WE WERE WAITING FOR A CLIENT TO SHOW UP AT Baker Street when Sherlock Holmes said, “You are wondering, Watson, how a ‘V’ might be changed to an ‘E’.”

It was no great intellectual feat working out how my friend had arrived at this observation.

“You saw me looking at that,” I said, indicating the letters V.R., which Holmes, in a sudden patriotic fit several years earlier, had picked out in bullet-pocks on one wall of our sitting room.

“You are thinking,” said he, “that it is now two years since our queen died and that my little piece of impromptu redecoration ought to be amended to reflect the King’s accession.”

“Or perhaps that the holes should be filled in and new wallpaper applied.”

“You would so soon erase the memory of Victoria?”

“She is unforgettable. I just think that, two years on from her death, should we not acknowledge she is gone?”

“I am not still in mourning for her, if that is what you are implying,” said Holmes. “I am not like those overzealous royalist types who continue to go around with black armbands on even now, wallowing in the whole maudlin excess of it. Is one not allowed to keep a symbol of one’s admiration for the greatest ruler this nation has ever known, even after she has left us? She was the mother of our country, Watson. She held great significance for us all. Remember Professor Avery Mellingford?”

“Professor…? Good Lord, yes. That was, what, a decade ago?”

“A decade and a half. If you want an example of the influence Her Majesty had over any self-respecting Englishman, look no further than the way Irene Adler was able to beguile Mellingford in the guise of a woman closely resembling the Queen. So, to answer your unexpressed query: no, I shall not be changing the ‘V’ to an ‘E’, even if it were possible to accomplish that with bullets. Nor shall I be covering up my little tribute. Now, where is she?”

For an absurd moment I thought Holmes was enquiring after the Queen’s whereabouts. Then I realised he meant his client.

“She is only ten minutes late,” I said.

“I specifically asked her to be here for eleven.”

“Woman’s prerogative and all that.”

“Thus speaks a man who has been married and is shortly to place himself at the mercies of feminine timekeeping again.”

“Oh, Holmes! Really!”

“I jest, Watson. Matrimony may not be for me, but I envy those who attain that state and are happy in it.”

“I must say, late or not, this particular client is somewhat unusual for you.”

“In what way?”

“You invited her,” I said. “I can’t think of another occasion when you have sought an audience with a client rather than simply expecting one to wash up at your door.”

Holmes gave an enigmatic smile. “You will discover why, once Mrs Maberley gets here.” He shot a forlorn glance in the direction of the mantel clock. “Assuming she ever does.”

The name Maberley will ring a bell for those who have read my tale “The Adventure of the Three Gables”. That was a story about the theft and destruction of a compromising manuscript. The truth, as the ensuing pages will show, was a whole lot stranger and more complicated.

A further ten minutes elapsed before, finally, the lady in question arrived.

Mary Maberley was a woman of a certain vintage who carried herself with an air of refinement and decorum. She was handsome now, and one could see that she would have been very comely indeed in her youth. Yet there was a haggardness to her looks – pallid skin, grey circles under the eyes, a redness to the eyes themselves – that suggested a recent encounter with tragedy. Confirmation of this supposition could be found in the fact that she was dressed head to toe in black. I did not assume for one moment that Mrs Maberley was one of the “overzealous royalist types” Holmes had spoken about earlier. She was a woman in the grip of a deep and very personal grief.

“Madam,” Holmes said as she installed herself in the chair reserved for clients, “thank you for coming. I am sorry to impose on you at this very difficult time, and please accept my condolences on your loss.”

“You are kind, sir,” replied Mrs Maberley. “The death of a loved one is hard enough, but the death of one’s own son…” She appeared on the verge of tears, but with some effort composed herself. I fetched a glass of water, from which she took a sip. Then she continued. “When your note arrived, I must confess I nearly threw it in the fire. Since that article about Douglas and me appeared in the Illustrated London News, a number of suspect individuals have got in touch. Mainly they have been psychic mediums, offering their services to contact my son’s spirit and convey messages from him from beyond the veil. I have no time for such charlatans. There have also been a couple of unscrupulous rogues trying to inveigle their way into my good graces. They see a bereaved woman in very comfortable circumstances – one who has long been a widow and now finds herself without issue – and fancy becoming beneficiaries of my legacy.”

“I assure you, my good woman, I am neither of those things.”

“On the contrary,” I chimed in, “much of Holmes’s career has been devoted to foiling the schemes of just that sort of mountebank.”

“Well, your name does carry an undeniable cachet, Mr Holmes,” said Mrs Maberley, “and that is what saved your note from the flames. You told me you are interested in Douglas’s death.”

“Put like that, it sounds prurient,” Holmes said. “I believe I wrote that the circumstances which led to your son taking his own life, and in particular his last words to you, had elements that intrigued me. With your permission, I would be keen to know more about both.”

Mrs Maberley gave a rather severe sniff. “I don’t really see what I will gain from talking to you. It won’t bring Douglas back, will it?”

“But I may be able to make his death more explicable,” Holmes replied. “You must be wondering what drove a young man – intelligent, from a stable background, with good prospects – into such depths of despair that he could see no alternative but to end his life.”

“I confess it does bewilder me how precipitously Douglas went into decline and how distraught he was in those last days of his life. He was always such a level-headed fellow and I honestly believed nothing could derail him. And then those things he said when he was in extremis, those awful, incomprehensible things…”

“Which were quoted verbatim in the London News,” said Holmes. “One can only assume you yourself were the source.”

“I wish I’d never spoken to that wretched reporter,” said Mrs Maberley. “He caught me at my most vulnerable. He promised me a sympathetic article, but what appeared was intrusive and sensational. No salacious detail was spared.”

“Watson here has not read the piece. For his benefit, would you care to rehearse both the circumstances of your son’s demise and the last words he uttered? In your own time. There’s no hurry.”

“Douglas came home one evening after a night out,” said our guest, “and took himself straight to his room without even offering me a greeting. I heard him there, striding up and down, raving to himself. I went to the door and listened. It was babble mostly, tearful and frantic. I could make out perhaps one word in ten. I knocked and asked if everything was all right. After a pause, he answered that all was well and I should leave him be. I was not convinced, but Douglas was a grown man and I was loath to mollycoddle him. I entered his room the next morning after he failed to come down for breakfast, and that was when I… I found him.” She took out a handkerchief trimmed with black ribbon and clutched it to her mouth. “He had hanged himself.”

She broke into sobs. Holmes and I left a respectful interval while her fit of anguish ran its course, whereafter my friend gently prompted her. “And the words your son said, the ones that were intelligible to you…?”

“He said something about a room,” Mrs Maberley told us. “‘I have seen what’s in that room… That room!’ Then he said, ‘No future. There is no future for us.’ And the final thing I heard was ‘me go’. He said it two or three times. ‘Me go. Me go.’ Like that. As though he meant to say ‘I go’ but had reverted to that stage of childhood when one has not yet grasped the proper use of pronouns.”

I glanced at Holmes, who gave me a surreptitious nod in return. Could Douglas Maberley actually have said “Mi-Go”? It was questionable whether that part of his fevered ramblings – those two reiterated syllables – constituted a clear reference to the Outside Things. Holmes, however, had evidently decided the possibility was strong enough to merit investigation.

“With hindsight,” Mrs Maberley said, “I can only infer that Douglas was trying to express a desire to leave the world. He wanted to go. Would that I had interpreted it correctly at the time. Then perhaps I might have ignored his request not to enter his bedroom and would have been able to offer him support and succour, to the point where he would have chosen living over dying. I will carry the regret to my grave.”

“You have nothing to reproach yourself for, Mrs Maberley,” I said. “You could not have foreseen what your son was going to do.”

“Are you a father, Doctor?”

“I am not.”

“Then you cannot hope to understand how I am feeling. No amount of consolation will help. I will never forgive myself for what happened.”

“Perhaps, Mrs Maberley,” said Holmes, “you could tell us a little more about poor Douglas’s end.”

“Very well, Mr Holmes. Dr Watson? This water is all very well, but might you have something a little more fortifying?”

A glass of Amontillado in hand, Mary Maberley resumed her account. “Douglas had not long returned from a posting overseas. He was an attaché, well regarded within the Foreign Office and destined, so everyone agreed, for great things.”

“He was stationed in Italy, was he not?” said Holmes.

“Did it say that in the article? I think it did.”

“It did, but regardless, I would have deduced it from your heart-shaped pendant. The pendant is the sole bright spot in your ensemble, and I can only assume you are wearing it because it has particular meaning. Furthermore, your hand has gone to it several times, an unconscious gesture that has corresponded with mentions of your son. From both these things I infer that the pendant has some connection with Douglas and that in all likelihood he gave it to you as a gift. It is Murano glass, from Venice. Nowhere else is glass that intricate and colourful made.” Holmes spread out his hands. “Thus, Italy.”

“He came back to England,” Mrs Maberley said, “and was waiting for his next posting. There was talk of the West Indies, or even a consulship in India, but for some while nobody at the Foreign Office could quite come to a decision. Douglas was left with time on his hands and so he got into the London social scene, going to clubs and dances and meeting old friends. It was then that he fell under the spell of Isadora Klein.”

Her features formed into a moue of distaste as she spoke the name.

“Mrs Klein is an American widow, hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, but of Brazilian extraction,” she continued. “She was married to a German sugar king, and since his death has become the merriest of widows. All of London society falls at her feet, and by universal assent she is very beautiful, with the sort of dark Latin looks which no man, it seems, can help but be bewitched by. Douglas, I’m afraid, was one such, and she in her turn took a shine to him. And why ever not? My Douglas was debonair, witty, personable, ambitious. But he was also very much her junior and nowhere near as experienced as she.”

The way Mrs Maberley said it, “experienced” was a synonym for “contaminated”.

“She latched on to him the way a cat latches on to a mouse. She toyed with him and batted him about, and the more she abused his affections, the greater they grew. At times the poor boy would speak of her as though she were a goddess and proclaim her as the woman he would make his wife. At other times, he cursed her and vowed he would have nothing to do with her any more. Yet he kept going back to her. All she had to do was beckon and Douglas would run to her side.

“It was not my place to interfere, yet I devoutly wished he would give her up. I introduced him to several far more suitable young ladies, none of whom met with his approval, and all the while I prayed that the Foreign Office would make up its mind and send him abroad, somewhere far from that woman and her manipulative ways.

“Well, the Foreign Office did finally make up its mind, and Douglas was offered a very favourable position at the embassy in Cairo. I urged him to take it. It was a significant step up the career ladder. But do you know what he did? He turned it down. He said he preferred to stay in London. He could not bear to abandon Mrs Klein. He could not even think of life without her.

“It was around then that I learned that Isadora Klein ran a… I’m not sure what to call it. A social gathering? A salon? It is called The Cultured and it counts among its membership some of the country’s elite. Douglas told me about it, saying she had invited him to join. He was terribly excited by the prospect. When I enquired just what The Cultured did, what its purpose was, he could not enlighten me. He did not know. He insisted, however, that it was an honour to belong to the group and there was no question of him refusing the invitation.

“‘I have arrived, Mama,’ he said. ‘I am on my way into the very uppermost echelons. Can you not be happy for me? Are you not proud? I am sure Father is looking down on me right now and smiling. This is all he ever wanted for his son.’

“It was a calculatedly cruel thing for him to do, invoke the shade of his father, whom I had loved dearly and to whose opinion I had always deferred. I rebuked him for it, saying that his father would not have liked seeing him throw his life away over some woman of questionable morals and dubious integrity. At that, Douglas flew into a rage and stormed out of the house. I did not see him again for the best part of a fortnight. Where he stayed during that period, I do not know, but I would not be surprised if it was at Mrs Klein’s house in Harrow Weald.”

Holmes straightened up in his seat. “Harrow Weald, did you say?”

“Yes. A mansion called The Three Gables. It’s there that The Cultured hold their soirées, or meetings, or whatever they are, with Isadora Klein playing the bountiful hostess.”

“And you honestly have no clear notion of The Cultured’s philosophy or the nature of their get-togethers?”

“None, Mr Holmes,” said Mrs Maberley. “The name would suggest something to do with the arts, I suppose. Or perhaps the pursuit of physical culture. That’s quite popular nowadays, isn’t it? Exercise, developing the body. Or it could merely denote a certain selectness and exclusivity. Douglas never went into the specifics, however. He remained tight-lipped, as if sworn to secrecy. What I do know is that when he returned from his fortnight’s absence, he had been inducted into The Cultured’s ranks. He admitted that much to me and said how thrilled he had been to meet and mingle with some of the nation’s top men and women, as an equal.

“He looked happy, and I was just glad that he had come home again, so I refrained from delving any more deeply into the matter. I had no wish to spark another row. I crossed my fingers and hoped he knew what he was doing and all would be well.

“It was following Douglas’s second attendance at a gathering of The Cultured that he began to change.”

“In what way change?” said Sherlock Holmes.

“He grew withdrawn,” said Mrs Maberley. “His mood became morose. Where previously he had been light, now he seemed heavy. You know how cartoons in Punch depict someone walking around with a raincloud over his head? That was my Douglas. He would mope around the house, scarcely talking to me or even acknowledging my presence. Only a fool would fail to see that something was preying on his mind.

“I tried to find out what was bothering him so. I broached the subject a number of times, tentatively, without success. Douglas simply told me, in no uncertain terms, to leave him be. I was, he said, better off not knowing.

“It got worse. He stopped eating, and he could not sit still. He would forever be jiggling a leg up and down or tapping his fingers.”

“The signs of deep-seated anxiety,” I said. “Perhaps depression too.”

“He was markedly less enamoured with Isadora Klein, what’s more,” Mrs Maberley said. “That was the one blessing about the whole wretched situation. He no longer spoke of her in glowing, rapturous terms. Rather, if he mentioned the woman at all, it would be in a muted tone, a lament rather than an encomium. From that, I could only infer that he and she were on the outs, once and for all.

“I assumed that Douglas would get over it in time. His broken heart would mend, and he would take up the Cairo appointment, which remained open. The future would be bright.

“Then a letter came from Mrs Klein. I do not know its contents, but it was evidently a summons. No sooner had Douglas read it than he went to her, like a dog when its master whistles. He may not wholly have wanted to go, judging by the gloominess of his expression as he left the house, but while relations between him and Mrs Klein might have soured, her hooks were still in him, sunk deep.

“That was the night he returned home in a state of the utmost agitation. The night he…”

“Yes,” said Holmes softly. “I shall not require you to relate that experience yet again.”

“He used a scarf she had given him,” Mrs Maberley said. “Another detail I shared with the London News reporter and he took great delight in dwelling on. A beautiful long cashmere scarf. A love token. I can only think Douglas chose it as the method of his self-termination in order to show how much he despised Mrs Klein in that moment.”

“Or, alternatively, how much he loved her.”

“Yes. I suppose that is possible. If I had to choose between the two interpretations, however, I would prefer mine.”

“Understandably,” Holmes said. “And just to make it quite clear, you are sure you overheard Douglas, amid his ravings that night, talk about a room?”

“Yes.”

“And ‘no future’.”

“Yes.”

“You do not know what he might have meant by that?”

“Not for the life of me.”

“Very well. But he definitely said ‘me go’?”

“Ungrammatical as it was, that was the phrase,” said Mrs Maberley, with certitude.

Holmes placed his hands on his knees, a gesture of finality. “Then you have given me all I need for now. I am grateful for your time, madam.”

Mrs Maberley rose to depart. “Do you think there is more to this than there seems, Mr Holmes?” she asked.

“I cannot give a categorical answer to that just yet. There are one or two singular aspects to the affair which would appear to warrant further enquiry, but on the face of it, I am inclined to believe that your son was the victim of a cold-hearted woman’s callousness; nothing more, nothing less. She ensnared him in a game of emotions which he simply did not have the wherewithal to play, and it destroyed him.”

The mourning mother heaved a heartfelt sigh. “I feared you would say that. I would dearly love to see Isadora Klein punished for what she did to my Douglas, but no laws were broken. Only he was.”

* * *

I showed Mrs Maberley out, and upon my return to our rooms found Holmes looking ebullient. His grey eyes glinted, and he was sitting with his legs drawn up and his arms wrapped around them, literally hugging himself.

“What do you make of it, Watson?” said he.

“Not as much as you make of it, if your jubilant tone is any indication.”

“You have adopted your habitual mystified air, but really, you must be intrigued by the possible Mi-Go allusion.”

“The word ‘possible’ is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence,” I said. “I would substitute ‘tenuous’.”

“And Harrow Weald?”

“What about Harrow Weald?”

“Cast your mind back just a few short months,” said Holmes. “Where was Shinwell Johnson’s brougham when we finally caught up with it?”

“Harlesden.”

“Where specifically in Harlesden?”

“On the Harrow Road.”

“Heading northward. And what lies at the northern end of the Harrow Road?”

