Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (6 page)

And behind us, the barred door clanged.

We all whirled. And there he stood in the corridor, the nightmare wizard Nightcrow: a chubby gray-bearded man in the sort of tweeds you see hikers wear in the countryside — he had, of course, been in Yorkshire. And behind his spectacles, the coldest blue eyes I had ever seen.

“A mortal man,” he said thoughtfully, regarding Holmes with those awful eyes. “A dream-child—” He looked at me, as if I were a butterfly in a net who’d make an interesting addition to some tray in a library. “And…” He looked at Peter. “And what have we here?”

“We have here your doom, Nightcrow!” trumpeted Peter, striding to the bars. “I am Peter Pan, and I have come here armed with spells for your destruction! Holmes, play your magic flute!”

“Holmes?” Nightcrow’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows ascended; he wasn’t in the least disconcerted. “So old Wylcourt’s hired occultists have given up trying to find the Gate I opened, and he’s hired Mr. Sherlock Holmes, eh? Now, that
is
a piece of news.”

Holmes laid Bobbie back on the stone bench where we’d found him and said coldly, “I have nothing to say to you, Herr Krähnacht, except that I advise you to flee as fast as you can. For you are indeed doomed.” Then, when Nightcrow only folded his arms with the air of a man expecting to see an interesting show in complete safety, Holmes sat down on the edge of the bench, turned his back on Nightcrow, took his flute from his pocket, and began to play the air from Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major. Peter flung up his arms, uttered a long wailing “Oooo-oo-ooo-ah-ah-ah-ooo-ooo-ooo,” and began to chant a string of nonsense syllables, coils of fairy-light (courtesy of Ten Stars, hiding prudently behind his back) ribboning from his outstretched fingers.

I realized what was going on, and began to hop around Peter in the best imitation I could contrive of my friend Delphine Tremlow’s Ancient Grecian Dances that she teaches shop-girls.

“Fascinating,” Nightcrow murmured, not disconcerted in the least. “You can’t do a thing to me, you know. We are neither in reality nor the dream world, and this enclave has its own laws. I look forward, Holmes, to observing you here over the next several years. As for Peter Pan —
the
Peter Pan — Well! I have a number of experiments I am eager to try—”

“Silence, fiend.” Peter paused in his chanting. “I am weaving your Doom.”

“I await it,” smiled Nightcrow sarcastically, “with bated breath. I’ve heard about you, of course — Did you come because young Viscount Mure was calling for you? He did, you know. For years now I’ve sought the secrets that lie within the realm of Dreaming, and now they’re within my grasp. My dear young lady, I hope your parents…”

At that point, summoned by Holmes’ piping, the terrible Gallipoot emerged from the darkness behind Nightcrow in a rush of sulfur stench and the wailing of a thousand chewed-up fragments of souls, and devoured him down to the last morsel. When the Thing Cold and Empty rolled, surged, oozed away down the corridor and vanished once again, all that was left of Nightcrow was his spectacles, his watch, and the key to the cell, lying on the stone floor a few inches outside the bars, in a puddle of Gallipoot slime.

“You did tell him to run away,” said Peter, in a satisfied voice. He knelt to retrieve the key. “Grown-ups never listen, do they?”

“Never,” lamented Holmes.

There is a crossroads on the borders of the ocean of sleep, a tiny islet of rock and sand in the vast archipelagoes of the Neverlands that stretch into eternity, and from there I could see, far away across the darkness, my bedside lamp burning low, and John asleep in a chair beside my bed.

If I turned my head I could see the other way, toward the Neverlands, world after world of forests and rainbows, of mermaid lagoons and pirate ships, of castellated islands and magic horses and caves full of enchanted books. Peter and Bobbie stood hand in hand where the gray arm of the crossroad led in that direction: “I’ll have him back at the stone circle in two days,” said Peter. I guessed that if Peter forgot, the King of Dreams would remind him.

