The Claw of Cthulhu
Chapter One: A Day at the Museum
In the early summer of 1923, much of London was still in the grip of Egypt-mania. Since that February, when Howard Carter and his party had finally entered the burial camber of Tutankhamun, each week had brought new revelations, new wonders, and everyone who could was taking advantage. Even the august British Museum was not above using the event to attract more visitors.
Lord Peter Wimseys' antiquarian interests were mainly confined to the collection of incunabula – those rare books printed before 1501 – but even he was not immune to the wave of public interest in the Land of the Pharaohs. So this summer afternoon found him strolling through the halls of the Museum on his way to see the latest wonders from the tomb of King Tut.
As he entered the Egyptian Hall, a familiar voice hailed him jovially: "Wimsey? What are you doing here? I didn't think you cared for Egyptian antiquities?"
The man addressing him was perhaps a decade older than Wimsey, about the same height and stockily-built with an open, handsome face.
"Crawley, old chap!" Wimsey replied. "Been an age. How are you?"
"Can't complain." The Earl of Grantham allowed. "Helen, you remember Peter Wimsey?"
The elegant Countess smiled and proffered a hand, which Wimsey bowed over. "Of course, Robert." She said, her American birth obvious in her voice. "You visited us at Downton last autumn, Lord Peter."
"Came up for the huntin'." Wimsey confirmed. "You're here for todays' show?"
"Lecture, please!" The Earl corrected him. "We'd planned to go back this morning, but then I heard about this, so we decided to catch a later train."
"Pity." Wimsey said. "If I'd known you were in Town we could have met up. Well, I'd better find me seat. Me brothers' lettin' me use the lodge in September, maybe you could come up for a days' shootin'?"
"I'd like that." The Earl smiled. "Drop me a line and we'll arrange something."
Wimsey nodded and strolled on. They watched him go, a young man of average height and slim build, with straw-coloured hair and a beak of a nose in a pleasant but slightly foolish-looking face.
"I can never understand why you like him so much." The Countess remarked to her husband. "He doesn't seem to have a brain to call his own."
"That's just his way." The Earl told her. "We served together. Wimsey was a Major in the Rifles, and as fine an officer as I ever knew. If he acts like a carefree fop now, it's because he's had enough horror for a lifetime."
Wimsey had taken the seat allocated to him, a few rows back. A functionary from the Museum was making some typically semi-audible opening remarks. As he came to his peroration, his voice became more confident.
"And now, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our main speaker for today. He has kindly accepted our invitation to come here from Marshall College in Connecticut. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr Henry Walton Jones, Junior!"
At first glance, a typical tweed-clad academic. But Wimsey never relied on first glances. He actually looked at people. The shoulders under the jacket were just a little too square when they should have been stooped from study. The skin of the handsome face and big hands had a deep tan that spoke of the outdoors more than the library. The jaw was a touch too firm, and the eyes behind the (obviously plain glass) spectacles far too watchful and focused. No common lecturer, then.
Nevertheless, he knew his subject, and was an entertaining speaker. He gave an overview of the times Tutankhamun had lived in, revealing that he was the son of the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who had caused upheaval in Egypt by renouncing the traditional gods in favour of a monotheistic cult of solar worship, renaming himself Akhenaten. Tutankhamun had come to the throne at the age of nine, and under the tutelage of the general Hor-em-Heb and the priest Ai had restored traditional religion.
But the young Pharaoh had barely reigned ten years before dying and being buried in a small tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The very tomb which Howard Carter had discovered the previous November. The contents of the tomb, Jones explained, were still being catalogued, and many years of study remained before they could be fully understood.
Afterwards, there were questions. One of which was the inevitable one as to why the tomb of a minor Pharaoh contained such riches while the tombs of mightier kings were empty.
"That answer is that this tomb isn't rich." Jones replied. "Not by the standards of others. The written records tell us that much. But the records, and the archaeology, also tell us that most of the other tombs were systematically robbed. Usually within a few years of being sealed.
"Carter has found evidence that somebody tried to break into this tomb, but didn't succeed. Maybe they were caught, maybe they thought better of it. Whichever it was, they never came back, and the tomb was forgotten. Lucky for us.
"But you have to remember, the value of these finds isn't in money, even the gold and jewels. The true value is in what they can tell us about how the Ancient Egyptians lived and what they believed."
