Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (23 page)

“Is this what you seek, Professor?” said Holmes, and swung the light away from Westen, playing it instead on the ancient scroll of
The Sigsand Manuscript
that he retrieved from his coat pocket.

The light veered again onto the Professor, shining into his unblinking eyes as he stiffly climbed down from the pipe and lumbered towards my friend with arms outstretched like a soulless automaton. Westen was all but upon him when the Professor flinched back, and I saw the pentacle around Holmes’ neck flash in the lantern light. Taking advantage of the confusion, Holmes threw the scroll deftly over the Professor’s head to where Carnacki, already rising, caught it between both hands. But in catching the precious grimoire he had reached too far forward and began to over-balance. The scroll fell from his hands, hit the floor and began to roll out of the pentacle. Dropping my revolver I grabbed the scroll with one hand while with the other clutched at Carnacki’s coat-sleeve as he began to pitch forward over the barriers — gripping him with all the fright and desperation I might feel rescuing a man teetering on the brink of a mighty chasm.

We seemed to swing in a moment of vertigo along the lines of garlic and blue chalk as though they were the very edge of the world. Then I pulled back with all the weight that Holmes had been so unkind about earlier, and we tumbled backwards together. I heard Carnacki gasp with relief, and it was only then I had a queer realization as to the danger we had been in.

But there was no time for reflection. “He’s coming your way!” I heard Holmes shout somewhere behind the glare of the lantern which now silhouetted something like a drunken string puppet stumbling blindly on toward us.

Carnacki and I were on our feet now. Professor Westen reeled closer, and attempted to cross the protective lines. As his foot hit the outer garlic barrier we made to grab him and haul him into the pentacle, but he staggered back as if struck and our fingers slid from him.

Westen stood quite still a few feet away, looking in at us with an odd, bewildered expression, his eyes unfocused in a way that made me think he could not really see us, despite the light. Then he tilted his head as if listening to something, a sound, or a voice that only he could hear.

“Yes,” he said. A moment later he began to choke, his face turning purple, spittle flecking his lips, his tongue beginning to protrude.

“He’s choking!” I cried and tried to move forward to help, but Carnacki thrust out a muscular arm, barring my way.

“No, Doctor! You mustn’t cross the lines!”

Before I could even begin to struggle or protest, Holmes was upon Westen and with a mighty shove propelled him across the pentacle. We had him in our grasp in an instant, but it was as though we were pulling the man out of the Grimpen Mire. The resistance was simply incredible. After some seconds struggle, utilizing my weight and Carnacki’s strength, we wrenched Westen forward and the power holding him outside gave way so suddenly that we stumbled back. Much to my relief the Professor immediately lapsed into a bout of coughing, which cleared after a few seconds, and I knew he was breathing normally again.

“Hallo, it’s Thomas Carnacki,” the Professor said, smiling bemusedly at his old acquaintance. “What are you doing here?” He glanced about. “What has happened? What is
The Sigsand Manuscript
doing on the floor? Why am I in my night-shirt?” He then swung around to find me standing at his elbow and with a look of frank astonishment said, “And who the deuce are you, sir?”

“He is my colleague Dr. Watson and I am Sherlock Holmes,” said my friend, stepping forward with the lantern.

“The detective? What crime has been committed?”

“Only the strangest case of attempted theft I have ever come across. What do you last remember, Professor?”

“It is important we know,” Carnacki said, soothing Westen’s obvious indignation at this questioning.

“Well … I was working here in the library,” he said. “That was a few minutes ago.”

“It was in fact some days ago,” said I.

He glanced at me doubtfully, then continued. “I turned and saw someone at the library door, which I thought odd as I’d not heard any of the church doors open, and I was locked in at any rate, and then … and then you three were suddenly here.”

“You were induced by hypnosis to steal
The Sigsand Manuscript
,” said Holmes. “But you resisted to a degree, so that you were able to hide it, although the trance still held you fast as you struggled to resist so that you lay in your room in a kind of mental limbo for some days. I was sure another attempt to steal the book would be made when we feigned defeat.”

