The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (8 page)

By virtue of that realization, every now and again—if only a little—Saint Anthony couldn’t help missing temptation.

THE UGLY CYGNET

by Hans Realist Andersen

It was glorious out in the country. All around the fields and the meadows were great forests, and in the midst of these forests were calm and glittering lakes. On the shore of one of these lakes a swan wife sat upon her nest, warming her eggs.

One by one, the eggs cracked and the cygnets came out to look around, wonderingly, at the blue water and the green trees. “How wide the world is!” they exclaimed, one after another.

“It’s much wider than it seems,” their mother told them. “When you’ve learned to fly, you’ll understand how wide it really is.”

When there was only one egg left unhatched, the swan husband came to take his turn at sitting on the nest. “It hardly seems worth it,” he said. “That last egg is much smaller than the rest.”

“If a job’s worth doing,” the swan wife said, “it’s worth doing well. Let’s give it a few more days.”

The small egg broke at last, and its occupant reluctantly emerged.

“I told you so,” said the swan husband. “Did you ever see such a scrawny cygnet? And it’s a boy, too.”

“Well, no,” admitted his wife, “but we must treat him as generously as our other children.”

The next day was spent teaching the cygnets to swim. They took to it readily enough, even the smallest one. The mother swan was greatly relieved to see that the late arrival was able to cope with the water, and she dared to hope that he might be able to grow fast enough to catch up with his brothers and sisters.

Alas, the smallest cygnet did not have half as much appetite as his older siblings, and he remained small. When the swans paraded their offspring around the shore of the lake politeness compelled the other birds to compliment them on their brood, but they all took a less-than-secret delight in adding their commiserations regarding the weakling of the family. “Pity about the little one,” they would say. “Quite lets the side down, doesn’t he?”

The smallest cygnet longed to ask how wide the world was, but feared the answer he might receive.

“Ugly little devil can’t keep up,” the swan husband observed. “He’s slowing us all down. The rats will have him if we’re not careful.”

“We’re not in any hurry,” the swan wife replied, “and it’s up to us to make sure that the rats don’t get to him.”

Unfortunately, the small cygnet overheard everything that was said of him, and realized that he was an embarrassment to his family. He would have run away had he not been so terribly afraid of the rats. Fortunately, the swan husband was a fearsome deterrent, not merely to rats and magpies but foxes and humans, so the smallest cygnet was able to do as much growing up as he was capable of doing—which was, alas, not nearly as much as his handsome brothers and sisters. With every week that passed the ignominy of the smallest cygnet’s existence was further increased, and so was his shame.

Autumn came, and it was time for the swans to migrate.

“The rest are ready,” said the swan wife, “but I don’t think the little one’s up to it. Perhaps we should give the Mediterranean a miss this year. How bad can winter be?”

“Ask the frogs and the squirrels,” the swan husband replied. “It’s so bad they try to sleep through the whole thing. I’m too old to learn to hibernate—and what kind of swans would we be if we didn’t fly south for the winter? The runt will have to keep up as best he can.”

“We really ought to stay,” said the swan wife, dutifully—but it was obvious to everyone, including the smallest cygnet, that she didn’t really mean it. This time, the smallest cygnet figured, it really was time to run away, for the sake of the family. It was bad enough that he was holding them back on the shore of the remote lake; how could they possibly hold up their heads on the Mediterranean with something as small and ugly as him in tow?

So the ugly cygnet went into the forest and hid, until all the swans had flown away.

Had it not been for global warming, the ugly cygnet would not have made it through the long winter, but the winter was exceptionally mild. The lake never froze, and the competition for food was so relaxed that the ugly cygnet managed to find enough food to stay alive and to provide for such meager growth as he was capable of making. He knew that he would never catch up with his siblings in terms of their size, but he did hope that he might one day match them for whiteness. Alas, every time he looked at his reflection in the water he saw that he was getting more and more colorful with every week that passed. By the time spring arrived, he was a vivid patchwork. He knew that his parents and siblings would laugh at him, but he looked forward to their return nevertheless. They were, after all, the only family he had.

But when the swan wife and the swan husband returned to their nesting-site to raise a new brood, they did not recognize the little creature that emerged squawking from the weeds, joyfully addressing them as “Mum” and “Dad”.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the swan husband said. “You’re not a swan at all—you’re a duck.”

“Technically,” the swan wife pointed out, “he’s a drake. But the effect is the same. He’s definitely not one of ours.”

“But I am!” the smallest cygnet protested. “My egg might have got into your nest by accident, but you sat on me, and protected me from the rats and the magpies, and the foxes and the humans. You’re my real father and my real mother, no matter what appearances may say.”

