The Terrible Arrogance of Gods
SHERLOCK HOLMES CLOSED THE CALFSKIN-BOUND journal, his manner pensive.
“Well, old friend,” he said. “What do you make of it?”
“A gruelling read,” said I. “Gruesome, too. There are passages where, in spite of Conroy’s somewhat florid and ungainly turn of phrase, the vivid horror of the scenes depicted gave me chills.”
“I did not ask for a literary critique. Does the author in you never relax? What I am after is your thoughts on the content of the narrative, not the style.”
“I believe it. Every word. How’s that? Satisfied?”
“Even the part about the omnireticulum? I heard a sharp intake of breath, as of surprise, when we reached that section of the narrative, as though what Conroy was asserting did not tally with your medical expertise.”
“It was intrigue more than surprise,” I said. “I am not cognisant of any cerebral gland corresponding to the one he describes. I do not recall seeing it pictured in Gray’s, for instance. That is not to say, however, that the omnireticulum might not exist. The brain, being perhaps the least understood organ of the body, is full of mysteries. Wise men from René Descartes to the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall have speculated that the soul resides somewhere within our grey matter. Conroy would seem to have identified just where.”
“Well, for my own part, I believe the journal too – every word. Little wonder Whateley was so keen to gloss over the events of his journey up the Miskatonic when addressing Mycroft and the Dagon Club. What a ghastly, tragic reality he was hiding.”
“Apart from anything else, his willingness to make scapegoats of the innocent Red Indians is shameful,” I said, “the more so because, were it not for those Wampanoag braves, he would not be alive to tell the tale. Even if our present circumstances were not proof enough, it shows that in Nathaniel Whateley we are dealing with a ruthless, vicious scoundrel.”
“Are we?” said my companion. He stood and made a circuit of the barn, stretching his arms and legs. We had been sitting on the bare cold floor for the best part of two hours while reading the journal, and my limbs were stiff too, so I joined him in his perambulations, although I steered well clear of the cage and the sleeping ghoul within.
“Are we not?” I said.
“I mean to say: are we dealing with Nathaniel Whateley, Watson? That is the question. Or is it some other?”
“R’luhlloig, you mean? The Hidden Mind? An Outer God travelling around inside Whateley like a passenger in a coach?”
“More like the driver,” said Holmes, “if Conroy’s account is anything to go by. But no, I am not referring to R’luhlloig. Do try to think, please, if you can. The clues are all there.” He indicated the journal. “Everything you need to draw the correct inferences lies in those pages and in the observations that we have made ourselves tonight and previously.”
I racked my brains, which still felt somewhat dulled after our exposure to the fumes from the Devil’s-foot root. Slowly, painstakingly, like a small child stacking up wooden building blocks, I assembled a hypothesis.
“He did it,” I said at last. “Of course!”
Holmes essayed a small smile. “It is like seeing a light come on in a far-off window. Who did what, Watson?”
“Conroy. Intercranial Cognition Transference. He pulled it off successfully. He did it to himself and Whateley. My God! Somehow he made it work. It is not Whateley who has taken us prisoner. It is Conroy. And those remains…” I motioned in the direction of the ghoul’s cage and the grisly detritus within. “They belong to Conroy, and yet they do not. He has vacated them and continues to walk the earth, alive and well in Nathaniel Whateley’s physical form. But how did he manage it? How could he dissolve his own omnireticulum and then inject it into Whateley? The procedure leaves the donor in a vegetative state. He must surely have employed some impoverished medical student to assist him, or else a physician, some quack who has been struck off the register and is desperate for money.”
“That is certainly a possibility.” Holmes picked up a long, rusty nail from the floor and began toying with it ruminatively.
“Also, the technique was far from perfected, at least up to the point where the journal leaves off. Conroy must have refined it considerably since. But would that not mean more human test subjects? Where did he find people upon whom he could conduct trials? And would he not have left a trail of brain-dead catatonics in his wake? How could he do so without drawing unwanted attention?”
“All good questions, Watson, governed by an unassailable logic. There is clearly some other factor at play here. What is apparent, beyond all reasonable doubt, is that Conroy has insinuated himself into Whateley’s form as though donning a suit of armour. Hence the peculiar mannerisms Whateley has exhibited. He was unclear about the talk he gave to the Dagon Club and needed reminding that he had taken a house in Pimlico. More pertinently, we saw him again and again touch the left side of his face, as though he could scarce believe it was intact, while the seeming paralysis of his left hand would suggest that he has forgotten how to use it over the course of two years when he has not had a left hand. He has grown accustomed to the lack and has yet to adjust to its restoration.”
“Intercranial Cognition Transference would account, too, for the injection mark you perceived on the back of the Bethlem inmate’s skull, and for the fellow’s state of non compos mentis. It all fits.”
