Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (5 page)

Hesitantly, I asked, “Why would this Mr. Krähnacht wish to kidnap Bobbie, even if he did know where he would come out of the Neverlands? Surely there are children in London—”

“Obviously,” said Holmes as he drew a half-sheet of paper to him and picked up a pencil, “he was paid to do so. By whom, can be deduced fairly easily once we have the boy himself back safe. Can you bring Peter to this place,” he asked, turning round to me the sketch-map he’d made, “in three hours? It’s down-river a good ways, but I can be there by then in a cab.”

Mischievously, I said, “Why don’t you fly with us, Mr. Holmes? I’m sure Peter and Ten Stars could fix you up.”

Peter’s eyes flamed with delight at the thought of Mr. Holmes, Inverness flapping like some vast cinder-hued bird, soaring through the night sky in a trail of fairy-dust. But Holmes shook his head and said primly, “I shall take a cab. Like most adults, I do not travel — at least in this instance — without baggage. I shall see you in Deptford at three.”

He laid emphasis on these words and met my eye with a look that said,
Can you make sure he gets there?

I gave a tiny shrug and a grimacing nod:
I’ll do my best
.

It came to me that he knew Peter as well as I did.

Barsham Lane lay on the far side of Deptford, far enough back from the river to be half in the countryside still. Number 37 was part of no ribbon-development, but rather lay apart, in its own grounds and about three-quarters of a mile from the last of the suburban villas. It took Peter and me exactly three hours and ten minutes to get there, and we swooped down out of the sky just as Mr. Holmes’ cab was disappearing into the thickness of the river mist, leaving him standing by Number 37’s iron gate.

As we came down through the fog I asked Peter softly, “Did you know Mr. Holmes before?”

“Of course I did, silly.” Peter dove in a circle around me, to pull my pigtail. “He helped me slay the dreadful Gallipoot, that haunted Kensington Gardens. You were there.”

I hadn’t thought Peter had seen me. “I mean before that.”

“Look,” said Peter, pointing, “there he is. D’you think he’s brought some more of those biscuits in that carpetbag?” For Holmes did indeed have a large carpetbag at his feet. He wasn’t looking at his watch, but into the fog above him, as if he knew we would take just as long to arrive as he did.

“Tell him to save me one,” added Peter, and flashed away over the wall in the direction of the house, Ten Stars like a glittering comet-tail behind him. The mud of the drive was very cold and nasty between my toes, and the gravel hurt my feet. I waved to Mr. Holmes but came down on the other side of the gate, lifting the bar there that was heavy to my child’s strength.

Holmes whispered, “Good girl, Mary,” as he slipped through, and shut the gate behind us. He stood for a moment looking down at me — he stood many inches taller than even my adult, real-world self — and though the fog made it too dark to see more than his outline against the dim reflection from his dark-lantern, when he spoke again I could hear the concern in his voice. “Can you find your way back to your home without Peter?” he asked quietly. “You know that you are not dreaming now—”

“I know.” I reached out, took his hand — cold, the way they always were, even through his gloves — and pinched his wrist with my fingernails, hard. His hand jerked back and I grinned up at him, then sobered again, when I saw that in my swift smile he almost recognized me. “But I’m not really real, either — or perhaps I’m more real than I’ve been in many years. And I know the danger is real. If something happens to me…”

I hesitated, not knowing what would become of me — where my self, my true self, whatever that true self was, would go.

“Peter,” I went on hesitantly, “doesn’t understand. He’s never really lived in this world, not since he was a tiny baby…”

I glanced back toward the house, invisible in the absolute blackness, save for the swift-moving foxfire glow that was Peter Pan, scouting every window, chimney, and door for signs of occupancy.

Then I went on, “But we can’t let the King of Dreams… It isn’t just about finding Bobbie Lewensham, you know, though of course he must be rescued. But if indeed some mage in this world has found the way through to the world of dreams — or even through to the borderlands that lie between them — he must be stopped. Even for the good mages of this world to go tampering on its borders is … dangerous. Too many of us need the Neverlands, to let the King of Dreams close its gates.”