“And we were not a moment too soon,” said Carnacki. “It seems you finally succumbed to the will commanding you, and having failed you would have destroyed yourself in obedience to the controlling mind. Indeed it may still be active. You should stay within the pentacle until morning. You will still be in peril until then.” Carnacki paused, glanced to the side and added, “And so are we all.”

“From what, pray?” said Holmes.

“From that.” He pointed to the library doorway where stood a small shifting, rippling column of translucent white mist, vaguely human-shaped and watching us with two dark pits where the eyes should have been. It shimmered as if seen through a heat haze, though I felt the room go distinctly chill. As I looked, part of it sloughed off to drop silently to the floor as a horizontal bar of mist, which, as I continued staring, began to shape itself into some indistinct crouching beast.

It growled, a sound part tiger, part wolf, and most horribly … part human.

“Get ready, Watson,” said Holmes. The unaccustomed quiver in his voice made me glance around, and I saw he had his revolver at the ready. I knelt and picked up my own weapon. At my first movement the crouching thing sprang, coming at us in a curious lope while still congealing its substance from the mist it had been, a nightmare beast of fangs, fur and shining scales. It hissed, it screamed, it roared and flung out clawed arms as it came.

“Now!” cried Holmes, and together we fired shot after shot into the unholy thing, the reports echoing and re-echoing from the ancient stone walls. The beast was visibly hindered by our efforts, shuddering back momentarily before plunging forward again. Impeded but far from stopped.

It rushed past Holmes, ignoring him as he emptied his last chamber into it. My final shot was at point-blank range, fired just as it flung itself across the barriers of the pentacle, straight for Professor Westen. The three of us fell back. The thing hung in mid-air, checked an instant in its leap, and fell back, giving a single scream far more human than its cries hitherto. It clawed the air with its terrible arms. Carnacki, Westen and I rushed forward, grappling with those flailing limbs, thin and incredibly strong, touching something rough and hot and strangely soft while Holmes on the other side hammered at it with his revolver.

The thing surged forward a little more, scything wicked claws this way and that. I heard Carnacki yell and felt warm blood splatter across my hands.

It edged closer, its claws slashing, its fangs and slavering jaws alive with hunger.

It was crossing into the pentacle
!

An arc of glittering gold caught my eye and I saw Holmes, having wrenched off his gold pentacle, swing it like a medieval knight’s mace and land it smartly down upon the creature’s head. Though it had resisted his hammering and was overcoming our three-fold fight against it, the gold pentacle smote with a sharp
crack
and in an instant it lost all vitality, slid to the floor and melted away to nothing.

It took me a moment to realize we had won, but a glimpse of the blood upon my clothes and hands reminded me victory had not been won without cost. I turned to Carnacki standing beside me, his face a mask of dazed horror, his right coat sleeve in ribbons and soaked in blood.

As I thought of suture and needles, disinfectant and morphine, the rents in his clothing sealed up and the blood faded, as did his expression of pain. He rolled up his sleeve and found no marks at all.

“If it had cut at your throat,” said Sherlock Holmes, shining the light full on Carnacki’s unbroken skin, “I fancy your mind would have killed you instantly.”

“Yes,” said Carnacki, nodding grimly.

“The ghost!” Westen suddenly exclaimed.

We looked to the library doorway but the watching apparition had gone.

We found the body of Susan the maid among the ruins of Grantchester Abbey early the next morning. In her right hand were hawthorn and rowan berries and what later proved to be cuttings of St. John’s Wort. In her left was a rag doll shaped into the form of some uncertain species of beast.

“I am shocked,” said Sherlock Holmes quietly as we looked upon the girl lying dead in the grass. “Shocked, but not surprised that such simple beauty should hide such diabolical evil.”

Later that day we apologized to Mrs. Westen for the fiction we had told her with such straight faces; apologies which were readily and gracefully accepted. The nightmare had been ended, and her husband returned to her, alive and healthy.

