The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Part 43

"Oh, I could name a dozen commonplace possibilities," replied Holmes, gesturing him to a chair. "And a score more if we wished to peruse a catalogue of the outre outre. Perhaps you could tell me, Mr. Colby, the name of this unfortunate young lady and the circ.u.mstances under which you were so rudely ejected from her parents' favor?"

"Guardians," corrected our visitor. "Her uncle is the Honorable Carstairs Delapore, and her grandfather, Gaius, Viscount Delapore of Depewatch Priory in Shrops.h.i.+re. It's a crumbling, moldering, Gothic old pile, sinking into decay. My family's money could easily rescue it-as I've said to Mr. Delapore, any number of times, and he agrees with me."

"A curious thing to do, for a man rejecting your suit."

Colby's breath gusted again in exasperated laughter. "Isn't it? It isn't as if I were a stranger off the street, Mr. Holmes. I've been Mr. Delapore's pupil for a year, have lived in his household on week-ends, eaten at his table. When I first came to study with him I could have sworn he approved of my love for Judith."

"And what, precisely, would you say is the nature of Mr. Delapore's teaching?" Holmes leaned back in the basket-chair, fingertips pressed lightly together, closely watching the young American's face.

"I guess you'd say he's... an antiquarian." Colby's voice was hesitant, as if picking his words. "One of the most remarkable students of ancient folklore and legend in the world. Indeed, it was in the hopes of studying with him that I came to Oxford. I am-I guess you might call me the intellectual black sheep of the Colby family." He chuckled again. "My father left the firm to my brothers and myself, but on the whole I've been content to let them run it as they wished. The making of money... the constant clamor of stocks and rail-shares and directors... From the time I was a small boy I sensed there were deeper matters than that in the world, forgotten shadows lurking behind the gaslights' artificial glare."

Holmes said nothing to this, but his eyelids lowered, as if he were listening for something behind the words. Colby, hands clasped, seemed almost to have forgotten his presence, or mine, or the reality of the stuffy summer heat. He went on, "I had corresponded with Carstairs Delapore on... on the subject of some of the more obscure Lammas-tide customs of the Welsh borderlands. As I'd hoped, he agreed to guide my studies, both at Oxford and, later, among the books of his private collection-marvelous volumes that clarified ancient folkloric rites and put them into contexts of philosophy, history, the very fabric of time itself! Depewatch Priory... ."

He seemed to come to himself with a start, glanced at Holmes, then at me, and went on in a more constrained voice, "It was at Depewatch Priory that I first met Mr. Delapore's niece, Judith. She is eighteen, the daughter of Mr. Delapore's brother Fynch, a spirit of light and innocence in that... in that dreary old pile. She had just returned from finis.h.i.+ng-school in Switzerland, though plans for her come-out into London society had run aground on the family's poverty. Any other girl I know would have been pouting and in tears at being robbed of her season on the town. Not she! She bore it bravely and sweetly, though it was clear that she faced a lifetime of stagnation in a tiny mountain town, looking after a decrepit house and a... a difficult old man."

From his jacket pocket Colby withdrew an embossed cardboard photograph-case, opening it to show the image of a most beautiful young lady. Thin and rather fragile-looking, she wore her soft curls in a chignon. Her eyes seemed light, blue or hazel so far as I could tell from the photograph, her hair a medium shade-perhaps red, but more likely light brown-and her complexion pale to ghostliness. Her expression was one of grave innocence, trusting and unself-conscious.

"Old Viscount Delapore is a grim old autocrat who rules his son, his niece, and every soul in the village of Watchgate as if it were 1394 instead of 1894. He owns all of the land thereabouts-the family has, I gather, from time immemorial-and so violent is his temper that the villagers dare not cross him. From the first moment Judith declared her love for me, I offered to take her away from the place-to take her clean out of the country, if need be, though I hardly think he would come after her, as she seems to fear."

"Does she fear her grandfather?" Holmes turned the photograph thoughtfully over in his hands, examining the back as well as the front most minutely.