“It was Mr. Gower, you know,” said Bobbie to Holmes. “Mr. Gower’s our business manager — Father’s, I mean. I never liked him — he was always asking questions about the fairies, and the Neverlands. When I came back through at the stone circle last time, he was there, he and Nightcrow…”

“He shall be dealt with,” promised Holmes, with grim quiet. “He will be gone, by the time you return.”

“If we see the King of Dreams,” said Bobbie, “I’ll tell him you’ve taken care of the problem.”

“You’re sure you won’t come with us?” asked Peter, looking up at Holmes. “Your tree’s still there, and Old Chief Walking Wolf would love to see you again.”

Holmes smiled, and shook his head. “I have to go deal with Mr. Gower,” he said. “To make sure that the Neverlands will still be open, the next time Bobbie — or your friends Wendy and John and Michael — wish to come through. But do indeed give my regards to the Chief, and to Melegriance the White Wizard, and to the Evil Queen of the Night Island, and all the others. And thank you.” He held out his hand, and Peter shook it, very man-to-man.

Peter said, “Any time,” though Holmes and I both knew how quickly he would forget.

After Peter and Bobbie had gone, I asked softly, “Were you one of Peter’s Lost Boys?”

Holmes gave me a sidelong look. “Certainly not. How would I have come to be Lost in the Neverlands?”

“How does anyone?” I asked. “Will you be able to get rid of this Mr. Gower when you get back? He’s obviously studied occult matters, the same as you have, to guess about Bobbie and the stone-circle and the fairies and the Neverlands, and to know to hire Mr. Krähnacht. If he’s their business manager, must he not have been speculating with the Earl’s money, while the old Earl’s been sick? That’s why he wanted to hide Bobbie in another world — so no one would find a body. It would be years before he’d have to be accountable for money he’d lost.”

Holmes smiled down at me. “I see you’ve grasped my methods, Mary. Since the matter is one of financial peculation, it should be easy enough to bring home to him, and to put him out of the way. Even had I not spoken to Bobbie, the culprit would have been simple to find. Quite elementary, my dear…”

The word stopped on his lips, and his face changed, in the starry twilight of that crossroads, as he recognized me at last. First enlightened, then filled with a rush of comprehension, as he understood at last why I had come to be so free within the Neverlands, followed by pity and grief. And it seemed to me that I no longer looked up so far at him, though as I’ve said he was always far taller than I. But it seemed to me that I was as he saw me, not my child self, nor even the woman I’d been when first we’d met, but a gaunt and shorn-haired invalid in the final stages of consumption.

“My dear.” He put out his hand, and where once it had felt cold against the healthy heat of my child-hand in dreaming, now his was the warm one.

“Don’t worry,” I said gently. “I’ll be returning to John, at least for a short while.”

In his face I saw his knowledge, of how short that time would be.

“Take care of him,” I said, simple and matter-of-fact.

“Of course.”

“It’s been good to have an adventure with you,” I said. “I always wanted to. They never let girls.”

Holmes opened his mouth to reply — almost certainly with some sentence beginning,
The female of the species
… then thought about the words, and closed it again. At length he said, “That has been my loss.”

We were silent, on that crossroads island, the dark bridge that led back toward my own room — and to Baker Street, for him — disappearing into the star-sprinkled gloom before our feet. In the other direction I could still see the Neverlands, sparkling in sunlight and joy.

Holmes asked, “Will you be all right?”

“Oh, yes. Peter will look after me, and go with me the first part of the way. It is the one thing he always does.”

He nodded, knowing this to be true. “Until we meet again, then, Mary.”

And we went our separate ways.

His Last Arrow

His Last Arrow

by Christopher Sequeira

The following is transcribed exactly as it appears on many handwritten sheets of paper. The original document itself was the sole contents of a plain brown envelope that had at one time been sealed with wax, which was found amongst a large selection of items in a house in Crowborough, East Sussex, in England. The envelope and many items of value were believed to have been stolen property, accumulated by a gang of burglars who were apprehended after successfully robbing several houses in the vicinity. Some of the goods the thieves had taken appeared to have come from the home of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, however, when the brown envelope was proffered to the late author’s family, and it was noted that the seal was broken, a legal representative of the Doyle family examined the documents and announced the papers had never at any time been in the possession of the family, and then took the unusual step of expressing the view in writing that any attempts to claim otherwise would meet with legal action.

