A Well-Woven Web
“MR HOLMES,” SAID R’LUHLLOIG. THE VOICE issuing from the mouth of Nathaniel Whateley had changed somewhat. The accent was markedly more anglicised, with a certain wheedling, spidery cadence that I thought I recognised but could not immediately place. “The years have not been kind. What are you, forty? Forty-one? Yet one might easily take you for a decade older.”
“I am not alone in having changed,” replied Holmes. “You have undergone far greater alterations than I.”
“But you have deteriorated, sir, while I have improved. I am enhanced beyond measure. He who stands before you today is to his former self as the sun is to the moon. No longer am I a pallid reflection of other light; I am a mighty blaze!”
“What has not changed is your egotism.”
“Is it egotistical to extol oneself when one is a god?” Holmes’s interlocutor smirked. “I think not. Gods are, by definition, superior beings. We have no call for modesty. And a god is all the greater when he is one who has ascended to that empyrean acme from the lowly status of a man. I made myself divine. You cannot denigrate that achievement.”
“I have no intention to,” said Holmes. “I can only marvel at it.”
“Holmes?” I said. “I do not understand. You and R’luhlloig are talking familiarly, as though on close terms.”
“Ah, the ally,” said R’luhlloig. “The faithful Watson.” He studied me intently, his head oscillating from side to side with slow, pendulum-like precision. “You, too, have succumbed to the ravages of time, sir, if not as markedly as your colleague. Somewhat thicker around the midriff, somewhat thinner of hair.”
I found his scrutiny discomfiting, the more so since his words implied that this was not our first meeting. Yet how could it not be?
“You have known loss,” R’luhlloig continued, his gaze seeming to penetrate deeper into me. “There is a seam of grief within you, a black fissure that will not close. A loved one. A wife. She was torn from you, and a piece of your heart will forever be missing. How sad.”
“I… I…”
“No. No need to reply, Doctor. Whatever you are fumbling to utter, be it pithy comeback or mulish lament, it is meaningless to me. A god, remember? I have risen so far above human concerns, they are like motes of dust to a star.”
“You are fond of the astronomical simile,” Holmes said. “That is not surprising. Perhaps you have not sloughed off your old skin as completely as you would have us believe. More than a trace remains.”
“There are many things I have not forgotten, Mr Holmes,” said R’luhlloig. “Many aspects of my mortal life are lodged indelibly in my memory – not least its termination. How can I not recall that? And how can I disregard him who was the instigator of it?”
“You brought your death on yourself.”
“Not so. Had you not interfered, had you and I not fought hand-to-hand like two brawling hooligans, all would have been well. Instead, I became the victim of the very fate I had planned for you. In the event, it has proved to be for the best.”
“Then perhaps you should be offering thanks,” said Holmes, “instead of planning a horrible death for me.”
R’luhlloig chuckled throatily. “Still a quip ever at the ready. That much has not changed. As it happens, I am not grateful to you, Mr Holmes. Of course I am not. Nor, though this may come as a surprise, am I angry with you. I am resolved that you must perish, but I desire your demise not out of spite or peevishness or any other petty motive like that. It is tidiness, that is all. It sets things right and clears away a potential impediment. In hindsight, you see, you did me a favour in that cavern beneath Shadwell. You killed me, but at the same time you set me free.”
Now, at last, I knew who R’luhlloig was. The realisation was like a blow to the gut.
“Moriarty,” I breathed.
Once more those beady eyes fixed upon me. “Doctor, you have caught up with the rest of the class. Finally! I was debating whether to put you in the corner with a dunce’s hat on.”
“But…”
R’luhlloig held up a forestalling hand. “No. Let’s not hear any of it. ‘But I saw Professor Moriarty drown. I saw him hauled down into that pool by Nyarlathotep. He is dead. He has to be.’ The evidence of your own senses tells you the contrary. I am not dead. Rather, I have transcended. I have attained godhood.”
“How?”