Another hand was raised. Female, slender and heavily-beringed. As Jones acknowledged the questioner, Wimsey recognised her as Madame Korova, the self-styled Russian mystic whose well-attended seances had made her an object of adoration for a certain 'set' in London society, and whose 'invitation-only mystical soirées' were attracting the discreet attention of the police.
"Dr Yones," she purred in her obviously-false 'Russian' accent, "are your colleagues in Egypt not afraid of ze wrath zat will fall on zem? Do zey not know zat ze Ka of Tut-ankh-amun will surely take vengeance on zose 'oo desecrate 'is tomb?"
For a moment, the man beneath the academic emerged as Jones flashed her an easy grin. "Lady," he replied, "I've desecrated a few tombs in my time, and never been bothered by a ghost! Traps, bandits, rivals and wild animals, yes, but never spirits.
"If those stories were even close to true, not one of those Pharaohs' tombs would have been even touched. As it is, almost all of them have been stripped. I have to figure that ghostly vengeance was the last of the robbers' worries, even back then.
"Now, I've been called a grave-robber before. People tell me I should respect the dead and leave them be. But, whatever they believed back then, those people don't need the things they were buried with in the afterlife. Experience shows that those things are going to be taken anyway. Would it do anyone any good if they were taken by people who'd melt them down for the gold and re-cut the gems for sale? Or even worse, sell them to some private collector who'll gloat over them in his own home?
"Isn't it better, more respectful, for someone like me or Howard Carter to find those things and put them in a museum where everyone can see them? Where they can be studied and learned from?"
Madame Korova had no answer, and that was the last question. People began to drift away. Jones was just packing his notes away when someone approached him. An elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned suit with a heavy watch-chain. He spoke urgently and quietly to Jones, who seemed to agree with some reluctance and was led off.
Odd. Wimsey thought. He was just about to leave, with a view to an early tea at Claridges', when he was also approached by a stranger. A youngish man, well-built with short-cropped hair and, despite the well-cut suit, a decidedly military air about him.
"Major Wimsey?" He enquired.
Wimsey screwed his monocle in and looked the man up and down. "Just Wimsey, these days, old chap." He said easily. "Lord Peter, if you're bein' formal. Not in the Army any more."
"If we're being formal, your Lordship," the other man replied, "then you're still in the lists as a reserve. Either way, I've been asked to tell you that Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust would like to speak with you."
That was a name out of the past. Despite himself, Wimsey was curious.
"Would he, indeed?" He responded with less of the usual drawl in his voice. "What about, I wonder?"
"If you'll follow me, sir, I'm sure he'll tell you himself. This way, please."
The young fellow led off, and Wimsey followed. There was no point in arguing at this point. He'd see what Sir Pellinore wanted and then decide whether to get involved or not.
The way led through a discreet door out of the public areas of the museum and down several flights of stairs until Wimsey guessed they must be many levels beneath the streets. It seemed the museum resembled an iceberg, with most of its substance under the surface. There were a series of rooms, of varying sizes, each lined with cases, all carefully labelled and catalogued.
But then there was a change. The rooms became larger, more dimly-lit and less frequented. The neat cases and labels were replaced with untidy shelves or clusters of objects. There seemed to be no order about them, and they ranged from the quaintly mundane to the utterly bizarre. In the space of a few yards, Wimsey saw an ancient but ordinary-looking bone whistle, an old Arabian lamp, a massive black iron broadsword (chained to the wall, for some reason) and a stone angel standing facing a mirror -the mirror bore a faded notice warning "Do Not Remove".
Their destination was a larger room – almost as big as one of the halls upstairs – here more lights were on, a fact which Wimsey regretted. The room was given over to statuary and carvings, but none of them were the kind that could be put on public display. It was not the quality – in most cases the workmanship was good, and in some superb – but the subject matter.
Like many Englishmen, Wimsey had a slight taste for the grotesque and the macabre, but what he saw here was far beyond that. This went beyond the weird dreamscapes of the new Surrealist school or the nightmare visions of Bosch into the territory of stark madness. Here were crudely-carved, acephalous, female forms with heavy breasts and gaping wombs. There were bulging-eyed, web-fingered, batrachian perversions of humanity, rendered in appallingly lifelike detail. And those were only the recognisable ones. Many of the things bore no resemblance to any form of life a sane planet could give birth to. Immense, tentacled cones and towering, radiate, starfish-headed monstrosities were only some of them. There was an odd familiarity about some of the pieces, and Wimsey recalled a book an American fellow-collector had sent him. Not an ancient one, but a small, privately-published book of plates taken from the works of the Boston artist Richard Upton Pickman. He had only looked through it once, and the images there were every bit as disturbing as these sculptures.
