“My agony grows steadily worse, gentlemen. Each morning, I waken to find myself slightly less human. At night, my desperate efforts at sleep are invaded by queer dreams: nightmares, in which I hear dark voices whispering obscene promises.” Norrys trembled, and there was a dampness in his eyes. “The police will not help me; my telegrams to the Home Office receive no reply. Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson: you two are my very last hope.”
“What do you hope to achieve?” I asked as gently as I could. “Your medical condition may well be irreversible, and—”
“I want the voices in the dark to go away,” Norrys quavered. “The voices and . . . and the sound of the rats in the walls!” Norrys clamped his hands over his ears, although his ears by now had dwindled to mere vestigial slits on his scaled flesh. “My life is nothing to me now. I have not entered the priory these last three days . . . yet I can still hear the whispering voices, and the rats in the walls!”
Our cab stopped abruptly, and the cabman informed us that he “warn’t going no nearer that there priory.” We paid him and alighted on a Shropshire country road, lined with high bushes of yellow gorse. Looming ahead of us was a dark tower, weirdly silhouetted in the moonlight, which Norrys assured us was our destination. Holmes switched on his battery lamp whilst I slid back the safety catch on my revolver.
Jephson Norrys had difficulty keeping up with us: he walked with a shambling gait, as if his legs were determined to fuse together and had to be forcibly separated with each stride.
The priory was a moss-crusted dilapidation at the edge of a limestone precipice. The grass all around the verge of the estate was blighted and yellow, and the night beasts which are so common to the countryside of England’s Salopian region—the bats, the owls, the voles—were strangely absent. I saw some broken headstones on the priory’s outermost grounds. Norrys produced an old brass ring with several warded church keys, and he used these to unlock the outer gate, then the inner gate, and then he finally unlatched the door leading into the priory itself.
A strange odor assailed us. Motioning for me to keep my weapon ready, Holmes led the way through the priory’s antechamber to a half-open doorway. Here we beheld a crumbling limestone stairway, descending into the depths of the priory’s cellars. To Norrys, I gently suggested: “Perhaps you should wait here . . .”
Jephson Norrys shook his head grimly and clenched the remnants of his teeth. “I will see this thing through, Doctor.”
We began our descent. I felt a maddening certainty that we were not alone in the cellar. All around us in the dark were muffled sounds, like the scurrying of tiny unseen creatures. I fancied I heard voices whispering nearby me, plucking at my mind as though seeking entrance. Voices accosted me, proclaiming themselves as denizens of many centuries and climes. I understood only some few of them. A voice speaking French introduced himself to me as Montagny, a courtier of Louis XIII. Another sentience, speaking in baroque dialects of English, professed to be the disembodied intellect of James Woodville, a merchant of Cromwell’s time. My grasp of Latin was sufficient to perceive another voice which claimed to be the mind of Titus Sempronius, quaestor palatii of the Roman Empire. All of these voices, and others, beseeched me to heed them.
“Can you hear it, Watson?” There was awe in my friend Sherlock’s voice. “A parliament of minds! There seem to be many intelligences here: a harvest of intellects, gathered from several millennia. I recognize one voice’s speech as predynastic Chinese, and another employs a Greek dialect. Like shadows out of time, projected into our midst. ’Pon my word, Watson, this is astonishing!”
“How is it possible, Holmes?” I asked while we descended the staircase.
“Perhaps these voices somehow transcend time itself. Watson, have you read the works of Henri Bergson, or Loubachevskii? They postulate a fourth dimension of space, enabling instantaneous communication across vast gulfs of distance and vast intervals of time. I wonder if—”
“You always did talk too much, Holmes,” said a harsh voice, somewhat louder and nearer than the others.
In the pale glow of Holmes’s battery lamp, I beheld a strange man. He was exceedingly tall and thin, round-shouldered, with a high-domed forehead and a protuberant face punctuated by two deeply sunken eyes. As there was something fishlike in the appearance of Jephson Norrys, there was much in this man that seemed reptilian. He stood midpoint along the flight of steps on the limestone staircase beneath us, glowering malevolently upward at Holmes.
“Dr. Watson, I have the honor of presenting Professor Moriarty,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes. “Although it had been my understanding that Moriarty long ago gave quits to this earthly realm, and changed his forwarding address to the realm of the dead.”
“Merely a temporary inconvenience, I assure you, Mr. Holmes,” said Moriarty. From the darkness behind him, there came the chanting unison of many unseen throats:
Tekeli-li, tekeli-li!
Tch’kaa, t’cnela ngöi!
Tekeli-li, teka’ngai,
Haklic, vnikhla elöi . . .
I raised my revolver, but Holmes’s hand on my arm restrained me. “Steady on, Watson. Professor Moriarty has been killed at least once already . . . or perhaps twice, if those rumors I encountered in Kowloon are accurate.” Gesturing for Jephson Norrys to draw closer, Holmes spoke: “Come, Moriarty! What is your unholy interest in this man?”
“None whatever,” Moriarty replied. “Norrys is merely the tenant of this place. It is the priory itself which we covet. Of all places on Earth, this priory’s subcellar is uniquely suited to our needs. By we, of course, I mean myself and the Elder Gods.”
Behind Moriarty, the chanting grew louder.
“I have long suspected, Moriarty, that I am your true prey,” said Sherlock Holmes. “This unfortunate fellow Norrys was merely your bait. Now that I am here, will you release Jephson Norrys and restore him to his manly condition?”
Moriarty spread his long spidery hands, palms upturned. “You wrong me, Holmes. I am innocent of any crime against Norrys. The taint which you behold is in his blood. The Norrys bloodline is obliquely descended from the house of de la Poer, the ancestral heirs to this estate . . . and the inheritors of its curse. By returning to these ancient grounds, first Habakuk Norrys and then his nephew Jephson have awakened the long-dormant taint in their ancestral blood.”
“Tekeli-li!” said the voices, as if in agreement with Moriarty.
“What do you want of me?” Sherlock Holmes asked.
“That’s better,” said Moriarty, rubbing his thin hands together. “You will join me, Holmes, in a long journey . . . a one-way passage, without a return ticket. A voyage to Yith.”
“Where’s that when it’s at home, then?” asked Jephson Norrys.
Moriarty waved a hand airily. “Yith is the home of the Old Ones, countless millions of miles from here . . . yet, when the stars are right, and the dimensions of space can be bent to the Elder Gods’ whim, Yith lies only a few inches beyond Shropshire’s realm in this cellar.” Beckoning us to draw nearer, Moriarty pointed into the darkness behind him at the base of the stairs. “This way.”
And now a most peculiar violet-colored glow appeared at the foot of the stairs. It began as a single point of light, then it rapidly swelled and enlarged until it formed a glowing sphere, then it suddenly flattened into a hexagon of violet-colored light in midair. The hexagon’s vertical axis expanded until it became coffin-shaped.
A wind sprang up in the still air of the priory’s cellar. I felt a breeze rush headlong past me down the stairway toward the hexagon of light. The wind clutched at my sleeves, at my coattails and cravat. A piece of lichenous moss suddenly tore loose from the wall near my elbow: I saw the moss whirl through the air, borne on the current of wind, until it was suddenly and awfully pulled into the violet-colored aura, where it vanished. In a paroxysm of horror, I observed that the peculiar glowing hexagon was a vortex of some sort . . . siphoning air and life from this catacomb to some hideous place.