At last we reached a level floor. A few paces farther the passage ended at the entrance to a large cist carved from the subterranean rock. And in that chamber, by the light of our torches, was revealed a scene which my mind at first refused to comprehend.
Miriam stood next to what appeared to be a stone altar, bounded on either side by stelae. Petroglyphs were carved into these stone pillars—sigils that seemed, in the uncertain light, to writhe and dance on the rocky surfaces. Atop the altar lay two tall stacks of ancient parchment, one higher than the other. I could barely make out the faded, cryptic scrawl that represented the thoughts, experiences, and fears of the mad Arab, set down by his own hand centuries ago. I realized that this must be the complete Kitab al-Azif; the book of which the Necronomicon was but the merest fragment.
Lying on the altar before it was my lucky stone, though I scarcely recognized it. It glowed, pulsing with a chatoyant light that shifted through a dark spectrum of colors I could not name.
Miriam did not notice us at first; she was occupied with chanting phrases in that same ear-smiting language she had spoken upstairs only moments ago. My senses reeled as I tried to comprehend this phantasmagorical scene. What was happening could not be happening. The very air seemed to be alive and visible, swirling like fog and smoke on a cold London winter’s eve, as those bizarre syllables, utterly inhuman in their cadence, reverberated about us:
“Wyülgn mefh’ngk fhgah’n r’tíhgl, khlobå lhu mhwnfgth . . .”
I realized Holmes was speaking to me, his voice urgent and barely audible over Miriam’s chant. “Shoot, Watson, shoot!”
I looked about in confusion. Shoot what? What I saw was as bizarre and unbelievable as a Jules Verne fantasy, but there was no immediate threat—
“Now, man—before she finishes the spell and it’s too late! You must!”
I stared at him, realizing with horror that he wanted me to shoot Miriam. At that point I knew one of us had gone mad, and I honestly wasn’t sure if it was Holmes or myself.
I was paralyzed with bewilderment, and Holmes must have realized that, for he raised his walking stick and lunged toward Miriam.
But she realized he was there before he could cover half the intervening distance. She broke off her chant and fixed him with that same horrifying glare that she had used on Coombs. She uttered the two-word command I had heard before—and Holmes stopped as if he had run into a stone wall.
He fell to his knees.
Dear God, I thought. But it was obvious that no benign deity was being invoked here. I looked from Holmes’s trembling form to Miriam, and saw there a cruelty in her features—the feral enjoyment of a cat tormenting a mouse. Miriam, who had nursed me for months, who had brought me back from the pit. Miriam, a woman of foreign soil whom I would have, against all convention, made my wife. She seemed unaware of me; all her attention was on Holmes.
“Holmes! I’m coming!” I shouted.
I took a step forward—and a strange lethargy swept over me. I was still aware of what was taking place, but in an increasingly dreamy, somnambulistic way. I felt somehow removed from it all, to the point of numbed intoxication. The hand holding my revolver dropped, to hang at my side. I was reminded of Mesmer’s experiments in concentration and suggestion, but even as they occurred to me they seemed spurious. I began to understand that this tableau before me was really none of my affair; more, that my human mind was completely inadequate even to begin to understand the forces at work here. Better, far better, not to interfere . . .
The luminous, thickening quality of the air was increasing; it seemed to be somehow coalescing near one side of the chamber. As if something was taking shape where there had been nothing.
Holmes, with what was obviously a great and wrenching effort, turned to look back at me. His face was going gray. A part of me, dim and far away, realized that I was watching my friend die.
Holmes was dying. And Miriam was killing him.
I cannot explain my next action—there certainly seems no logical reason for what I did. I can only be grateful that my body responded in an atavistic, primitive way to the danger. Had I stopped to think, I would have hesitated—and all would have been lost.
My left hand dug into my pocket, grasped the talisman Miriam had given me, and pulled it out. It, too, seemed to be glowing slightly, but perhaps that was only my imagination. I cast it on the stony chamber floor and ground it to powder under my heel.
As it had done before in Coombs’s parlor, reality seemed to snap back. The lassitude enveloping me vanished. I took a deep breath, and raised my revolver.
“Miriam, stop!” I shouted.
I clearly saw a moment of surprise, of uncertainty, flash across her countenance. “You can’t shoot me, John,” she said. “You still love me.”
It was true, I realized. I did still love her. Even though I knew she had laid some kind of mental snare for me, even as she continued to somehow cause Holmes’s slow death from afar—still I felt love for her.
“Join me, John,” she said. Even without the aid of the charm, her voice was alluring, convincing. “The secrets of the Arab can grant us a life beyond earth, beyond flesh, beyond imagining . . . the cosmos can be ours, John; worlds to create, to command, to destroy . . .”
The sound of my weapon firing was perhaps the loudest noise I have ever heard.
Miriam, a look of stunned disbelief on her face, stared at me in shock as she crumpled. Simultaneously Holmes seemed to regain his strength. He and I ran forward. I remember wondering if my medical training could save her, wondering if my loyalty to humanity—to life itself—would let me—
I held the torch high and we saw the answer to that.
Whatever it was, it was no longer Miriam Shah—if in fact it ever had been. Obviously it was not life as we define the word, as its death was unlike the death of any material being. Or so I am given to understand. Mercifully, I do not remember it—my brain has elided that memory, a fact for which Holmes says I should be profoundly grateful. It is he who has supplied the gist of our final few moments in the underground chamber. My last recollection is of pulling the trigger. The sound of the gunshot still reverberates within me.
My next complete memory is of our train ride back to London the next day. Of the time it took us to return to the surface, I remember only brief, intermittent flashes.
“You knew,” I said to Holmes. “You knew what she was. You called on me to stop when I prevented Bradley from shooting her.”
He nodded gravely. “I had thought to spare you, old friend. I was hoping to deal with her myself, but I confess I underestimated her power. If Coombs’s man could have ended it then and there, I was willing to go that route.”
I felt utterly drained—grief was there, but it was a distant wave on a distant shore. “How did you know, Holmes?”
For the first time in my association with him, Holmes seemed reluctant to expound upon his deductive abilities. “The most obvious clue was the talisman she wore,” he said at last. “No good Mohammedan woman would bear such a thing, for their faith does not permit such charms, and the representation of the human form in their artwork—even so much as a hand—is expressly forbidden by the Prophet. But I had thought it no more than part of her disguise. I would surmise there were magnetic elements in it that somehow gave her mesmeric power over you.
“But what was more informative was her demeanor. Although you have never spoken directly of her, I long ago surmised that you had met someone during your service in the East. The confirmation of that came nearly four years ago, when I happened into a discussion of the Maiwand campaign with a former infantryman who had been a physician’s assistant in your ward. Please believe me when I tell you I did not solicit details about your stay there—he volunteered the information that you and an Afghan woman had developed a certain . . . affection for each other.”