His guide, apparently unconcerned with the looming horrors that surrounded them, led him into the centre of the chamber. Here the lights were brighter still, and among the statues stood a mall group of men, gathered around an empty plinth.
"Sir Pellinore," Wimseys' escort said, "I brought the Major."
"Very good, carry on, Broughton." Sir Pellinore ordered. "Wimsey. Good to see you again, even under the circumstances."
"I admit I didn't expect to see you again, after my answer to your letter." Wimsey replied.
Sir Pellinore waved the matter aside with a large hand. "Not at all, Wimsey. I'm not one of those chaps who thinks a fellow can go through what you did and come out unscathed, you're no malingerer. The War was over and you'd more than done your part. The business I'm in isn't for anybody who doesn't want to be in it, and you didn't, fair enough.
"But I do notice you've kept yourself busy. Sent a few blackguards to the gallows where they belonged, and saved a few more poor fools who didn't deserve to hang. Good work, you always were the brightest man in the room. When I spotted you here earlier today I wondered about coming over, but there didn't seem a reason to drag up old memories."
"And now there is?" Wimsey asked.
"Not as such, no." Sir Pellinore allowed. "This affair is really more in your line than mine, so when I found out about it, I thought I'd see if you'd be willing to lend a hand." He turned to the rest of the group, who'd been standing by with various degrees of patience. "Gentlemen, this is Lord Peter Wimsey, an old colleague of mine. Wimsey, this is Sir Alfred Duncton, Chief Curator of the Museum." A portly, rubicund gentleman with no hair on his head but magnificent white side-whiskers, who accorded Wimsey a slight bow. "Professor Tarleton, Curator of Extraordinary Antiquities." Slight, frail, grey-haired, he gave a nervous nod. "And I believe you'll recognise Dr Henry Jones."
"Indiana Jones." The American archaeologist stuck out a hand, and the two men exchanged a firm grip. "I saw you at my talk, Lord Wimsey."
"And deuced interestin' it was, Doctor Jones." Wimsey stated. "Not an Egypt expert meself, but you know your onions!"
"Can we get on with this?" Tarleton interrupted in a dry, fussy voice. "My people do not like outsiders or disturbances."
"Quite." Sir Pellinore said. "Wimsey, Dr Jones. You will of course be wondering why I asked you both here so unexpectedly..."
"Not really," Jones put in, "Since we're all gathered round an empty plinth, I guess something's been stolen?"
"Indeed." Tarleton said. "A statuette, some eighteen inches high, made from green stone with white veins, and of remarkable workmanship. The figure represented is a smaller and more finely-worked version of the one directly behind you."
The statue alluded to was some four feet high and carved in granite. It represented a singular monstrosity. The thing was seated on a stone block, its body was humanoid, if rather corpulent, but the feet that rested on the edge of the block as it sat huddled, and the hands that rested on the knees were heavily-clawed, and a pair of wings extended from the shoulders all the way down the back. The true strangeness of the thing was in the head; this was round, and had no face, instead, the front of it was a mass of appendages that might have been antennae, tentacles, neither or both.
"Handsome feller, ain't he?" Wimsey remarked.
"That 'handsome fellow', as you call him, is referred to as Great Cthulhu in a cycle of fragmentary myths found all over the world." Tarleton remarked. "He is a demon, god or priest of some importance!"
"Well," Jones noted, "he's either real dejected, or fast asleep, whatever he is!"
"The latter." Tarleton told him. "Legend has it that Great Cthulhu and his legions wait in a death-like sleep in a submerged city known as R'Lyeh."
"Probably exhausted from pronouncin' their names." Wimsey commented. "So you want us to get this statuette back. Valuable, is it?"
"Not exactly, not in monetary terms." Sir Pellinore replied. "The scholarly value I can't speak to. No, what we want to know is who took it, and more importantly, how they knew it existed and where it was.