“Well, a fair number of places,” I said, “Harrow Weald among them.”

“Exactly. Now, this could, of course, be mere coincidence, but it is a noteworthy correlation all the same.”

“Oh, come off it, Holmes!” I chided. “Are you seriously suggesting that Johnson was taking Billy, and likewise took those three girls before him, to this Three Gables place? That he deposited them with Isadora Klein for some reason?”

“With Isadora Klein and her so-called The Cultured, whoever they may be. Yes, I am suggesting just that. Now cast your mind back further – much further – to a certain Dr Felder.”

“Dr Ulrich Felder? The fellow who brought those corpses back from the dead at Highgate?”

“Remember him?”

“Even after all these years, how could I forget?”

“From whom did Felder state, in his journal, that he had received the fungus he used to create his ‘fungal reanimates’?” Holmes asked.

I racked my brains. “A woman,” I said. “Definitely a woman.”

“Well done. You have ruled out half the human race. See if you can narrow it down further.”

“I have it!” I declared. “It was an ‘Amerikanische Frau’.”

Holmes delivered a slow, ironic handclap. “Excellent. Now tell me, who fits that description?”

“You were always of the view that it referred to Irene Adler.”

“But could it not refer just as easily to Isadora Klein? She is indisputably both a woman and from America.”

“Well, I suppose so. This all seems like a bit of a stretch.”

“Perchance it is,” said Holmes. “Consider, however, that Mrs Klein was formerly married to a German and that Felder himself was German. The Teutonic link could be another coincidence but could equally be another noteworthy correlation. I would need to do some homework and check the dates, but it is not beyond the realms of feasibility that Isadora Klein was living in Germany at the same time Dr Felder was, and that the twain met.”

“Yes, because Germany is a tiny nation made up of a handful of people, and everyone there knows everyone else.”

“Sarcasm ill befits you, Watson.”

“Fanciful speculation ill befits you, Holmes.”

My friend dismissed my comment with a sniff. “There is a third noteworthy correlation.”

“Or coincidence, as we sensible folk call it.”

“The name ‘The Cultured’,” said Holmes. “What does one do when propagating tiny organisms such as fungal spores in a growth medium? What is the term for the process? As a clinician, you should know.”

“Culturing.”

“Voilà. The Cultured. Nothing to do with highbrow pursuits or building up muscle, as Mrs Maberley posited. Rather, a sly, sidelong reference to fungus, with which class of organisms the Outside Things have such a close relationship.”

I could not suppress a scornful laugh. “This is preposterous stuff, Holmes.”

“Is it?”

“You cannot surely be asking me to accept that these disparate facts are all linked.”

“I am asking you to entertain it as a possibility.”

“You are seeing things that are not there.”

“What I am seeing, Watson, is an assemblage of gossamer threads that seem to run in different directions but actually converge to form an intricate web. Here, at last, may lie the culmination of those various cases, all of which have carried associations with the Mi-Go but each of which has resolved nothing save its own individual mystery. Over the years, from Dr Felder to Black Peter Carey to Josiah Amberley, we have received glimpses of a conspiracy, yet when we have chased it, it has proved as elusive as any mirage. Now, courtesy of Mrs Maberley, and to a lesser degree Baron Gruner and Shinwell Johnson, we have a strong lead to pursue, one that may take us right into the heart of the thing. What if The Cultured are the cabal of Mi-Go allies whom we presume, with some justification, to exist? The group Irene Adler works for? The people who stymied the work of Professor Mellingford and his ilk? The people who set up Amberley’s Shub-Niggurath cult as a decoy, to dupe me?”

“If that were so,” I said, “it would be remarkable.”

“It would,” said Holmes. “It would point to fifteen years’ worth of machinations, across which you and I have flown like a skimmed stone across a lake, touching down repeatedly but only disturbing the surface.”

“And now, after so long, you have the opportunity of making a splash.”

“At the very least, Watson, if there is the remotest chance that investigating The Cultured leads to uncovering the fates of Kitty Winter and the other two girls whom Gruner entrusted to Shinwell Johnson’s tender care, it would be remiss of me not to take it.”

He knew I could not gainsay that argument, and I conceded defeat with a bow and a shrug of the shoulders.

“To that end,” said Holmes, “I propose to resurrect one of my alter egos.”

“Which? The asthmatic master mariner? Captain Basil? Escott the plumber? One of your multidenominational array of priests?”

“No, it will be a fellow I use sparingly. I am fairly certain you haven’t met him, or even heard of him.”

Holmes fell into a contemplative reverie.

“Hum. Yes,” said he to himself. “I do believe he is just the man for the job.”

* * *

A month later, a new patient showed up at my practice complaining of lumbago and a touch of arthritis.

“Please, sit down,” I said as he walked into my consulting room. He was a slope-shouldered, pot-bellied fellow with longish hair, a drooping, pendulous nose and, if his pink eyes and florid, broken-veined complexion were anything to go by, a clear penchant for strong drink. I had treated many a bon viveur in my time and knew almost any of his ailments could be ameliorated by an improvement in diet and a less sedentary lifestyle. I felt safe in predicting, too, that in addition to his other complaints he would have incipient, undiagnosed gout and was at high risk of developing kidney stones.

“It’s Mr Pike, isn’t it?” I said, checking the notes on my register which my receptionist had prepared for me.

“Langdale Pike, that’s me,” said the patient. The voice was as louche and languid as the rest of him, as though clear enunciation demanded altogether too much effort. “You come highly recommended, Doctor, and the fact that you can afford a general practice on Queen Anne Street, just a stone’s throw from Harley Street, proves it. I have every reason to think that, with you, I am in good hands.”

“Now then, according to my receptionist’s notes, you suffer from lumbago.”

“Terrible twinges in the lower back, Doctor, every time I sit down or stand up. Like being stabbed with a knitting needle.”

“And arthritis.”

“The fingers of my right hand, Doctor.” Pike wafted them in the air like a particularly nonchalant orchestra conductor. “Sometimes they ache so much I can hardly hold my brandy balloon.”

“Tell me, Mr Pike,” I said, “what is your profession?”

“Oh, I do a little of this, a little of that. I am, you might say, a purveyor of delicacies. I haunt the gentlemen’s clubs and pick up the latest hearsay and society tittle-tattle, which I feed to certain columnists. It earns me a living. A very decent one. Four figures.”

I jotted down the information in my casebook. “And do you take any form of regular exercise?”

“If you call gentle perambulations around the Pall Mall area exercise, then yes.”

“Very good. Now, before I give you a physical examination, I have one more question. Would you mind telling me how long you have experienced the symptoms of being a consulting detective in disguise?”

Langdale Pike looked aghast. “I beg your pardon?”

I stuck to my guns. “I am asking how long you intend to maintain the pretence that you are not Sherlock Holmes, before you relent and admit the truth.”

Pike studied me with the air of someone rueing his decision to commit his health to the care of a man who was plainly quite mad.

Then he burst out laughing, and it was laughter I knew very well indeed.

“Watson, Watson, Watson!” Langdale Pike declared, in Sherlock Holmes’s voice. “Well done! I thought it would take you much longer.”

I felt a mixture of satisfaction and relief. “You underestimated me.”

“Clearly. What gave it away? Is it my eyes? I have reddened them with drops of salt water in hopes that that would draw attention away from the distinctive grey of the irises.”

“I shall be honest with you,” I said. “I have been playing the odds.”

“How do you mean?”

“I knew you might pull a stunt like this. You have form for it. You present yourself to me as an alter ego and wait for me to catch on. That time you masqueraded as Mycroft, to name but one.”

“My yardstick for a disguise is that if it can fool Watson, who knows me intimately, it can fool anyone.”

“Langdale Pike is the third new male patient to have come to my door in the past month,” I said. “With both of the others, either of whom could conceivably have been you, I made an offhand allusion to Sherlock Holmes in order to see how they reacted. One had not heard the name and displayed not a flicker of interest. The other confessed to being a fan of both you and my writing, and indeed added, somewhat shamefacedly, that this was in large part why he had chosen me to be his physician.”

“You were a lot more confident in your approach to Langdale Pike.”

“Holmes, you have named the fellow after the Langdale Pikes, a set of mountains in the Lake District. As aliases go, it practically screams ‘invented’.”

“In my view,” said Holmes, “it appears so contrived that it could only be real. Pater and Mater Pike were such lovers of the Lake District, they named their darling boy after one of its most scenic assets.”

“The clincher for me is the fact that Langdale Pike is so patently modelled on your brother. His mannerisms, his drawl, his status as a perennial clubman – all characteristics of the mighty Mycroft.”

Holmes nodded. “True, but then the best impersonations are drawn from life. I salute you, old friend. Where others’ perceptiveness dulls with age, yours grows ever more acute.”

“It’s your half-hour,” I said, tapping the register with my pen. “The appointment is bought and paid for. Tell me what Langdale Pike has been up to and what facts he has gleaned about Isadora Klein and The Cultured.”

“Give me a cigarette,” said Holmes, “and I shall.”

Blowing out a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling, Holmes explained that he had looked into Mrs Klein’s background, first by trawling the newspaper archives and then by roving clubland, as Langdale Pike, and artfully bringing her name into discussions with people he met there. He had learned whom she was known to consort with and then made overtures to various of those persons.

“Her immediate circle constitutes a veritable Who’s Who of British society,” he said. “Politicians, lawmakers, captains of industry, landed gentry, the cream of the artistic fraternity – you name them, she knows them. Nobody has a bad word to say about her. She hosts parties of extraordinary magnitude and lavishness, throwing the late Mr Klein’s millions around like confetti. She is by all accounts an accomplished pianist and singer, she paints a very decent watercolour, and her beauty is remarked upon by all and sundry. Half the husbands she is acquainted with are in love with her, and half the wives insanely jealous of her.”

Holmes had cultivated a friendship with someone who was especially close to Mrs Klein, a man called Morley Babington.

“The theatre impresario,” I said. “He puts on everything from Shakespeare to ‘Adelphi screamers’. I saw his Lear a few years ago. It was hugely popular, but a little too grand guignol for my tastes.”

“Mr Babington deems Langdale Pike great company,” said Holmes. “Pike is a fund of outrageous anecdotes, is as much of a trencherman and imbiber as Babington himself is, and revels in his bachelordom. The pair have gone to an exhibition of Greek sculpture together, and have attended the ballet and – ballet’s antithesis – a boxing match. Babington even invited Pike to join him at the Turkish bathhouse. Much as I enjoy a Turkish bath, obviously I could not go as Pike, not when I have this padding on.” Holmes patted his protuberant stomach. “Were I to emerge from the changing room wearing just a towel, revealing my usual lean physique…”

“You would have a hard time explaining where all the weight had vanished to.”

“Precisely. Not to mention the problem of keeping all this face makeup intact in a bathhouse’s humid atmosphere. I excused myself from that obligation, to Babington’s disappointment, but in every other respect relations between him and Pike have gone swimmingly. Furthermore, I have managed to work hints about the Outside Things and Yuggoth into our conversations, and this has yielded results. Babington was moved to observe that I seemed well versed in some rather recondite subject matter, to which I responded that I was merely a dabbler, someone who devotes a few hours of his spare time to studying other planets and the denizens thereof. It was an interest, I told him, that was piqued by H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which I had read when it was serialised a few years ago in Pearson’s. ‘If there is life on Mars,’ I said to him, ‘why not on other planets of the solar system? And in those I include the putative ninth planet that is said to orbit beyond Neptune.’ By returning to this topic intermittently, without appearing too insistent, I have convinced Babington that I would be worthy of introduction to The Cultured.”

“Good Lord!”

“Oh, he has not stated as much, not explicitly,” Holmes said. “He has not even mentioned The Cultured by name. He has, however, mentioned Isadora Klein, telling me I must meet her. ‘You and she would have much in common,’ he said, ‘much to talk about.’ And so, to cut a long story short, this very weekend I am to travel with Babington to The Three Gables in Harrow Weald, there to be ushered into the presence of the great lady. Or rather, Pike is.”

“I shall be curious to learn how it all pans out,” I said.

“You will be the first to know, Watson,” said Holmes. “This may lead to nothing. Equally, it may be that I have taken the first steps to infiltrating a secret society of Mi-Go sympathisers. A risky gambit, perhaps, but then what worthwhile undertaking is not?”

* * *

According to Holmes, the party at The Three Gables was a glittering occasion. The guest list would not have shamed a function at Buckingham Palace, and the copiousness with which the wine flowed was rivalled only by the abundance of the accompanying canapés, ferried among the partygoers by a horde of scurrying, livery-clad servants. Hugh Enes Blackmore, the noted Scottish tenor, was prevailed upon to sing a selection of comic songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and further entertainment was provided by a juggler whose act climaxed with him keeping five carving knives in the air while balancing on a unicycle.

Morley Babington was pleased to show off his friend Langdale Pike, like a child with a new bauble. He squired him around the room, making introductions. Pike, for his part, proved excellent company, eliciting scandalised gasps and gales of laughter from his interlocutors with some rather risqué snippets of gossip. “I cannot help myself,” he was heard to remark more than once. “I am the very Devil when it comes to rumourmongering.”

Isadora Klein herself did not put in an appearance until well after an hour into the proceedings. She arrived escorted by a fellow who could not have seemed more out of place in such surroundings. He was tall and brawny, wearing a bowler hat and a loud-checked suit, and amid a sea of white faces his coal-dark skin stood out in marked contrast.

Holmes recognised him in an instant. It was Steve Dixie, one-time prizefighter, with the flattened nose and cauliflower ear to prove it. In recent years Dixie had moved out of the boxing ring and into the criminal underworld, where he earned his keep as a ruffian-for-hire, ever ready to collect overdue debts, deliver blackmail messages in person, and intimidate witnesses into silence. What his menacing, heavy-browed features and bulky physique alone couldn’t achieve, his massive, knotty fists could. He was also the prime suspect in the killing of a young ne’er-do-well called Perkins during an altercation outside the Holborn Bar the previous year, and while he had an alibi for the crime, it was hardly cast-iron. Holmes had taken only a passing interest in the case, however, since anything that thinned the ranks of London’s felons didn’t, in his view, require his services.

The presence of this hulking brute of a man at a high-class drinks party was made all the more incongruous by virtue of the fact that throughout the evening Steve Dixie scarcely left Mrs Klein’s side. While she did the rounds, greeting all and sundry, clasping hands, kissing cheeks, Dixie loitered nearby, never more than half a dozen yards from her. His eyes were watchful and wary, constantly roving. Holmes knew a bodyguard when he saw one.

Why Isadora Klein felt she needed such protection – and at a party in her own home, no less – he could not fathom. Who among these carousing sophisticates might wish her harm? On the contrary, they fawned over her, the women curtseying before her as low as they might before a monarch, the men grinning like apes when she turned her gaze on them. She glided through their midst, a stately, glorious galleon to their little bobbing tugboats.

When it came Langdale Pike’s turn to be graced by Mrs Klein’s attention, he kowtowed just like the rest.

“This is Mr Pike,” said Morley Babington. “You know, the one I told you about.”

“Oh yes!” declared Mrs Klein in a sharp New England accent with just a hint of South America softening its edges. “Mr Pike. A pleasure.”

“The pleasure, Mrs Klein, is all mine.”

“Call me Isadora.”

“If you insist. And you must call me Langdale.”

Her hand rested softly for a moment in Holmes’s. It was smooth and cool and felt feather-light. Steve Dixie, meanwhile, hovered in the background. Holmes was careful to keep the prizefighter in the periphery of his vision.

“Morley tells me you and he are very sympathetic, Langdale,” said Mrs Klein. “He is glad to have met a man who shares his interests.”

“It was kind of him to bring me,” said Holmes.

“You are more than welcome here. Any friend of Morley’s is a friend of mine.”

“He has told me several times how wonderful your parties are, and now that I’ve seen one with my own eyes, I have to agree.”

“This? This is nothing, Langdale. We have smaller yet far more exciting occasions than this, don’t we, Morley?”

“We do, Isadora dear.”

She fixed Holmes with a pair of dazzling dark eyes. Their scrutiny was intense, and in that moment he felt wholly unmanned, as though he were being mesmerised and his will was being sapped from him. When he told me this, I remarked that for a man as impervious to feminine charms as Sherlock Holmes, it was quite an admission.

“I understand,” said Mrs Klein, lowering her voice somewhat, “that you have turned your gaze outward, beyond the confines of the Earth.”

“Morley mentioned that, did he?”

“Do you think, perhaps, that gazes from other worlds are turned on ours?”

“It is not beyond the realms of possibility. Only human arrogance would deny the likelihood of races other than our own existing somewhere in the solar system, or in the wider universe for that matter.”

“Do you wonder if they wish to be our friends or our enemies?”

“That, I would say, depends on many factors,” Holmes replied. “One is whether we wish to be their friends. It would be a case for diplomacy, I reckon. As in all encounters between civilisations, if both are willing to be accommodating towards each other, then marvellous things may be accomplished. On the other hand, if there is resistance on either side, there will be friction and possibly conflict.”

