Flight to Far Cathuria
THERE WERE STEPS, SEVENTY OF THEM, AND I descended.
There were two high priests, both lushly bearded and wearing tall crowns reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian headdresses, in a cavern temple lit by a pillar of flame. They were called Nasht and Kaman-Thah, and they approved of me, and so my journey continued, down another seventy steps.
Then I was in a dark, enchanted wood. Gigantic twisted tree trunks surrounded me, and fungi grew in preponderance amidst the leaf litter, their caps phosphorescent, glowing like multi-coloured stars. Large brown rodent-like creatures scurried about my ankles, muttering to one another in some strange fluting tongue.
They were hostile, these cat-sized rat-things that were known as zoogs. Individually none would pose an insurmountable threat, but I feared they might attack me en masse. If only I might fly, up above the treetops. Then not only would I escape the zoogs but I might perhaps find civilisation, some sort of sanctuary.
And so I flew. I did it without conscious thought. All at once I was aloft, and I glided through the warm night air, beneath constellations I did not recognise and a moon whose face was not that of the Earth’s satellite, its features somehow less benign.
The Enchanted Wood extended for many miles, but from my eagle’s-eye vantage I saw, beyond its bounds, rivers that gleamed like silver veins. I saw, too, volcanic mountains to the north and south whose summits rose higher than those of the Alps. Somehow I knew their names. Mount Lerion. Mount Hatheg-Kla. Mount Ngranek. Their snowy peaks were as white as fangs.
Ahead loomed the mighty basalt pillars of the West atop promontories on either side of a strait through which the Southern Sea channelled itself in a torrent. I followed the course of the rushing water, between those vast cyclopean columns. Men had toiled generation after generation to erect them, spending their lives piling stone upon stone, all in the pursuit of divine preferment.
I had no doubt that I was headed for Cathuria. A land of ideals, bedecked with splendid cities built of marble and porphyry, their roofs made of gold. Even the lowliest of its inhabitants lived like kings, dining on luscious fruits and drinking wine made from grapes whose skins were a delicate shade of magenta.
Yet the land I saw now was a far cry from the Cathuria of repute. The countryside was blasted. The cities had fallen, their crumbled architecture blackened by fire. The surviving Cathurians were a depleted, bedraggled lot. They lived as refugees in makeshift camps upon barren plains, huddled together beneath canvas or in shelters crudely built from sticks and foliage; miserable, starving, terrified.
Meanwhile, through the ruins of their former homes, amid splintered bones and shattered skulls, roamed monsters. Monsters who were gods. Gods who were monsters. All shapes and sizes, each a living horror, they strutted about with a cocksure arrogance, rulers of all they surveyed. Once, they had been worshipped and sacrificed to, and they had been content with that. They had enjoyed listening to the hymns and prayers that were intoned in their name and smelling the smoke of burnt offerings and the fumes of wine libations, even if they found such things fripperies and affected apathy towards them.
They were different now, these Outer Gods who were known, here, as the Other Gods. They had changed. Something had roused them from the indolence and the infighting that had characterised their lives over the past several millennia. Something had instilled ambition in them, and a renewed sense of purpose. They had travelled from the outermost edges of the universe to wreak havoc.
I saw how they behaved towards one another when they met. Where before they might have exchanged insults, perhaps even been at one another’s throats, now they shared a greeting – a hailing hand, a flashing compound eye, the flaring of a dorsal fin, the uttering of a sublime mathematical equation. They were, if not cordial, at least courteous in their interactions.
One word recurred in their conversation. One word seemed an emblem of the accord that had lately arisen amongst them.
R’luhlloig.
The Outer Gods had laid Cathuria waste. They had rebelled against their role as deities. They wished to be something more, something worse. And the catalyst for this upheaval was, it seemed, none other than R’luhlloig, the Hidden Mind.
Daemon-sultan Azathoth was one who had violently cast off the shackles; Tulzscha, the Green Flame, another. So was Yog-Sothoth, who is known as the Lurker at the Threshold, and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. They and more paraded through the devastation they had created, puffed up with newfound pride, like cruel, hideous children who have plucked the wings off butterflies and are revelling in the insects’ suffering.
“R’luhlloig,” they said to one another, those of them that had mouths grinning.
“R’luhlloig,” they sang, in voices that were either ethereally lovely or infernally loathsome.
“R’luhlloig,” they cackled, with malicious glee.
It was a rallying cry, a call to arms, and I sensed that the Hidden Mind had done more than simply incite a spasm of wanton destruction. This was just a first step.