Holmes whispered, “Yes.” I thought he would say something else, but after an intake of breath, he was after all silent.

Peter came whipping back in a shower of brightness that lit up the fog around him like diamonds. “Cravens! The house is deserted!”

“Excellent.” Holmes picked up his carpetbag. “Krähnacht is presumably still back in Yorkshire, in whatever place he breached through to the Nightmare Castle when he ambushed our young Viscount upon his emergence from the Neverlands. Whatever that entrance is — almost certainly close by the stone-circle — the Fairies’ Dance — where you first met Bobbie Lewensham, Peter — it will be heavily guarded. But Krähnacht has been in and out of the Neverlands before.”

“The Wizard Nightcrow!” I cried excitedly. And when Peter looked blank, I said, “Krähnacht is German for…”

“I knew that,” said Peter loftily. “I’d just forgot.”

Holmes gave me the lantern to carry (of course Peter sees like a cat in the dark), and, when we drew near the house, the carpetbag as well. “It’s very heavy,” he warned, uncoiling from it a good twenty-five feet of insulated wire, at the end of which was rigged what I recognized as a crude electromagnetic coil. “But whoever doesn’t carry it has to get near them, and I’d rather that were me.”

“Get near who?” I asked, hoisting the unwieldy burden and staggering under its weight.

“The Black Knights,” Holmes said, “of course.”

Ten Stars — who was tremendously helpful and obliging (unlike some other fairies I could name) — lit on the corner of the bag like a butterfly, and smeared it with fairy-dust, which made carrying it much easier, although it did develop a tendency to want to travel in its own direction and had to be pulled fairly firmly. Still, that was better than carrying fifteen or twenty pounds of electrical batteries all by myself.

Jakob Krähnacht had his laboratories on the ground floor, strange rooms filled with crystals and mirrors, and a workshop with a small forge. There was a conservatory creeping with foul-smelling plants, and all the carpets and wallpaper stank of smoke and worse things. Much worse things. Ten Stars refused to go in, when Holmes picked the lock on the side door, but Peter walked just ahead of Holmes in the darkness, calling out softly, “Bobbie? Bobbie, it’s Peter…”

The darkness thickened, and thickened, until the rays of the lamp couldn’t pierce it, as if a hand of invisibility were slowly closing around the light-source, crushing the glow back in. Peter’s voice ahead of us suddenly sounded a vast distance away, dimming down a long corridor. “Bobbie? We’re here to save you—”

Holmes stopped. What little light remained showed me a wall ahead of us, dark and seemingly soot-stained. Holmes put out his hand to touch it, yet I could hear Peter on the far side of it, his voice fading, “Bobbie—”

I said, “We can go through. We only think it’s there.” I’d encountered such walls in the Neverlands. Evil Wizards use them all the time. “Close your eyes—”

I set the carpetbag down — and it settled with a metallic rattle to the floor — and closing my eyes, walked forward, hands outstretched.

After perhaps a dozen steps, I could hear the sound of the breakers, far off on Neverland’s shores.

I turned around, and Holmes was gone.

I was in the blackness of a dungeon, cold rock under my feet. By the taste of the air, the smell of horror and damp, I knew I was in the Nightmare Realm somewhere, and I knew there was evil close-by. Peter darted up beside me, his face grim in the tiny glow shed by Ten Stars — goodness knows where she’d come from — and his knife in his hand. “Did they get him?” he whispered. “The Black Knights. They’re everywhere…”

I shook my head, grieving and very frightened, at least in part because I suspected that Peter did not hold the power here in these realms that he had in the kindlier skerries of dreams. “He can’t come through,” I whispered. “He doesn’t remember the way. Mr. Holmes!” I called, as loudly as I dared. “Mr. Holmes, just close your eyes! Walk forward!”

We stood for what felt like an eternity — what
could
have been eternity, I was well aware, for this realm was neither in the real world nor the Neverlands themselves, like a pocket of darkness in the curtain that separates them. An old pocket, filled with the smell of things that belong in no child’s dreams.

