Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

At the beginning of this long-winded and wandering introduction I wondered what the impact of fantastic fiction on an impressionable child, might be? Well, now you know, in my case it eventually led to the creation of the book you hold in your hands. A little horror, a little pulp-style thriller, a little comic book adventure, a little ghostly spook story, a little bit mystery and hopefully a whole lot of fun. Not your traditional selection of Sherlock Holmes stories by any means, but what is the fun of that? After all, as Watson noted in The Speckled Band “…
he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual and even the fantastic
…” so why should we?

Enjoy!

Charles Prepolec, 2008

The Lost Boy

The Lost Boy

by Barbara Hambly

When the Darling children disappeared without a trace from their nursery one night, their father took the case at once to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Mrs. Darling came to me.

“You know how George is,” she said, when the first spate of anguish, of terror, of speculations both probable and grotesque had been talked out over tea. I had been in the Darling night nursery innumerable times, listening to the tales Meg Darling — Meg Speedwell she had been, when first I knew her at Mrs. Clegg’s dreary boarding school in the north of England — would tell small Wendy, smaller John, and baby Michael of pirates, mermaids, red Indians and the fairies that dwell in Kensington Gardens.

I knew the distance from that high window to the street below, and that the drainpipe was at the back, not the front, of that narrow brick mansionette in its row of identical dwellings. I knew how big a dog Nana was, and the sturdy Newfoundland’s ferocity where the children were concerned.

“George says—” Meg began, and then stopped. For a time she sat turning her saucer round and round, forty-five degrees at a time, a habit she’d had when we were girls, and she was thinking about how best to say something that the adults had told us we shouldn’t say or even think.

And I knew then that what — or who — she was thinking about, was Peter Pan.

“Do you remember Peter Pan?” she asked, after a long, long time, in the small voice one usually only hears late at night, when the other girls in the bleak cold dormitory have gone to sleep.

I nodded. I didn’t say,
How could I forget
? I think Peter Pan was the reason that I didn’t kill myself when I was seven or eight — and it’s a mistake adults make, to think that children who are sufficiently unhappy don’t want to try to end their own lives. Mostly we just don’t know how. That I’d lived through Mrs. Clegg’s ideas of how to operate a girls’ school was entirely because I learned to dream, and in those dreams I’d met Peter Pan.

It was what we called him, Meg and I, because Meg dreamed about him, too. We both knew he had another name, a real name, and that other children had called him other things over the years. We both knew — the way you do in dreams — that he was more than he appeared to be, and more than he himself realized he was much of the time. We were both certain that it was possible for him to cross through the film that separates the Neverlands from the damp chilly world of girls’ schools, and account-books that don’t add up, and bleak London streets, and knowing one is going to die.

Meg had told me once back then — and I believed her — that she had seen him do so.

Now she said — and I believed her — “I saw him in the night-nursery, a week ago.” She watched my face as she said it, knowing of course that John — my John, after whom her own seven-year-old son was named — was a doctor, and fearing that my immediate conclusion would be that she was mad.

When I said nothing, she went on softly, “It was only for a moment. I dreamed he had rent the film, that separates the Neverlands from us—” That was what we’d called them, Meg and I: those endless skerries of islands, where children go when they dream. “I dreamed the children peeked through, and saw. I woke, and he was there still, looking just as he always did.” She shook her head, at the shared memory of that shock-headed child clothed in skeleton leaves, smiling his ageless brilliant smile.

“Did the children see him?” I asked, and she hesitated, calling the scene back to her mind.

“I think so,” she said slowly. “I screamed, and he flew away through the window, like a swallow flies—”

How well I remembered — though I had not until she said it — the motion of his flight, a darting swoop, the tiny lights of whatever fairies he had with him just then flicking in his wake.

She whispered, “He left his shadow behind.”

John came home early that evening, though he had stopped at Baker Street to visit with Mr. Holmes. I was ill a great deal that year, and though John kept closer to home than he had before, he also saw a good deal more of Holmes. He would stop at Baker Street for a half an hour on his way back from his rounds. Though I would take a Bible oath that he never so much as mentioned to Holmes his fears for me, nor did Holmes offer so much as a shred of a reassurance that he would have disdained as illogical, still, John would come home comforted, and full of the details of whatever case occupied his friend’s keen mind.

