The Thing in the Cage
AT LAST I FATHOMED WHERE WE WERE. WE HAD been consigned to the boarded-up barn.
The origin of the blood smell, however, remained unknown to me, and I was reluctant to learn whence it came. I am not a squeamish man. How can I be when I have amputated limbs on the battlefield and had my hands inside a man’s stomach cavity while attempting to repair shrapnel damage? Nonetheless Holmes’s warning filled me with unease. If he himself, as inured as I was to gore, considered something “not a pretty sight”, then it most assuredly was as advertised.
“I can spare you the anticipation, if you would like,” said he. “I have perceived that there is an oil lantern to hand, and next to it a box of matches. Whateley has left them for us.”
“How courteous of him.”
“All I need do is light the lantern.”
“Then by all means let us get this over with.”
A match was struck, its flame blindingly bright. Soon the lantern wick was burning, snug within its glass funnel.
There was a cage. It occupied one corner of the barn, a thing of sturdy iron construction, some eight feet long on each side. The area of floor that it encompassed was covered with a thick layer of straw.
Within were two humanoid forms.
One was a corpse, the naked remains of a man clad in the tatters of a white gown or nightshirt. The belly had been ripped open. The face had been torn off. Not one limb remained intact. The straw around it was caked with dried blood. Organs were scattered everywhere, some whole, some not.
Adjacent lay a creature who looked dead too but was in fact, I quickly gathered, only asleep. It was stretched out prone on the straw, head resting upon its arms. Its facial features were doglike, while its hands resembled paws and its feet were cloven hooves. Its ribs flared in and out like bellows with every slumbering breath.
Dark wet smears around the creature’s muzzle and over its arms, all the way up to the elbow, spoke of the terrible depredations it had visited upon the corpse. It had dined heartily on human flesh and was now sleeping off its meal, like a tiger after the kill.
“A ghoul,” I said, with equal parts revulsion and hatred.
Twice in the past had Holmes and I encountered this obnoxious species, notorious for its unclean habits and vile predilections. On the first occasion, back in ’87, a band of ghouls had been responsible for the abduction – and partial consumption – of a prize racehorse from its stables at King’s Pyland on Dartmoor. On the second occasion, two years later, a lone ghoul had caused minor but irreparable harm to the person of hydraulic engineer Victor Hatherley. The common thread in both cases is, of course, the creature’s carnivorous appetite, which shows a preference for raw meat, ideally torn from a still-living victim. As for the source of that meat, the creature is not fussy. If it feels moved to assuage its hunger on the highest of sentient beings, then so be it. The ghoul knows no better.
“Upon my word,” I breathed. “That vile thing has been there all along, no more than ten feet from us!”
“That thing and its repast,” said Holmes. “It is securely locked up in the cage, though. It cannot reach us.”
“Even so. To think that we have been lying unconscious in a – a charnel house.”
“You exaggerate, but the point is taken. It is disquieting. If only you had your revolver still, then we might at least be able to defend ourselves.”
I checked my pocket; the gun was gone. “Whateley must have taken the precaution of removing it.”
“Yes, its comforting bulge is absent from your jacket. And I am deprived of my portmanteau. We are weaponless. If there is any sort of silver lining to this cloud, we may note that our quest has achieved its objective, in however gruesome and anticlimactic a fashion.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Has it not occurred to you, Watson, whose corpse that is?”
“I suppose I have not yet given attention to the matter, owing to the fact that we are shut up in a barn with a ghoul.” My voice carried a slight edge of hysteria, which I felt it was reasonable to indulge in under the circumstances. Somewhat more placidly, I said, “Doubtless you have the answer, Holmes, and are keen to share it.”
“Observe the victim’s left arm.”
“What of it? It is a mutilated mess, like the rest of him.” “There is no hand.”
“No, and I can tell you where it now resides: inside the ghoul.”
“Really, old man, there is no need for that mulish tone. We have seen this arm before and the neat stump in which it terminates. The hand was not gnawed off by the ghoul. It has long since been absent.”
“Conroy?” I said, peering at the limb.
“Zachariah Conroy,” said Holmes with a nod. “What is left of him, at any rate, and of his Bethlem inmate’s smock. He was conveyed here by the nightgaunt and fed to the ghoul.”