Colby nodded, his face clouding with anger. "She claims she's free to come and go, that there's no influence being brought to bear upon her. But there is, Mr. Holmes, there is! When she speaks of Viscount Gaius she glances over her shoulder, as if she imagines he could hear her wherever she is. And the look in her lovely eyes... ! She fears him, Mr. Holmes. He has some evil and unwholesome hold upon the girl. He's not her legal guardian-that's Mr. Carstairs Delapore. But the old man's influence extends to his son as well. When I received this-" He drew from the same pocket as the photograph a single sheet of folded paper, which he pa.s.sed across to Holmes, "I begged him to countermand his father's order, to at least let me present my case. But this card... " He handed a large, stiff note to Holmes, "was all I got back."

The letter was dated August 16, four days ago.

"My best beloved, "My heart is torn from my breast by this most terrible news. My grandfather has forbidden me to see you again, forbidden even that your name be mentioned in this house. He will give no reason for this beyond that it is his will that I remain here with him, as his servant-I fear, as his slave! I have written to my father but fear he will do nothing. I am in despair! Do nothing, but wait and be ready.

"Thine only, Judith."

The delicate pink paper, scented with patchouli and with the faint smoke of the oil-lamp by which it must have been written, was blotted with tears.

Her father's card said merely: "Remove her from your thoughts. There is nothing which can be done."

Burnwell Colby smote the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, and his strong jaw jutted forward. "My grandfather didn't let the mandarins of Hong Kong chase him away, and my father refused to be stopped by Sioux Indians or winter snows in the Rockies," he declared. "Nor shall this stop me. Will you find out for me, Mr. Holmes, what vile hold Lord Gaius has upon his granddaughter and his son, that I may free the gentlest girl that ever lived from the clutches of an evil old man who seeks to make a drudge of her forever?"

"And is this all," asked Holmes, raising his eyelids to meet the American's earnest gaze, "that you have to tell me about Carstairs Delapore and his father? Or about these 'lurking shadows' that are Delapore's study?"

The young man frowned, as if the question took him momentarily aback. "Oh, the squeamish may speak of decadence," he said after a moment, not off-handedly, but as if carefully considering his words. "And some of the practices which Delapore has uncovered are fairly ugly by modern standards. Certainly they'd make my old pater blink, and my poor hidebound brothers." He chuckled, as if at the recollection of a schoolboy prank. "But at bottom it's all only legends, you know, and bogies in the dark."

"Indeed," said Holmes, rising, and held out his hand to the young suitor. "I shall learn of this what I can, Mr. Colby. Where might I reach you?"

"The Excelsior Hotel in Brighton." The young man fished from his vest-pocket a card to write the address upon-he seemed to carry everything loose in his pockets, jumbled together like cabbages in a barrow. "I always stay there," he explained as he scribbled. "It was how Miss Delapore knew where to reach me. How you can abide to remain in town in weather like this beats me!" And he departed, apparently unaware that not everyone's grandfather rammed opium down Chinese throats in order to pay the Excelsior's summer-holiday prices.

"So what do you think of our American Romeo?" inquired Holmes, as the rattle of Colby's cab departed down Baker Street. "What sort of man does he appear to be?"

"A wealthy one," I said, still stung by that careless remark about those who remained in town. "One not used to hearing the word 'No.' But earnest and good of heart, I would say. Certainly he takes a balanced view of these 'decadent' studies-to which the Delapores can scarcely object, if they share them."

"True enough." Holmes set letter and note upon the table, and went to the bookcase to draw out his copy of the Court Gazette Court Gazette, which was so interleaved with snipped-out society columns, newspaper clippings, and notes in Holmes' neat, strong handwriting as to bulge to almost double its original size. "But what are the nature of these folkloric 'practices' which are 'fairly ugly by modern standards'? Ugliness by the standards of a world which has invented the Maxim gun can scarcely be termed bogies in the dark.