“A fascinating answer, Langdale.” She turned to Babington again. “I like him, Morley. I like him a lot.”

“I hoped you might,” said Babington.

She rested her hand in Holmes’s once more. “It was nice to make your acquaintance, sir. Perhaps we shall meet another time.”

“I look forward to it,” said Holmes.

Mrs Klein threw a knowing glance at Babington, then moved on to another guest, with Dixie in tow. The boxer scowled at Holmes as he passed him, and Holmes made sure that Langdale Pike reacted in a sufficiently daunted manner, grimacing and shrinking away.

“You’ve made a good impression on her,” Babington said, patting Holmes’s shoulder.

“If not so much on her shadow,” Holmes said, gesturing at Dixie. “That look he just gave me… I’m fairly quaking.”

“Steve? Oh, you mustn’t worry yourself about him. He’s like that with everyone. He growls and bares his teeth, but never bites.”

“Why does she keep someone like that around?”

“He makes her feel safe,” said Babington. “When you are a very rich woman, you never know who you can trust. With Steve at her side, Isadora can be sure that nobody is going to try and take advantage of her.”

“But he’s so…”

“So thuggish? But that’s just it. Sometimes you need riff-raff in order to keep the riff-raff at bay.”

Holmes chuckled, and the remainder of the party passed without incident. Carriages arrived promptly at midnight, and he was back at Baker Street by one thirty.

He did not hear from Morley Babington for several days, and then a note arrived, lavender scented, on mauve stationery, written in immaculate copperplate.

“Isadora has requested your presence at another gathering, the weekend after next,” it read. “This one is a dinner party, for a select few. She tells me she thinks you will find the company congenial and your temperament will align nicely with theirs. Do say you’ll go.”

“And will you go?” I asked Holmes, after he had shown me the note.

“Naturally,” said he. “What have I got to lose? If I am barking up the wrong tree, so be it. At least the catering will undoubtedly be first-rate, the wine likewise.”

I left him in order to meet my fiancée for lunch, where our wedding plans were due to be the main topic of discussion. On my way out I passed Mrs Hudson in the hallway. She was standing on a chair, dusting the chandelier.

I hailed her. “How are you today, madam?”

Our landlady pivoted round, dropping her feather duster and almost falling off the chair herself.

“My goodness,” I said. “I am sorry. I did not mean to startle you.”

I held out a hand and helped her down to the floor.

“It’s my fault,” she said, bending to retrieve the duster. “I was miles away. When doing housework, I sometimes fall into a reverie, you see.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Quite sure.”

“I have never known you to be nervous, that’s all.”

“Everything is fine, Doctor,” the woman said sternly, sounding more like her usual self.

“I am glad to hear it.”

“Perhaps… Perhaps it’s because I’m concerned about Mr Holmes.”

“About Holmes? Why?”

“He is working so very hard at present. I see him heading out time and time again, all got up in that fancy disguise of his. When he comes back, he often smells of alcohol, and at mealtimes he’s barely touching the food I put in front of him. I suppose I should be used to his behaviour by now, but this seems excessive even for him.”

“I can’t reveal much about his current case,” I said, “but I can tell you it happens to entail plenty of dining out and hobnobbing with the smart set.”

“Nice for some.”

“Which rather flies in the face of his image as a solitary, ascetic creature of intellect, don’t you think?”

Mrs Hudson grimaced. “If you ever write one of your stories about it, you’d better leave out the socialising part. Your readers will not believe you.”

“You would be surprised, my dear woman,” I said, “just how much I do leave out of my stories.”

And with that, I bade her farewell and hurried to the restaurant where my soon-to-be-wife awaited.

* * *

Langdale Pike shared a cab to Harrow Weald with Morley Babington, and they arrived at The Three Gables just as dusk was falling. Last time, the great, sprawling house had been fully lit, every window aglow, as though the building itself had put on its finery and wished to impress. This time only a few ground-floor rooms were illuminated, so that the upper bulk of the house loomed in empty silhouette against the purpling sky. It seemed to signal that tonight’s event was going to be a more low-key affair.

In the hallway, the guests’ outer garments were taken from them by a gaunt, pinch-faced housemaid. Babington addressed her as Susan and made a point of bantering with her, even though she was plainly a woman who lacked quick-wittedness and a sense of humour.

“You are looking especially lovely this evening, Susan,” said he. “Have you done something different with your hair?”

“It is pinned down under a cap as always, Mr Babington. Nothing about it has changed.”

“And that perfume you have on – is it rosewater?”

“I use carbolic soap in my daily toilet, nothing else.”

“Would that we could all be as naturally decorous as you.”

“I really don’t know what you mean, Mr Babington.”

When it came Holmes’s turn to hand her his overcoat, Babington said, “Susan, this is Mr Langdale Pike. If all goes well, you will be seeing a lot more of him.”

“Charmed I’m sure, sir,” the housemaid said to Holmes. Then she added, “Langdale Pike. I swear I know that name from somewhere. Yes. I remember. I went on a walking holiday once, in the Lake District.”

“And encountered the Langdale Pikes,” said Holmes.

“That’s it, sir.”

“My parents named me after them. Their surname happening to be Pike, they thought it a fond tribute to the range of crags that so enchanted them on their honeymoon.”

Susan’s puckered mouth did an odd little something which, in hindsight, Holmes realised was its version of a smile.

“Lofty but not insurmountable, those mountains are,” she said. “They look like they’re hard to penetrate, but really there’s less to them than meets the eye.”

“An interesting observation.”

“But no less true for that. I hope you have an enjoyable time, sir.”

A large conservatory appended to the east wing of the house was the venue for the dinner. Brilliantly candlelit, it accommodated a long table with place settings for twenty. The cutlery was solid gold, the crockery Limoges porcelain, the glassware thumb-cut lead crystal. Most of the dinner guests were already present, and the last few filed in behind Holmes and Babington. There was mingling and some subdued chitchat, during which Holmes took stock of the complement. They were an odd mix, consisting of lesser-known society figures, here a matron fond of charitable causes, there a wayward member of the nobility, with a couple of academics thrown in, plus a goateed philosopher, a controversial pamphleteer, and a playwright whose productions, long on polemic but short on drama, were never well attended. If anything characterised them all, it was earnestness. They belonged to the class of well-meaning do-gooders, the type who talked a lot about social change and sometimes even effected it.

The moment Isadora Klein swept in, the mood in the room became animated and attentive.

“So good to see you all,” said Mrs Klein. “Let us be seated and commence, without further ado.”

Accompanying her, as ever, was Steve Dixie, who took up a position in one corner where he had a clear view of the entire conservatory. He would remain there throughout the meal, glowering around, the proverbial spectre at the feast.

There were place cards at every setting, and Holmes, somewhat to his surprise, found that Langdale Pike was seated at their hostess’s right hand. Babington was down at the far end of the table but evinced no jealousy of Pike, only pride and delight that the man he had introduced into their company should be accorded such a privileged position.

In no time Holmes and Isadora Klein were deep in conversation, the hostess wanting to learn everything she could about him. Holmes had devised an in-depth history for Langdale Pike, starting with the aforementioned tale of his parents’ honeymoon in the Lake District and proceeding from there, through a difficult schooling and failed stints at the Inns of Court and the Home Office, to his current self-administered vocation, which was, as he put it, being “the receiving-station as well as the transmitter for all the gossip of the metropolis”. In that respect, Pike’s life paralleled Mycroft Holmes’s almost exactly, albeit in negative. Where Holmes senior had been an academic high achiever and had ascended effortlessly through the law and politics to carve out an indispensable niche for himself at the heart of government, Pike had accomplished little save for lining his own pockets through the airing of others’ dirty laundry.

Holmes managed to steer the talk around to Mrs Klein’s own life, and while she was a great deal less forthcoming than Pike, he ascertained that she had left New England in the mid-eighties after meeting Herr Manfred Klein there. The German sugar magnate had been looking to extend his business interests into the United States and made a fair few lucrative deals during his trip, but the real prize he brought home with him to Europe was the hand in marriage of Miss Isadora Maria Pereira Dos Santos.

The couple took up residence in Heidelberg, where Klein’s main factory lay, and for a time they were perfectly happy, until Klein was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel. Surgery was performed and seemed successful, but the cancer recurred, this time inoperable. Mrs Klein nursed her husband through his final, terrible months and was at his bedside, holding his hand, when he breathed his last.

Her eyes moistened as she related this sad memory, and Langdale Pike was the epitome of concern, canting his head and making soothing, solicitous noises.

However, Holmes’s ears had pricked up at the mention of Heidelberg, and more so at the mention of cancer.

“I trust,” said he, “that you had a good doctor to see you through those dark days.”

“Oh, the best, Langdale. One of Germany’s foremost oncologists.”

“His name?”

“Felder. Ulrich Felder. He was the one who carried out the bowel resection on Manfred, and then attended to him when the cancer came back.”

Willpower was a quality Sherlock Holmes possessed in abundance, but it took every ounce he had to keep a look of triumph from his face. Here was indisputable confirmation that Mrs Klein had known Dr Felder. It was a near certainty that she was Felder’s Amerikanische Frau.

He pressed further, in order to confirm it. “You must surely have been grateful to him for the help he gave you and your poor husband.”

“How could I not be?” came the reply. “I demonstrated it by supporting him in his research.”

“Financially?”

“How else? I have no medical knowledge. It is not as if I could have volunteered as his laboratory assistant.”

“It just strikes me that one could have helped him out in other ways,” said Holmes, “perhaps by recommending patients to him or alerting him to potential new cures one might come across.”

“I suppose one could have,” said Mrs Klein.

“What has become of the fellow anyway? Has he made progress eradicating the disease?”

“Dr Felder is no longer with us, alas. He moved to London not long after my husband passed away, and died tragically in a house fire. Any oncological advances he made died with him.”

“That seems a shame.”

Mrs Klein laughed lightly. “This conversation has gone off at rather a tangent, don’t you think, Langdale?”

“Forgive me, Isadora. I have an enquiring mind.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t think I’m not wise to your game.” Her tone was teasing but with a hint of steel to it.

“Game?”

“You are frank about your role as a purveyor of gossip. I’m minded to think you are trying to extract some out of me.”

“Heaven forfend!”

“I should warn you, anything you see or hear within these walls is sacrosanct. It goes no further than here. Do I make myself clear?”

“I would never dream of being so indiscreet.”

“You may even have asked yourself why I’ve allowed a fellow as loose-lipped as you to cross my threshold. And,” she said, indicating their fellow diners, “let him be surrounded by such a rich seam of potential gossip-column fodder. Do you think I am foolish?”

“I think you are anything but.”

“Then perhaps you’re wondering what I see in you. Why are you, of all people, part of an assemblage like this?”

“You mean to say I don’t belong in the company of intellectuals and philanthropists and idealists?” Holmes said with genial mock-offence.

“On the face of it, no,” said Mrs Klein. “But Morley senses there is more to you than a cynical clubman, and I have faith in his judgement.”

“My fascination with hypothetical alien races must stand me in good stead too, surely. I recall our conversation on that topic meeting with your approval.”

“So it did. And you are affable company and seem to have a good heart. For all that, I reckon it’s a good idea to have you right here at my side, where I can keep my beady eye on you and, if need be, use my considerable influence to curb you.”

“The old adage: keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

“That only applies if you choose to be my enemy, Langdale. I would much rather have you as a friend. A trusted one.”

Now she was all warmth and amicability again. She stroked Holmes’s forearm, and her eyes were enthrallingly limpid.

“You can definitely count on me, Isadora,” said he.

“I know I can.” She uttered a high, musical laugh. “And you will see how much, after the meal’s end.”

Holmes had the distinct sense that he had just been tested and had passed. The answers given by Langdale Pike had been satisfactory and had earned him Mrs Klein’s seal of approval.

Now, as course after course was served to the table, each a culinary masterpiece, and the wineglasses were constantly replenished, Holmes permitted himself to feel that he was making headway and that it was only a matter of time before the identities of The Cultured stood revealed. He was fairly confident, in fact, that they comprised the men and women in this very conservatory. There was just one tiny worm of disquiet gnawing at him. What exactly had Mrs Klein meant, “after the meal’s end”? What would be happening then?

* * *

Postprandial cigars and coffee did the rounds. Then the serving staff withdrew. There was no mention of the women decamping to another room and leaving the men at the table to discuss masculine things, as was traditional. For several minutes, the dinner continued as before, but Holmes detected an atmosphere of anticipation that hadn’t been there earlier.

At last Mrs Klein gestured to Steve Dixie, who disappeared into the house and returned bearing a small rosewood casket with a lock and other fittings made of brass.

Mrs Klein tapped her port glass with a fork, and a hush fell over the gathering.

“We have a newcomer among us, my friends,” said she, with the tiniest of nods towards Holmes. “For those that don’t know him, he is Langdale Pike, and although this is his first time in our company, I have vetted him to my satisfaction and feel it is safe to welcome him into our number. Any objections?”

Heads all around the table were shaken. Either everyone had implicit faith in Mrs Klein’s discernment or no one dared contradict her.

“Langdale is a prime candidate for membership,” Morley Babington opined. “His interests are broadly aligned with ours. He would make a valuable addition to our group.”

“I think so too,” said Mrs Klein. “Therefore, nem. con., it is agreed. Langdale Pike shall be brought into the fold. If, that is, you are willing, Langdale?”

“I don’t see how I cannot be,” Holmes replied. “This is all very exciting. I really have no idea what is happening. I only know that something extraordinary is unfolding, and I am curious to see what it is.”

“That is just the attitude we like,” said Mrs Klein. “Open-mindedness. Enthusiasm. A willingness to venture into the unknown.”

Holmes rubbed his hands together in a show of eagerness. “What larks!” he declared.

Isadora Klein rose to her feet, and her manner became serious and authoritative. “Ladies. Gentlemen,” she said. “Stand ready to reveal yourselves. We are The Cultured. We have sworn loyalty to a cause. Now, in the presence of this uninitiated man, let us display the mark of that loyalty.”

Solemnly, with great ceremony, she unbuttoned one cuff of her long-sleeved dress and rolled the sleeve up to the elbow. Upon the underside of her forearm there was a circular patch of redness roughly the size of a tuppence piece. It looked like a very localised skin rash, a blemish on an otherwise flawless limb.

Other diners likewise exposed parts of their bodies. Predominantly it was the arm, but one man undid his dickey and bared his chest, while a woman adjusted her neckline to reveal her clavicle. Each bore a patch of redness akin to their hostess’s.

“Give one another the sign of acknowledgement,” Mrs Klein said.

Everyone at the table leaned towards his or her neighbour. Mrs Klein herself turned to the dinner guest on her left, extending her arm to him. He bent over so that his rash was directly adjacent to hers. As Holmes watched, the pair of red circles began to shift, as though awakened by mutual proximity. Each dispersed itself swirlingly across its owner’s skin like wind-blown dust, settling to form a pattern, an asymmetrical tangle of straight lines and curlicues that Holmes had no trouble recognising. It was the sigil of the goddess Shub-Niggurath. He had seen it several times over the course of his life, perhaps most notably when it had been scrawled on the wall of Josiah Amberley’s strong-room.

Every dinner guest performed this little ritual with the neighbour on either side, except Mrs Klein and the woman on Holmes’s right, for the obvious reason that the man between them lacked their queer adornment. Then all the guests resumed their normal seated positions. Similarly, the sigils returned to their former state as circular red rashes, and clothing was rearranged to cover up the marks.

“I am not sure what I have just witnessed,” said Holmes in a marvelling tone. “Did those things just move? Or have I perhaps drunk a little too much?”

“Your eyes did not deceive you, Langdale,” said Mrs Klein. “Each of us has been granted this special mark. It tingles when another of our kind is close by, like an alarm bell, and we can then secretly confirm our shared fealty by holding the marks next to each other.”

“But what is it?”

“A fungal infection, deliberately introduced beneath the skin.”

Holmes blinked rapidly as though in perplexity. “No. I mean, yes. I can see how it might be that. But actually I am asking you what is the – the shape it becomes?”

“That,” said Mrs Klein, “is a special, magical symbol. It represents a deity known as Shub-Niggurath.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The name is quite a mouthful, I admit. It is unlikely you have heard of Shub-Niggurath. Not many have. Suffice it to say she is an ancient, powerful entity, worshipped by certain friends of ours.”

“Friends?”

Mrs Klein bestowed a forgiving look upon him. “You are being initiated into a number of mysteries at once, Langdale. It is a lot to take in.”

“It is, Isadora, and I am trying my best. You call yourselves The Cultured, did you say?”

“That is us,” said Mrs Klein. “These present here, and a few others besides.”

“Are you some sort of secret society?”

“In a sense. We have banded together to pursue a simple but essential goal: securing the future of mankind.”

