The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters (52 page)

Before we proceeded farther Holmes drew me aside. He reached inside his vest and withdrew a small object which he held concealed in his hand. I could not see its shape, for he held it inside a clenched fist, but I could tell that it emitted a dark radiance, a faint suggestion of which I could see between his fingers.

“Watson,” quoth he, “I am going to give you this. You must swear to me that you will not look at it, on pain of damage beyond anything you can so much as imagine. You must keep it upon your person, if possible in direct contact with your body, at all times. If all goes well this night, I will ask you to return it to me. If all does not go well, it may save your life.”

I held my hand toward him.

Placing the object on my outstretched palm, Holmes closed my own fingers carefully around it. Surely this was the strangest object I had ever encountered. It was unpleasantly warm, its texture like that of an overcooked egg, and it seemed to squirm as if it were alive, or perhaps as if it contained something that lived and strove to escape an imprisoning integument.

“Do not look at it,” Holmes repeated. “Keep it with you at all times. Promise me you will do these things, Watson!”

I assured him that I would do as he requested.

Momentarily we beheld Mrs Llewellyn moving down the hallway toward us. Her stride was so smooth and her progress so steady that she seemed to be gliding rather than walking. She carried a kerosene lamp whose flame reflected from the polished blackness of the walls, casting ghostly shadows of us all.

Speaking not a word she gestured to us, summoning us to follow her. We proceeded along a series of corridors and up and down staircases until, I warrant, I lost all sense of direction and of elevation. I could not tell whether we had climbed to a room in one of the battlements of the Anthracite Palace or descended to a dungeon beneath the Llewellyns’ ancestral home. I had placed the object Holmes had entrusted to me inside my garments. I could feel it struggling to escape, but it was bound in place and could not do so.

“Where is this bishop you promised us?” I asked of Mrs Llewellyn.

Our hostess turned toward me. She had replaced her colourful Gypsyish attire with a robe of dark purple. Its colour reminded me of the emanations of the warm object concealed now within my own clothing. Her robe was marked with embroidery of a pattern that confused the eye so that I was unable to discern its nature.

“You misunderstood me, Doctor,” she intoned in her unpleasant accent. “I stated merely that it was my hope that Bishop Romanova would preside at our service. Such is still the case. We shall see in due time.”

We stood now before a heavy door bound with rough iron bands. Mrs Llewellyn lifted a key which hung suspended about her neck on a ribbon of crimson hue. She inserted it into the lock and turned it. She then requested Holmes and myself to apply our combined strength to opening the door. As we did so, pressing out shoulders against it, my impression was that the resistance came from some willful reluctance rather than a mere matter of weight or time.

No light preceded us into the room, but Mrs Llewellyn strode through the doorway carrying her kerosene lamp before her. Its rays now reflected from the walls of the chamber. The room was as Lady Fairclough had described the sealed room in her erstwhile home at Pontefract. The configuration and even the number of surfaces that surrounded us seemed unstable. I was unable even to count them. The very angles at which they met defied my every attempt to comprehend.

An altar of polished anthracite was the sole furnishing of this hideous, irrational chamber.

Mrs Llewellyn placed her kerosene lamp upon the altar. She turned, then, and indicated with a peculiar gesture of her hand that we were to kneel as if congregants at a more conventional religious ceremony.

I was reluctant to comply with her silent command, but Holmes nodded to me, indicating that he wished me to do so. I lowered myself, noting that Lady Fairclough and Holmes himself emulated my act.

Before us, and facing the black altar, Mrs Llewellyn also knelt. She raised her face as if seeking supernatural guidance from above, causing me to remember that the full name of her peculiar sect was the Wisdom Temple of the Dark Heavens.

She commenced a weird chanting in a language such as I had never heard, not in all my travels. There was a suggestion of the argot of the dervishes of Afghanistan, something of the Buddhist monks of Thibet, and a hint of the remnant of the ancient Incan language still spoken by the remotest tribes of the high Choco plain of the Chilean Andes, but in fact the language was none of these and the few words that I was able to make out proved both puzzling and suggestive but never specific in their meaning.

As Mrs Llewellyn continued her chanting she slowly raised first one hand then the other above her head. Her fingers were moving in an intricate pattern. I tried to follow their progress but found my consciousness fading into a state of confusion. I could have sworn that her fingers twined and knotted like the tentacles of a jellyfish. Their colours, too, shifted: vermilion, scarlet, obsidian. They seemed, even, to disappear into and return from some concealed realm invisible to my fascinated eyes.

The object that Holmes had given me throbbed and squirmed against my body, its unpleasantly hot and squamous presence making me wish desperately to rid myself of it. It was only my pledge to Holmes that prevented me from doing so.

I clenched my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, summoning up images from my youth and of my travels, holding my hand clasped over the object as I did so. Suddenly the tension was released. The object was still there, but as if having a consciousness of its own, it seemed to grow calm. My own jaw relaxed and I opened my eyes to behold a surprising sight.

Before me there emerged another figure. As Mrs Llewellyn was stocky and swarthy, of the model of Gypsy women, this person was tall and graceful. Swathed entirely in jet, with hair a seeming midnight blue and complexion as black as the darkest African, she defied my conventional ideas of beauty with a weird and exotic glamour of her own that defies description. Her features were finely cut as those of the ancient Ethiopians are said to have been, her movements filled with a grace that would shame the pride of Covent Garden or the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

But whence had this apparition made her way? Still kneeling upon the ebon floor of the sealed room, I shook my head. She seemed to have emerged from the very angle between the walls.