“Once I realised I was doomed – I was being drawn deeper and deeper into the black depths of the pool and there was no escaping the grip of Nyarlathotep’s tentacle – I resigned myself to the inevitable. I let go of the chain I was holding onto, the other end of which was attached to Mr Holmes and by which I was dragging him down with me. In that moment, I made a decision. Nyarlathotep could have me, but he could not have my adversary as well. My soul, and mine alone, would be surrendered to the Crawling Chaos. I would not share that destiny with another, certainly not with the man who had upset my scheme to have godhood conferred upon me. For I still, even as the air in my lungs gave out and the need to breathe grew overwhelming, harboured the ambition of becoming deified. I merely had to accept that I had forgone the opportunity of doing it one way; therefore I must do it another. In that aim, Nyarlathotep was key.”
“You offered yourself to him voluntarily,” said Holmes.
“The ultimate sacrifice. Whereas I had tried to give him you, your brother, the good doctor here and that policeman in exchange for divine power, now I was giving him a single prize greater than the sum of the four of you: me.”
“If only you had elected to take that tack to begin with. It would have saved us all a lot of bother.”
“Snipe away, Mr Holmes, if it makes you feel better,” said R’luhlloig. Now that I knew he was Professor Moriarty, I could not mistake the snide, condescending tone. Deified or not, he spoke as Moriarty had. “To Nyarlathotep I submitted wholeheartedly. He took my all. He thought of me as sustenance, a feast, but I had other plans. What he had not reckoned with was my indomitable will. I determined that my soul was not mere god food. It was not to be digested. I became, rather, a force within him, insulated, a discrete entity. I resisted being absorbed and instead became the one who did the absorbing. Little by little I fed off Nyarlathotep from the inside.”
“Like a tapeworm.”
“Not an inaccurate analogy, if reductive. I grew fat on his power. I was a parasite within, and him all unknowing. He began to weaken and I strengthened. Soon the Crawling Chaos ceased to be an inchoate mass. I used Nyarlathotep’s amorphousness against him, reshaping him, fashioning him in a new image from the inside out. I was the hidden mind within him, gradually coming to the fore. How long did it take? I cannot say. Time passes differently for the gods. Minutes to them can be hours; hours, eons. Each second is an eternity, and eternity a second. There is no temporal linear flow to it, either, as far as they are concerned: no past, present or future. The gods stand outside time, able to observe it much as we might observe a cube in space, a three-dimensional object that we may turn over, look under, revolve, stand on its end… I apologise. Some concepts cannot readily be conveyed in words. At any rate, whether it took a year or forever or the blink of an eye, Nyarlathotep ceased to exist as he had hitherto been known, and in his place was R’luhlloig.”
“A new Outer God.”
“One born, phoenix-like, from the ashes of a man. Who else but James Moriarty could have made that leap?”
“Congratulations would be in order,” said Holmes, “were you not already congratulating yourself so fulsomely.”
R’luhlloig regarded my companion with lofty contempt. “These efforts to irk me smack of desperation. What result are you hoping for? To goad me into some drastic error of judgement? To provoke me until I shoot you dead out of sheer irritation? Believe me when I say that your barbs find no purchase. I am a god, and you are not even a nuisance.”
“It is clear, nevertheless, that you still hold a grudge against me, Moriarty.”
“‘R’luhlloig’, if you would.”
Holmes puffed out a breath of air dismissively. “Since you insist. R’luhlloig. It is clear, too, that in spite of my being so apparently insignificant, you have gone to a great deal of trouble to effect my capture. You convinced Nathaniel Whateley to relocate to England.”
“I did not. It was his own choice.”
“Then you convinced Zachariah Conroy to follow him to these shores.”
“That, yes, I had a hand in,” said R’luhlloig. “Conroy wished to visit revenge upon Whateley, and since Whateley happened to be living in London, your stamping ground, it seemed serendipitous. Conroy would go after Whateley, and I would capitalise on that situation by using it to go after you. I am not one to turn down a convenient opportunity when it presents itself.”
“Doubtless you also arranged for Whateley to tell the Dagon Club about the expedition up the Miskatonic River. What seemed like foolish indiscretion on Whateley’s part was in fact artful contrivance.”