“No way,” said the swan husband.

“We couldn’t have made a mistake like that,” said the swan wife.

The ugly cygnet realized then that he was not and never had been a real cygnet, and that he would never, under any imaginable circumstances, be accepted as a swan.

“But I can fly,” he said. “Not as fast or as far as you, perhaps, but I
can
fly. I can find out for myself how wide the world is.”

“Good idea,” said the swan husband.

“The sooner the better,” said the swan wife. Being a swan, she had the grace to wait until the drake had flown away before she added, in a tone of deep disgust: “Me, raise a
duck!
As if!”

“Nasty little paint-pot with delusions of grandeur,” said the swan husband, nodding his handsome head in agreement. “Still—it all goes to prove what they say. Once a loser, always a loser. It’s the way of the world. He can fly all the way around it if he wants to, but he won’t find anywhere different.”

ART IN THE BLOOD

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
(A. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”)

It was not yet five o’clock; Mycroft had barely sunk into his nook and taken up the
Morning Post
when the Secretary appeared at the door of the reading room and gestured brusquely with his right hand. It was a summons to the Strangers’ Room, supplemented by a particular curl of the little finger, which told him that this was no casual visitation but a matter in which the Diogenes Club had an interest of its own.

Mycroft sighed, and hauled his overabundant flesh out of his armchair. The rules of the club forbade him to ask the Secretary what the import of the summons was, so he was mildly surprised to see his brother Sherlock waiting by the window in the Strangers’ Room, looking out over Pall Mall. Sherlock had brought him petty puzzles to solve on several occasions, but never yet a matter of significance to any of the Club’s hidden agendas. It was obvious from the rigidity of Sherlock’s stance that this was no trivial matter, and that it had gone badly thus far.

There was another man in the room, already seated. He seemed tired; his grey eyes—which were not dissimilar in hue to those of the Holmes brothers—were restless and haunted, but he was making every effort to maintain his composure. He was obviously a merchant seaman, perhaps a second mate. The unevenness of the faded tan that still marked his face—the lower part of which had long been protected by a beard—testified that he had returned England from the tropics less than a month ago. The odors clinging to his clothing revealed that he had recently visited Limehouse, where he had partaken of a generous pipe of opium. The bulge in his left-hand coat pocket was suggestive of a medicine bottle, but Mycroft was too scrupulous a man to leap to the conclusion that it must be laudanum. Mycroft judged that the seaman’s attitude was one of reluctant resignation: that of a man determined to conserve his dignity even though he had lost hope.

Mycroft greeted his brother with an appropriate appearance of warmth, and waited for an introduction.

“May I present John Chevaucheux, Mycroft,” Sherlock said, immediately abandoning his position by the window. “He was referred to me by Doctor Watson, who saw that his predicament was too desperate to be salvageable by medical treatment.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” the sailor said, coming briefly to his feet before sinking back into his chair. The stranger’s hand was cold, but its grip was firm.

“Doctor Watson is not here,” Mycroft observed. It was not his habit to state the obvious, but the doctor’s absence seemed to require explanation; Watson clung to Sherlock like a shadow nowadays, avid to leech yet another marketable tale from his reckless dabbling in the mercurial affairs of distressed individuals.

“The good doctor had a prior engagement,” Sherlock reported. His tone was neutral but Mycroft deduced that Sherlock had taken advantage of his friend’s enforced absence to carry this particular enquiry to its end. Apparently, this was one “adventure” Sherlock did not want to re-read in
The Strand,
no matter how much admiring literary embellishment might be added to it.

Given that Chevaucheux’s accent identified him as a Dorset man, and that his name suggested descent from Huguenot refugees, Mycroft thought it more likely that the seaman’s employers were based in Southampton than in London. If the man had come to consult Watson as a medical practitioner, rather than as Sherlock’s accomplice, he must have encountered him some time ago, probably in India—and must have known him well enough to be able to track him down in London despite his retirement. These inferences, though far less than certain, became more probable in combination with the ominous news—which
was
ominous news, although it had not been reported in the Post—of the sudden death, some seven days ago, of Captain Pye of the
S.S. Goshen
. The
Goshen
had dropped anchor in Southampton Water on the twelfth of June, having set out from Batavia six weeks before. Captain Pye was by no means clubbable, but he was known to more than one member of the Diogenes as a trustworthy agent.

“Do you know how Dan Pye died, Mr. Chevaucheux?” Mycroft asked, cutting right to the heart of the matter. Unlike Sherlock, 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.