“Not quite. As you have just remarked, removal of the omnireticulum’s contents leaves one bereft of all sense. Yet the Bethlem inmate conversed with us, albeit at a rudimentary level, and could write with charcoal. A dim spark of lucidity remained.”
“Perhaps that is the difference between conducting the procedure upon humans and upon animals,” I said. “With humans, the self cannot be erased entirely. Had Junior Brenneman not died after the operation was performed, the body he left behind might have evinced the same degree of basic brain function we observed in the Bethlem inmate. There might have been some sediment remaining that was identifiably Junior. We can at least say with some degree of certainty that Conroy has spent the time since he penned his memoir perfecting the procedure.”
“Can we?” said Holmes enigmatically, squinting as he examined the point of the rusty nail.
“It is a speculation worth wagering on, I would suggest.”
“I will not take that bet. On the other hand, I would lay you good odds on Conroy being the one who sent Whateley the parcel, the arrival of which triggered his abrupt departure from his home in Pimlico. I would lay good odds, too, on the contents of said parcel being the journal we have just read.”
“The parcel did have the dimensions of a book.”
“And how could Whateley read the journal and not be provoked? Conroy’s narrative lays bare every wrong thing they did while on the Miskatonic River.”
“You mean Conroy hoped to blackmail him with it?” I said. “But that would never work. As Whateley said in the journal, by exposing the truth Conroy would damage both of them. Nor would any sensible person believe Conroy’s account. Monsters, mind transfer, murder – it would read to most like the worst kind of penny-dreadful fiction. Given that it comes from a man who has spent time in a sanatorium, Whateley would have had no trouble discrediting it.”
“The journal’s closing words constitute a direct personal threat. Conroy wrote that he intended to find Whateley and get his own back. Whateley could not afford to ignore such a warning. That is what I meant by his being provoked. Here is his erstwhile intimate friend and hapless dupe, whom he has not seen for two years, suddenly back in his life. Conroy has crossed an ocean to be reunited with him. He wants Whateley’s attention, and the journal is a good way of getting it. Presumably it came accompanied by a covering letter, something that told Whateley where Conroy was staying. Whateley saw no alternative but to head out to confront his antagonist. But when the two of them met, things did not go as he foresaw. It was a trap. Conroy overpowered him, sedated him, and performed the operation.”
“Why not simply kill Whateley, if vengeance was what he sought?”
“Would it not be a far sweeter revenge to inhabit Whateley’s mortal coil? To usurp his life? One discerns a marked covetousness in Conroy’s descriptions of Whateley – his looks, his manner, his accomplishments. At the start of their relationship, at least, he loved and envied the fellow in equal measure. To Conroy – who was, let us not forget, left more than a little deranged by the events of the Miskatonic expedition – there might well be a perverse thrill to be gained by becoming the very man who ruined him.”
“Even if he knew Whateley to be in league with R’luhlloig? He had already sensed the Hidden Mind’s sinister presence within Whateley. Would that not put him off?”
“Conroy must have weighed up the pros and cons and decided there were more of the former than the latter. Even with an Outer God in the equation, he might reckon that two hands and a handsome, unblemished face, not to mention a decent unearned income, more than compensated.”
“Perhaps he thought that R’luhlloig and Whateley were conjoined,” I suggested. “When he ousted Whateley, R’luhlloig would be ousted along with him.”
Holmes greeted this with a nod. “Perhaps. What cannot be gainsaid is that R’luhlloig has been a constant refrain throughout this whole affair. Is there some connection between the Hidden Mind’s conquest of Cathuria and the ‘world-changing’ future Whateley crowed about to Conroy? There must be, surely. When last there was war amongst the gods, back in prehistoric times, the earth suffered. Entire continents were sunk during the conflict. The very face of the planet was reshaped. A trace memory of it can be found in the myths of a ‘great flood’, which permeate practically every ancient culture. People of old knew that a global cataclysm had occurred in the dim and distant past, and some even ascribed it to divine wrath.”
“To some extent it was. The wrath of godlike beings waging internecine war.”
“Imagine such a conflict erupting today, in our populous modern era. Imagine the carnage. Millions would perish, trampled underfoot as the gods rage back and forth, smiting one another with weapons of awesome destructiveness. It hardly bears thinking about. Homo sapiens might well be driven to the brink of extinction, and indeed beyond.”
I shivered, and at that same moment the ghoul in its cage emitted a strange, snuffling whine. Both Holmes and I swivelled round to look at it. I thought the creature might be awakening from sleep, yet the ghoul merely turned over in its foul bed, rubbed its gore-pinkened muzzle with a forepaw, and grew still again.
Thereupon my companion and I kept our voices, which were already low, down to a murmur.
“Whateley allied himself with R’luhlloig,” Holmes said. “He allowed the Outer God access to his person by means of the Necronomicon, the book serving as a sort of bridge between planes of reality.”
“For what purpose?”
