Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

“And is this all,” asked Holmes, raising his
eyelids to meet the American's earnest gaze, “that you have to tell
me about Carstairs Delapore and his father? Or about these 'lurking
shadows' that are Delapore's study?”

The young man frowned, as if the question
took him momentarily aback. “Oh, the squeamish may speak of
decadence,” he said after a moment, not off-handedly, but as if
carefully considering his words. “And some of the practices which
Delapore has uncovered are fairly ugly by modern standards.
Certainly they'd make my old pater blink, and my poor hidebround
brothers.” He chuckled, as if at the recollection of a schoolboy
prank. “But at bottom it's all only legends, you know, and bogies
in the dark.”

“Indeed,” said Holmes, rising, and held out
his hand to the young suitor. “I shall learn of this what I can,
Mr. Colby. Where might I reach you?”

“The Excelsior Hotel in Brighton.” The young
man fished from his vest-pocket a card to write the address upon –
he seemed to carry everything loose in his pockets, jumbled
together like cabbages in a barrow. “I always stay there,” he
explained as he scribbled. “It was how Miss Delapore knew where to
reach me. How you can abide to remain in town in weather like this
beats me!” And he departed, apparently unaware that not everyone's
grandfather rammed opium down Chinese throats in order to pay the
Excelsior's summer-holiday prices.

“So what do you think of our American Romeo?”
inquired Holmes, as the rattle of Colby's cab departed down Baker
Street. “What sort of man does he appear to be?”

“A wealthy one,” I said, still stung by that
careless remark about those who remained in town. “One not used to
hearing the word 'No.' But earnest and good of heart, I would say.
Certainly he takes a balanced view of these 'decadent' studies – to
which the Delapores can scarcely object, if they share them.”

“True enough.” Holmes set letter and note
upon the table, and went to the bookcase to draw out his copy of
the
Court Gazette
, which was so interleaved with snipped-out
society columns, newspaper clippings, and notes in Holmes' neat,
strong handwriting as to bulge to almost double its original size.
“But what are the nature of these folkloric 'practices' which are
'fairly ugly by modern standards?' Ugliness by the standards of a
world which has invented the Maxim gun can scarcely be termed
bogies in the dark.

“Carstairs Delapore,” he read, opening the
book upon his long arm. “Questioned concerning his whereabouts on
the night of the 27th August, 1890, when the owner of a public
house in Whitechapel reported her ten-year-old son Thomas missing;
a man of Delapore's description – he is evidently of fairly
unforgettable appearance – seen speaking with the boy that evening.
Thomas never found. I thought I recognized the name. Delapore was
also questioned in 1873 by the Manchester police – he was in that
city, for no discernable reason, when two little mill-girls went
missing … I must say I'm astonished that anyone reported their
disappearance. Mudlarks and street-urchins vanish every day from
the streets of London and no one inquires after them anymore than
one inquires the whereabouts of butterflies once they flitter over
the garden fence. A man need not even be very clever, to kidnap
children in London.” He shut the book, his eyes narrowing as he
turned his gaze to the endless wasteland of brick that lay beyond
the window. “Merely careful to pick the dirtiest and hungriest, and
those without parents or homes.”

“That's a serious conclusion to jump to,” I
said, startled and repelled.

“It is,” Holmes replied. “Which is why I jump
to nothing. But Gaius, Viscount Delapore was mentioned three times
in the early reports of the Metropolitan police – between 1833 and
1850 – in connection with precisely such investigations, at the
same time that he was publishing a series of monographs on 'Demonic
Ritual Survivals along the Welsh Borders' for the discredited Eye
of Dawn Society. And in 1863 an American reporter disappeared while
investigating rumors of a pagan cult in western Shropshire, not
five miles from Watchgate village, which lies below the hill upon
which Depewatch Priory stands.”

“But even so,” I said, “even if the Delapores
are involved in some kind of theosophistic studies – or white
slaving for that matter – would they not seek rather to get an
outsider like Delapore's niece out of the house, rather than
keeping her there as a potential source of trouble? And how would
the old man use a pack of occult rubbish to dominate his
granddaughter and his son against their will?”

