Free The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels by Brian Stableford Page A

he did not like to delay matters with unnecessary chitchat.
“He was cursed to death, sir,” Chevaucheux told him, bluntly. He had obviously been keeping company with Sherlock long enough to expect that Holmesian processes of deduction would sometimes run ahead of his own.
“Cursed, you say?” Mycroft raised an eyebrow, though not in jest. “Some misadventure in the Andamans, perhaps?” If Pye had been about the Club’s business—although he would not necessarily have known whose business he was about—the Andamans were the most likely spot for him to run into trouble.
“No, sir,” Chevaucheux said, gravely. “He was cursed to death right here in the British Isles, though the mad hatred that activated the curse was seething for weeks at sea.”
“If you know the man responsible,” Mycroft said, amiably, “where’s the mystery? Why did Watson refer you to my brother?” The real puzzle, of course, was why Sherlock had brought the seaman here, having failed to render any effective assistance—but Mycroft was wary of spelling that out. This could be no common matter of finding proofs to satisfy a court of law; the Secretary’s little finger had told him that. This mystery went beyond mere matters of motive and mechanism; it touched on matters of blood.
Sherlock had reached into his pocket while Mycroft was speaking, and produced a small object the size of a snuffbox. His expression, as he held it out to Mycroft, was a study in grimness and frustration. Mycroft took it from him, and inspected it carefully.
It was a figurine carved in stone: a chimerical figure, part-human—if only approximately—and part-fish. It was not a mermaid such as a lonely sailor might whittle from tropic wood or walrus ivory, however; although the head was vaguely humanoid the torso was most certainly not, and the piscine body bore embellishments that seemed more akin to tentacles than fins. There was something of the lamprey about it—even about the mouth that might have been mistaken for human—and something of the uncanny. Mycroft felt no revelatory thrill as he handled it, but he knew that the mere sight of it was enough to feed an atavistic dream. Opium was not the best medicine for the kind of headaches that Chevaucheux must have suffered of late, but neither he nor Watson was in a position to know that.
“Let me have your lens, Sherlock,” Mycroft said.
Sherlock passed him the magnifying-glass, without bothering to point out that the lamplight in the Strangers’ Room was poor, or that the workmanship of the sculpture was so delicate that a fine-pointed needle and the services of a light microscope would be required to investigate the record of its narrow coverts. Mycroft knew that Sherlock would take some meager delight in amplifying whatever conclusions he could reach with the aid of the woefully inadequate means to hand.
Two minutes’ silence elapsed while Mycroft completed his superficial examination. “Purbeck stone,” he said. “Much more friable than Portland stone—easy enough to work with simple tools, but liable to crumble if force is misapplied. Easily eroded too, but if this piece is as old as it seems, it’s been protected from everyday wear. It could have been locked away in some cabinet of curiosities, but it’s more likely to have been buried. You’ve doubtless examined the scars left by the knives that carved it and the dirt accumulated in the finer grooves. Iron or bronze? Sand, silt or soil?” He set the object down on a side-table as he framed these questions, but positioned it carefully, to signify that he was not done with it yet.
“A bronze knife,” Sherlock told him, without undue procrastination, “but a clever alloy, no earlier than the sixteenth century. The soil is from a fallow field, from which hay had been cut with considerable regularity—but there was salt too. The burial-place was near enough to the sea to catch spray in stormy weather.”
“And the representation?” Mycroft