“That all sounds extraordinarily noble, not to say idealistic.” Holmes felt that Langdale Pike ought to exhibit at least a modicum of incredulity at this point. It would be suspicious otherwise. The man was supposed to be an incorrigible cynic, after all, who profited from people’s capacity for hypocrisy and self-delusion. “And you think you have the means of achieving your aims?”

“Very much so,” said Mrs Klein. “Remember when we spoke the other day, you and I, and our discussion strayed to races from other worlds?”

“I do.”

“Those friends I just mentioned are from another world, and we are in regular communication with them.”

“Bless me!” Holmes exclaimed, clutching hand to heart. “It is possible? Can it be? But how?”

“I am about to show you,” Mrs Klein said. “They are wise, benevolent creatures who wish not only to forge an alliance with the people of Earth but to live here among us, guiding us to a better, brighter tomorrow. They hope to end our warlike ways and engender worldwide harmony.”

“They sound positively angelic.”

“Nothing so ethereal as that. They are living beings, just like you or me. As different from us biologically as can be imagined, but flesh-and-blood entities nonetheless. In terms of philosophy and ethics they are more evolved than us, but that is only to our advantage. We can learn from them and, in tandem with them, accomplish great things.”

“Do they have a name, this race of paragons?” Holmes enquired.

“Mi-Go,” said Mrs Klein. “Their planet is called Yuggoth. And now I intend to converse with them and reaffirm the bond that has been established between them and us Cultured.”

She clicked her fingers, and Steve Dixie stepped forward with his rosewood casket. By that stage of the evening, the candles were burning low. Several had gone out altogether, and the flames of the remainder guttered in their lumpen beds of melted wax. Their fitful light scarcely held back the dark outside the windows, while making everything within the conservatory dance and jump erratically.

Dixie laid the casket on the table in front of his mistress, who took out a small key and inserted it into the lock. Inside the casket lay a spherical fungus whose glossy brown surface was shot through with lightning-like zigzags of gold.

Holmes’s alert, retentive mind recalled Irene Adler describing just such a fungus when she was taken to that large black stone at Round Hill in Vermont. It had exploded in her face like a puffball mushroom, and breathing in its spores had sent her on a psychic journey to Yuggoth.

“My, my,” he said in wonderment. “Whatever can that be?”

“It is the means by which I am going to speak with the Mi-Go,” replied Mrs Klein.

“Like a kind of telephone?”

“You might call it that. Now, pray silence, all. No distractions. And bear in mind that time on Yuggoth moves more slowly than time on Earth, so there is always a delay when it comes to relaying the responses I receive.”

The other Cultured grew hushed and attentive. They reminded Holmes of attendees at a séance, and indeed there was much about the situation that resembled the average parlour table-rapping session: the low, uncertain candlelight, the expectation of something occult and otherworldly, and above all Mrs Klein’s demeanour, not dissimilar to that of a medium. She was preparing to communicate with another realm and bring back important messages, and this necessitated, it seemed, a certain melodrama. She waited until the room was entirely quiet, whereupon, with solemnity replacing the usual vivacity on her face, she bent over the fungus. Holmes half expected her to start chanting and imploring her spirit guide to manifest from the Great Beyond.

The fungus began to pulse and swell, just as the one encountered by Irene had. Holmes saw tiny particles whirling around within its translucent shell, their activity becoming ever more agitated and intense.

Then the thing burst, spurting a puff of dust into Mrs Klein’s face. She inhaled sharply at the same time, after which she reeled back in her chair, clutching the table’s edge. Her eyes flew wide. She wheezed and gasped.

Holmes pretended to give a start, and he made a move to lay a hand on her, just as someone unfamiliar with events like these might do. The woman on the other side of him gripped his arm and shook her head.

“She is fine,” she whispered in Holmes’s ear. “This is simply what happens. Leave her be.”

A couple of minutes passed, and then Mrs Klein cried, “I am there! I have reached Yuggoth!” Her eyes were glazed and distant. Whatever she was looking at, it was not in that conservatory.

Two minutes more, and she said, “Here they come. Our Mi-Go friends, gathering at the temple of Shub-Niggurath. There is Glaw Za-Jooll. Hail to you, Glaw Za-Jooll! I have journeyed to you across the gulfs of space, bringing greetings from The Cultured.”

Another long pause. Holmes had the opportunity to reflect that Irene’s meeting with the Outside Things – including their high priest, Glaw Za-Jooll – had taken place while she was wholly insensible. Mrs Klein, by contrast, was in a kind of trance state, and he could only infer that through repeated usage of the fungus she had become expert at conducting this form of communication, to the point that she could retain a degree of consciousness throughout.

“Glaw Za-Jooll,” she said eventually, “wishes me to convey his respects to you all. He restates his hope that through amity and cooperation we may bring about a fruitful union between our two races.”

Another long pause.

“Yes, Glaw Za-Jooll. Preparations are well under way. It will not be long before you and your brethren walk among us. We look forward to welcoming you into the heart of the greatest empire on Earth, whereby you will be able to propagate your influence across the globe. You have waited long and toiled hard for this, as have we, and things are reaching their culmination.”

Pause.

“There is one among us who is not yet a fully inaugurated member of our group. Therefore I must be circumspect in my answers. All I can tell you is that the work is going well. I am assured that the procedure will soon be so honed and refined that there will be no possibility of failure.”

Pause.

“Thank you. Salutations to you and your people, and I shall renew contact with you again soon.”

With that, Mrs Klein sank down in her chair, seemingly exhausted, like a balloon with some of the air let out. The Cultured waited patiently, and at last she gathered herself, straightened up, and braved a smile.

Throughout the foregoing, Steve Dixie had not stirred from her side, standing there with his arms folded and a clear determination to ensure that no harm befell her body while her mind was elsewhere. Now, without a word, he closed the rosewood casket with the depleted fungus inside and poured his mistress a drink, which she accepted gratefully.

“Thank you, Steve.” She wiped spore dust off her face with a napkin, then locked the casket. “Take that away, will you. There’s a good fellow.”

As the former prizefighter exited the conservatory, Mrs Klein turned to Holmes. “So, Langdale, you may now have a clearer idea of the purpose behind the formation of The Cultured.”

“I am… awestruck,” said Holmes, giving every indication of being just that. “Would I be right in thinking that what I have just beheld was some sort of interplanetary communication? Good Lord! I am quite overcome. I think I need a drink too.” He helped himself from the port decanter.

“I have engaged in colloquy with the Mi-Go for several years now,” said Mrs Klein. “You could say I am their deputy on Earth. Having established an accord between our two worlds, I have expended a great deal of time and effort, and indeed, money, with a view to enabling Mi-Go to visit us in person.”

“By building some sort of machine that can travel between their planet and ours?”

“No. Oh no. A far subtler and more ingenious method than that. But I’m afraid I cannot reveal more to you, not yet. You have taken your first steps to joining us, but until we are quite assured of your bona fides, certain details of our plans will have to remain known solely to initiates. You understand?”

“Quite, my dear lady,” said Holmes. “I feel honoured to have got this far, and I shall strive to prove worthy of further trust.”

“A good answer,” said Isadora Klein. “You always seem to know just what to say, Langdale Pike.”

* * *

A month later, the glibly plausible Langdale Pike attended a second dinner at The Three Gables, and a couple of weeks after that, a third. The roster of guests at each meal varied slightly. Some were regulars, others made just a single appearance. Holmes made a mental note of the attendees, and by his estimate The Cultured numbered at least forty in total. Not one of them could be described as anything but bien pensant. Their collective high-mindedness was such, Holmes said, that it dwarfed the Himalayas.

It was around this time that my fiancée and I got married. This second wedding of mine was a modest occasion but no less delightful for it. The attendees numbered no more than a dozen, and Holmes, as before, served as my best man. Our honeymoon took us to Deauville, where beautiful late-spring weather and a hotel boasting both a first-rate restaurant and incomparable views over the Channel helped make our stay on the northern French coast utterly delightful. We strolled along the promenade and relaxed at the hydrotherapeutic baths, and I gambled on the horses at the Hippodrome Deauville– La Touques and won handsomely.

When we returned to England, I paid Baker Street a visit at the first opportunity. By then Holmes had been to a fourth gathering of The Cultured, and he caught me up on events.

“Langdale Pike is fully embedded with them now,” said he. “The infiltration is complete. See for yourself.”

He rolled up his shirtsleeve. There on his forearm, just above the wrist, lay a raised, circular patch of redness the size of a tuppenny bit.

“Why, it could be pityriasis rosea, intertrigo, psoriasis, even eczema,” I opined. “Any commonplace rash.”

“It was introduced into my skin subcutaneously, using a needle dipped in a solution containing fungal spores,” Holmes said. “Rather like a tattoo, but with ink made of diluted living plant matter.”

“That must have hurt.”

“Not to a man who used to inject himself with a hypodermic syringe on a regular basis. I barely felt a thing. Langdale Pike, however, whimpered throughout the procedure.”

“Does it itch? It looks as though it does.”

“No. The appearance of infection is just that, an appearance. I am told that the ‘tattooing’ must be repeated every few weeks. The mark will fade as the body seeks to heal it, and will eventually disappear altogether if not renewed. The way it tingles when it encounters a fellow mark is, I can tell you, somewhat unnerving.”

“The Cultured have bestowed their seal of membership on you,” I said. “Or rather, on Pike. Have you been able to parlay that trust into learning more about their plans?”

“Very much so,” Holmes said. “Much progress was made while you were off gallivanting in Normandy. Congratulations on your wins at the races, by the way.”

“I never mentioned that.”

“You haven’t had to. Deauville is famed for its racecourse among other attractions, and your penchant for gambling is well known. That tie you are wearing is brand new and made of Gauffre silk. Very expensive, and just the sort of thing a man buys himself when he has had a windfall. Ergo, you had a flutter on the nags, did well, and treated yourself to an item of French-made neckwear to celebrate. The inference is—”

“Yes, yes. I know. Elementary.”

“But back to business,” said Holmes. “I have intermingled with The Cultured not only at The Three Gables but elsewhere. I have contrived for Langdale Pike to bump into members in other social situations around town. To a man, and indeed, a woman, they sincerely believe they are engaged in an enterprise that will bring about world peace and a bright future for mankind thanks to the Mi-Go. Isadora Klein believes it most strongly of all, to the point where I might call her an ideologue.”

“Is it possible they are right? Do the Mi-Go have our best interests at heart?”

“Every comment relayed by Mrs Klein from Glaw Za-Jooll points to it.”

“Yet you sound doubtful.”

Holmes reached for his pipe. “Let me lay the evidence before you, Watson, and you tell me what you think. Now that The Cultured have taken Langdale Pike to their bosom, I have learned various pieces of new data, and these have enabled me to draw together disparate threads that have cropped up in various of our investigations over the past few years and weave them into a tapestry. I shall start with Dr Ulrich Felder, back in ’eighty-eight. If, as I strongly suspect, Mrs Klein gave him the fungus with which he attempted his failed cancer cure, was it merely the action of a grief-stricken widow hoping to spare others the misery she herself endured? Perhaps. If, however, the fungus came originally from the Mi-Go, as it surely must have, would the Outside Things not have known how it would affect the human physiology? Would they not have been well aware that it would both hasten the growth of cancerous tumours and bring back to life those whose deaths it accelerated?”

“In which case, giving her the fungus to pass on to Felder and pretending to her that it would cure cancer is a strange act for such supposedly benevolent beings. Unless, that is, they were under the impression it might be genuinely advantageous to cancer sufferers.”

“Hence we must ask ourselves whether they had an ulterior motive. Were the fungus’s effects precisely the ones the Mi-Go wished to achieve? And if so, why?”

“Do you know the answer?”

“I have an idea,” said Holmes, blowing out tobacco smoke, “but it is, as yet, a half-formed one, if that. Now let us turn to the next occasion when something related to the Mi-Go intruded upon our lives, which occurred later that same year.”

“Your second brush with Irene Adler, following on from the King of Bohemia affair.”

“Miss Adler’s natural gift for impersonation was enhanced to the nth degree by exposure to that morel-like fungus in rural Vermont. She used it to coerce Professor Mellingford and others into acting against Britain’s best interests. She did this in service to certain employers whom she refused to identify but whom we can be fairly sure were The Cultured, themselves working on the Mi-Go’s behalf. Again, we must question how altruistic the Outside Things really are if subverting Britain’s progress is on their agenda.”

“If, however, peace on Earth is their goal, then their chosen targets for extortion make sense.”

“Really, Watson?”

“Look at it this way. The First Naval Lord wanting to reduce the size of our forces at sea, a potential Viceroy of India publicly espousing the dismantling of the Raj, a munitions manufacturer curtailing output from his factories, Professor Mellingford abandoning his research into poison gas for the battlefield… This country, as the foremost world power, would be seen very visibly beating its swords into ploughshares, and where Britain leads, other nations might follow.”

“There is some validity in that argument,” Holmes allowed.

“But what about Josiah Amberley and his Shub-Niggurath cultists? How do they fit into this?”

“They were, as I suggested at the time, just a distraction. It was an attempt by Irene Adler to throw me off The Cultured’s scent.”

“No direct Mi-Go connection, therefore.”

“Unless Miss Adler was acting under their instruction, which is not impossible. I think we should now spread our net wider and consider what else we know of Mi-Go activity on our world.”

“Which isn’t much,” I said. “There is, I suppose, Captain Carey and the space-ship he found in the Arctic.”

Holmes refilled and relit his pipe. “That is just what I am referring to, Watson. The space-ship crashed on Earth back in 1883. At the time of reading Carey’s logbook, we speculated as to why the Mi-Go aboard the vessel, those ‘fungonauts’ of ours, came to this planet. We wondered if they were perhaps a diplomatic mission, or else a military expedition.”

“I err on the side of the former.”

“Do you? Even allowing for those items they brought with them which caused so much harm to the Sea Unicorn’s crew and which could only have been anti-human weapons?”

“You said they might have brought them for self-defence.”

“Self-defence is still offensive.”

“But what about the fungus that you put to use as your mycophone? In the right hands it could be a revolutionary new method of interpersonal communication.”

“But in the wrong hands a spying device,” Holmes said, “as I amply proved by using it to eavesdrop on Baron Gruner.”

“The wrong use for it, but for the right reasons,” I said.

“Mrs Klein, at any rate, affirmed that the space-ship was a first attempt by the Mi-Go to make contact with the people of Earth. She and Langdale Pike were discussing Mi-Go biology, after Pike had expressed a desire to know what the Outside Things looked like. She went on about them at some length: their insect-like bodies, their glowing heads, and so forth. Glaw Za-Jooll, she then said, had once spoken of a valiant crew of volunteers who embarked on the lengthy voyage from Yuggoth to Earth. Their last report to him was transmitted just as they entered our planet’s atmosphere.”

“Transmitted fungally, I presume.”

“Yes. The crew communicated with their home planet via the same method used by Mrs Klein and indeed Miss Adler. They told Glaw Za-Jooll they were having difficulty moving and breathing. They felt pinned to the floor, as though beneath an immense weight. Thus they were unable to maintain control of their vessel. Instead of making a smooth descent, the spaceship plummeted. The last Glaw Za-Jooll heard from the crew, they were crawling from the wreckage but evidently in the throes of dying.”

“You surmised that they might have been killed by the richness of oxygen in our atmosphere, which suffocated them,” I said. “That or exposure to our much stronger sunlight baked them to death. Neither of those things, however, would explain why the fungonauts started suffering ill effects before they landed.”

“I did indeed postulate two differences between Earth’s environment and Yuggoth’s that would have accounted for the demise of the fungonauts,” Holmes said. “Oxygen. Sunlight. I neglected to consider a third possibility.”

“Namely?”

“Gravity. Prevailing astronomical thought has it that the putative planet beyond Neptune, which you and I know as Yuggoth, is far smaller than our own. There are suggestions that its mass is five hundred times less than that of Earth, and its gravity is therefore proportionately lighter. If so, there lies our explanation. The moment the fungonauts encountered our much heavier gravity, it crushed them. Within their exoskeletons, their organs were flattened. Their breathing spiracles collapsed. It would have been a dismal death, and the upshot of this ill-fated endeavour, whether it was diplomatic delegation or embryonic invasion, is that the Mi-Go learned they cannot survive on Earth. That would account for what the Outside Things did next, which was to send a very different kind of emissary here.”

“What do you mean?”

“The meteorite, Watson. The carved black stone that landed in the Vermont woods and sowed a garden of fungi all around it. Those two backwoodsmen, Natty and Zeke, told Miss Adler the meteorite fell to earth in 1884, a year after the events in Carey’s logbook. We may reasonably posit that the Mi-Go propelled it somehow to Earth, having first implanted it with fungal spores, which scattered themselves immediately upon landing, took root and grew.”

“With the aim of opening a channel of communication between Earth and Yuggoth.”