“Holmes!” Peter cried, a little louder, and somewhere in the dark behind us, I heard the soft, deadly whisper of metal on metal, the distant clicking of machinery, like a dozen vile clocks.

I kept my voice steady with an effort. “Mr. Holmes,” I said. “Mr. Holmes, if you can hear me… What was the first song you learned to play?”

I listened hard in the darkness, in my mind and my heart, but heard nothing from him.

Peter whispered, “It was this one.” He took from his pocket (the only pocket he had, hanging from the belt where he carried his knife) his pipes, and played: it was an Irish tune that I’d heard Mr. Holmes weave into fantasias of melody on his violin. Yet it was very simple, the kind of thing a boy might whistle, when he’s been locked in his room for seeing too clearly, and for making deductions about his elders from what he sees.

Behind us the clicking grew louder, and by the glow of Ten Stars’ fairy-light I could see them, at the far end of the corridor. Four Black Knights, towering and identical. Faceless, as Holmes had said, only through their helmets’ visors I could see the cold glitter of something moving steadily, mechanically. Peter’s eyes widened, but he kept playing, playing as he and I slowly backed from them, until we reached the wall at the end of the corridor, trapped by that pocket of blackness. The lead knight raised its hand, and I could see that instead of a hand it had glittering steel blades coming straight out of its wrist, blades that whacked back and forth like saw-toothed scissors.

In panic, in despair, my adult self somewhere in dreaming cried,
John
—!

Then Holmes was beside us, stepping out of what looked like a pocket of still-deeper blackness by the wall. Ten Stars flickered, dove about him as he dropped the heavy carpetbag, dug from it a second electromagnetic rod. “We’ll only have current for a moment,” he warned as he handed it to Peter. “Mary, when I yell
Now
—”

“—throw the switch,” I finished, because there was a switch among the neat maze of wires and batteries visible in the bag. “Is it a magnet?” I called after them, as they went striding, gray-clothed man and green-clothed boy, trailing wires down the corridor toward those faceless dark shapes, those whirling blades. The corridor was narrow, the Black Knights crowded one another, jostling, two behind two as they lifted their deadly slashing hands.

Holmes said, “Absolutely,” and lunged like d’Artagnan, thrusting the rod into the center of the metal attacker’s breastplate at the same instant that Peter thrust his. “
Now
!”

There was a blazing shower of white sparks, a flash of lightning when whatever was still trying to power the clockwork mechanism of the attacking knights imploded as metal fused to metal. The second pair of knights, running into the first pair, magnetized from them and also froze in a shower of blue sparks.

Peter’s eyes shone blue and wild, brighter than the lightning with delight. “Super!” he breathed.

The Black Knights completely blocked the corridor, so Peter put his shoulder to the nearest one, sending all four crashing. “That tears it,” said Holmes, kneeling to wrap up his electrical rods and batteries. “We must find Bobbie and flee, for Nightcrow will come, and he won’t make the mistake again, of using the technology of the real world in this realm.”

Peter whispered confidently, “This way.”

We found the boy Bobbie Lewensham in a stone cell, its barred door standing open to the dank blackness of the corridor. His head was pillowed on his rolled-up blue coat and his little blue cap; he was profoundly asleep. Holmes tried to wake him, and then Peter, to no avail. I stood looking down at that thin, peaky-looking little face — he was very young, no older than John Darling.
What is it that you were fleeing, Bobbie, that opened your heart so fully to the realm of dreams? ‘Bobbie never visits anywhere,
’ Peter had said. ‘
When he’s at home, he’s alone
…’

Alone with at least one person who knew or guessed about the Neverlands, and knew where to hire a kidnapper who would hide him in the other world forever.

“He’s been drugged.” Holmes scooped the boy up in his arms as if he were a kitten. “Drugged or a spell. Peter, listen. Can you keep him in the Neverlands with you for another two days? It will take me that long to find the man who hired Krähnacht — Nightcrow — and make sure he’s not in a position to make a second attempt on the boy.”

“He’ll be safe with me.” Peter inclined his head like a young king. He always liked to turn orders or suggestions around so that they were actually his idea.