"You see, the Extraordinary Antiquities department isn't one everybody knows about. Their job is to curate and study things that don't fit into our knowledge and ideas about the past. I'm told there are artefacts in here, for instance, which hint that human civilisation is far older than current archaeology can prove. Objects that indicate that stories we call myths might actually be true.
"Now if we released everything there is here to the public, there'd be all kinds of trouble. The Churches wouldn't like it, for one thing. For another, a lot of people would take up these studies, first-class minds that we need to be doing something more useful and relevant than chasing up old stories. So we keep it all here, where it can be studied by a few specialists, until we turn up enough evidence to either prove something a sham, or make it safe to release."
"So the job could only have been done by somebody who knows about this place." Jones concluded. "How many people actually know about it?"
"Hard to say, exactly." Sir Pellinore admitted. "In the Museum, only the Senior Curators, the researchers who work here and a few Special Custodians.
"Beyond that, the PM, the Home Secretary, their Permanent Secretaries and some people in my Department. Then there's the Warehouse and the Torchwood Institute – they vet everything that comes in here and take away the dangerous stuff for safe-keeping or special study. There's the other lot as well, but they keep to themselves and clean up their own messes, mostly.
"But out of all those people, only the ones who work here should actually know where these rooms are."
As Sir Pellinore spoke, Wimsey had been working his way out from the empty plinth in expanding circles. Now he suddenly held up his hand and approached a statue. It was of a large, tree-like creature and carved from rough sandstone. Wimsey peered carefully at a spot on the surface, then propped his cane up against the statue. Reaching into a pocket, he drew out a leather case, from which he took a pair of tweezers. With these he teased some fibres off the rough stone and placed them in a small envelope he produced from another pocket. The he picked up his cane and seemed to measure the statue, at least from the floor to the spot he had found the fibres.
"Good job I like to be prepared for anythin'." He remarked. "Whoever came in here must have brushed against this statue. Your own people would know where it was and wouldn't walk into it like that. Whoever it was stood about five foot four and was either a woman or an Oriental man."
"How'd you work that out?" Jones asked.
Wimsey held up his cane. "It's marked in feet and inches on one side and centimetres on the other." He said. "That's how I got the height. For the rest, those threads are silk, if I'm any judge. Chaps don't usually wear silk, unless they're Orientals, but women wear it a lot."
"No women or Orientals are currently employed here." Tarleton said.
"Then somebody who does work here must have let the cat out of the bag." Wimsey said.
"That is entirely possible." Tarleton sighed. "The work we do here attracts a particular type of individual. Many of them are unduly sensitive – some claim to be psychic. Unfortunately a good deal of our work – especially the translations – relies as much upon highly-developed intuition as on pure intellect.
"But such people are notoriously impressionable, and it is possible someone let something slip in the wrong company."
"It would still have to mean something to whoever heard it, though." Jones pointed out. "There can't be many people in London who'd even recognise the name of this Cthulhu character, much less want to steal a statue of him!"
Wimsey snapped his fingers. "Of course!" He said. "Now I remember. Thought the name seemed familiar. It's mentioned in some of the books in my collection!"
Duncton spoke for the fist time, in a melodious baritone. "Collection?" He asked. "Ah! So you are that Peter Wimsey? The collector of incunabula?"
"Guilty as charged." Wimsey admitted.
"You'll pardon me, Lord Peter," Duncton said, "but you did not use your title in your dealings with the Museum. You were generous enough to donate several unique volumes to us last year."
Wimsey shrugged. "You find all kinds of things pokin' around in old bookshops. Those books were far too rare to be sittin' on my shelf. Here's the best place for 'em."
It was immediately apparent that Dr Jones was making a rapid and favourable reassessment of Wimsey. "You figure we might find something in those books that'll help?"
"Anythin's possible." Wimsey allowed. "But I'd like to find out who would want to steal the thing, and why."
"I might be able to assist there." Sir Pellinore informed them. "I don't have much time for that sort of thing myself, but I've a friend who's interested in the whole occult business. He lives in Curzon Street. I'll drop him a note to give you an appointment. I'm taking it that you're both interested in helping us with this?"
"Of course I am." Jones said firmly. "Some things belong in a museum, where they can be studied, even if the public can't see them. I hate it when people steal antiquities for their own purposes."
"As for me," Wimsey said, "I've got nothin' on at the moment, and I do enjoy a puzzle."
"So the only problem we have," Jones said, "is that I'm due on a boat back to the States tomorrow!"