“Preferment. Material success. The fulfilment of ambition. Consider how mesmerically charming Whateley was in Conroy’s narrative. How he could influence not just people but the outcome of events. Almost invariably, what Nathaniel Whateley wanted, he got. That is the message in the journal. He latched onto poor, timorous, unworldly Conroy and groomed him like a show poodle, seeing in him the potential for making a fortune.”
“Only to be undone when Intercranial Cognition Transference proved unfeasible between humans.”
“At that stage, yes. Who is to say how much of Whateley’s remarkable skill at manipulation was his own by nature and how much the doing of R’luhlloig? An Outer God, by bestowing a small fraction of his quintessence upon a mortal, would be able to grant that person just such powers as Whateley exhibited. Whateley, one may infer, struck a deal with the so-called Hidden Mind, and R’luhlloig duly kept his half of the bargain.”
“But what might R’luhlloig want in exchange?” I said. “I doubt the deal was one-sided. Such compacts seldom are. What could Whateley give R’luhlloig that R’luhlloig could not obtain for himself ?”
“An agent on Earth perhaps? The services of a living conduit between our world and his? A pair of eyes and ears through which he might spy upon mankind? But it does not seem sufficient return on the investment.”
“At any rate, the deal between Whateley and R’luhlloig will have been rendered null and void now that Conroy is Whateley and Whateley is no more.”
“Has it?” said Holmes. “Here we are, you and I, held captive. If R’luhlloig had chosen to rescind his arrangement with Whateley, leaving Conroy to his own devices, then Conroy would have had no cause to drug us and lock us in this barn.”
“Well, no cause other than to protect himself. Look at it from his point of view. Sherlock Holmes comes calling at his door. For all he knows, you are on to him. You have linked him with the kidnapping of the Bethlem inmate and the death of the attendant, McBride. By taking us prisoner, Conroy can contain the problem and then, with the ghoul’s assistance, cover his tracks. Given what he has done to his former body, I would not put it past him to dispose of us in the same manner.” I shook my head, marvelling that I could talk so casually about the prospect of being fed to a monster.
“Then why has he not done so already?”
“The ghoul has a full belly. He is waiting until it is hungry again.”
“A fair point. But there is more to it, I would suggest. What if R’luhlloig has struck the same deal with Conroy as he did with Whateley? What if Conroy has succumbed to the Hidden Mind just as his former friend did? Conroy is eminently suggestible, is he not? His journal presents ample evidence of a rather weak-willed individual, for all his intellectual prowess. I would be far from surprised if he has not kowtowed to R’luhlloig as readily as he did to Whateley back in Arkham. In a sense he was already in thrall to R’luhlloig, if we are right in thinking that R’luhlloig was behind Whateley’s uncanny charisma all along. All that has happened is that Conroy is now directly under R’luhlloig’s sway, rather than at one remove through Whateley. It is hardly a great shift from the one to the other.”
“And R’luhlloig has convinced him that you and I must die.”
“The Hidden Mind has perceived that we stand in opposition to him and his kind and that we would not have them gaining any sort of toehold in this world. If he did not know it beforehand, he would have discerned it from my attempted use of the Liquor of Supremacy to seize control of the nightgaunt. We are a threat to him, he believes – rightly, I trust – and must be eliminated.”
“Then were we meant to read Conroy’s journal,” I said, “so that we might fathom all of this out for ourselves?”
Holmes nodded. “Just as, no doubt thanks to R’luhlloig, we were meant to experience that Dreamlands vision of conquest.”
“But to what end?”
“R’luhlloig is so confident that we are doomed, he does not care if we know the full story. Indeed he wants us to. He wants us to understand how badly we have failed. It is the terrible arrogance of gods. As far as they are concerned, it is not sufficient merely to crush us mortals. We must be humiliated first.”
“You make it sound as though you have given up all hope, Holmes.”
“Do I? By God, I won’t deny that ennui has set in, Watson. I have become tired of this constant struggle. I find myself pining for the life I have in your fictions, where I glide with sublime ease from case to case, confronting nothing worse than blackmailers, murderers, jewel thieves and the odd blackguard with designs upon some hapless, blushing female. I am able to resolve every problem balletically, and with barely any risk to my sanity or my soul. Nobody could blame me for wanting it all to be over. But!” He wagged the rusty nail in the air, rather like an orator illustrating a point with a forthright forefinger. “If this current business has shown me anything, it is that I must forge on. R’luhlloig is a danger to the future of mankind and must be stopped. For that to happen, of course, we need first take steps to escape.”
I could not suppress a grin. “By the living Jingo! I thought you would never get round to it. You have devised a method, yes? Some clever stratagem?”
“Clever? Perhaps. I cannot vouch for its wisdom, however, for it may as likely kill us as liberate us.”
After a moment’s thought, I shrugged. “Since the only alternative is death anyway,” said I, “I am content to try the thing that does not guarantee that fate over the thing that does. Tell me more.”