Holmes nodded through the blue haze of smoke that now surrounded him. “And recruiting certain humans to their cause, so as to achieve by proxy that which they could not in person.”

“Why send the meteorite to such a remote region if they wanted it to be found? Why not a populated area?”

“I suspect that pinpoint accuracy over a distance of millions of miles is not easy,” Holmes said. “But also, if your goal is to introduce yourselves quietly and with the minimum of fuss, firing a large rock at a major conurbation is not the way to go about it. Can you imagine the effect it would have were a meteorite like that to come down in central London? The impact alone would lead to devastation, panic and numerous casualties. The military would become involved, reporters would descend on the scene in their droves, crowds would gather to gawp… I mean, you too have read Wells. He has it about right, I think. But our Mi-Go, unlike Wells’s Martians, aren’t interested in making a bold statement. They seem to prefer the sidelong, stealthy approach, which betokens a certain underhandedness and reinforces the notion that they are not on the level.”

“Or is it merely judicious caution?” I said.

“I wish, Watson, I were as inclined towards optimism as you,” Holmes said. “I now know, at least, that the Vermont meteorite is not the only one they have sent our way. There has been another. That’s to say, another for which there is reliable eyewitness testimony. There could well be more which we don’t know about. Meteorites hit the planet at the rate of a dozen a day, so it is reckoned. Most are tiny and burn up to nothing in the upper atmosphere, but a fair few make it to the ground. Amid those numbers, a couple extra here or there would hardly make a difference.”

“When you say ‘eyewitness testimony’, are you referring to Isadora Klein again?”

“Very good, old friend.”

“I did wonder where she might have obtained her various fungi.” I counted them off on my fingers. “Felder’s supposed cancer cure. The one she uses to communicate with Yuggoth. The one that creates the mark of The Cultured. She must have got them from somewhere.”

“And that somewhere is the Black Forest,” said Holmes. “It lies just south of Heidelberg and comprises roughly two thousand square miles of dense, mountainous woodland. It is not dissimilar, in many ways, to Vermont’s Green Mountains, so there is some consistency there in the Mi-Go’s choice of targets. Mrs Klein told me she happened upon her meteorite while hiking in the Black Forest in ’eighty-six, not long after her husband’s death, and was rewarded with a psychic trip to Yuggoth that paralleled Irene Adler’s. I say ‘happened upon’, but she was led to the spot by the guide she had hired for the hike. A guide who, in the event, turned out to be not all he seemed.”

“Doubtless a Mi-Go agent.”

“Not just any Mi-Go agent. You may recall that it was around then that the very same Irene Adler was cutting a swathe through Europe as an adventuress and all-round mischief-maker.”

“So Miss Adler was assigned by the Mi-Go to pose as a guide,” I said, “and bring Mrs Klein to the meteorite.”

“Not Mrs Klein specifically, but a suitable candidate of her choosing,” said Holmes. “She opted for Isadora Klein because really there could not have been a better fit for the job of Mi-Go envoy. Wealthy, well connected, charismatic. Mrs Klein admitted that she was reluctant at first to accept the role, but then Glaw Za-Jooll made an offer too tempting to refuse. He knew how her husband had died, and he said he had a means whereby others might not have to go through the same ordeal.”

“The so-called cancer cure.”

“That sealed the deal for her,” said Holmes. “But the cure did not work. It seems Mrs Klein has no idea that Felder’s experiments went awry. She only knows that he died in a house fire while pursuing the research which she instigated and sponsored.”

“At least it is now beyond dispute that Irene Adler is in cahoots with The Cultured.”

“Mrs Klein did not actually identify Miss Adler by name. Yet the latter being her hiking guide seems so likely as to be incontrovertible, and we may assume the two women have been working together since on the Mi-Go’s behalf.”

I paused a moment to chew over the glut of information my friend had served up. “We still have yet to establish whether The Cultured are collaborators with the Outside Things or their unwitting dupes.”

“I have had thoughts in that direction,” said he. “Their contention that they wish to build a better world is certainly at odds with Douglas Maberley’s despairing cries about ‘no future’.”

“The lad was not in his right mind, remember.”

“Doesn’t that make it more, not less, likely that he was speaking the truth? Often it is the mad who have insight. The sane are prone to deluding themselves.”

“A neat little apothegm, Holmes,” I said. “Neat, but dashed misanthropic.”

“I don’t deny that I have a tendency towards misanthropy,” Holmes said. “It helps a criminalist to think the worst of people.”

“And of aliens as well?”

“Them too. As it happens, Douglas Maberley may have furnished us with a clue to proving The Cultured’s status either way.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Let me answer your question with a question, Watson. What are your views on breaking and entering?”

* * *

Exactly nine days after Sherlock Holmes posed that rather freighted query, I found myself skulking amid shrubbery in the grounds of The Three Gables. It was a warm, moonless night, and I was wearing dark clothing, leather gloves and a woollen watch cap, with a scarf fastened around the lower half of my face, so that the only part of me that stood exposed was my eyes. My pockets held various implements, among them a small hammer, a dark-lantern and a set of lockpicks. In short, I could not have looked or been behaving more like a burglar if I had tried.

As I loitered in that shrubbery, awaiting the moment I would make my move, my mind drifted back to the conversation with Holmes I have just related. I recalled the little thrill of apprehension that had run through me as my friend asked me to perform what can only be described as a felony – apprehension only somewhat mitigated by his insistence that it was all in the name of the greater good.

“I have, as Langdale Pike,” he said, “had little chance to explore The Three Gables. The Cultured’s meetings are orderly, circumscribed affairs, taking place exclusively in the common parts of the house. Yet I cannot forget how Douglas Maberley spoke of a room. ‘I have seen what’s in that room. That room!’ It is no stretch of the imagination to suppose that the room in question lies within The Three Gables. When Maberley mentioned it, after all, he had just returned from a rendezvous with Mrs Klein. Therefore I made an attempt to look round the premises.”

Holmes told me how Langdale Pike had briefly excused himself from the dinner table, left the conservatory, and hastened along the house’s mazy corridors. From earlier visits, he knew the layout of the ground floor fairly well, but there were two entire wings he had not ventured into, and the upper floors were likewise terra incognita. He did not have much time. An absence of longer than five minutes would arouse suspicion. That meant he must try only the doors to rooms he had never entered.

These afforded access to perfectly normal-looking chambers: a study, a scullery, a boot room, and so on. All too soon, his five minutes elapsed, and he returned to the conservatory none the wiser.

That was at one dinner party. At the next, he again excused himself from the table and sought out more doors he had not previously tried.

Somewhere in the north wing, he found one that was firmly locked. He had less than a minute left before he would have to return whence he had come, so there was no question of picking the lock. He put an eye to the keyhole. It had a cover, but he hoped that there was just the one on the outside of the door. Unfortunately, there was one on the inside as well, and so he could see nothing. He did, however, catch a faint smell coming from within. It was the odour of chemicals.

He was on his way back to the conservatory when, around a corner, Steve Dixie abruptly appeared.

“Mr Pike,” said the prizefighter.

His flat, neutral tone made it hard to decide if this was just a greeting or if Dixie had been actively looking for the absentee. A vaguely knowing glint in his eyes suggested the latter.

“Mr Dixie!” Holmes declared. “You startled me, looming out of nowhere like that.”

“You seem to have strayed from the party.”

“It’s a very large house. I got confused.” He gave a sudden lurch towards Dixie, and saw the boxer’s huge hands instinctively clench into fists. “I am also,” he said confidentially, “rather drunk. Shh! Don’t tell Isadora.”

Dixie glanced past Holmes’s shoulder, as though checking the way he had come. “Drunk or not, it don’t do to go wandering, Mr Pike. This ain’t your home. You got me? You should keep to the places you’re meant to keep to.”

“Please don’t be so stern with me,” Holmes said, swaying now, as an inebriate might. “You’re very fierce looking, and you’re scaring me.”

“Good,” said Dixie. “Now, answer me straight. Why are you here, so far from the conservatory?”

“I told you. I’m drunk. I got confused. It happens to drunk people. Although,” Holmes added, with a tremulous glance at Dixie’s fists, “I am staring to sober up quite fast.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you were snooping.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You’re a gossip man. Maybe you’re looking for dirt on Mrs Klein, something you can sell to the press.”

“On dear Isadora? Never! I swore to her I would keep her secrets, hers and everyone else’s here. I’m a loyal Cultured.”

The boxer leaned closer to Holmes. “You’re lying. I know liars. Just like in the ring, when the bloke you’re fighting is pretending he’s hurt worse than he is, so he can lure you in and surprise you. I can smell fakery, and you reek of it.”

Holmes had the feeling that, come what may, this confrontation was going to end in violence. Steve Dixie seemed hell-bent on roughing him up, and while Sherlock Holmes would happily have responded in kind, giving as good as he got, this option was not open to Langdale Pike. If Dixie dealt out punishment, Langdale Pike would just have to take it, in order to preserve the imposture.

“Pray don’t hit me,” he said. “Isadora wouldn’t like it, would she?”

“Mrs Klein has told me I should always go with my instincts when it comes to her wellbeing,” Dixie replied. “That’s what she pays me for. And my instincts are telling me I should pummel the truth out of you.”

Dixie raised one of those fists. Its knuckles resembled knots in the wood of an oak. Holmes braced himself.

Then a voice rang out. “Steve Dixie! What in heaven’s name are you doing?”

It was the housemaid, Susan. She had arrived on the scene unnoticed by either man, and now she stood, hands on hips, arms akimbo, staring down her narrow nose at them.

“You lower that arm this instant, Steve,” she said. “What has got into you? Threatening one of the guests!”

“Mr Pike ain’t where he ought to be,” said Dixie. “He was acting all suspicious like.”

“Not suspicious,” said Holmes. “Drunk, perhaps, but not suspicious.”

“It’s not up to you where people can go in the house,” Susan said to Dixie.

“I’m looking out for Mrs Klein’s interests.”

“Maybe you are, but I’m sure that hitting Mr Pike won’t serve those interests. Now, you back away from him, Steve. I shan’t tell you again.”

He rounded on her. “And what if I hit you instead, Susan? Snooty old witch that you are. Maybe you need putting in your place.”

Susan did not flinch. “You just try it, Steve Dixie. Lay one finger on me, and you’ll regret it.”

There was a brief standoff, the prizefighter glaring at the housemaid, the housemaid defiantly returning the glare.

Then Dixie dropped his fist. “Ah, to the devil with you, woman. You’re not worth the bother. You.” This was to Holmes. “You come back with me to the conservatory right now. I’ll make sure you get there and don’t go wandering and ‘getting lost’ again.” The inverted commas around “getting lost” were clearly audible.

As Dixie stalked away, Holmes murmured, “Thank you,” to Susan.

The housemaid merely sniffed. “You’re in his bad books now. You had better watch yourself.”

“Oh, I will, Susan. I will.”

“Mr Pike!” Dixie made a beckoning gesture, one that did not brook refusal.

As he escorted Holmes back to the conservatory, Holmes contrived to stumble against Dixie once or twice, to reinforce the impression that Langdale Pike was drink-impaired. Dixie being so solidly built, colliding with him was, Holmes told me, akin to bumping into a brick wall. It also did little to improve the fellow’s enmity towards him, but then he doubted anything could have.

“Langdale,” said Mrs Klein as Holmes re-joined the dinner party. “We were starting to wonder where you’d gotten to.”

“I’m so sorry,” Holmes said with a bow of apology. “I took a few wrong turns. Luckily Mr Dixie was on hand to steer me straight. He was a godsend.”

For the rest of the meal, Steve Dixie’s scowling gaze seldom strayed from Holmes. It was clear that the prizefighter had it in for Langdale Pike and would be watching him like a hawk from then on.

That meant Holmes would find it hard, if not impossible, to investigate the locked room, and therefore someone else must do the job. Hence my nocturnal sojourn in the shrubbery, which lay some fifty yards from the house across a patch of lawn.

Over the past nine days Holmes had given me an intensive course in lockpicking and drawn me a floorplan of The Three Gables, sketched from memory. I had committed the map to my own memory, and my lockpicking skills, while no match for Holmes’s own, had developed to the point where I could make a passable cracksman.

Finally my watch told me it was ten o’clock. It was traditionally around then that Mrs Klein initiated contact with Glaw Za-Jooll. The servants would be in the kitchen, occupied with washing up the dinner things. The guests’ attention would be focused fully on their hostess, as would Steve Dixie’s. There would not be a better time.

Steeling myself, I crept out from my place of concealment and tiptoed across the dew-damp lawn. The north wing lay at the opposite end of the house from the conservatory. Here, few windows were lit. The darkness was thick. I approached a door, the upper half of which held a grid of inset windowpanes. Holmes, from his explorations, knew this door was likely to be bolted as well as locked, with the key left in place.

From one pocket I took a sheet of brown paper and a small pot of treacle. Smearing some of the latter liberally over one side of the former, I pressed the paper to the windowpane nearest the handle. The treacle adhered it in place. Then, with my hammer, I gave the pane a firm tap. The glass broke but the treacle-coated paper both muffled the sound and prevented the shards from falling. Then all I had to do was peel it away, the shards coming with it. A few remained fastened in the putty, but picking them out was no trouble. This was an old burglar’s trick Holmes had taught me. With the frame of the pane now empty, I reached through, turned the key, and slid back the bolt. The door opened soundlessly, and I crossed the threshold.

I stole through the house, my every sense on the alert. My breathing seemed inordinately loud, to my ears. Same with my footfalls, no matter that I trod as softly as I could. I listened out for voices, the sound of a door opening, a step on a stair.

A sudden burst of distant laughter sent me scurrying for refuge in the narrow gap between an armoire and an ornamental plant on a table. I remained there for a full three minutes, and in all that time I did not, I think, breathe once. The laughter was not repeated, and at last I emerged and continued on my stealthy way.

I located the locked door. Holmes’s map had been accurate to the last detail, even depicting the Persian rug that ran the length of the corridor I was on.

Kneeling before the door, I fetched out the set of lockpicks. I raised the keyhole cover and inserted a torsion wrench into the bottom of the lock, exerting a slight downward pressure with it. I then inserted a rake pick above it, which I gently slid back and forth in a roughly circular motion. By this means I could bounce the pins of the lock to the shear line one after another in succession, while keeping each in place with the torque wrench.

“You have a doctor’s steady hands, Watson, with a dexterity honed by delicate work such as suturing,” Holmes had told me. “Think of it as a kind of surgery.”

To practise lockpicking at Baker Street was one thing; to pick a lock at a house I had no business being in was quite another. Under those circumstances my hands were, in fact, neither steady nor dextrous, and after several frustrating minutes I was coming to the conclusion that the lock was never going to budge.

Then, just when I was convinced all was lost, through the torque wrench I felt a slight but significant give. The final pin had set. The lock had yielded to my ministrations.

Holding the torsion wrench in position to keep the lock undone, I turned the knob and pushed the door an inch ajar. Then I stowed the lockpicks away, opened the door fully, and stepped through.

Pushing the door to behind me, I took a moment to collect myself. My task was half complete. Now all I had to do was see what was in this room, and I could then, by God’s good graces, leave the house undetected and unhindered.

The air smelled thickly musty, with a sharp undernote that reminded me, for some reason, of my sojourns at Barts and Netley, although I could not quite put my finger on why just then.

I took out the dark-lantern, struck a match and lit the wick. I swept its beam around, and gasped in surprise.

* * *

Perhaps I should not have been startled. After all, Douglas Maberley had effectively provided a warning. I suppose I’d been hoping that the room he had been referring to was not this one.

There were three tables lined up in a row. One was bare, while on the other two, men lay. Each had a sheet draped over him, covering him up to his chin. They were very still, but with both I perceived a slight rise and fall of the chest. They were, it would appear, in a deep sleep.

This was a queer sight but, in and of itself, not all that remarkable. Yet, as I played the beam of the dark-lantern over the pair, I perceived that one of the men was wearing what appeared to be a helmet. Closer inspection revealed it to be some kind of bluish-grey fungal growth, snugly encasing the top of his head. Tendrils from the fungus dug into his skin around its rim, causing a puckering effect. It was as though the fungus had knitted itself into place.

As for the other man, I had to look twice. My first impression was that there was something wrong with his head; that it was misshapen, perhaps owing to some congenital deformity. On second glance I learned that there was something much more seriously awry.

The top of the man’s skull had been removed, sheared off just above the temples. His entire scalp was gone, and with it his brain.

That was when I identified the smell which had reminded me of my medical student days. It was the tangy odour the human anatomy gives off when its insides are opened, when blood and viscera lie exposed.

Ghastly as the man’s missing cranium was, ghastlier still was the fact that he still breathed!

I approached the table with trepidation, stunned by the inconceivability of what I beheld. The surgery had been performed very neatly. Veins and arteries were sewn shut. The brain stem, at the bottom of the hollow, rugged bowl that was the man’s cranial cavity, showed signs of neat excision.