"Carstairs Delapore," he read, opening the book upon his long arm. "Questioned concerning his whereabouts on the night of the 27th August, 1890, when the owner of a public house in Whitechapel reported her ten-year-old son Thomas missing; a man of Delapore's description-he is evidently of fairly unforgettable appearance-seen speaking with the boy that evening. Thomas never found. I thought I recognized the name. Delapore was also questioned in 1873 by the Manchester police-he was in that city, for no discernable reason, when two little mill-girls went missing... I must say I'm astonished that anyone reported their disappearance. Mudlarks and street-urchins vanish every day from the streets of London and no one inquires after them anymore than one inquires the whereabouts of b.u.t.terflies once they flitter over the garden fence. A man need not even be very clever, to kidnap children in London." He shut the book, his eyes narrowing as he turned his gaze to the endless wasteland of brick that lay beyond the window. "Merely careful to pick the dirtiest and hungriest, and those without parents or homes."

"That's a serious conclusion to jump to," I said, startled and repelled.

"It is," Holmes replied. "Which is why I jump to nothing. But Gaius, Viscount Delapore, was mentioned three times in the early reports of the Metropolitan police-between 1833 and 1850-in connection with precisely such investigations, at the same time that he was publis.h.i.+ng a series of monographs on 'Demonic Ritual Survivals along the Welsh Borders' for the discredited Eye of Dawn Society. And in 1863 an American reporter disappeared while investigating rumors of a pagan cult in western Shrops.h.i.+re, not five miles from Watchgate village, which lies below the hill upon which Depewatch Priory stands."

"But even so," I said, "even if the Delapores are involved in some kind of theosophistic studies-or white slaving for that matter-would they not seek rather to get an outsider like Delapore's niece out of the house, rather than keeping her there as a potential source of trouble? And how would the old man use a pack of occult rubbish to dominate his granddaughter and his son against their will?"

"How indeed?" Holmes went to the bookcase again, and took down the envelope in which he had bestowed Burnwell Colby's card. "I, too, found our American visitor-despite his patent desire to disown a.s.sociation with his hidebound and boring family-an ingenuous and harmless young man. Which makes this all the more curious."

He held out the envelope to me, and I took it out and examined it as he had. The stock, as he had said, was expensive and the typeface rigidly correct, although the card itself bore slight traces of having been carried about loose in Mr. Colby's pockets with pens, notes, and photographs of his beloved Judith. Only when I brought it close to examine the small dents and scratches on its surface was I conscious of the smell that seemed to imbue the thick, soft paper, a nauseating mix of frankincense, charred hair, and... .

I looked up at Holmes, my eyes wide. I had been a soldier in India, and a physician for most of my life. I knew the smell.

"Blood," I said.

The note Holmes sent that afternoon received an answer within hours, and after we had finished our supper he invited me to accompany him to the home of a friend on the Embankment near the Temple: "A curious customer who may fill in for you some hitherto unsuspected colors in the palette of London life," he said. Mr. Carnaki was a thin young man of medium height and attenuated build, whose large gray eyes regarded one from behind thick spectacle lenses with an expression it is hard to define: as if he were always watching for something that others do not see. His tall, narrow house was filled with books, even lining the walls of the hallways on both sides so that a broad-built man would have been obliged to sidle through crab-wise, and through the darkened doorways I glimpsed the flicker of gas-light across what appeared to be complex chemical and electrical apparatus. He listened to Holmes' account of Burnwell Colby's visit without comment, his chin resting on one long, spidery hand, then rose from his chair and climbed a pair of steps to an upper shelf of one of the many bookcases that walled the small study at the back of the house to which he'd led us.

"Depewatch Priory," he read aloud, "stands on a cliff above the village of Watchgate in the wild hill country on the borders of Wales, where in 1215 King John confirmed the appointment of an Augustinian prior over an existing 'hooly howse' of religion said to date back to foundation by Joseph of Arimathea. It appears from its inception to have been the center of a cycle of legends and whispers: indeed, the King's original intent was apparently to have the place pulled down and salt strewed on its foundations. One Philip of Mundberg pet.i.tioned Edward IV, describing the monks there engaged in 'comerce wyth daemons yt did issue forth from h.e.l.l, and make knowne theyr wants by means of certain dremes,' but he apparently never reached the King himself and the investigation was dropped. There were repeated accusations of heresy involving the transmigration of the souls of certain priors, rumors which apparently transferred themselves to the Grimsley family to whom Henry VIII presented the priory in 1540, and surfaced in the 1780s in connection with the Delapores, who succeeded them through marriage.