"I'll see to that," Sir Pellinore told him. "and arrange matters with your college. You won't find yourself out of pocket, I assure you."
"If you need somewhere to stay," Wimsey ventured, "I've a guest bedroom you can use."
"Sounds fine, if it's no trouble." Jones replied with a grin. "I'm used to roughing it!"
"Don't let my man Bunter hear you say that!" Wimsey cautioned. "Unless you like your toast burnt and your bacon cold!"
"I will arrange for the names and addresses of all current staff in this department to be sent to you, Lord Peter." Tarleton said. "I also have several plaster casts -complete in every detail -of the stolen statuette. I'll have one sent round, it may be of help."
"Well in that case, if you're done with us, Sir Pellinore, we'll be on our way." Wimsey said.
Outside the Museum, Wimesy turned to his new acquaintance and said. "We'd best start by goin' to your hotel. You can arrange for your traps to be sent over to my house, and I can telephone Bunter to expect them and get the room ready.
"We've both missed tea, so how about an early dinner at one of my clubs? Nobody listens to anyone elses' conversation in a club dining room – bad form, y'know -so it's as good a place as any to start plannin'!"
"It's your town, Lord Wimsey!" Jones replied.
Wimsey grimaced. "Just 'Wimsey' will do, Jones. If you want to use the title, it's 'Lord Peter', but I'd rather you didn't. I'm only a Lord because me father was a Duke, it's a courtesy title."
Jones grinned. "I guess we Republican Colonials are always getting those thing wrong, huh?"
Wimsey chuckled. "Wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't all so complicated to start with!" He replied. "Even we can't always get it right. But you never put a title in front of a surname without the Christian name in between."
"I'll try to remember that." Jones told him. "Do all English gentlemen carry canes with measures marked in the sides?"
Wimsey shook his head. "I had this one specially made." He explained. "It's my vade mecum, my indispensable companion. As well as the measures, it has a steel ferrule, a compass in the handle and a sword inside it."
"All handy." Jones allowed. "Though I find a gun more useful than a sword."
"I'd noticed." Wimsey said. "I carry one too, but mine's an automatic. A revolver like yours does spoil the line of a chaps' suit."
They dined at the largest and least exclusive of Wimsey's clubs, simply because you could take a guest there without prior arrangement. The large dining room was more than half empty at this early hour, and they had no trouble finding a table in a quiet corner. Over lamb cutlets and new potatoes, Jones turned to the matter at hand.
"You do realise, don't you, that there's more to this than a stolen sculpture." He said.
"Quite." Wimsey responded. "Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust doesn't personally intervene in anythin' that simple. I learned that durin' the War."
"I'll bet, and I'm not going to ask about any of that." Jones said. "But there's something I know that maybe you don't, and Sir Pellinore – I got that right? Sir Pellinore doesn't know I know.
"I did my part in the War, too, and I met a guy, He was a Secret Service agent, a real good guy, called Sawyer. We were out in the field once, and some German was taking pot-shots at us. Sawyer lined up from nearly a mile away and dropped the guy with one shot!
"I asked him where he learned to shoot like that, and he told me he'd been taught by an Englishman. Guy called Quatermain."
"Allan Quatermain?" Wimsey asked. "Chap who found King Solomons' Mines?"
"The same." Jones averred. "Sawyer said he'd worked with Quatermain and some others in 1900 on a big secret mission to do with the arms race. He told me they worked from a base under the British Museum. I thought he was just spinning a yarn for a while. But then I found out from somebody else that Quatermain was killed in 1900 while on a job for the Government. Now I find out that there's a lot more under that Museum than just store-rooms, and a high-up British official is getting hot under the collar about somebody outside knowing about it."
"So you're sayin' that the fact of somethin' bein' stolen is less important than the fact that somebody knew where to steal it from?" Wimsey asked.
"That's what I'm guessing." Jones confirmed. "Look, Sawyer is as much of a legend in the Secret Service as James West and Artemius Gordon. Why would a guy like that need to tell tall tales about Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo unless they were true?"
Wimsey nodded. "I think you're right, Jones. The more so because Sir Pellinore holds a post that, if my sources are correct, was once held by Mycroft Holmes, the brother of Sherlock Holmes.
"I don't think anybody but Tarleton cares about the statuette, Jones. But I think they're awfully keen to find out who knows about what's under the Museum and how they know it!"