“After hearing such a confession, your brother and the other members of his silly little cabal would be apt to remember Whateley, while at the same time dismissing him as a garrulous dilettante. The name Nathaniel Whateley would be fixed in their minds, and by association that of Zachariah Conroy, so that should your investigation happen to hit the doldrums, there was dear Mycroft primed with this puff of wind to send you on your way again. Whateley himself had no idea why he mentioned the expedition. It was simply in answer to some instinctive inner prompting.”
“From you.”
“All part of laying the groundwork. It has been inevitable that I must despatch you at some point. I have striven to bring about that end in a way that is as entertaining as possible to myself, and perhaps also, in some manner, to you.”
“You insist upon making little of it, R’luhlloig,” said Holmes, “but the distinct impression remains that I matter to you. That is why you created such a well-woven web to enmesh me. You see in me someone who can hamper you in your broader objectives.”
“No, Mr Holmes!” R’luhlloig declared, but the vexation in his tone belied the denial. “Not in the least. I am in no way troubled by you.”
“You showed Watson and me your subjugation of Cathuria in the Dreamlands. Was that simply to impress upon us how potent and bellicose you are?”
“Yes!”
“And not the act of someone insecure about his accomplishments? A swaggering bully who masks his lack of self-worth by boasting about the number of his victims? Watson has had me dub you ‘the Napoleon of crime’ in one of his stories, and I am wondering if the Napoleon comparison is not apt. The real Napoleon, after all, compensated for his shortcomings by conquering half of Europe. He was a posturing popinjay, a man who behaved less like a general and more like a boy pushing tin soldiers back and forth across the sitting-room carpet, until Wellington came along and made him tidy them away.”
“Mr Holmes!” R’luhlloig boomed.
But Holmes was not to be shouted down. “And I see abundant similarities between him and you. You have begun waging a war. You have marshalled the Outer Gods and aligned them against the Great Old Ones, cementing their loyalty to you by giving them an enemy upon whom to direct their ire. You have thrown down a gauntlet, and it will surely be picked up. The open challenge the Outer Gods have delivered to the Old Ones – Watson and I saw it in our vision of the Dreamlands – is too inflammatory to be ignored. Like sleeping bears, the Old Ones will not care for being prodded and will surely lash out. Is becoming divine not enough for you? It seems you will not rest until you have sparked all-out, cosmos-wide conflict.”
“And won it and established myself as supreme god of all.”
“For what? To make up for some fundamental inadequacy within your being. Where does it end? You would tear apart the entire universe in the hope of filling this gnawing emptiness inside, but where will that leave you? You will be emperor of ruins. Somewhere in your heart – a black, shrivelled organ, to be sure – there is a voice, and it is telling you that you will never be content. Even after your war is over and you have everything you could wish for, it will still whisper to you that you are James Moriarty, failed academic, failed occultist, failed human, failed divinity…”
“My name is not—”
“Failed everything. The kindest thing you can do for yourself, Moriarty, is abandon this course. Look at you. You stand there fuming. If I, a mere man, can render you thus – you, a god – then you must truly fear me. And if you fear me, then you cannot be a god.”
R’luhlloig looked fit to burst. His entire frame was quivering. To say that Holmes had struck a nerve would be an understatement. He had struck oil, and the stuff was gushing to the surface, propelled by tremendous pressures.
“DAMN YOU, SHERLOCK HOLMES!” R’luhlloig roared. He seemed to be growing before our very eyes, the body of Nathaniel Whateley swelling, unable to trammel the full wrath of a god. Veins stood out. Sinews strained. There were a few seconds in which I wondered whether he might actually explode.
The nightgaunt appeared to think this a possibility. The creature began backing warily away from R’luhlloig.
That was when Holmes gave the signal: a downward-chopping motion of his hand. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye. I was so distracted by R’luhlloig, I almost missed it.
Now, while R’luhlloig was lost in a trembling paroxysm of fury, were we presented with our greatest likelihood of success.
We had our opening. We seized it.