My gaze roved to his body – his impossibly alive body – and I noticed how it was peculiarly lumpy. Little nodules and hillocks bulged against the sheet where no person should have any. I glanced over at the other man’s body, but its contours looked normal.

Curiosity compelled me to reach out a nervous hand towards the man in front of me. Taking hold of the top of the sheet that covered him, I drew it back.

The fellow’s torso was wreathed in knots and twists of the same bluish-grey fungus that capped the other man’s head. It clung to him like the toils of some sticky vegetal web, and it was moving, apparently of its own volition. Several of its tubular strands, I saw, penetrated the man’s ribcage and were connected to two largish flesh-like sacs which sat on either side of him and inflated and deflated in a slow, steady rhythm. Others had embedded themselves in his stomach, and ripples were passing along their length in a manner I can only describe as peristaltic.

A dreadful truth dawned.

The fungus was keeping this man without a brain alive. It was helping him respire and feeding him via a surrogate digestive system.

If this was what Maberley had seen, no wonder it had made such an appalling impression on him. Nonetheless, in the professional part of my mind, I marvelled. Was this fungal apparatus a Mi-Go offering? It could only be, in which case the Outside Things had presented the people of Earth with one of the greatest gifts of all time. If life could be sustained in a body which by every right should be dead, the applications for medical science were manifold. Complex surgical procedures, the healing of near-lethal injuries, patient survival prospects: all could be radically improved.

While chewing over these thoughts, I trained the dark-lantern around the rest of the room. There were shelves and racks around the walls, laden with boxes and glass phials. These appeared to be containers for various chemicals. There were shallow trays, too, lined with compost from which several different kinds of fungi budded. Further fungi were contained in sealed glass flasks, many of which had condensation beading their interiors.

Most notably there were a trio of hatbox-sized metallic cylinders sitting in a row. Their design was familiar. Holmes had one such at Baker Street, sporting a similar porthole and array of knobbly protrusions.

That cylinder, however, differed materially from these in certain respects. I went over for a better look and descried that, as I had thought, they were not made from the same metal as the one from Carey’s toleware box, with that uncanny nacreous sheen. These were plain old brass, forged and riveted. The protrusions on them seemed cruder, too. It was as though the cylinders had been fashioned in emulation of the Mi-Go version, by earthly hands.

Two were filled with a clear, viscous liquid. I bent to peer through the porthole of the first and saw that it contained a hairy, hemispherical mass. To my disgust, I realised I was looking at a human scalp. The scalp, without question, belonged to the man on the table.

The other cylinder contained something even worse, and doubtless of the same origin. It was an entire human brain.

There the organ sat, yellow-grey and corrugated, suspended in the liquid. Everything about it – the various lobes, the longitudinal fissure, the pons, the medulla oblongata – was perfect and intact, all the way down to the truncated stem.

But there was an addition. Perched between the frontal lobes was a bright red blob about the size of a tomato. I at first thought it might be an unusually large blood clot, but closer scrutiny led me to understand that it was a type of fungus. It seemed firmly attached to the brain, its lower portion merging with the gyri and sulci of the cortex. Meanwhile a half-dozen strands extended outward from its upper portion, connecting it to the interior of the cylinder, as though the fungus was anchoring itself, and thus the brain, in position.

A sudden rustling behind me set me pivoting round.

Beneath the watch cap, my hair stood on end.

* * *

One of the men on the tables – the one with the fungus on his head – had sat bolt upright, the sheet slipping off his upper body to pool around his waist. His eyes were wide open below the brim of that fungal helmet, and he was staring at me with evident wariness and perplexity.

“Why…?” he said. His voice was scratchy and thin, like the sound made when one turns the spigot of a water tap that has grown rusty from long disuse. “Why are you?”

My heart was in my mouth. All I could think to say in reply was, “‘Why’? Don’t you mean ‘who’?”

“Yes. Who. Forgive me. I got my words muddled. Who are you?”

“I am a doctor,” I said. It was the most innocuous answer my flustered brain could conjure up. It was also the only one.

“Doctor.” He pronounced the two syllables separately, carefully. “Yes. Doctor. A healer. One who treats the sick.”

“That is me. Who are you?” As an interloper, I had less justification in asking him that question than he did me, but it might be helpful to know whom I was dealing with.

“I am… I am Dysart,” he said. “Octavius Dysart. I write plays. Are you here to help me, Doctor? That’s what doctors are for. To help.”

“Indeed,” I said, pulling my scarf down and fixing a reassuring smile on my face. I recalled Holmes mentioning that one member of The Cultured was a playwright. “What has happened to you, Mr Dysart? Your disorientation and mild aphasia suggest to me you have perhaps been in a coma for some time. Is that the case?”

Octavius Dysart passed a hand across his eyes. “I… think so,” he said. “It must be.”

“Was it an accident?”

“No.”

“Then who is responsible? The Cultured?”

“The Cultured? Yes. They are the ones.”

Dysart swung his legs over the table’s edge and tried to stand. He wobbled, and I hastened over and took hold of him.

“You must lie back down,” I said. “You are clearly very weak, and I don’t think standing is a good idea.”

“No,” Dysart said. “I can manage.”

His second attempt met with greater success. He teetered for a moment, but steadied. I picked up the sheet, which had slipped off him entirely and fallen to the floor, and proffered it, in order to allow him to preserve his modesty. In his state of confusion he didn’t seem to know what to do with it, so I helped, fastening it around his waist as one might a bath towel.

“Are you one of them?” he asked. “Is that why you are here?”

“Them? The Cultured?”

“Yes. Did they engage you to watch over me?”

It seemed prudent to lie, in hopes of gaining Dysart’s full confidence and dispelling any notion that I did not belong here. “Yes. Yes, that is it. The Cultured thought it advisable to bring me in, as a doctor, to ensure your wellbeing.”

“You are of their number?”

“Yes. Assuredly yes.”

“Then you know what has been done to me.”

“In broad terms.” I extemporised as best I could. “You have been subjected to a certain procedure. A highly experimental one. The, er, the fungus on your head is there to – to facilitate that procedure.”

With its signal lack of detail, the statement did not sound very convincing even to my own ears, but Dysart seemed persuaded.

“Very good,” he said. “And in the process of discharging your obligations, Doctor, what comes next?”

“Next?” My growing belief was that Dysart had been subjected to some kind of experiment, against his will, by his fellow Cultured members. Therefore it was incumbent upon me to get him out of the house to safety, which just so happened to accord with my own desires. But how was I to achieve that, when I had already established I belonged to The Cultured myself ? It would jeopardise his trust in me if I appeared in any way to be working counter to them.

An idea struck me. “I must take you to a hospital,” I said. “You can rest there and be tended to. There, too, with all the necessary equipment to hand, we can go about removing that fungus from your head. Whatever it’s doing to you, it cannot be healthy.”

“A hospital. I see.”

“And I think we should leave straight away.”

“But what about him?” Dysart gestured at the man on the other table.

“Him? I will come back for him later. Getting you proper medical attention is my foremost concern.”

“Very well then.”

I shut off the dark-lantern, took Dysart by the elbow, and shepherded him towards the door. I peeked out into the corridor. The coast was clear.

“This way,” I said, making every effort to sound casual.

We walked for several dozen yards, and all the while I feared that one of The Cultured, or else a member of the domestic staff, might stumble upon us and the game would be up.

Then, on a sudden, Dysart went stock still.

“Come along, Dysart,” I said. “This is no time to hesitate. The sooner we reach that hospital, the better.”

“No.”

I fought to stifle my frustration. “What is the matter?”

“The matter, Doctor, is this,” said Dysart. “You are not what you say you are.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He held up his arm, and I spied a small, circular rash on it. The mark of The Cultured. I had not noticed it before.

“If you were truly a member of The Cultured, you would have one of these on your person,” he said, “and mine would be tingling and changing shape, as would yours. Mine is not, and I do not think you have one yourself at all.”

I thought fast. “Well now, when I said I was one of The Cultured, I misspoke. What I should have said is that I am… affiliated with them. Not a full member, as such. But close enough. I aspire to joining their ranks in due course, if they’ll have me.”

Dysart eyed me circumspectly. “‘Doctor’ has two meanings. One is to work as a healer. The other is to tamper or falsify.”

“I am aware of that. Now please, let’s move.”

“You, Doctor, may be a healer but you are also a falsifier. Help!” He yelled the last word at the top of his lungs.

“Quiet!” I hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Calling for help,” Dysart said simply, then yelled again: “Help!”

Distantly I heard voices, the first stirrings of a commotion.

I was frozen with indecision. I knew I had grievously misread the situation with Octavius Dysart. It was a blunder of epic proportions, and the penalty could well be my life.

* * *

The hubbub was growing, getting louder, coming closer, even as Dysart kept calling for help.

Self-preservation overrode all other considerations. I began to run, making for the entrance I had come in by.

Up ahead, a man appeared. He was dark-skinned and enormous. He took one look at me and broke into a loping jog, making a beeline for me.

This could only be the fearsome Steve Dixie, and I immediately skidded to a halt and about-turned.

Running the other way, I saw Dysart move to block my path. I lowered my shoulder, as one does on the rugby pitch when carrying the ball and driving towards the opposition. Dysart I thought I could barge aside, unlike the bulky Dixie.

The playwright, however, was more determined than I had thought, and although I was able to push past him, he contrived to trip me up. I went sprawling to the floor. I was on my feet again in a flash. Dysart tried to grab me. I shook him off and resumed running.

The delay, however, allowed Steve Dixie to catch up with me. He seized hold of my arm and spun me round. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor again, on my side, doubled over, heaving for breath. Dixie had delivered a vicious jab to my solar plexus, a blow so swift, I had not even seen it coming. I wheezed and gasped, feeling as though I would never be able to draw a breath again.

Just as my lungs began to work once more, I was hauled upright. Dixie, holding me by the collar, put his leering face just inches from mine.

“Don’t try nothing, my friend,” said he. “’Less you want the stuffing knocked out of you.”

I was hardly able to stand, let alone fight. My belly was afire from his punch, and my head swam. I was aware of people gathering around us. Faces hovered in and out of my vision. Voices murmured.

A very beautiful woman leaned towards me and said, in an American accent, “Doctor John Watson, I presume.”

This had to be Isadora Klein, but even if I had not still been winded, I would not have known what to say in reply. The only clear thought I had, in the dazed tangle that was my mind, was how did she know who I was?

Another face appeared, next to Mrs Klein’s. It was Langdale Pike.

“Good heavens,” said he. “Dr Watson? The Dr Watson? As in, the aide and confidant of Sherlock Holmes? Is it really him?”

“He was present when I awoke, after my Palimpsest Process,” said Octavius Dysart. “He claimed to be working for The Cultured. But I… What is the saying? Smelled a rat.”

“You were right to,” said Mrs Klein. “The presence of Dr Watson on the premises spells trouble. It means Sherlock Holmes is meddling in our affairs. You don’t get the one without the other.”

“But why?” said Langdale Pike, betraying not the least indication that he was talking about himself. “Holmes investigates crimes, and we Cultured are doing nothing wrong. Are we, Isadora?”

She ignored the question. “Steve, keep a tight hold on him. He may be just Holmes’s sidekick but he is wily in his way.”

“He ain’t going anywhere, Mrs Klein,” said Dixie, “don’t you worry.”

She cast her gaze around The Cultured. “The rest of you, back to the conservatory. I will handle this. Not you, Octavius. But everyone else. Go on!”

The Cultured shuffled obediently away. I watched as Langdale Pike, with some reluctance, turned to accompany them, and my heart sank. I had thought Holmes might concoct some excuse to remain. I could only hope that, even as he departed from the scene, he was thinking up a plan to rescue me and would put it into action as soon as he was out of sight.

Then Mrs Klein waylaid him with a hand.

“Stay, Langdale. I may need an extra pair of hands.”

“Very well.”

My relief was enormous. Without realising it, Mrs Klein had just dramatically improved my chances of emerging unscathed from this predicament.

Once it was only her, Dixie, Dysart and me left – along with Holmes, of course – Mrs Klein ordered her bodyguard to frisk me.

“Dr Watson often carries a pistol,” she said.

Dixie emptied out my pockets, finding the dark-lantern, lockpicks and small hammer. “That’s all,” he said, tossing the items to one side. “No gun.”

“Fine.” Mrs Klein motioned with her hand. “Let us go to the Palimpsest Chamber. We can have some privacy there, and you, Octavius, can continue to heal. I don’t think that fungus is ready to come off just yet.”

“As you wish, Isadora,” said Dysart.

We moved off in a procession, Mrs Klein leading the way, followed by myself, with Dixie right behind me, frogmarching me along with one arm up behind my back in a half-Nelson. Holmes and Dysart took up the rear.

“Palimpsest?” Holmes enquired as we went. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that word in the past minute, and it is not a commonly used one. Palimpsest Process. Palimpsest Chamber. What does it refer to, Isadora?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, Langdale. You are about to be initiated into the final mystery of The Cultured.”

“Really? Consider me honoured and excited.”

Presently we were in the room with the tables, the fungi and the cylinders. Mrs Klein shut the door and lit the gas jet, while Dixie thrust me into a corner and took up a guarding stance beside me. I had no doubt that any attempt to escape or resist would be met with immediate and overwhelming force. I bided my time, waiting for Holmes to come through with some ingenious resolution to our quandary. I still had no idea how Mrs Klein had identified me. I wasn’t that well known, was I? I supposed she might have recognised me from Paget’s illustrations in The Strand, but his likenesses of Holmes and myself, while close, were not picture-perfect.

“What are all these things?” Holmes said, looking around the room wonderingly. “Who is that on the table there? And why… My God! How revolting!” He did a very good impersonation of a man struggling to hold down his rising gorge. “His head. Part of his head is missing. What on earth is going on here?”

Isadora Klein had a little snub-nosed revolver in her hand. I am not sure where she produced it from, probably a pocket of her evening gown. Now it was trained unwaveringly upon Holmes.

“‘What on earth’ indeed,” said she. “The simple answer, Langdale, is that the jig is up. You can stop all this flimflam of yours now.”

Holmes looked nonplussed. “Flimflam?”

“And I, in turn, can stop calling you Langdale Pike,” said Mrs Klein, “when I know perfectly well that you are Sherlock Holmes.”

* * *

“I’ve known it for weeks,” Mrs Klein went on. “I knew it even before Langdale Pike set foot in this house. You may have been dissembling, Mr Holmes, but I have been dissembling too, and one of us is far better at it than the other.”

I expected Holmes to put up at least a token protest. He seemed to decide, however, that there was little to be gained by that.

“Good for you, madam,” said he, straightening from Pike’s stooping, slope-shouldered posture to his own habitually erect one. His voice, at the same time, adopted its customary crisp, clear intonation. “Well played. It did occur to me that Langdale Pike’s promotion from outsider to insider was going rather smoothly, but I elected not to look that particular gift horse in the mouth. I was sure that if you ‘rumbled’ me, to use the vernacular, I would see the signs and be able to extricate myself in time. Plainly I was wrong. Remind me never to take you on at cards.”

“How droll,” said Mrs Klein. “You are behaving with remarkable insouciance for a man looking down the barrel of one of Mr Colt’s finest.”

“This is not the first time I have been held at gunpoint and it will not be the last.”

“The latter portion of that remark may prove untrue.”

“I hope not,” said Holmes. “Tell me, Mrs Klein, if you knew all along who Langdale Pike really was, why permit him such intimate access to The Cultured’s secrets?”

“You make it sound like a ridiculous tactic.”

“Isn’t it? Ah. Come to think of it, perhaps not. You wanted me where you could see me. Indeed, you all but admitted that that was what you were up to. ‘I reckon it’s a good idea to have you right here at my side,’ you said, ‘where I can keep my beady eye on you and, if need be, use my considerable influence to curb you.’”

Mrs Klein nodded, smiling. In other circumstances, I might have found that smile captivating.

“Moreover,” she said, “I could ensure that you knew only as much about our activities as I felt safe with you knowing. I dripped just enough information into Langdale Pike’s ear to keep Sherlock Holmes’s intellectual curiosity sated, but not a drop more. When ‘dearest Langdale’ disappeared from the table for an extended period, two dinners running, that was when I realised you were pushing deeper in your pursuit of discovery and I must shorten the leash.”

“Hence, the second time, you had your thick-eared pet ox go looking for me.”

“Thick-eared pet ox?” snapped Dixie, bristling. “Am I supposed to just let him call me that, Mrs Klein?”

“Yes, you are, Steve,” came the reply.

“How did you know I was referring to you, Mr Dixie?” Holmes said. “I never specified whom I meant. It could have been any thick-eared pet ox.”

Dixie shook a fist at him – an alarmingly large fist, whose ability to incapacitate I knew all too well. “Oh, really now!” he said. “You keep that up, I’m going to fix you, Sherlock Holmes. Fix you good and proper.”