“How indeed?” Holmes went to the book-case
again, and took down the envelope in which he had bestowed Burnwell
Colby's card. “I, too, found our American visitor – despite his
patent desire to disown association with his hidebound and boring
family – an ingenuous and harmless young man. Which makes this all
the more curious.”

He held out the envelope to me, and I took it
out and examined it as he had. The stock, as he had said, was
expensive and the typeface rigidly correct, although the card
itself bore slight traces of having been carried about loose in Mr.
Colby's pockets with pens, notes, and photographs of his beloved
Judith. Only when I brought it close to examine the small dents and
scratches on its surface was I conscious of the smell that seemed
to imbue the thick, soft paper, a nauseating mix of frankincense,
charred hair, and…

I looked up at Holmes, my eyes wide. I had
been a soldier in India, and a physician for most of my life. I
knew the smell.

“Blood,” I said.

*

The note Holmes sent that afternoon received
an answer within hours, and after we had finished our supper he
invited me to accompany him to the home of a friend on the
Embankment near the Temple: “A curious customer who may fill in for
you some hitherto unsuspected colors in the palette of London
life,” he said. Mr. Carnaki was a thin young man of medium height
and attenuated build, whose large gray eyes regarded one from
behind thick spectacle lenses with an expression it is hard to
define: as if he were always watching for something that others do
not see. His tall, narrow house was filled with books, even lining
the walls of the hallways on both sides so that a broad-built man
would have been obliged to sidle through crab-wise, and through the
darkened doorways I glimpsed the flicker of gas-light across what
appeared to be complex chemical and electrical apparatus. He
listened to Holmes' account of Burnwell Colby's visit without
comment, his chin resting on one long, spidery hand, then rose from
his chair and climbed a pair of steps to an upper shelf of one of
the many book-cases that walled the small study at the back of the
house to which he'd led us.

“Depewatch Priory,” he read aloud, “stands on
a cliff above the village of Watchgate in the wild hill country on
the borders of Wales, where in 1215 King John confirmed the
appointment of an Augustinian prior over an existing 'hooly howse'
of religious said to date back to foundation by Joseph of
Arimathea. It appears from its inception to have been the center of
a cycle of legends and whispers: indeed, the King's original intent
was apparently to have the place pulled down and salt strewed on
its foundations. One Philip of Mundberg petitioned Edward IV,
describing the monks there engaged in 'comerce wyth daemons yt did
issue forth from Hell, and make knowne theyr wants by means of
certain dremes,' but he apparently never reached the King himself
and the investigation was dropped. There were repeated accusations
of heresy involving the transmigration of the souls of certain
priors, rumors which apparently transferred themselves to the
Grimsley family to whom Henry VIII presented the priory in 1540,
and surfaced in the 1780s in connection with the Delapores, who
succeeded them through marriage.

“William Punt …” He tapped the black leathern
covers of the volume as he set it on the table beside Holmes, “in
his
Catalogue of Secret Abominations
described the place in
1793 as being a 'goodly manor of gray stone' built upon the
foundations of the Plantagenet cloister, but says that the original
core of the establishment is the ruin of a tower, probably Roman in
origin. Punt speaks of stairs leading down to a sub-crypt, where
the priors used to sleep upon a crude altar after appalling rites.
When Lord Rupert Grimsley was murdered by his wife and daughters in
1687, they apparently boiled his body and buried his bones in the
sub-crypt, reserving his skull, which they placed in a niche at the
foot of the main stair in the manor-house itself, 'that evil dare
not pass.'“

I could not repress a chuckle. “As protective
totems go, it didn't do Lord Rupert much good, did it?”

“I daresay not,” returned Holmes with a
smile. “Yet my reading of the 1840 Amsterdam edition of Punt's
Catalogue
leads me to infer that the local population didn't
regard Rupert Grimsley's murder as particularly evil; the villagers
impeded the Metropolitan police in the pursuit of their duties to
such effect that the three murderesses got completely away.”

“Good heavens, yes.” Carnaki turned, and drew
out another volume, more innocuous than the sinister-looking tome
of abominations: this one was simply a History of West Country
Families, as heavily interleaved with clippings and notes as was
Holmes'
Gazette
. “Rupert Grimsley was feared as a sorcerer
from Shrewsbury to the Estuary; he is widely reputed to have worked
the roads as a highwayman, carrying off, not valuables, but
travelers who were never seen again. Demons were said to come and
go at his command, and at least two lunatics from that section of
the Welsh border – one in the early part of the eighteenth century
and one as recently as 1842 – swore that old Lord Rupert dwelled in
the bodies of all the successive Lords of Depewatch.”

