The Cthulhu Casebooks, Page 29

  Yet, for the moment, as the world celebrated the passing of one year and the birth of another, I felt cause for hope.

  Perhaps, with Sherlock Holmes as our general, we might survive. We might even prevail.

  EPILOGUE

  I TYPE THESE CLOSING PARAGRAPHS WITH MIXED feelings. I am pleased to have purged myself of a tale I have long kept hidden and shared with no one, not even either of my wives. It is a relief.

  Yet I am heavy-hearted, knowing that I have yet more to do. More ground to cover, more words to write. This self-exorcism is far from over. The events of 1895 – which began at the Bethlem Royal Hospital at Southwark, the “Bedlam” of renown and notoriety – will form the next volume of this memoir. Then in the third and final volume I must address the matter of the sea-spawned abominations which blighted the south coast of England some fifteen years further on.

  Throughout the three decades covered in these books Holmes and I found ourselves confronted time and time again with an unassailable, unalterable truth. It is a truth which contrived to sweep the legs from under us whenever we felt we were getting the better of our foes and standing tall, and it is enshrined in a rhyming couplet in the Necronomicon. These two brief lines, penned by Abdul Alhazred while describing a nameless ancient Arabian city of which he once dreamed, encapsulate everything that we strove to vanquish and that strove to vanquish us in return:

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.