“Come,” the Outer Gods cried. “Come, you so-called Great Old Ones. We call you forth. Hear us in your prisons, your chambers, your fastnesses, where you skulk and slumber. Come and face us. Stop us, if you have the strength. Come, if you dare!”
The Outer Gods were on the warpath.
Watson.
They were amassing, marshalling themselves.
Watson, can you hear me?
There was impending conflict in the air, loud as drumbeats.
Watson, snap out of it, man.
And at the heart of it all lay R’luhlloig.
A “new god”, they were calling him. A “beacon of hope”. Even a “messiah”.
“Watson!”
* * *
The word hit me like a slap in the face.
Then I realised that I had just been slapped in the face.
I blinked, my cheek stinging. “Holmes? Is that you?”
“Who else? I apologise for striking you, old friend, but verbal imprecation alone seemed not to be doing the trick.”
Cathuria was gone. I was back in the real world. But I could see nothing. Holmes’s voice was coming from directly in front of me, but of Holmes himself there was not even the slightest glimmer. Was I blind?
“You are not blind,” Holmes said as if in answer to my unasked question. “It is merely that we are somewhere almost entirely devoid of light. Your eyes will adjust to the gloom in due course. How are you feeling?”
“Confused,” I said. “I have been… I do not know where I have been. Elsewhere.”
“The Enchanted Wood, I’ll be bound. The Southern Sea. The Basalt Pillars of the West. Cathuria.”
“Yes!” I declared. “How on earth could you know?”
“Because I have been there too, Watson. I have seen all that you have just seen.”
“But… how? How can that be?”
“Because we have both been voyagers, old friend. We have both been sent involuntarily on a journey to the Dreamlands.”
“The Dreamlands?”
“You have heard of them, surely.”
“Vaguely. I recall reading about them once or twice.”
“They do not merit many mentions in the literature. They are a place men may visit only in their sleep, as the name implies, or else while under the influence of some powerful narcotic. Mystics may travel there at will but only after years of practice. Alhazred, Prinn, von Junzt and the rest give them short shrift because the influence of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods upon them is minimal.”
“Was minimal, you mean,” I said. “If what I saw is anything to go by, all that has changed.”
“Indeed. Cathuria is lost. The Outer Gods, at the urging of R’luhlloig, have claimed it for their own, and if their belligerence goes unchecked Cathuria will not be the last place to fall to them. A worrisome development.”
“But how can you and I have had the exact same vision? It is not possible.”
“How many times, Watson?” Holmes heaved an exasperated sigh. “We are long past defining things as either possible or impossible. There is only what is and what is not. In this instance, we were both being guided while we were in the Dreamlands. We were being shown that which someone wished us to see.”
“Someone? Who? Whateley?”
“He could well have been murmuring instruction in our ears, influencing our progress through the Dreamlands. That or some other, subtler force was at work.”
“And how did he drug us? Was it something in the fireplace, as I heard you intimating just before I passed out?”
“An hallucinogenic plant, secreted amongst the logs. The psilocybin mushroom, perhaps, or fly agaric, or datura. My money, however, is on the Devil’s-foot root. It is used as an ordeal poison by medicine men in areas of West Africa and has a distinctive sweetish smell when burned. In large doses it is positively toxic. In lesser quantities, however, it can induce vivid waking visions. Witch-doctors in the Ubangi country, for instance, administer it to young warriors on the cusp of manhood as part of an initiation rite. It is supposed to temper the spirit and banish fear.”
“The Devil’s-foot root,” I said.
“It sounds as if the seed of a story idea has just been planted,” my companion observed.
He was right, although it would be some years before it germinated.
“But how was Whateley immune to its effects?” I said. “He was there in the room with us.”
“If I were forced to guess – and you know how much I hate guessing – he could have built up a resistance to it beforehand, through repeated exposure. There may, though, be another, subtler reason,” he added cryptically. “Something Whateley is hiding from us.”
“Care to expand on that?”
“Not yet. In due course.”
I at last was beginning to perceive shapes amidst the darkness. Holmes’s face, in aquiline profile, glimmered before me. I also became aware of smells. Musty dampness predominated, but the aroma of straw was distinguishable too, and another odour, which I recognised all too well from both the operating theatre and the theatre of war. It was blood. But more than just blood. It was the smell of freshly cut flesh, of a body opened up and on display.
“You are sniffing, Watson,” said Holmes. “Your nose has detected something untoward.”
“You can smell it too, can you not?”
“Is it you? Are you hurt?”
“No. I, however, have been conscious longer than you and my eyes have had time to adapt fully. I know what is in here with us. And I should warn you, my friend. It is not pretty.”