"William Punt... " He tapped the black leathern covers of the volume as he set it on the table beside Holmes, "in his Catalogue of Secret Abominations Catalogue of Secret Abominations described the place in 1793 as being a 'goodly manor of gray stone' built upon the foundations of the Plantagenet cloister, but says that the original core of the establishment is the ruin of a tower, probably Roman in origin. Punt speaks of stairs leading down to a sub-crypt, where the priors used to sleep upon a crude altar after appalling rites. When Lord Rupert Grimsley was murdered by his wife and daughters in 1687, they apparently boiled his body and buried his bones in the sub-crypt, reserving his skull, which they placed in a niche at the foot of the main stair in the manor-house itself, 'that evil dare not pa.s.s.'" described the place in 1793 as being a 'goodly manor of gray stone' built upon the foundations of the Plantagenet cloister, but says that the original core of the establishment is the ruin of a tower, probably Roman in origin. Punt speaks of stairs leading down to a sub-crypt, where the priors used to sleep upon a crude altar after appalling rites. When Lord Rupert Grimsley was murdered by his wife and daughters in 1687, they apparently boiled his body and buried his bones in the sub-crypt, reserving his skull, which they placed in a niche at the foot of the main stair in the manor-house itself, 'that evil dare not pa.s.s.'"

I could not repress a chuckle. "As protective totems go, it didn't do Lord Rupert much good, did it?"

"I daresay not," returned Holmes with a smile. "Yet my reading of the 1840 Amsterdam edition of Punt's Catalogue Catalogue leads me to infer that the local population didn't regard Rupert Grimsley's murder as particularly evil; the villagers impeded the Metropolitan police in the pursuit of their duties to such effect that the three murderesses got completely away." leads me to infer that the local population didn't regard Rupert Grimsley's murder as particularly evil; the villagers impeded the Metropolitan police in the pursuit of their duties to such effect that the three murderesses got completely away."

"Good heavens, yes." Carnaki turned, and drew out another volume, more innocuous than the sinister-looking tome of abominations: this one was simply a History of West Country Families, as heavily interleaved with clippings and notes as was Holmes' Gazette Gazette. "Rupert Grimsley was feared as a sorcerer from Shrewsbury to the Estuary; he is widely reputed to have worked the roads as a highwayman, carrying off, not valuables, but travelers who were never seen again. Demons were said to come and go at his command, and at least two lunatics from that section of the Welsh border-one in the early part of the eighteenth century and one as recently as 1842-swore that old Lord Rupert dwelled in the bodies of all the successive Lords of Depewatch."

"You mean that he was being constantly reincarnated?" I admit this surfacing of this Thibetan belief in the prosaic hill-country of Wales startled me considerably.

Carnaki shook his head. "That the spirit-the consciousness-of Rupert Grimsley pa.s.sed from body to body, battening like a parasite upon that of the heir and driving out the younger man's soul, as the human portion of each Lord of Depewatch died."

The young antiquarian looked so serious as he said this that again I was hard-put to suffocate a laugh; Carnaki's expression did not alter, but his eyes flicked from my face to Holmes'. "I suppose," said the young man after a moment, "that this had something to do with the fact that each of the gentlemen in question were rumored to be involved with mysterious disappearances among the coal-miners of the district: Viscount Gerald Delapore, who is reputed to have undergone so terrifying a change in personality at his accession to the t.i.tle that his wife left him and fled to America... and the young Gaius Delapore himself."

"Indeed?" Holmes leaned forward eagerly in his chair, his hand still resting on the Catalogue Catalogue, which he had been examining with the delighted reverence of a true lover of ancient volumes. He had hardly taken his eyes from the many tomes that stacked every table and most of the corners of Carnaki's little study, some of them the musty calf or morocco of Georgian bookbinders, others the heavier, more archaic black-letter incunabula of the early days of printing, with not a few older still, hand-written in Latin upon parchment or vellum and illuminated with spidery marginalia that even at a distance disturbed me by their anomalous bizarrite bizarrite. "And what, precisely, is the evil that is ascribed by legend to Depewatch Priory, and for what purpose did Rupert Grimsley and his successors seek out those who had no power, and whom society would not miss?"