I shuddered. “A hideous end.”
“An ignominious one, too.”
“Whateley. He is a callous, cold-hearted monster.”
“And more.”
“Are we next? Is that to be our fate as well? Served up to a ghoul on a platter?”
Holmes shrugged. “Only if we allow it. We are alive for now, and that is enough. While we remain so, there is always hope. There is also… that.”
With a tap of his foot, he indicated a heap of clothing not far from where we sat, beside several bundles of straw.
“Conroy’s?”
“Must be. From when he was first held prisoner here, before he escaped and fetched up in Bethlem. What interests me is not so much the clothes themselves but the book that lies on top.”
He went over to retrieve said book, which he brought back to within the aura of the lantern.
“It appears to be a journal,” I said.
It was indeed a journal, bound in calfskin, the sort of thing one might buy at any stationer’s. Nothing was written upon the cover to suggest whose it was or what it contained. Holmes opened the cover.
“You are planning on reading it?” I said.
“Why not? We do not have anything better with which to occupy our time.”
“How about escaping?”
“I have already tried the door and windows. They are secure.”
“We could kick out the window planks without too much difficulty, I imagine.”
“And then what? Have you forgotten about the nightgaunt? You can rest assured it is waiting for us outside. Indeed, I believe I have heard its soft tread once or twice.”
“Oh. Oh yes.”
“A far more effective gaoler than any prison warder. We would not get ten paces before it was upon us. No, we are in this barn until dawn at least, when the nightgaunt will surely have to rest – unless, that is, Whateley comes for us sooner. I have the impression, besides, that we are meant to have spotted the journal. Why else was the lantern here and the book in plain view? Whateley has set all of this up with a specific purpose. There is an air of ‘stage management’ about the situation. There has been ever since we got here.”
“For what it’s worth, that has been my impression too.”
“Nathaniel Whateley is more than devious. He is duplicitous.”
“You will have no argument from me on that front.”
“I mean it almost literally. Duplicitous in the sense of having two elements or parts, being twofold or dual. His interior and exterior do not match.”
“Now you are losing me.”
“Then I shall endeavour to lift the fog of befuddlement. Tell me this. Have you noticed Whateley’s left hand?”
“Indeed I have. It appears to be suffering from palsy. That or an injury damaged the nerves.”
“But Mycroft did not mention any such disability when recounting the talk Whateley gave at the Diogenes, and I am certain he would have.”
“It could have happened since then.”
“Whateley’s landlady Mrs Owen said nothing about it either, and she saw him far more recently than Mycroft. More to the point, do you not think it a queer coincidence that the hand which is malfunctioning is the same hand that Conroy is –was –lacking?”
“If there is something wrong with a man’s hand, then there are even odds of it being the same one as that of another man who also has something wrong with his hand,” I said. “So no, on those grounds I do not find it that coincidental. You obviously beg to differ.”
“You noticed, too, the way Whateley touched his face while he was talking to us? Once to sweep aside a lock of hair, another time to stroke his cheek.”
“An affectation. He is the affected type.”
“It did not seem to you that he was feeling his own skin?”
“No.”
“That is how it struck me.” Holmes returned his attention to the journal. “So. Shall we…?”
Within the book lay page upon page of dense handwriting. The penmanship was neatly formed but betrayed a certain jagged intensity. At times emotion seemed to have got the better of the writer, and the words escaped the constraints of the printed lines or else degenerated into a scrawl, while still remaining just the right side of legible.
Holmes flicked through, then returned to the first page.
An Account of a Voyage up the Miskatonic River and What We Found There
by Zachariah Conroy
The title was followed by these opening words:
I hereby set forth that which is both confession and accusation. It is a true testimony and calls into doubt, in large part, the accepted narrative of events as promulgated by one Nathaniel Whateley of Arkham, Massachusetts.
Holmes and I read on, he turning the pages, I looking over his shoulder. We did so for the next couple of hours, with increasing absorption and fascination, until at last almost everything we had experienced over the preceding few days began to make sense – to me, certainly, although Holmes had inferred most of the truth already – and we were left both enlightened and filled with dark foreboding.