In 1894 I had returned to Baker Street following the failure of my marriage. I had concealed the full ignominy of my situation by revising the beginning of a story that was just about to see print in The Strand magazine so that the tale began with a contemporary reference to the ending of the union as a ‘bereavement’. This was artistic sophistry, of course, for the woman I had married was still on this earth, she had simply decided she could tolerate no more of my involvement in the activities of my friend, Sherlock Holmes. What my other friends and acquaintances, as well as my readers had no appreciation of, however, was how well I knew this deception would take on a life of its own, and surely enough, it did. Within months old friends like Thurston, Murray and Stamford were speaking of my former wife as if she had passed from this world.

My return to Baker Street and resettling of some of my personal effects seemed to interrupt Holmes not at all. He seemed to be cocooned in a realm of chemical formulae and calculations, and would sit for hours painstakingly measuring droplets of fluids and solutions that he mixed and boiled on his Bunsen burner. When he did speak of his current work he claimed he was seeking an alternative chemical explanation for a spattering of dye stains he had found on a murderer’s dye-apron, because that killer’s height and infirmity of the left elbow precluded his wielding a left-handed blow that killed his much taller attacker. Due to the fact I was in sombre spirits I made a poor attempt at humor and suggested the killer might have stood on a ladder and turned his back to his victim, stabbing that poor person with his right hand, but in a backwards thrust. Holmes glared at me curiously and instead of expressing disgust or amusement he became quite absorbed in the notion. He proclaimed “Watson, you have increased your deductive capacity greatly since our last shared occupancy — that was positively luminous!” and he spoke not another word for the remainder of the week as he completed his investigations.

So I had much to ponder in those first days back in the old digs, and much to ponder without the company of another’s conversation. I surveyed our old quarters, noticing that Holmes had changed little about its character and appearance. Cigars lay sequestered in the coal scuttle, tobacco was to be found in the toe of a Persian slipper Holmes kept near the gasogene, and a bust of Napoleon near a window often served as a hat rack. I wandered to the mantelpiece cluttered with the essential items that marked Holmes’ day — tobacco dottles, correspondence answered and unanswered, souvenirs of his most recent case — and here I stopped.

The mantle-corner was the place he always left a souvenir of his last effort; be it a coin, a letter; anything that allowed him to reflect on the relative successes and failures of his last inquiry; and the object always remained there until replaced by the next dirt sample, bent hairpin or scribbled cryptogram that merited his scrutiny.

The latest item was a curious flattened stone, almost perfectly triangular but with rounded corners. On the uppermost side there was carved into the surface a writing of some kind, vaguely like Sanskrit or the Arabic language, whilst on the reverse I was surprised to discover a sort of pictograph; an image carved into it. The writing meant nothing to me, but the image was another matter, infuriatingly, it seemed familiar yet impossible to place into context. The image was clearly a face of some kind, but a monstrous one, of a leering, demoniacal caricature, an ugly fetish, bulging-eyed and sporting a jaw full of menacing teeth, clearly meant to frighten the simple-minded and superstitious. Although it seemed unlike that of the native art of any cultures of the Middle East I had encountered — though I was far from an expert I had spent many years abroad — I felt the nagging sense I’d come across such a totem before.

I knew Holmes would ignore me if I asked him about a recent case whilst he was engaged on a new one, so I decided to wait until he had finished his chemistry work. I could not put the issue, and my possible memory lapse, from my mind easily, but I consoled myself by recalling that during the frantic events of my time of service in the East, including the brush with death that my one-time orderly Murray had saved me from in Afghanistan, there were many experiences that were lost or blurred in the turmoil of gunfire, heat and blood; or the delirium of terrible fevers.