Carnaki set aside his History and seated himself on the oak bookcase steps, his long, thin arms resting on his knees. He glanced again at me, not as if I had offended him with my earlier laughter but as if gauging how to phrase things so that I would understand them; then his eyes returned to Holmes.

"You have heard, I think, of the six thousand steps, that are hinted at-never directly-in the remote legends of both the old Cymric tribes that preceded the Celts, and of the American Indian? Of the pit that lies deep at the heart of the world, and of the ent.i.ties that are said to dwell in the abysses beyond it?"

"I have heard of these things," said Holmes quietly. "There was a case in Arkham, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1869... ."

"The Whateley case, yes." Carnaki's long, sensitive mouth twitched with remembered distaste, and his glance turned to me. "These legends-remembered only through two cults of quite shockingly degenerate Indian tribes, one in Maine and the other, curiously, in northeastern Arizona, where they are shunned by the surrounding Navajo and Hopi-speak of things, ent.i.ties, sentient yet not wholly material, that have occupied the lightless chasms of s.p.a.ce and time since the days before humankind's furthest ancestors first stood upright. These elder beings fear the light of the sun, yet with the coming of darkness would creep forth from certain places in the world to prey upon human bodies and human dreams, through the centuries making surprising and dreadful bargains with individuals of mankind in return for most hideous payment."

"And this is what Gaius Delapore and his son believe they have in their bas.e.m.e.nt?" My eyebrows shot up. "It should make it easy enough for us to a.s.sist young Mr. Colby in freeing his fiancee from the influence of two obvious lunatics."

Holmes said softly, "So it should."

We remained at Carnaki's until nearly midnight, while Holmes and the young antiquarian-for so I a.s.sumed Carnaki to be-spoke of the appalling folkloric and theosophical speculations that evidently fuelled Viscount Delapore's madness: hideous tales of creatures beyond human imaginings or human dreams, monstrous legends of dim survivals from impossibly ancient aeons, and of those deluded madmen whose twisted minds accepted such absurdities for truth. Holmes was right in his a.s.sertion that the visit would supply the palette of my knowledge of London with hitherto unsuspected hues. What surprised me was Holmes' knowledge of such things, for on the whole he was a man of practical bent, never giving his attention to a subject unless it was with some end in view.

Yet when Carnaki spoke of the abomination of abominations, of the terrible amorphous shuggoths and the Watcher of the Gate, Holmes nodded, as one does who hears familiar names. The shocking rites engaged in by the covens of ancient believers, whether American Indians or decayed cults to be found in the fastnesses of Greenland or Thibet, did not surprise him, and it was he, not our host, who spoke of the insane legend of the shapeless G.o.d who plays the pipe in the dark heart of chaos, and who sends forth the dreams that drive men mad.

"I did not know that you made a study of such absurdities, Holmes," I said, when we stood once more on the fog-shrouded Embankment, listening for the approaching clip of a cab-horse's hooves. "I would hardly have said theosophy was your line."

"My line is anything that will-or has-provided a motive for men's crimes, Watson." He lifted his hand and whistled for the Jehu, an eerie sound in the m.u.f.fled stillness. His face in the glare of the gaslight seemed pale and set. "Whether a man bows down to G.o.d or Mammon or to Cthulhu in his dark house at R'lyeh is no affair of mine... Until he sheds one drop of blood not his own in his deity's name. Then G.o.d have mercy upon him, for I shall not."

All of these events took place on Monday, the 20th of August. The following day Holmes was engaged with turning over the pages of his sc.r.a.pbooks of clippings regarding unsolved crimes, seeming, it appeared to me, to concentrate on disappearances during the later part of the summer in years back almost to the beginning of the century. On Wednesday Mrs. Hudson sent up the familiar elegantly restrained calling-card of the American folklorist, the man himself following hard upon her heels and almost thrusting her out of the way as he entered our parlor.