Thus that evening I heard all about George Darling’s visit to Holmes. “Old George kept his head remarkably,” John said, as he stirred cocoa for us both in a little pan on the bedroom hearth, while I lay among my pillows sorting through his medical notebook. It was my duty always to keep track of his patients, and tot up the bills which half the time John then left uncollected. “Holmes could not have done better. George knew the height of the window-sill from the pavement, the names of the cab-men at the corner of the road; before he came to Holmes, he went through the whole of the rear yard examining the ground there, and found no marks of a ladder, nor smudges on the window-sill, nor signs on the drain-pipe that it had been climbed. Of course Holmes returned to the house with him in any case, but he found nothing, either.”

I nodded, and the part of me that had years since ceased to believe in that small, shining boy with the wonderful smile wept with sickened shock, that the three children John and I loved as if they were our own might at that moment be dead. Or if not dead, in the hands of the human horrors that he and I both knew too well populated the adult world.

John wrapped his hand around mine as he handed me my cocoa. “They’ll be all right, Mary,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Holmes will find them. They’ll come to no harm.”

I whispered, “I know.”

The medicine I was taking then was bitter and strong. Though it gave me the sleep I needed, it also sent dreams, more vivid than I had known in adult life. In dreams that night I walked in Kensington Gardens, leaving the paths that John and I followed on our summer afternoon strolls and seeking the tree-hidden stillness along the far end of the Lake, where the fireflies’ reflection played above water like black onyx. This was where the fairies lived, Meg had whispered to me when we were children. This was where Meg herself had disappeared one evening when Mrs. Clegg had brought the lot of us down to London for I forget what occasion — it wasn’t a treat for us, that was all I knew — and had not reappeared for almost two days. Mrs. Clegg had hushed it up, of course, and pretended that it hadn’t been more than a few hours. But though we were quite small — five or six — I remembered it clearly.

It had been two days.

And Meg had told me, that she had been in the Neverlands, with Peter Pan, for what seemed to her then to have been many weeks. She was never quite the same after that. Happier, as if she carried in her heart the assurance that things would all come right in the end.

I knew, too, from conversations with Martha Hudson, that Mr. Holmes’ logic and studies extended far beyond what people like John — bless his kindly, literal heart! — regard as the Real World.

Thus I wasn’t at all surprised to see Mr. Holmes in Kensington Gardens, walking quietly in the cool blackness barred with moonlight, not only listening but touching the tree-bark, the grass-blades, the dew upon the leaves as he passed. I couldn’t imagine how he knew about Kensington — Mrs. Clegg had certainly never reported that long-ago disappearance of her charge to the police — but he moved like a man who knew the place well, and knew what he sought. When a fairy darted in a sparkling skim of pale-blue light across the lake-surface he only stopped, as it swooped up before him, hung in the darkness a yard in front of him for the space of a second or two, then whipped away.

Whether Mr. Holmes carried something in his pockets that signaled the fairies of his benign intent — and I think he must have — I did not know. But they flickered from the woods, followed him thicker and thicker, as he walked unerringly toward the belvedere that only exists in the park sometimes, usually after the sun goes down: the rest of the time you cannot find it, no matter how systematic your search. But Holmes went straight towards it, coming out of the circle of willows to see it standing in its little meadow, with the fairies hovering around it like dragonflies above standing water in the darkness.

And as he came into the open, about thirty feet from the ghostly circle of marble pillars, he met Peter Pan.

Or, rather, Peter seized Holmes by the sleeve and dragged him back into the willows: “Hist! Beware!” His dagger wrought of meteor-iron, its handle carved of dragon’s bone, caught the moonlight in his other hand.

Holmes dropped at once to one knee at the child’s side, so that their eyes were nearly level; followed his gaze toward the open meadow, the belvedere. “What is it?”

