my own face, for fear that it would follow suit. I thought that I might be able somehow to hold it in position.
The room was darkening. I glimpsed Holmes rising to his feet, then staggering. Little wonder he did, for the floor had become a steep slope. It was a miracle that he did not slide completely off it.
In the event, he sank to his knees. He pointed an accusing finger at Whateley. His mouth moved, and the words it emitted came to me as though from miles away, slurred and somewhat delayed, but this time intelligible at least.
“You did this,” he said. “You have drugged us. Not the tea. The firewood. Damn you, Whateley. The smoke. You…”
Then everything went grey.
And after that, nightmare.
