Of a Pursuit, and What Pursued
What follows is pieced together from notes taken, by the Collective's own admission, "at a run." The Editor has not sought to smooth the breathlessness out of them, or to speculate on certain subjects that strain credulity.
His Lordship saw a strange, four-legged creature shambling from the building into the compound β its silhouette too distorted to be that of a horse β unless it was horribly disfigured. His Lordship commanded the sepoys picketed at the bungalow north wall to keep a close watch on the apparition.
The household began to hear chanting from the woods β the British element recognising it as the same unsettling utterances they had heard from the cultists in Garway before they brutally gunned them down β but here, without leaving the apparent safety of the bungalow, our intrepid heroes had no targets to affect the same conclusion.
Abruptly, the chanting stopped β the silence almost complete except for the plaintive bleating of a goat. The Professor, maintaining watch on the west side of the bungalow, saw a frail-looking man driving an animal in front of him with a stick, before the goat-herd disappeared into the trees.
An ominous shaking of the ground emanated from the south, louder than a herd of elephants. Hopes of the elephant train returning were not even entertained, as the earth-shaking noises, if they were indeed the footfalls of a huge beast, could only come from a single entity, and something far larger than an elephant.
His Lordship reinforced the south perimeter, shouting words of encouragement to the nervous sepoys: 'whatever it is, we can kill it!' His puissant words would come back to haunt him, as from the trees stepped forth something beyond the comprehension of human intellect, a mockery of the works of Darwin, a nightmare that could only be spawned from the mind of a demented and indifferent god.
Despite the soul-shattering impact of such a realisation, the front-line held their nerve to a man, firing only on the command of his Lordship.
To absolutely no avail. Well-aimed shots that would have felled an elephant passed through the thing like it was not even there, causing barely an impact on the puckered flesh. The thing approached the bungalow, flinging the bodies of the dead into the air like macabre confetti, only for them to fall on the roof like spent canister. It was only when the tentacled monstrosity ripped the front of the building away, the Professor howling, 'we can't hit it, but it can hit us!' that His Lordship gave up all hope, screaming 'every man for himself!' before abandoning his post. There was nothing for it but to run, the valiant defence of the bungalow had descended into a shameful rout.
Lords, academics, police-sergeants, soldiers, cooks, mahouts and punkah-wallahs leapt from windows; the great distinctions of class, breeding, race and education evaporating in the terrified rush for survival that the siege had become, a mass of humanity fleeing like terrified beasts.
The mob fled north, coalescing as participants recognised their erstwhile defenders. Desperate gunfire was heard from the bungalow, the party realising that Captain Leighton, Colonel Monty, and the stalwart Akshan were not amongst them. No-one dared look back.
The misshapen thing at the stable turned out to be a disembowelled horse, somehow still standing, somehow still alive. The Professor had to remind Lieutenant-Colonel Arbuthnott of his obligations as an Englishman (perhaps forgetting he was actually Scottish) before His Lordship put a bullet in the suffering animal.
The abomination still pursued them, there was nothing for it but to run into the trees, blindly, without maps, direction or purpose other than to flee the thing that should not be.
The Professor, despite being a sturdy enough fellow for his years, called a brief halt, sensing they had put some distance between themselves and the atrocity, and that he could not continue unaided. Two sepoys hoisted him up, and the ignoble retreat continued. The party spotted tracks heading west, and quickly decided to follow them, if only in the wild hope of finding the Colonel's last horse.
Dripping with sweat from the heat of the nighttime jungle, the party came across a brutal parody of crucifixion, a corpse of a man weeks dead, hanging upside-down from a pole, clearly beaten and tortured before dying. The party stopped for a brief rest and discussion, too desensitised by the past day's horrors to be discommoded by a bloodied and decomposing corpse. They heard the blasphemous howling of the entity that stalked them, the Professor pointing out that there may indeed be more than one, and they decided they must press on, discovering two more defiled corpses along the way. Were they warnings? Boundary markings? Some kind of occult defence? The Professor could discern no specific occult element to the hanging bodies, although they clearly signified something. They pressed on. It was all they could do.
The sepoys in the vanguard dropped to their knees, the Havildar beckoned His Lordship forward. Beyond was a clearing. There were two cultist chowkedars guarding what looked like an underground entrance. There was a goat tied to a stake, and what looked like some kind of hoist beyond the guards and the goat. After much whispered debate as to how to continue it was decided that the heroic Archibald Tomlinson, slayer of the Limehouse Piper, would sneak forward and get a better idea of what they were up against. His Lordship and the Professor were reluctant, as Archie had taken a severe battering in the defence of the bungalow, but the valiant Archibald was most insistent. Archie worked his way anti-clockwise around the clearing, and approached the hoist from the west. He discovered that there was a square hole in the ground surrounded by a low wall, below which there was a pool, and rooms that stretched out beyond the water into the darkness. There were tracks in the dirt around the opening, like those made by bullock-carts. He also confirmed that the two cultists were guarding a stairway that led underground. The chowkedars were not being particularly attentive to their duties, perhaps confident that they had nothing to fear from the jungle. Once Archie returned to the group, and at the urging of the vengeful Havildar Satam, His Lordship agreed to fire on the chowkedars. The sepoys' Martini-Henrys brought them both down, and the party swiftly moved across the clearing. Two more cultists lurked at the top of the stairs, and these too were quickly dispatched.
Leaving a sepoy and the cook at the top of the stairs the party descended below ground into a large chamber. The dust on the ground showed that many men had moved across this chamber recently. There was a stone altar at the southern end of the chamber, behind which was a grotesque and ancient wall-carving, that the Professor took to be of far more ancient provenance than the apparently Mughal architecture of the underground building.
The Professor ordered Ravi, the mussalman cook, to prepare some food; sepoys were posted at the entrypoints to the chamber, while the party decided what to do next.
The session concluded in the early hours of Wednesday, the 15th of November, 1893. Of Captain Leighton, Colonel Montgomery, and the valet Akshan, nothing was yet known.