“You mean that he was being constantly
reincarnated?” I admit this surfacing of this Thibetan belief in
the prosaic hill-country of Wales startled me considerably.

Carnaki shook his head. “That the spirit –
the consciousness – of Rupert Grimsley passed from body to body,
battening like a parasite upon that of the heir and driving out the
younger man's soul, as the human portion of each Lord of Depewatch
died.”

The young antiquarian looked so serious as he
said this that again I was hard-put to suffocate a laugh; Carnaki's
expression did not alter, but his eyes flicked from my face to
Holmes'. “I suppose,” said the young man after a moment, “that this
had something to do with the fact that each of the gentlemen in
question were rumored to be involved with mysterious disappearances
among the coal-miners of the district: Viscount Gerald Delapore,
who is reputed to have undergone so terrifying a change in
personality at his accession to the title that his wife left him
and fled to America … and the young Gaius Delapore himself.”

“Indeed?” Holmes leaned forward eagerly in
his chair, his hand still resting on the
Catalogue
, which he
had been examining with the delighted reverence of a true lover of
ancient volumes. He had hardly taken his eyes from the many tomes
that stacked every table and most of the corners of Carnaki's
little study, some of them the musty calf or morocco of Georgian
bookbinders, others the heavier, more archaic black-letter
incunabula of the early days or printing, with not a few older
still, hand-written in Latin upon parchment or vellum and
illuminated with spidery marginalia that even at a distance
disturbed me by their anomalous
bizarrité
. “And what,
precisely, is the evil that is ascribed by legend to Depewatch
Priory, and for what purpose did Rupert Grimsley and his successors
seek out those who had no power, and whom society would not
miss?”

Carnaki set aside his History and seated
himself on the oak bookcase steps, his long, thin arms resting on
his knees. He glanced again at me, not as if I had offended him
with my earlier laughter but as if gauging how to phrase things so
that I would understand them; then his eyes returned to Holmes.

“You have heard, I think, of the six thousand
steps, that are hinted at – never directly – in the remote legends
of both the old Cymric tribes that preceded the Celts, and of the
American Indian? Of the pit that lies deep at the heart of the
world, and of the entities that are said to dwell in the abysses
beyond it?”

“I have heard of these things,” said Holmes
quietly. “There was a case in Arkham, Massachusetts, in 1869…”

“The Whateley case, yes.” Carnaki's long,
sensitive mouth twitched with remembered distaste, and his glance
turned to me. “These legends – remembered only through two cults of
quite shockingly degenerate Indian tribes, one in Maine and the
other, curiously, in northeastern Arizona, where they are shunned
by the surrounding Navajo and Hopi – speak of things, entities,
sentient yet not wholly material, that have occupied the lightless
chasms of space and time since the days before humankind's furthest
ancestors first stood upright. These elder beings fear the light of
the sun, yet with the coming of darkness would creep forth from
certain places in the world to prey upon human bodies and human
dreams, through the centuries making surprising and dreadful
bargains with individuals of mankind in return for most hideous
payment.”

“And this is what Gaius Delapore and his son
believe they have in their basement?” My eyebrows shot up. “It
should make it easy enough for us to assist young Mr. Colby in
freeing his fiancée from the influence of two obvious
lunatics.”

Holmes said softly, “So it should.”

*

We remained at Carnaki's until nearly
midnight, while Holmes and the young antiquarian – for so I assumed
Carnaki to be – spoke of the appalling folkloric and thesophical
speculations that evidently fuelled Viscount Delapore's madness:
hideous tales of creatures beyond human imaginings or human dreams,
monstrous legends of dim survivals from impossibly ancient aeons,
and of those deluded madmen whose twisted minds accepted such
absurdities for truth. Holmes was right in his assertion that the
visit would supply the palette of my knowledge of London with
hitherto unsuspected hues. What surprised me was Holmes' knowledge
of such things, for on the whole he was a man of practical bent,
never giving his attention to a subject unless it was with some end
in view.