"Well, Holmes, it's all settled and done with," he declared, in a loud voice very unlike his own. "Thank you for your patience with old Delapore's d.a.m.ned rodomontade, but I've seen the old man myself-he came down to town yesterday, d.a.m.n his impudence-and made him see reason."

"Have you?" asked Holmes politely, gesturing to the chair in which he had first sat.

Colby waved him impatiently away. "Simplest thing in nature, really. Feed a cur and he'll shut up barking. And here's for you." And he drew from his pocket a small leather bag which he tossed carelessly onto the table. It struck with the heavy, metallic ring of golden coin. "Thank you again."

"And I thank you." Holmes bowed, but he watched Colby's face as he spoke, and I could see his own face had turned very pale. "Surely you are too generous."

"S'blood, man, what's a few guineas to me? I can tear up little Judi's poor letter, now we're to be wed all right and tight... ." He winked lewdly at Holmes, and held out his hand. "And her old Dad's d.a.m.ned impudent note as well, if you would."

Holmes looked around him vaguely, and picked up various of his sc.r.a.pbooks from the table to look beneath them: "Didn't you tuck it behind the clock?" I asked.

"Did I?" Holmes went immediately to the mantle-cluttered as always with newspapers, books, and unanswered correspondence-and after a brief search shook his head. "I shall find it, never fear," he said, his brow furrowing. "And return it, if you would be so kind as to give me your direction once more."

Colby hesitated, then s.n.a.t.c.hed the nearest piece of paper from the table-a bill from Holmes' tailor, I believe it was-and scribbled an address upon it. "I'm off to Watchgate this afternoon," he said. "This will find me."

"Thank you," said Holmes, and I noticed that he neither touched the paper, nor came within arm's reach of the man who stood before him. "I shall have it in the post before nightfall. I can't think what can have become of it. It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Colby. My felicitations on the happy outcome of your suit."

When Colby was gone Holmes stood for a time beside the table, looking after him a little blankly, his hands knotted into fists where they rested among the sc.r.a.pbooks. He whispered, "d.a.m.n him," as if he had forgotten my presence in the room. "My G.o.d, I had not believed it... ."

Then, turning sharply, he went to the mantelpiece and immediately withdrew from behind the clock the note which Carstairs Delapore had sent to Colby. This he tucked into an envelope and sealed. As he copied the direction he asked in a stiff, expressionless tone, "What did you make of our guest, Watson?"

"That success has made him b.u.mptious," I replied, for I had liked Colby less in his elevated and energized mood than I had when he was merely unthinking about his own and other peoples' money. "Holmes, what is it? What's wrong?"

"Did you happen to notice which hand he wrote out his direction with?"

I thought for a moment, picturing the man scribbling, then said, "His left."

"Yet when he wrote the address of the Hotel Excelsior the day before yesterday," said Holmes, "he did so with his right hand."

"So he did." I came to his side and picked up the tailor's bill, and compared the writing on it with that of the Excelsior address, which lay on the table among the sc.r.a.pbooks and clippings. "That would account for the hand being so very different."

Holmes said, "Indeed." But he spoke looking out the window into Baker Street, and the harsh glare of the morning sunlight gave his eyes a steely cast, faraway and cold, as if he saw from a distance some terrible event taking place. "I am going to Shrops.h.i.+re, Watson," he said after a moment. "I'm leaving tonight, on the last train; I should be back-"

"Then you find Viscount Gaius' sudden capitulation as sinister as I do," I said.

He looked at me with blank surprise, as if that construction of young Colby's information had been the farthest thing from his mind. Then he laughed, a single sharp mirthless breath, and said, "Yes. Yes, I find it... sinister."

"Do you think young Colby is walking into some peril, returning to Depewatch Priory?"

"I think my client is in peril, yes," said Holmes quietly. "And if I cannot save him, then the least that I can do is avenge."

Holmes at first refused to hear of me accompanying him to the borders of Wales, sending instead a note to Carnaki with instructions to be ready to depart by the eight o'clock train. But when Billy the messenger-boy returned with the information that Carnaki was away from home and would not return until the following day, he a.s.sented, sending a second communication to the young antiquarian requesting that he meet us in the village of High Clum, a few miles from Watchgate, the following day.