“Fix me like your bout against ‘Gypsy’ Jim Acosta was fixed?”

“I won that fight fair and square!” Dixie bellowed. “Anyone who says I didn’t is a liar. Third-round knockout, and Acosta wasn’t faking being flat out on the floor.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Steve,” Mrs Klein sighed. “Restrain yourself. Mr Holmes is trying to rile you. Doubtless he reckons that if he can push you far enough, you’ll lose control, a ruckus will ensue and, amid all the chaos, he and Dr Watson will make a miraculous escape. I’m sure it is a ploy that has worked in the past. It shan’t today. But only if you don’t give in to your baser instincts.”

Dixie grumbled and huffed, rolling his shoulders, but his temper subsided.

“We’re here now,” said Holmes, “in what I presume to be The Cultured’s inner sanctum – the hub of its operations. Might I advance a theory or two as to what goes on in this room? Then by all means feel free to deal with Watson and myself as you see fit. Torture us, kill us, exact whatever grisly fate you have in store for us.”

Mrs Klein shrugged her shoulders. “Go ahead. It makes little difference as far as I’m concerned. It won’t change the outcome of events. In fact, I’m curious to see just how much the mighty Sherlock Holmes has figured out.”

It was patently obvious to me that my friend was stalling, playing for time. I would have been surprised if the shrewd Mrs Klein didn’t know it, too.

“Besides,” she added, “you love nothing more than to pontificate in front of an audience. Sherlock Holmes is, at heart, an incorrigible show-off. Even if that weren’t common knowledge, thanks to Dr Watson’s stories, the proof is there in the lengths you have gone to with your Langdale Pike persona. And who am I to deny you the pleasure of one last hurrah?”

“The Palimpsest Process that takes place in this so-called Palimpsest Chamber,” Holmes said, “is the transfer of a mind from one place to another. The places in question are Yuggoth and Earth. More specifically, they are the body of a Mi-Go and the body of a human.”

“How have you arrived at that conclusion?”

“The brain in that cylinder, there, can only belong to that partially decapitated body, there. Each is being kept alive in discrete ways, the body by means of the fungus wreathing it, the brain through that liquid it floats in, which I presume to be some kind of nutrient-rich preservative solution. The same holds true of the scalp in the adjacent cylinder. All the cylinders I see here, incidentally, are of human manufacture.”

“Built to specifications provided by Glaw Za-Jooll.”

“They lack the smooth elegance of the Mi-Go’s own.”

“We had to make do.”

“You are using one of them to store the scalp for the sake of convenience only,” Holmes said. “The other, however, serves a more complicated purpose. The brain within it sports a fungal attachment which, if I don’t miss my guess, fulfils much the same function as the fungus you use to communicate with Glaw Za-Jooll on Yuggoth. It is a conduit that permits a sentience to travel between worlds. Am I right so far?”

“Go on,” said Mrs Klein, which I took to mean yes.

“The difference in this case is that the journey is one-way and permanent. The sentience overlays itself on the sentience already extant in the brain. One personality supplants another, just as in a genuine palimpsest the text of the original manuscript is effaced so that the sheet of paper may be reused for fresh text. Octavius Dysart here, to take a handy example, is not Octavius Dysart at all. Not any more. He looks like him, has his voice, to all outward appearances is him. But in fact, Dysart is now just a vehicle for someone else to move around in.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Dysart.

“Logic argues inexorably for it,” Holmes replied. “You spoke of awakening after your Palimpsest Process. Until not long ago, you were like that fellow there.” He pointed to the man on the table. “Your brain was separated from your body and placed in one of those cylinders to receive the transmission of a sentience from Yuggoth. Once the process was complete, your brain was reinstalled in its rightful place, as was your scalp. Why else would you be carrying that fungus on your head? It is a type of fungus with extraordinary curative properties. If it can keep a man without a brain alive, as we see before us, then it can surely perform remarkable feats of healing too. In time, doubtless, it will be removed, and there will be no visible scarring and your altered brain will sit comfortably within your skull as though it was never absent. Nobody will be able to tell the change you have undergone, at least not by looking at you.”

“This is untrue,” said Dysart. “I am Octavius Dysart. That is who I am.”

“You keep insisting on that,” I chimed in. “You have ever since you came round on that table, and the more you do so, the less I am inclined to believe it.”

“Well put, Watson,” said Holmes. “Granted, you are the semi-successful playwright Octavius Dysart. But what is your real name? Your Mi-Go name?”

Dysart looked to Mrs Klein, who gave him a nod of assent. “Tell him. Like I said, none of it is going to make a difference. Mr Holmes is only ensuring that he and Dr Watson cannot be allowed to go free. Every word he utters is, in effect, another nail in their coffins.”

“I am Ranax Za-Ko,” said Dysart. “Or rather, I was. From now on I am Octavius Dysart. I shall go by no other identity.”

Holmes bowed. “Pleased to meet you, Ranax Za-Ko. You have come far. I hope the journey was not too onerous.”

“I thank you, but as I said, I am Octavius Dysart now and I would have you address me accordingly.”

“How many more times are you going to use Dysart’s full name? It is quite an odd habit and, I may say, not very human-like.”

“He is me,” said Dysart, “and I am human.”

“If you really hope to convince people of that, it will take some practice, Ranax Za-Ko.”

Dysart’s head twitched. “You are being quite a pest, sir.”

“He is,” said Mrs Klein. “He’s trying to get a rise out of you, Octavius, just as with Steve, and I offer you the same advice. Don’t let him. Ignore him.”

Holmes tapped fingers to lips for a moment, pondering. “You cannot have perfected the Palimpsest Process without first performing trial runs. That is where Shinwell Johnson comes in. He provided you with specimens to experiment upon. Human specimens.”

Mrs Klein’s face hardened somewhat. “And if he did?”

“That, madam, marks the point at which your actions go from understandable to unpardonable. You took receipt of three young women from Johnson. He brought them to you, unconscious and helpless, and you paid him for them, then used them as a scientist uses rats in the laboratory. It was in order to prove that you could safely remove and reinstall a brain, wasn’t it? That this healing fungus worked properly?”

“It was necessary.”

“Three young women, all with some social standing. That was a risk. Why not a street urchin? Why not a vagrant, or a lady of ill repute? London is riddled with lost souls whose disappearance would hardly go noticed. Why choose three who might actually be missed? After all, it was their trail that helped lead me to your door.”

“I requested Johnson to do just as you say,” said Mrs Klein, “to show discernment and bring me only insignificant people. He, however, was greedy and came to an ancillary arrangement with an associate of his.”

“Baron Gruner.”

“Why go to all the fuss and hazard of snatching somebody at random off the street when you have access to a reliable supply? Gruner was handing those women to Johnson on a plate, and also paying to have them disposed of, meaning that Johnson was making money twice over, from both me and Gruner. I entreated him to stop using Gruner as a source, but Johnson refused, saying that if I didn’t like what he had to offer, I could always go elsewhere.”

“But there aren’t many Shinwell Johnsons around,” said Holmes. “There isn’t even the Shinwell Johnson around any longer.”

“Besides, those girls were good material,” said Mrs Klein.

“Material!” I ejaculated.

“Young, healthy, liable to withstand the rigours of the process. They proved nicely biddable, too. There’s a certain type of girl, from a certain type of background, who is easy to control if you cow her sufficiently. They’re bred that way.”

“They were human beings,” I said. “They had done nothing wrong, and you – what you subjected them to is tantamount to vivisection.”

“By all means vent your indignation, Dr Watson. It means little to me. You have no idea of the sacrifices and compromises I have had to make in order to get this far. I do, and have made my peace with it. If the cause is noble, anything is justified.”

Behind that beautiful face, those dazzling eyes, evil lurked. I saw it now. Isadora Klein was a fanatic who did not care what depths she must stoop to or whom she must trample over in order to achieve her ends.

“Where are they now, these ‘nicely biddable’ victims of yours?” Holmes said. “Did they survive your sadistic experimentation?”

“Two did. One did not.”

“And the one who did not is, I would hazard, buried somewhere in the grounds of this house. I would also hazard that same holds true for the other two. They may have lived, but you could not have let them go free, not after what they had been through, not with them knowing what they now knew.”

“As I said, Mr Holmes: sacrifices.” There was a hint of remorse in Mrs Klein’s voice, but so slight as to be barely detectable. “I made it quick and painless.”

“I am sure that was a great comfort to you, if not to them.”

“Is it me you are trying to irk now? Having failed with Steve and Octavius, am I next on the list?” She laughed scornfully. “You must be desperate. Is it not obvious that I am impervious to shame or insult or goading?”

“A lot of things are obvious,” said Holmes, “including your sheer lack of conscience and your deep-seated depravity.”

“You seem to forget who is holding a gun on you.”

“Oh, you aren’t going to shoot me, Mrs Klein. Nor Watson.”

“Who says?”

“Logic again. You keep asserting that we are doomed, that nails are going into coffins, but I note a certain caginess in your language. I think you want us alive.”

“How would that be to my advantage?”

“Would Watson and I not make excellent subjects for your Palimpsest Process?” Holmes said. “Would we not be two very suitable vessels for Mi-Go sentiences to occupy?”

Mrs Klein looked at him askance. “I would be lying if I said that has not occurred to me.”

“You already have Dysart there, carrying Ranax Za-Ko within him. On the table lies Ezra Woolfson, the philosopher, whose brain is even now busy being commandeered by an Outside Thing. What do the two men have in common? They are both representatives of the intelligentsia, as indeed are all of The Cultured. Watson and I are also, in our way, representatives of the intelligentsia. Killing us means having to get rid of our bodies and laying yourself open to the possibility that the police will come knocking. There are several redoubtable Scotland Yarders who might wonder what has become of us and begin making enquiries. There is also my brother, who would find my sudden, unexplained vanishment sufficient reason to apply his great brain to finding me. Why bother with all that when you can instead make good use of us? When you can turn us back out into the world alive and well, if no longer quite our former selves?”

A chill ran through me. Was that her intent? Were Holmes and I destined to become vessels for occupation by alien sentiences?

Mrs Klein’s silence was answer in itself.

“What I am uncertain about,” Holmes went on, “is whether your fellow Cultured know what the Palimpsest Process truly implies. They heard Dysart use the term a short while ago, and none seemed puzzled by it or queried it, so I feel safe in assuming that they are familiar with the concept. Nor, for that matter, did any of them bat an eyelid at the sight of a half-naked man with a head crowned with fungus. Indeed, some of the glances they directed towards him were admiring and envious. Do they realise, though, that the procedure necessitates the erasure of one’s own personality in order to accommodate that of a Mi-Go? Have you withheld the full truth from them, in order to ensure their compliance when the time comes? Or do you have to force them into it, perhaps at gunpoint? Is that how it went with Dysart and Woolfson?”

“It’s heartening that you don’t know everything, Mr Holmes.”

“I do know that Douglas Maberley was in on the secret, and it drove him to such a paroxysm of despair that he took his own life.”

“Douglas. Poor, sweet, beautiful Douglas.” Again, Mrs Klein was exhibiting a hint of remorse, but again, too little of it to be worth anything. “In hindsight, I should not have allowed the closeness between us to develop to the extent that it did. I wanted that young man as one of The Cultured almost as much as I wanted him for myself, but my romantic feelings towards him blinded me to his shortcomings.”

“By ‘shortcomings’ you mean his sense of morality.”

“I showed him this room. There was a girl in it at the time, Kitty someone-or-other, halfway through the healing part of the process.”

“Her name was Kitty Winter,” I said.

“I explained everything to Douglas. I thought he would understand. But seeing the Winter girl and learning what purpose she served – it was too much for him. He fled before I could stop him.”

“But the letter you sent coaxed him into returning,” said Holmes.

“Back he came,” said Mrs Klein, “but he was no more sanguine about the situation than before. If anything, the opposite. I understood then that I would have to find some way of securing his silence. Given the wretched state he was in, it was easy. ‘If we really cannot come to some sort of accommodation, Douglas,’ I said, ‘then I no longer have any need for you. Go. Imagine life without me. Imagine your future and how empty it is going to be. It will be no future at all.’”

“You knew exactly the effect those words would have on him,” said Holmes. “They would tip him over the edge, and by killing himself he would save you the bother of having to do the job.”

“He left me, a broken soul, sunk in misery. News of his death reached me a day later. I was devastated.”

“Of course you were.”

“I did love Douglas. I thought he had a lot to offer, and it was a pity things ended how they did. But still…”

Even as these callous words left her lips, Mrs Klein was reaching for the doorknob with her free hand, while still keeping the gun in her other hand aimed unerringly at Holmes. I did not understand what she was up to, until all at once she snatched the door open.

Immediately outside the room stood the housemaid, Susan. She was half bent over, looking startled.

“Susan,” said Mrs Klein, coolly. “How long have you been standing there?”

“I don’t know what you mean, ma’am. I was just passing.”

“Don’t take me for an idiot. You had your ear to the keyhole. It’s quite obvious. I heard the faint creak of a floorboard directly outside the door about a minute ago, and another a half-minute after that. Come in.”

“I have work to attend to, ma’am. I should be on my way.”

“I said come in. That’s not a request.”

Nervously Susan stepped across the threshold. Her eyes widened as she took everything in, from the body on the table to the fungus on Dysart’s head to the Colt in her mistress’s hand.

“You have been very foolish, Susan,” Mrs Klein said. “Your nosiness has brought you to dire straits.”

“Mrs Klein, please, I am frightened.” Susan’s hands fluttered like birds. “That gun. This room. I meant nothing by listening at the door. It was mere curiosity. I heard voices within, and knowing the room is normally locked and we staff are forbidden to enter, I gave in to my worst instincts. I am very sorry. Please… Please can we pretend this didn’t happen? I should not want to be sacked.”

“Being sacked is the least of your concerns. You have seen more than you ought, more than is safe for you to have seen.”

“Dear Lord!” Susan wailed. “I hope you do not mean what I think you mean. Oh, madam!” She fell to her knees before Mrs Klein and clutched her mistress’s skirt, abject in her terror. “I will say nothing. I vow it. You can count on me. Only, I beg you, spare my life.”

Isadora Klein looked down at her employee with utter pitilessness.

“You have been a decent enough housemaid, Susan,” said she. “You carry out your duties diligently, if with little flair. Against that, you are a dull-witted thing, and there is a haughtiness about you that ill befits your station. On balance, I don’t think I shall miss you greatly.”

Susan tottered to her feet and started backing away from Mrs Klein. Her hands were raised defensively. “You would shoot me?” she said in a plaintive but also slightly petulant manner. “Kill me in cold blood?”

“I don’t see that I have a choice.”

“Before all these witnesses?”

“They, for one reason or another, are guaranteed to keep mum.”

Susan found herself butting up against the shelves of chemicals. “And there is nothing I can say that will make you change your mind?”

“Not a thing.”

Mrs Klein had yet to switch the snub-nosed revolver from Holmes to Susan. She must still be judging my friend the greater threat of the two. But it would only take a split second to swing the weapon towards the housemaid, fire the fatal shot, and swing it back to Holmes.

“Well then.” Susan straightened up and fixed her mistress with a defiant glare. In that moment of finality, she seemed to have discovered some backbone. “Queen takes king, it would appear.”

“A chess analogy?” said Mrs Klein. “From you, Susan?”

“I have hidden depths, ma’am.”

“Not that deep. I take it I am the queen, but how do you reckon yourself a king? You are, if anything, a pawn.”

I darted a glance at Holmes. His eyes met mine and I saw, visible even beneath his Langdale Pike makeup, a look I recognised. It said, Be prepared. Something is about to happen.

The mention of “queen takes king” had told me that Susan the housemaid was more than she seemed. I sensed that Holmes had known it all along. Now, assuming I was right, I had the distinct feeling that events were about to take a turn for the dramatic.

* * *

Susan’s hand groped for the shelves behind her and fastened onto a flask containing a blotchy purple fungus. She snatched up the flask and held it aloft.

In a flash, Mrs Klein’s expression went from complacent to appalled.

“What do you think you are doing, woman?” she snapped. “Put that down at once. You have no idea the danger you are putting us all in.”

“I have every idea,” said Susan. “If I smash this flask on the floor, the fungus inside it will also break open and will release a deadly infection.”

“How can you know that?”

“Does it matter? What you ought to be asking is how willing I am to imperil my own life as well as everyone else’s in this room. The answer, by the way, is perfectly willing.”

Mrs Klein turned the revolver on her. “And if I shoot you before you can throw the flask down…?”

“Then I will drop it anyway. It and the fungus will still break, and you shall be as dead as I am. Your death will just take much longer than mine and be considerably more unpleasant.”

“This is a bluff. You are not suicidal.”

“Can you afford to test that theory?”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want you to allow Mr Holmes, Dr Watson and myself to go free.”