Some degree of relief to the mystery of the stone came in another form the following morning. I had breakfasted alone — Holmes had left a note that he was on one of his mysterious excursions — but as I finished my toast I heard the door downstairs open and close and then the familiar tread of Inspector Gregson on the stairs. Moments after a sharp double-rap at the door and a yelled “Halloa”, the man himself entered the room.

The long-faced Scotland Yard man looked older than just the year or so since I had last seen him, and I discerned something unhealthy about his physique; he seemed wasted and drawn, his eyes slightly yellowed, although his greeting was hearty enough.

“Doctor, Good Lord, man, I wasn’t aware you had returned here, I am so sorry about your wife, sir.”

I muttered a reply, and waved him to a chair, and brought forth some cigars and cigarettes. He smiled and pointed at the silver coffee pot.

“Thank you, Doctor; I wouldn’t say no, if I might also partake of a cup of Mrs. Hudson’s coffee, she always brews it just right.”

“She does indeed, Inspector, so help yourself. Mrs. Hudson has doubtless told you that Holmes is out, but I take it since you opted to come upstairs anyway that I may act as the sounding board of old? Now, what criminal enigma brings you here today?” I said.

Gregson sipped his coffee and exhaled a plume of Egyptian tobacco smoke. He gave me a grin.

“Murder of the most unusual stripe, sir, very much in Mr. Holmes’ line. There’s an antiques appraiser, name of Spencer Pethebridge, lives in Bloomsbury, but maintains an office in the Commercial Road. He’s considered extremely knowledgeable, especially about Oriental artifacts, and has exposed more than a few forgeries, I’m told. And only an hour ago he was found dead, in his office, probably murdered.”

I leaned forward, my attention fully engaged.

“Inspector, you should not tease me after I’ve only just returned to this house of riddle-solving. Probably murdered, you say? How can a murder be only probable to a Scotland Yard man?”

Gregson saluted me with his cigarette. “Bravo, Doctor, I was seeing if you were in the frame of mind for the business again. I do say ‘probably’, because although there was all the appearance of a suicide, the method of death was so out of the ordinary that murder has to be countenanced.”

“Unusual?” I said, feeling a strange sense of dread rise in my chest, rather than the excitement of curiosity that I had felt in the days of old. I was surprised at this reaction, and concealed it from Gregson. I wondered if I was not myself because of the circumstances that had brought me back to Baker Street, the sense of failure, or regression.

I wondered if I was merely growing too old too soon.

“Oh, yes, unusual it was. Mr. Pethebridge shot himself, straight through the heart. With an old arrow, fired by a crossbow.”

I was about to ask a question — exactly what I cannot now recall at all — when the door to the room was flung open, and a weird individual stood on the threshold, staring at us both.

He was a tall man in his late fifties or early sixties, with sun-baked, heavily creased, skin. He had a military bearing, but wore a strange hodge-podge of clothing, partly European, in terms of his boots and his trousers, but his long shirt and robe-like cloak was cotton and loose-fitting, and his head was adorned with the many windings of a turban. A few loops of beads were draped about his neck, some holding shining stones and metallic links of a sort not seen in Europe, and in his hand he clasped a very tall stick; more a staff than a cane. Although obviously of the Asian continent in origin, he reminded one more than anything else of that wonderful citizen of the Crown who lived life as much in the world of the Orientals as he did England, the late Sir Richard Burton. He flung a yellow-nailed hand out at Gregson, and spoke in a high, clear, but accented voice, assuredly Middle Eastern.

“The man Holmes, are you he?” he said; then turned to me. “Or are you?”

I stood and approached the fellow, extending my hand, cautiously, although this took enormous effort, for I found I was fearful of the fellow and his blazing brown eyes.

“Mr. Holmes is, I’m afraid, not here,” I said, “However if you would state your business I might be able to assist you, Mister…?”