“It’s the Gallipoot,” whispered the child. “The Thing Cold and Empty. It haunts the zone of shadow between your world and the Neverlands. It waits for the veil to open, so that it can slip through and hunt.”

“What does it hunt?” asked Holmes.

“Souls on this side,” Peter replied. “Dreams on the other. It slices them up and swallows them, and all the little pieces of them wave shrieking about it like bloody flags in agony, forever.” His eyes burned somberly. It was hard to tell from where I stood, half-hidden among the willows, whether Peter was pretending or not, because he
did
pretend … only the things that he pretended often came to pass. “I’ve sought to drive it back through the belvedere into the zone of shadow, but it’s eluded me, and I dare not call upon my henchmen, for it would make short work of them.”

Holmes took a flute from his pocket — an ivory one he’d acquired in Tibet — and said, “Will it come to the music of souls?”

Peter nodded.

“I will stand before the opening into the zone of shadow,” said Holmes, “and play. When it lunges at me, I will leap out of the way, and you must drive it through with your weapon.”

The child nodded again, trying not to look impressed — I couldn’t remember whether Peter could play the flute himself or not. Holmes and Peter walked toward the belvedere together, and I noticed that all the fairies had disappeared. The air of the summer night grew cold, and strange, directionless movements seemed to stir the darkness, with a smell of sulfur and mould. Far, far off, as if at the end of an endless corridor, I could hear shrieking, as of the bleeding fragments of a thousand souls.

I did not know whether at that moment I qualified as a soul or a dream. All I knew was that this was real, this was happening in Kensington Gardens, even as I lay deep in sleep at John’s side not many streets away. If it caught my soul, I would never wake up.

I had thought Holmes would play one of those strange airs that he learned in Tibet, or the weird gypsy music that he sometimes coaxed from his violin. But he played the air from Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major for Lute, and the Gallipoot drew closer — I could smell it, hear the trapped souls screaming, feel its nearness in the bone-hurting cold. When it broke from the trees I tried to cry out in my sleep, tried to scream so that John would wake me, but I couldn’t. It was well I didn’t, for I realized a moment later that if I screamed it would become aware of me, come for me…

It rolled, oozed, surged toward the belvedere, and the exquisite melancholy song of the flute didn’t waver, though the screaming of the trapped and devoured souls rose like the wail of storm-wind. Through its darkness the marble pillars glimmered, then vanished, and I felt in my bones the wrenching of the fabric of the world as it struck.

A shriek like a thunderclap pierced my skull like lightning, and in the blackness that swallowed the moonlight, I saw the flash of Peter’s knife—

Then Holmes was stepping down the shallow platform of the belvedere, the world normal again and as it should be, tucking his bone flute into his pocket with one hand.

In the other hand, he held Peter’s knife.

“Give that back!” Peter came leaping out of the belvedere, grabbed for Holmes’ arm.

Holmes sidestepped him like a dancer. “When the Darling children return to their home, you shall have your knife back.”

“Who are the Darling children?”

Peter doesn’t always remember things.

“Wendy, and John, and Michael,” said Holmes. “The children who went away with you to the Islands last night.” I don’t know how he learned this — perhaps he’d only guessed it, until he actually encountered Peter — but then, as I said, Holmes studied extensively the writings concerned with other realities than those of the material earth. Someone, at some time, must have written about the Neverlands — or the Islands, as they were apparently also called, and they had other names as well. Certainly Meg was not the only child who had inexplicably disappeared, without any traceable sign of human agency, in Kensington Gardens or elsewhere.

Peter said, “They’re my friends. Wendy is to be my mother, and take care of me, and look after my Lost Boys in a secret house below the ground.”

Holmes nodded gravely. “You are renowned for looking after your friends,” he said, as one recalling a legend — or a set of instructions, as to what one must say to a dragon or a fairy — “in the face of any and all danger to yourself.”

Peter smote his chest proudly. “I am.” Peter never could resist renown.

“Then promise me this,” said Holmes. “When the Darling children return home — as return they will, one day — promise me that you will see to it, that they will do so on the day after they departed. That way,” he added, “you will have your knife back in only two days.”