And now I heard the voices again. Beneath the strange alien chant, I heard the whispers of human dialects: French, Latin, Old English, and others . . . beckoning within my mind.
“D’you hear them, Watson?” said Holmes beside me. I saw the look on his face, and I shuddered. Sherlock Holmes was trembling with a rapture that seemed nearly spiritual. “Hear them, Watson! All the minds that have preceded me into this place: intellects out of time, from Earth’s past and Earth’s future. Some snatched unwillingly, some abducted, yet all of them awaiting me on the far side of that vortex . . . and gloriously sentient! Think of all the secrets . . . all the mysteries which their abducted wisdom can reveal to us! Come, Watson! Let us visit to Yith, and pay a call on the Old Ones.”
“No, Holmes!” I cried. “It’s a trick! We daren’t . . .” And then, as I spoke, I heard one other whisper joining the alien chorus. This voice was gentle, and fair, and familiar . . . and I heard her sweet words easily above the growing howl of the wind.
“John,” said the beckoning voice. “Darling John, here I am . . .”
I knew that voice, though I have not heard it for these past seven years. The voice came from the center of the vortex. I knew I must not turn toward it. I knew I must not raise my head to see. And yet . . . I looked.
Within the glowing hexagon I beheld my dear departed wife, Mary, exactly as I had known her before her last consumptive illness carried her off. With all my intellect, I knew the truth: she was dead, she is buried in Nunhead Cemetery. No power in the universe could restore life to my beloved Mary Morstan and convey her, smiling and complete, to the other side of the unearthly portal from which she now stood beckoning me. And yet she was there . . .
Suddenly a memory from my university days broke the surface of my consciousness. I recalled one of my professors demonstrating a peculiar rhizomatous flower, native to certain American swamps. Insects are lured to the deadly leaves of this plant by the sweet nectar which it exudes from its flowers to entice unsuspecting prey. It is Dionaea muscipula, or Venus’s-flytrap. But why was I suddenly reminded of . . .
Sherlock Holmes had a death grip on my arm. I felt him pulling me, step-by-step, down those limestone stairs toward the beckoning vortex. I tried to resist him, as I tried to resist the enticements of my departed wife, whom I knew to be not my wife at all. “Come to me, John . . .” she whispered. “Hurry to me, for the vestibule between the worlds cannot stay open much longer.” And I knew that I could not resist . . .
“I am coming, Mary.” The words escaped my lips, despite myself.
Somewhere far away, yet very close, I heard Moriarty’s laughter.
“Can’t you see it’s a trap?” Someone rushed past me on the stairs. I saw Jephson Norrys fling himself headlong at Moriarty. For a moment they grappled at the brink of the grim vortex: Moriarty within it, Jephson still outside it on the bottom stair of the subcellar. I saw the two men struggle, yet it was clear that Moriarty was the stronger. Laughing dementedly, he gripped Norrys by the throat and bent him easily backward, threatening to snap his spine. With Moriarty’s hands ’round his throat, I saw Jephson Norrys gasping for air like a fish out of water while the wind of the vortex clutched and tore at Norrys’s coat.
Something fell from his pocket. I saw that it was Norrys’s memorandum book. It struck the staircase, and the gray limestone split it open. I saw loose-leaf pages scattered by the wind, whirling in spirals of air. I saw the tintype photograph of Jephson Norrys in his younger days, snatched by the gale force and sucked into the vortex. I saw something else fall from the memorandum book. In the dim glow of the battery lamp, I saw a glimpse of color . . .
Moriarty saw it, too. I saw him release his grip on Jephson Norrys, who fell sprawling while Moriarty looked toward the foot of the limestone staircase. As Norrys fell, I saw Moriarty’s face change. His features softened; his expression of leering cruelty became almost wistful. I saw the face of a man who had suddenly glimpsed something precious which he feared was lost forever. I saw Moriarty bend, and reach down to pick it up . . .
With an oath, Jephson Norrys struggled to his feet and lunged forward. With all his strength, he snatched Moriarty and plunged pell-mell with him into the mouth of the vortex. I heard a strangled cry. And then, abruptly, the edges of violet-colored aura contracted. Of a sudden the jaws of the vortex snapped shut . . . with Moriarty and Norrys within. I heard a hideous crunching sound, and then something flew past my head and landed on the limestone steps above me.
In the gleam of the lamp, I saw Jephson Norrys’s hand with some few inches of his severed forearm in a bloodstained coat sleeve. The broad paddled mass of his finlike appendage pointed accusingly toward the bottom of the staircase. The rest of Norrys, and the whole of Moriarty, had quite vanished. The interdimensional vortex had closed while Jephson Norrys’s arm was inside the aperture . . . and his hand had been neatly sheared off.
The whispering voices fell silent. But now I heard again the muffled scurryings, like the sounds of unseen rats within the walls. And from somewhere nearby, in the dark, it resumed: the faint whisper of “Tekeli-li . . .”
“Really, Holmes,” I ventured, “I see no point in our tarrying here.”
“Just a moment, Doctor.” My friend reached down with one of his long arms to retrieve something, then we ascended the stairs with all speed, and soon—not soon enough for my tastes—we were in the moonlit graveyard of the priory. Not until we were well past that shunned place and safely on the road to Anchester did Holmes consent to speak.
“Evidently, Bergson and Loubachevskii were correct,” said Sherlock Holmes, pausing briefly to light his pipe before we continued down the road. “It is possible to bridge the gulf between distant points in the dimensions of space. Some unknown factor in the cellar of that priory enables it to serve as the terminus for a viaduct between Earth and elsewhere: perhaps the limestone deposits, or some peculiar mixture of the minerals which have seeped through them for centuries. Moriarty spoke of the stars being ‘right’ for his intentions: but the stars in the heavens move constantly, and bring their gravitational fields along with them . . . which may explain why Moriarty could keep the viaduct open for only such a brief time.”
We walked in silence for a moment whilst I lighted a cigar, and then Sherlock Holmes spoke again: “That vortex, Watson, is the most fiendish thing I have ever encountered, with the possible exception of the giant rat of Sumatra. Something within that vortex seemed to promise us the thing we most desired, although the promise was certainly false. I was offered a chance to commune with intellects nearly the equal of my own. Watson, I heard you cry out the name of your late beloved wife, so I can guess what you were offered. I can but hope that Jephson Norrys has found some measure of peace, and that he entered the vortex of his free will. As for Moriarty, I believe that he found his final temptation on this side of that hideous gulf between the worlds.”