Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows (The Cthulhu Casebooks, #1)

by James Lovegrove

I AM AN OLD MAN. A TIRED, FRIGHTENED OLD MAN. I have lived a long time, done much, seen much. Now my eyesight is fading, my body is gnarled and weak, and I feel my life ebbing with each passing day.

The time has come to unburden myself of secrets I have kept long after Sherlock Holmes died. At his express request I have buried the truth, but its grave has been unquiet and disturbances from it have since troubled me in the night.

see. You are saying he held them captive without food or water until they perished.” Gregson spread out his hands. “Wouldn’t you agree that’s the logical assumption?” “‘Logical assumption’ is, in my view, an oxymoron. The words do not even belong in the same sentence. But let us parse your proposition anyway.”

Gong-Fen waved slender fingers airily. “Another baseless accusation. All I am saying is that death is an easy thing to come by, and some deaths have greater meaning than others.”

London, however, was where he discovered the truth: that the gods are amongst us, and want only our lives and our destruction. Up until then, gods had been a fanciful delusion as far as he was concerned. Let simpletons and the unlearned believe in them. In England’s capital, of all places – that peerless urban jewel, heart of empire, epicentre of the modern world – this presumption of his was rudely shattered.

As for the book, the gold leaf lettering on the spine was so rubbed and worn as to be almost illegible, but he managed to make out the author’s name, one Ludwig Prinn, and construed that the title was De Vermis Mysteriis, or something close to it.

“One way to rid the mind of unwanted tenants is to occupy it with something else, something practical.

OUR “DEGREE”, IF I MAY CALL IT SUCH, WAS conducted in the basement of the British Museum, in a dusty, remote archive set well apart from the rest of that venerable institution and known by a somewhat euphemistic soubriquet: Sequestered Volumes.

These often made references to other texts of which no copies were known to have survived into the modern era and to scriptures, such as the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan and the Tablets of Nhing, which had never been seen on Earth and were thought to reside only in the palaces of the dark gods themselves.

“What you perceive as calmness, Watson, is simply fixity of purpose.

“All the same, I cannot help feeling like a mouse who is sniffing at the cheese, with the jaws of the trap yawning over him.”

“Keep your wits about you, Watson,” Holmes said. “I can go one better than that,” I replied, and drew my revolver.

Then I spied a sight which sent a tingle of horripilation over my entire body. The phrase “every hair standing on end” would not be inapt.

Travel broadens the mind, as they say, even if it does also slim the wallet.”

Only may one who is without become one who is within, by speaking the words enshrined in tradition.’ This is a door built to keep those below in their place.”

He was asking us to commit ourselves to a campaign combating the forces arrayed against Earth from beyond, from the far reaches of space, from the nether realm below, from all quarters. It seemed both an insurmountable task and an unendurable burden.