The visitor stamped a foot impatiently, almost in temper. “I cannot delay! I cannot delay!” he said. “I must return to my own city soon. I have no time!”

“I am Holmes’ closest associate,” I ventured, “if you would just explain what you want, it may help.”

The man jumped forward, so fast that I had absolutely no time to anticipate him, and found my forearms gripped with a coiled strength that could have been painful had he exerted much more pressure. Gregson moved to his feet to assist me somehow, but it was not necessary, I was not, apparently in any danger.

“The Doctor! I was told you no longer dwelt here, that you had…” The stranger paused and a look passed over him. He stared at me, searching my face for I knew not what. “I mean that you no longer lived here, with the man, the detective, Holmes,” he finally said. “Please, when will Holmes return here? I have a message that he must receive, I took an oath to bring it to him.”

I tried to explain to the visitor that Holmes’ movements were not easily predictable when he was on a case but the man seemed to lose all interest. Gregson was becoming impatient with the fellow, too.

“I think that’s about all Dr. Watson really needs tell you, sir, unless you are prepared to give a name, or something a bit more substantial. And as a member of her Majesty’s Scotland Yard detectives division I would suggest you heed him.”

Our guest looked at Gregson, and then shook his head, but there was no hostility, only sadness.

“My name is Faroukhan. I will try to find Mr. Holmes elsewhere. If you see him, please tell him I will return no later than four o’clock this afternoon if I have not found him by then. I stay with friends, but only until seven o’clock tonight, then I must return home.”

“Do you wish to leave me the address of where you stay, sir?” I asked.

The stranger shook his head, and without another word he turned and left.

Gregson, bless his soul, could sense the strain this odd intrusion had on me, so newly returned to the world of Holmes and his parade of strange clients.

“Don’t worry, Doctor, you’ll get used to things again, I dare say. Here, why don’t you come to the Commercial Road with me, we’ll leave a message with Mrs. Hudson and perhaps Mr. Holmes will end up joining us there if we’re lucky.”

I agreed that this sounded an excellent plan. We left and took a cab.

Once in Commercial Road we stopped outside a small house-front where two constables were guarding the door in a largely futile effort to dissuade a group of curious on-lookers from loitering. Gregson nodded at the men and escorted me inside.

It was a terrible sight. There was a large desk and chair in the middle of the room whilst the walls were covered by a multitude of shelves featuring reference books of many shapes and sizes and glass cabinets containing a small museum’s worth of oddities and artifacts. Ancient weapons, old bronze vessels, aged and cracked tools lay in various cabinets within the shelving. All of this paraphernalia only served to heighten the ugliness of the scene of the dead man at the desk.

He was a dark-haired man of between thirty and forty, clean-shaven, and he sat back in the chair, a look of pain frozen on his white face. A crossbow was clutched in his fingers, and indeed an arrow was embedded in his chest — just the angle and appearance of the corpse made me feel certain that the weapon had pierced his heart and killed him almost instantly. But what cast an eerie aspect upon the whole scene was the item that lay on the desk, largely under the dead man’s hands and the crossbow. It was a photographic plate, the type that appears in textbooks illustrating a particular item, and a ragged edge made it quite clear that it had been torn from the pages of a book.

Naturally enough my first thought in this room of many books was that the original volume the page belonged to might be somewhere at hand, recently pulled from a shelf, but no tomes seemed to have left their home on the bookcases.

What the photographic plate depicted was a dying man, in eastern clothing lying on a mat on a dirt floor in some sort of tent, surrounded by grieving women and children. The man however had one arm outstretched and his eyes looked in that direction, even though, judging from the emaciated state of the man, the act of rising even that small amount seemed to be an effort. The curious aspect of the plate was that where the man looked to, where his hand was stretched to — there was nothing, no other hand grasped his withered palm to comfort him, and despite the look in his eyes, he met no other face with his gaze. The caption read simply
“The Shaman asks for Mercy on his Death-bed”.