It puzzled me that Holmes should have chosen the late train, if he feared for Colby's life should the young man return to fetch his fiancee from the hands of the two monomaniacs at Depewatch Priory. Still more did it puzzle me that, upon our arrival at midnight in the market town of High Clum, Holmes took rooms for us at the Cross of Gold, as if he were deliberately putting distance between us and the man he spoke of-when he could be induced to speak at all-as if he were already dead.

In the morning, instead of attempting to communicate with Colby, Holmes hired a pony trap and a boy to drive us to the wooded ridge that divided High Clum from the vale in which the village of Watchgate stood. "Queer folk there," the lad said, as the st.u.r.dy cob leaned into its collars on the slope. "It's only a matter of four mile, but it's like as if they lived in another land. You never do hear of one of their lads come courtin' in Clum, and the folk there's so odd now none of ours'n will go there. They come for the market, once a week. Sometimes you'll see Mr. Carstairs drive to town, all bent and withered up like a tree hit by lightnin', starin' about him with those pale eyes: yellow hazel, like all the Delapore; rotten apples my mum calls 'em. And old Gaius with him sometimes, treatin' him like as if he was a dog, the way he treats everyone."

The boy drew his horse to a halt, and pointed out across the valley with his whip: "That'll be the Priory, sir."

After all that had been spoken of monstrous survivals and ancient cults, I had half-expected to see some blackened Gothic pile thrusting flamboyant spires above the level of the trees. But in fact, as Carnaki had read in William Punt's book, Depewatch Priory appeared, from across the valley, to be simply a 'goodly manor of gray stone,' its walls rather overgrown with ivy and several windows broken and boarded shut. I frowned, remembering the casual way in which Colby had thrown his sack of guineas onto Holmes' table: Feed a cur and he'll shut up barking... .

Yet old Gaius had originally turned down Colby's offer to help him bring the Priory back into proper repair.

Behind the low roof-line of the original house I could see what had to be the Roman tower Carnaki had spoken of-beyond doubt the original "watch" of both priory and village names. It had clearly been kept in intermittent repair up until the early part of this century, an astonis.h.i.+ng survival. Beneath it, I recalled, Carnaki had said the sub-crypt lay: the center of that decadent cult that dated to pre-Roman times. I found myself wondering if old Gaius descended the stairs to sleep on the ancient altar, as the notorious Lord Rupert Grimsley had been said to sleep, and if so, what dreams had come to him there.

After London's stuffy heat the thick-wooded foothills were deliciously cool. The breezes brought the scent of water from the heights, and the sharp nip of rain. Perhaps this contrast was what brought upon me what happened later that day, and that horrible night-I know not. For surely, after I returned to the Cross of Gold, I must have come down ill, and lain delirious. There is no other explanation-I pray there is no other explanation-for the ghastly dreams, worse than any delirium I experienced while sick with fever in India, that dragged me through abysses of horror while I slept and have for years shadowed not only my sleep, but upon occasion my waking as well.

I remember that Holmes took the trap to the station to meet Carnaki. I remember, too, sitting by the window of our pleasant sitting-room, cleaning my pistol, for I feared that, if Holmes had in fact found some proof that the evil Viscount had kidnapped beggar-children for some ancient and unspeakable rite, there might be trouble when we confronted the old autocrat with it. I certainly felt no preliminary s.h.i.+ver, no premonitory dizziness of fever, when I rose to answer the knock at the parlor door.

The man who stood framed there could be no one but Carstairs Delapore. "Withered all up like a tree hit by lightnin'," the stable-lad had said: had his back been straight he still would not have been as tall as I, and he looked up at me sideways, twisting his head upon a skinny neck like a bird's.

His eyes were a light hazel, almost golden, as the boy had said.

They are my last memory of the waking world that afternoon.

I dreamed of lying in darkness. I ached all over, my neck and spine pinched and stiff, and from somewhere near me I heard a thin, harsh sobbing, like an old man in terror or pain. I called out: "Who is it? What is wrong?" and my voice sounded hoa.r.s.e in my own ears, like the rusty caw of a crow, as alien as my body felt when I tried to move.