In the maid’s room, under the roof, we found further evidence that she had been meddling in the Mysteries, amongst her possessions were found two grimoires —
The Book of the Cypress Tree
and
The Book of the Forty Words.
Their contents,
Carnacki assured us, were not for the uncertain and the amateur. As he leafed through her secret notebooks he shook his head sadly, declaring her a poor student.

“Who knows what disasters she might have wrought had she tried to put Sigsand’s text into practice,” he said, and shuddered a little. “We all strive to better ourselves, but she clearly had little idea of where her particular path would ultimately lead.”

Strangely enough there was no sign she had ever kept a dog. In fact the dog that had been seen with her many times since she had taken service in the Professor’s household was never seen again.

Two days after our adventure, as we rattled down to Grantchester station in the dog-cart, Holmes leaned across and said to me in confidential tones, “You know, Watson, my faith in all that is rational and real is as unshaken as always. You see that?”

“Of course, Holmes,” said I, although I was still inclined to speculate. He
did
think to strike with the gold pentacle even after our revolvers had failed to stop it.

“But for all that, I do believe that our Mr. Thomas Carnacki has a fascinating career before him.”

The Steamship Friesland

The Steamship Friesland

by Peter Calamai

For reasons that will presently become obvious I have instructed my solicitors to withhold this tale from publication until 75 years after my death. It could be argued that I should have specified that span after the death of my companion and friend of many years, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, since he is the central character of the tale. Holmes, who so often came close to death during our adventures, bids fair to outlive me by many years, removed as he is from the unhealthy miasma of London to the pure air of the Sussex Downs and rejuvenated by the Royal Jelly, of whose regular use he believes me ignorant.

As I write, the nightmares of the Great War have eclipsed much of the previous public fascination with spectral happenings. Only a few years ago it was not thought frivolous to believe in an afterlife and in shadowy beings who could inhabit both the world of the living and that of the dead. Perhaps when this tale appears there will be still some who can remember the world of 1894 when ghosts moved among us.

My tale begins in the early summer of that year, just a few months after Holmes had effected the capture of Colonel Sebastian Moran, an event which I recorded in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’. Although that is now more than two decades ago, I am able to draw upon the customary accurate and complete notes that I kept of many of my friend’s unusual and important cases.

My wife had once again abandoned me for some ailing relations, so I was spending time in our old rooms at 221B Baker Street. I had retired early, but the deep ache from the Jezail bullet that had long ago pierced my flesh kept me from sleep. I was reading one of Kipling’s fine stories about Mowgli when my attention was diverted by unusual sounds from the sitting room. Long association with Holmes had inured me to the acoustical disturbances of violin playing, explosive chemical experiments and even indoor revolver practice. That night, however, it was the great detective himself who was the source of the troubling sounds.

Through the heavy oak door it first seemed as if Holmes was carrying on an agitated discussion with a late-night visitor who had somehow contrived to mount the 17 steps to our rooms without alerting Mrs. Hudson, our long-suffering landlady. When I inched open the door, however, I could clearly see that my colleague and friend was alone in the sitting room, apparently talking to himself.

“Are you quite sure it is the same three men behind this trouble?” he asked. Then he waited for some moments in quiet repose, his gaze fixed to a spot in front of and above his head and his hands grasping tightly his favorite cherrywood pipe.

“Would they not have taken great care to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves?” Another pause, much shorter than the first. “Their emotions concerning the matter are that strong, then?” Pause. “But is there any reason to suppose their accusations of miscegenation to be well founded?” Pause. “And Brouwer paid for that with his life!”

To my ears this one-sided exchange was devoid of any meaning. Nonetheless, hearing it served to heighten a fear that had been mounting for some days. Since his dramatic return from the supposed dead that Spring, Holmes had been pushing himself beyond the limits of normal human physical and mental endurance. His days consisted of repeated bursts of frenetic activity, and he appeared not to sleep at night. He ate little and even then at most irregular hours. His features were contorted in a permanent expression of anxiety, and his eyes stared wildly from their sockets. Several times in the past week I had observed him injecting himself from a hypodermic needle. Even his iron constitution could take only so much of such mistreatment, and I had begun to fear that, once again, he might be on the cusp of a breakdown. Now my worst fears seemed to be borne out. But the next morning when I taxed Holmes with the fruits of my nocturnal observations and my deep concern for his health and sanity, his response baffled me even further.