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“A pity,” said Susan, brandishing the flask. “Then we all perish.”

Unless I was much mistaken, the fungus in the flask was the same kind that had killed three crewmen aboard the Sea Unicorn, as related by Peter Carey in his logbook. They had died in feverish agony. I did not relish going the same way myself.

Neither, it seemed, did Isadora Klein.

“You have the upper hand, Susan,” said she. “I think I now know who you are, and if I am right, then I would be wise not to challenge your determination.” She lowered the revolver.

“I thought you might see sense.” Susan gestured to Holmes and me. “Gentlemen, if you will make good your exit…”

As I moved, I saw Steve Dixie out of the corner of my eye preparing to stop me. Mrs Klein gave a shake of her head.

“Let him go, Steve,” she said.

“But, Mrs Klein…”

“They have got the better of us, thanks to Susan-who-is-not-Susan. They have won the round, but that does not mean they will win the fight.”

With Susan keeping a wary eye on Mrs Klein, Holmes and I filed towards the door.

“I never even suspected,” Mrs Klein said to her erstwhile housemaid. “You have been in my employ for half a year, and all that time you were hiding your true identity. Why have you rebelled against the Mi-Go? What has made you a turncoat?”

“One might ascribe it to a conflict of loyalties,” Susan said. “Something a monomaniac like you would never understand.”

Mrs Klein feigned offence. “Monomaniac. I am wounded to the quick.” Her lip curled as she added, “You should know that your betrayal will not go unpunished.”

“Do you think I am intimidated, Mrs Klein?” said Susan. “I have been living under your roof all this time, undetected. You hadn’t the least clue who I really am. Punish me? How easy do you think it will be even to find me when you have the entire world to search?”

“It will happen. Be in no doubt about that.”

By this time, Holmes and I were in the corridor, and Susan was backing out of the room, the flask still held above her head.

“It’s a shame,” she said to Mrs Klein. “If you hadn’t just threatened me, I might have shown mercy. As it is, you have forced my hand.”

Grabbing the doorknob, she hurled the flask into the room and slammed the door shut behind her.

“Run,” she said to Holmes and me. “If you value your lives, run!”

Holmes and I needed no further urging. We all three sprinted down the corridor, even as screams of rage and terror issued from the Palimpsest Chamber. Behind us, I heard the door open. A gunshot rang out. A bullet ricocheted off a wall and whined past us. We rounded a corner and kept running. Holmes barged through a door, and Susan and I followed him. We entered a library. Holmes crossed straight over and thrust open one of the French windows. We emerged onto the lawn, and onward we ran, beneath the starlit sky. A boundary wall appeared ahead, and Holmes scrambled to its apex, leaning down to offer a helping hand to me and then to Susan. When the three of us were over the wall, we resumed running. We stopped only after a mile or so, once we were sure nobody was pursuing us. I bent to catch my breath and allow my racing heart to settle.

We were on a lane somewhere in the forested depths of Harrow Weald, and by unspoken mutual consent we began walking, looking for a highway that would take us back to London proper.

* * *

The three of us had been plodding along in silence for several minutes until Holmes said, “Thank you, Irene.”

“You’re welcome,” said Susan.

“Are you not going to revert to your usual form?”

“Not yet. Call it vanity, but Susan’s frame is more robust than mine. Her dress does not hang well on Irene Adler. I imagine the same is true of you and Langdale Pike’s clothing.”

“At least I shall now no longer have to wear this outfit, or the padding and theatrical makeup,” Holmes said with feeling. “I cannot say I am sad about that.”

“It was a good disguise. Worth the effort, I reckon.”

“Yet you saw through it at a glance,” said Holmes. “‘Lofty but not insurmountable, those mountains are,’ Susan the housemaid said, talking about the Langdale Pikes. ‘They look like they’re hard to penetrate, but really there’s less to them than meets the eye.’ You might as well have just pointed a finger at me and cried, ‘Sherlock Holmes! I know you are Sherlock Holmes!’”

“It wasn’t simply your eclectic choice of character name,” said Irene Adler. “I know disguise. It is what I do. It is who I am. There is nobody who can fool me with one, not even you, Sherlock. Besides, I wasn’t only telling you I knew who you were.”

“No. You were announcing your own identity too. I suppose I should be thankful that you did not betray me to Mrs Klein.” Holmes’s eyes narrowed. “Or did you? She told me she knew all along who Langdale Pike really was.”

“Not my doing. Which isn’t to say that the thought of debunking Langdale Pike did not cross my mind. I was worried you might queer my pitch. I thought, however, that if I revealed myself to you, you would immediately perceive that I was engaged in a scheme of my own and leave me to it.”

“I did, although I wasn’t wholly certain I could trust you. Not until you, as Susan, defused that contretemps between Langdale Pike and Steve Dixie.”

“What is this ‘scheme of my own’ you mention, Miss Adler?” I asked. “Not that I am ungrateful to you for getting us out of the tight corner we were just in, but I’ve always understood you to be in league with the Mi-Go, which would mean, by extension, with Mrs Klein and The Cultured as well. Have you changed sides, and if so, how come?”

“Simply put, Doctor, my participation in Mi-Go activity on Earth was always half-hearted at best. As I’m sure your friend will have told you, I was more or less blackmailed into working for them. It was either agree to High Priest Glaw Za-Jooll’s stipulations or die. I have done various ‘favours’ for the Outside Things over the years, out of a sense of obligation more than anything. Yet that sense of obligation has worn increasingly thin.”

“Would one of those ‘favours’ have been aiding Josiah Amberley in his revenge plot?” said Holmes. “A plot which, I might add, nearly cost me my life.”

“You were never in any real danger, Sherlock,” said Miss Adler reprovingly. “I had every confidence you would outwit Amberley. Cunning though he was, he was hardly your match.”

“But why embroil me in his plans at all?”

“I think you know why. I hoped you would believe you had defeated the conspiracy of which I was a part and would thus devote yourself to other things. I was trying to keep you out of harm’s way.”

“Out of harm’s way, or out of your way?”

“Both. By then – what was it, five years ago? – I was coming round to the idea that the Mi-Go might pose a threat to us, even if I had no clear notion how or why. Their actions could easily be construed as ill-disposed towards mankind. As for the Cultured, the Mi-Go’s tame thralls, they struck me as fanatics and thus also potentially dangerous – Isadora Klein especially so.”

“She whom you yourself had introduced to the Mi-Go in ’eighty-six.”

Miss Adler nodded. “Mrs Klein would convey the Mi-Go’s instructions to me, and I would act upon them. It was she who organised the extortion campaign I put into action back in ’eighty-eight.”

“Professor Mellingford and the rest,” I said.

“Yes. The more I consorted with her, however, the more I grew disenchanted with her. For one thing, she does not blink enough. Word to the wise: never trust anyone who does not blink enough. For another, her behaviour has become increasingly immoderate as time goes by. From being a convert, she is now a zealot.”

“Was,” I corrected. “Was a zealot. She is dead now, or as good as.”

“I suppose so, assuming that purple fungus is as virulent as I understand it to be. She, Steve Dixie, Octavius Dysart – or should that be Ranax Za-Ko? Ezra Woolfson too. All doomed.”

“Thus, in light of your concerns about The Cultured,” said Holmes, “you took it upon yourself to spy on them, in the guise of Susan.”

“Six months ago Mrs Klein’s then-housemaid came into an unexpected legacy, some five hundred pounds,” said Miss Adler.

“Courtesy of you, no doubt.”

“Naturally she quit, and I, knowing that a sudden vacancy had come up among the domestic staff at The Three Gables, applied for the job and got it. Or rather, Susan did. She came with excellent references.”

“Immaculately forged, I should imagine.”

“They were, even if I do say so myself. I had to be very careful in my spying. I couldn’t be sure the Mi-Go would not realise that their tame shapeshifter was, in shapeshifted form, snooping around in the home of their primary human agent. The consequences of being discovered would no doubt have been dire.”

“You put yourself at great risk,” said Holmes. “Yet you did not want me exposing myself to the same risk.” He sounded – a rare thing for Sherlock Holmes – puzzled.

“Is that so unreasonable?” Miss Adler said. “There are some things we would rather do ourselves than leave to those whom we – we admire.”

I could have sworn she had been about to use a verb other than “admire”, a much more emphatic one.

“I should be flattered,” said Holmes.

“You should. At any rate, there I was, making progress, and who should come blundering onto the scene, swathed in stage makeup, but Sherlock Holmes?”

“Blundering!” my friend expostulated.

“All I could do was look on, at arm’s length, and hope that your investigation would not interfere with mine.”

“But you did get involved on that one occasion,” I said. “That ‘contretemps’ Holmes just referred to.”

“I knew Pike would have to take a drubbing from Dixie in order for the imposture to be preserved,” she said.

“And you could not bear to see Holmes badly beaten?”

“There is that, but more importantly, I was afraid Dixie would realise, during the course of the pummelling, that his victim was wearing stage makeup and sporting a fake paunch. I didn’t know then that Mrs Klein was already wise to Sherlock Holmes’s game. By stepping in I redirected Dixie’s ire onto me, confident that not even he would hit a woman.”

“The upshot of all this,” Holmes said, “is twofold. First, if Mrs Klein has indeed received a fatal infection from the purple fungus, then The Cultured are done for. Without her to guide them and spur them on, they will fall apart. By the same token, the Mi-Go will have lost their principal agent on Earth. Their plot has unravelled. Second, we know what that plot is: the systematic replacement of certain prominent individuals with Outside Things.”

“They were trying to infiltrate British society,” I said, “using Mi-Go sentiences occupying human bodies.”

“And ‘trying’ is the operative word there, Doctor,” said Miss Adler. “Messrs Dysart and Woolfson were the first Cultured to undergo the Palimpsest Process. The first and, as it transpires, the last.”

“All in all, a decent night’s work,” said Holmes. “However, we still have to ascertain the Mi-Go’s motives. If Mrs Klein is to be believed, they wish to bring about positive change in the world.”

“But if that’s the case,” I said, “why not be upfront about it? Why all the subterfuge?”

“Precisely, Watson. It may simply be because people do not always want what is perceived to be ‘good’ for them. They resent it as meddling or nannying, and kick back against it. The Mi-Go understand this and would prefer to avoid it. We must, furthermore, be open to the possibility that they have other allies besides The Cultured, and other plans in motion.”

“You could usefully apply yourself to that problem, Sherlock,” said Miss Adler.

“I? And not you too? Now that you have shown firmly where your allegiances lie, Irene, do you not feel it incumbent upon you to resist the Outside Things further? There is a certain pleasing irony in you deploying the talents they gave you against them.”

“No,” was the adamant reply. “I am done with all this. It is time I moved on to other things. I have been at the Mi-Go’s beck and call for fifteen years. I would like to start living my life wholly on my own terms again.”

“That,” said Holmes, “is a shame.”

Miss Adler brushed a hand against his cheek. “I have every faith in you, Sherlock. You too, Dr Watson. And now I shall take my leave of you. Good luck!”

So saying, she got down on all fours, and next moment underwent a transformation so startling, I can scarce put it into words. Her face contorted, her nose elongating, her eyes growing round and yellow. Her limbs shrivelled. Her back arched. Her entire body writhed and distended. Hair appeared on her skin where no hair had been. Her dress slithered off her like a tent whose guy ropes have been severed. Within seconds, in place of Susan the frowsty housemaid there was a fox, standing with a puddle of feminine garments around its feet.

The fox – a rather handsome specimen, with alert ears, thick brush and lustrous marmalade-orange coat – looked at both Holmes and myself. Its eyes were amber-coloured and seemed infinitely wise. Then, with a decisive flick of its tail, the creature turned and loped off into the woods at the side of the lane.

It was a full minute before I found my voice.

“That was… remarkable,” I said, still staring off in the direction the fox had gone.

“Memorable, I’d say,” Holmes opined.

“Well, I can now add housemaid and fox to the forms I have seen Irene Adler in, and yet still I have not met her as she normally is. At this rate, perhaps I never shall. I can’t help but wonder, though, why someone who has made a point of saying she does not wish to be hunted would choose to transform herself into, of all things, an animal that is routinely hunted.”

“I am sure she will be fine, Watson,” my companion said tersely.

“I was just making light of the situation.”

“Well, kindly do not.”

With that, Holmes bundled up Miss Adler’s discarded clothing and disposed of it amid a clump of brambles. Then we continued on our way.

Soon we could make out the lights of London, shedding their glow against the bowl of the heavens, and not long after that we were on the Harrow Road, an arrow whose unwavering course would take us into the heart of the capital. Throughout the journey, Holmes was sunk in silence, and I, sensing the depth of feeling that had given rise to this brown study, chose not to intrude upon it.

* * *

All the next day, and the day after, Holmes scoured the newspapers for reports about Isadora Klein and The Three Gables. He expected headlines declaring that a noted society hostess had been taken severely ill, had been ferried to hospital, and had died despite doctors doing their utmost to save her. None appeared.

Eventually, frustrated by the lack of information, Holmes took himself back up to Harrow Weald. I accompanied him. I felt no little trepidation as we passed through the gates of The Three Gables and approached the house. If Mrs Klein was alive and well, I doubted she would receive us cordially, and I did not much look forward to another confrontation with Steve Dixie. My service revolver was in my pocket, however, which helped allay some of my concerns.

In the event, the house was empty. There was no answer to Holmes’s knock, and through the ground-floor windows we saw rooms whose furniture was draped in dustsheets. Going round to the back, we got in through the same door I had used the night before last. The broken windowpane had not been replaced.

Our footfalls echoed hollowly through the corridors. There is a peculiar kind of stillness that falls over a property when it is abandoned, an almost forlorn hush, and just such a hush now filled The Three Gables. Everyone had vacated the place, from the lady of the house down to the lowliest servant.

“Where?” I said to Holmes. “Where have they gone to?”

“With Mrs Klein’s resources,” came the reply, “it could be anywhere.”

“So she lives.”

“Maybe, or maybe, ravaged by sickness, she has taken herself off somewhere to die, bringing the similarly afflicted Steve Dixie, Ezra Woolfson and Ranax Za-Ko along with her.”

We tried the Palimpsest Chamber. The room had been cleared out. Only the tables and shelves remained, all bare. The smell of bleach hung in the air.

“Someone cleaned up here,” I said. “Scrubbed it thoroughly to get rid of any trace of the purple fungus.”

“So it would appear.”

“Then this has been a wasted journey.”

“Not entirely,” said Holmes. “We may at least be able to bring some resolution to the families of three missing girls.”

We searched the grounds, and eventually, in an overgrown corner behind the walled kitchen garden, we found a patch of disturbed earth. Some cursory digging revealed a silk-clad arm, and we knew we had found the last resting places of Kitty Winter, Cornelia Waunchope and Abigail Roxbury-Trent.

Back in London, Holmes contacted Scotland Yard to report our grim findings: three graves at The Three Gables. To Sir Hartley Winter he conveyed, in person, the tragic news about his daughter’s demise. He also tried to get in touch with Morley Babington, but the prepaid reply slips with his telegrams were returned blank. Visiting the theatre impresario’s house in Bloomsbury, he was told by a manservant that “Mr Babington has been called away unexpectedly on business.” The fellow said that his master had given no indication when he might return, and he had no knowledge where he had gone.

Holmes made enquiries into the whereabouts of other members of The Cultured, with similar results.

“They have scattered to the four winds,” he said.

“Is that a good sign, or a bad one?” I asked.

“You mean have they fled in terror, never to be of concern to us again, or have they gone to ground in order to regroup and retrench? I wish I could say.”

“So this is not over yet.”

“At the very least, we must keep on our guard,” said Holmes. “And not just in the conventional manner, either, such as looking out for ambushes or watching for spies.”

“Explain.”

“If Mi-Go can inhabit human bodies, Watson, they can impersonate anyone. You could secretly be an Outside Thing, for all I know.”

“You don’t suppose for one moment that—”

“No, my friend. No. I am not suggesting you are a Mi-Go sentience masquerading as John Watson.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“Although, having said that, you were away in France for a goodly length of time. Could it be that Mrs Klein or some other Mi-Go agent got to you there and subjected you to the Palimpsest Process?” Before I might object again, Holmes wafted a hand as though batting the thought aside. “It is a serious concern nonetheless, broadly speaking. The Palimpsest Chamber at The Three Gables might not be the only one in existence.”

“So we must be careful.”

“Very careful,” said Holmes. “We cannot be certain that the people around us, even people we know well, can be trusted.”

That night, as I ate supper with my wife, I looked across the table at her. She smiled back at me in that winsome way of hers, head on one side, eyes bright. I recalled how we had met: her near-accident with the pantechnicon, my saving her. Could it have been staged?

“What is it, John?” said she.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Nothing at all, my dear. I was just thinking how fortunate I am to have met you.”

She smiled again, and I resumed eating, and the food tasted like coaldust in my mouth.