"Art in the Blood"

by Brian Stableford

originally published Shadows Over Baker Street, Ballantine, 2003

Mycroft Holmes is lounging at the Diogenes Club when Holmes brings him a curious case - a seaman named John Chevaucheux, who has an unusual problem.  He reports that Captain Dan Pye, of the ship Goshen, a man apparently known and important to Mycroft, has died - from a curse.  Holmes shows a small figurine, with humanoid, fish, and octopoid features to Mycroft, as Chevaucheux tells his story.

He shipped out under Captain Pye.  Also on the voyage was a man named Sam Rockaby, who came from a small village in the South East of England, where the old houses and buildings often have grotesque faces carved into the walls.  Rockaby claims to be of "older" blood, and to have knowledge of the origins of these faces, and other strangenesses of the regions, including those of "the Elder Gods" and "the Others". 

The voyage is a difficult one, and the crew are beset by seasickness and St. Anthony's Fire.  They see visions of terrible sea monsters.  Rockaby gets crazier and crazier.   

Despite some losses, they make it home.  But soon after Capt. Pye summons Chevaucheux.  He is on his deathbed, and his flesh is turning into a kind of octopoid skin.  He passes the figurine to Chevaucheux, who shows Mycroft and Holmes that he, too, is now suffering from the same affliction.

Mycroft instructs Holmes to find Rockaby, and to round up every figurine and hurl them into the ocean.  From a now almost hopelessly insane Rockaby, Holmes and Chevaucheux learn of a coastal cave, with faces even more grotesque than those found in the homes stare from the walls, and seem to be alive in some way.  Chevaucheux loses it, transforming into a worm-cephalopod before tossing himself into the sea.  Holmes returns to Mycroft with his puzzling tale and its unfathomable implications.

This is the second superior Mythos-ian tale I've read by Stableford, who I always thought of as a hard-SF author, and now know I want to read more by.  Despite is frustrating ambiguities, this is a potent tale, and Stableford effectively evokes Lovecraftian creeps in his description of the sea voyage and elsewhere.  Good stuff!