“Watson, I believe you are well acquainted with a fellow medical man of some repute here in London who is an eye specialist, of Irish heritage but trained in Edinburgh and familiar with ophthalmic practices on the Continent. I now desire to consult him on a professional matter. Would you be so kind as to request such a meeting for me?”

“Of course, Holmes, but I should tell you that he put aside medical practice a few years ago to devote himself to writing historical novels. Perhaps I should arrange a meeting with another ophthalmological surgeon instead, one active in the field?”

“I would prefer the original, Watson. We had a brief chat at a social function once, and I was impressed with his clear-headedness and brisk intelligence on matters other than his specialty.”

“Can you give me some indication of the subject matter. He is bound to ask.”

My friend said he had been reading about the study of the blood vessels and light receptors at the back of the eye, work that had begun more than a half century ago, and made rapid strides recently with advances in the capabilities of dark-field microscopes and in photography. He believed this scientific technique could yield a means of identifying people by their eye patterns, a potentially invaluable tool in the investigation of crime, and he was considering a monograph on this subject.

I dispatched a telegram to South Norwood, home to my medical colleague turned author. He replied instantly that he was pleased to give time to the world’s greatest consulting detective, and the meeting was arranged for the following day.

When Holmes returned to our rooms, he was a changed man. If anything he appeared even more drawn and fatigued but now his features were in repose and his eyes stared no longer. He sank into the basket chair and, after charging his pipe, spoke: “Watson, I fear that I have not been entirely open with you, but I beg you for the sake of our long friendship to hear my defence of this deceit. I also urge you to keep an open mind concerning what I am about to tell you. I ask you to remember that you have professed to regard me, despite some minor personal foibles, as a man of sound moral character and the highest degree of rationality.”

After this astonishing preamble and without waiting for my response, Holmes proceeded to unfold a tale, the telling of which here will, I believe, explain my decision to delay publication for so long. He began by revealing that he had not gone to the former ophthalmologist to pursue the identification of criminals by retinal scans, but instead to discuss communication with the dead.

“Holmes, even broaching such a subject is unbecoming in a man of your intellect and reputation for strict ratiocination ,” I protested.

“As you know, my dear Doctor, I have often compared my reasoning in these recondite matters that come my way to the approach of a serious historian like Macaulay. Using indications culled from various documents, he recreates a picture of a time, a place and the great actors who shaped events. In my own way, using observations of everything from a woman’s spatulate fingers to traces of clay on a shoe, I construct an imaginary picture of how a crime was committed and by whom.

“So I have no patience with accounts of table-rapping, messages spelled out using Ouija boards, emissions of ectoplasm, or other instances of spirits being able to communicate only through mediums and then only imprecisely. I am also convinced that the spirits of the departed would have neither the desire nor the ability to project some sort of physical presence. Surely projecting an intellectual presence would suffice, especially when communicating with a powerful and attuned mind.”

That was precisely the possibility Holmes had explored in his visit to the author and former ophthalmologist, who turned out to be well studied in spiritualism. But what had prompted this interest, I asked, as my bewilderment and anxiety increased. In silent answer he extracted a newspaper clipping from his pocketbook and handed it to me.

A shocking discovery was made late last night by members of the River Police from the new Blackwall Station. A police launch, on patrol in the Thames, came upon the body of a man floating in the water at the entrance to Blackwall Basin. Although the body was already partly decomposed, papers in an oil skin pouch identified the unfortunate soul as Jan Brouwer, the First Officer of the steamship
Friesland
out of Rotterdam which tied up at the West India Docks here only days ago. Because there were no signs of violence upon the body, the authorities are treating the death as the type of misadventure that is sadly all too common along a waterfront populated by establishments where sea-going men are encouraged to consume excessive amounts of alcohol.

“That is very regrettable, to be sure. But I fail to see anything that would lead anyone to a belief that the spirits of the departed could communicate with us, either corporeally or by intellect alone,” I said with some asperity.

“Of course you are correct, Watson, that the newspaper account by itself contains no obvious indication that spiritualism plays any part in this unfortunate incident. Yet when I read about Brouwer’s death I experienced a reaction that has happened to me only twice before. Somehow I knew there was more to this tragedy than met the eye.”

Spurred by what he frankly admitted to be nothing more than a non-rational ‘intuition,’ Holmes had hurried to the police and was fortunate to find the case in the charge of an old acquaintance, McFarlane. He observed at once that the police examination had overlooked the absence of discoloration around the mouth common in drowning. With McFarlane’s approval he was able to open Brouwer’s chest cavity.

“The incompetence of the police is quite astounding, Watson. There was no water in Brouwer’s lungs. The man was dead before his body went into the river. With that knowledge I examined the body closely and discovered that he had suffered a blow to the head, not enough to break the skin but almost certainly sufficient to render him senseless. As well, his eyes betrayed tell-tale sign of asphyxiation, and inside his nostrils I detected several small fibres of wool. From this evidence I concluded that the poor man had been smothered after being knocked unconscious, quite possibly with a cap held fast over his mouth and nose.

“I left the morgue convinced that Brouwer’s death was the result of an assault, almost certainly premeditated, and therefore murder. But I had no client, no particular reason to place the investigation of this commonplace crime above the others on which I am engaged, and so I resolved to simply forget about it.

“But here’s the rub, Watson. I couldn’t banish Brouwer’s tragedy from my thoughts. No matter how much I willed it otherwise, my mind returned constantly to that subject throughout the day. I began wondering whether I was suffering from a malignant brain fever brought on by overwork. Then that night, sitting in this chair, I heard a voice.”

“Sherlock Holmes hearing voices!” I ejaculated. “My good friend, why did you not confide in me immediately?”

“If I myself had begun to doubt my own mental stability, my dear doctor, I could well imagine how you would have responded. Until now I had always insisted there were no such things as spirits and ridiculed anyone who believed in them. Yet you see me before you today apparently rational and sane, so I implore you to listen to the rest of my tale.”

Of all the stories I had heard in that sitting room over many years, the one that Holmes told that evening was the most astonishing, and it was but the first act of the even more astonishing drama that was to follow shortly and which nearly cost us our lives.

The first phrase that my friend heard urgently repeated by that spectral voice was chilling. “Brouwer was murdered by the same men who murdered me,” Holmes quoted.

“I tried to ask questions, but I had no more success at first than Hamlet and his colleagues when they were addressing the ghost on the battlements of Elsinore,” Holmes said. “Then abruptly the voice varied its refrain.

“‘Brouwer was murdered by the same men who murdered me, John Openshaw.’”

Holmes said that he almost bit through the stem of his pipe in astonishment. As contemporary readers of my writings would have known then (and possibly readers of this account will still recall) Openshaw was a young man who sought Holmes’ help when threatened by former members of the Ku Klux Klan. They believed he had custody of family papers implicating them and some now-prominent Southerners in criminal activities in the years after the American Civil War. My friend had outlined a course of action that might have placated the KKK, but Openshaw was fatally assaulted and dumped into the Thames that very evening. As I recounted at the time, this had a profound effect on Holmes, who vowed to make retribution for Openshaw’s murder a personal crusade, saying:

“If God sends me health, I shall set my hand upon this gang. That he should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his death—!”

Within the day, by making full use of his remarkable deductive and reasoning powers, Holmes had identified Openshaw’s killers. They were the captain and two other crew members of the barque
Lone Star
out of Savannah in the state of Georgia. That very morning the ship had sailed for America, but Holmes instantly put into motion a plan that would guarantee the three murderers were brought back to London to stand trial. Alas, that never happened. A shattered sternpost carved with the initials “L. S.” was spotted far out in the Atlantic, and the barque and all aboard her were presumed to have perished in a fierce equinoctial gale.

“But in fact the barque did not founder in the storm. Openshaw explained that to me, once we began talking freely. That and very much more,” declared Holmes.