She floated toward the altar, lifted the chimney from the kerosene lamp, and doused its flame with the palm of her bare hand.

Instantly the room was plunged into Stygian darkness, but gradually a new light—if so I may describe it—replaced the flickering illumination of the kerosene lamp. It was a light of darkness if you will, a glow of blackness deeper than the blackness which surrounded us, and yet by its light I could see my companions and my surroundings.

The tall woman smiled in benediction upon the four of us assembled, and gestured toward the angle between the walls. With infinite grace and seemingly glacial slowness she drifted toward the opening, through which I now perceived forms of such maddeningly chaotic configuration that I can only hint at their nature by suggesting the weird paintings that decorate the crypts of the Pharaohs, the carven stele of the mysterious Mayans, the monoliths of Mauna Loa, and the demons of Thibetan sand paintings.

The black priestess—for so I had come to think of her—led our little procession calmly into this realm of chaos and darkness. She was followed by Mrs Llewellyn, then by Lady Fairclough whose manner appeared as that of a woman entranced.

My own knees, I confess, have begun to stiffen with age, and I was slow to rise to my feet. Holmes followed the procession of women, while I lagged behind. As he was about to enter the opening Holmes turned suddenly, his eyes blazing. They transmitted to me a message as clear as any words.

This message was reinforced by a single gesture. I had used my hands, pressing against the black floor as I struggled to my feet. They were now at my sides. Fingers as stiff and powerful as a bobby’s club jabbed at my waist. The object which Holmes had given me to hold for him was jolted against my flesh, where it created a weird mark which remains visible to this day.

In the moment I knew what I must do.

I wrapped my arms frantically around the black altar, watching with horrified eyes as Holmes and the others slipped from the sealed room into the realm of madness that lay beyond. I stood transfixed, gazing into the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Hell, into the very heart of Gehenna.

Flames crackled, tentacles writhed, claws rasped and fangs ripped at suffering flesh. I saw the faces of men and women I had known, monsters and criminals whose deeds surpass my poor talent to record but who are known in the lowest realms of the planet’s underworlds, screaming with glee and with agony.

There was a man whose features so resembled those of Lady Fairclough that I knew he must be her brother. Of her missing husband I knew not.

Then looming above them all I saw a being that must be the supreme monarch of all monsters, a creature so alien as to resemble no organic thing that ever bestrode the earth, yet so familiar that I realized it was the very embodiment of the evil that lurks in the hearts of every living man.

Sherlock Holmes, the noblest human being I have ever encountered, Holmes alone dared to confront this monstrosity. He glowed in a hideous, hellish green flame, as if even great Holmes were possessed of the stains of sin, and they were being seared from within him in the face of this being.

As the monster reached for Holmes with its hideous mockery of limbs, Holmes turned and signalled to me.

I reached within my garment, removed the object that lay against my skin pulsating with horrid life, drew back my arm and with a murmured prayer made the strongest and most accurate throw I had made since my days on the cricket pitch of Jammu.

More quickly than it takes to describe, the object flew through the angle. It struck the monster squarely and clung to its body, extending a hideous network of webbing round and round and round.

The monster gave a single convulsive heave, striking Holmes and sending him flying through the air. With presence of mind such as only he, of all men I know, could claim, Holmes reached and grasped Lady Fairclough by one arm and her brother by the other. The force of the monstrous impact sent them back through the angle into the sealed room, where they crashed into myself sending us sprawling across the floor.

With a dreadful sound louder and more unexpected than the most powerful thunderclap, the angle between the walls slammed shut. The sealed room was plunged once again into darkness.

I drew a packet of lucifers from my pocket and lit one. To my surprise, Holmes reached into an inner pocket of his own and drew from it a stick of gelignite with a long fuse. He signalled me and I handed him another lucifer. He used it to ignite the fuse of the gelignite bomb.

Striking another lucifer I relit the kerosene lamp that Mrs Llewellyn had left on the altar. Holmes grasped the lamp, leaving the gelignite in its place and lead the four of us—Lady Fairclough, Mr Philip Llewellyn, Holmes himself, and I—to swiftly make our way out of the strange room and the Anthracite Palace.

Even as we stumbled across the great hall toward the chief exit of the Palace, a terrible rumbling seemed to come simultaneously from the deepest basement of the building—if not from the very centre of the earth—and from the dark heavens above.

We staggered from the Palace through the howling wind and pelting snow of a renewed storm, through frigid drifts that rose higher than our boot tops, and turned about to see the great black edifice of the Anthracite Palace in flames.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE PEACOCK STREET PECULIARS, by Michael Mallory

Damn you, Graham Wicking! I thought as I set down the old book, which I had been struggling through for the best part of a half-hour. It was Wicking who had gotten me into this wretched situation, and now there was no way of backing out.

In addition to being a longtime friend (at least up until now), Graham Wicking was the owner of a small mystery imprint called Crime Does Not Pay which, if nothing else, adequately described his royalties system. I can speak to that first hand since my first two books—written long before my acclaimed (if I may speak so immodestly) “DCI Sim Tanner” series began—have been reprinted by Wicking. I was hesitant at first about the prospect of seeing those early efforts in print again, as they reflected a somewhat immature author, but Wicking is a persuasive man, and no matter how underbaked my early efforts might have been, they were a damn sight more accomplished than this.

I took up the book again and forced myself to continue. The Case of the Vindictive Vicar was the next story in the seemingly unending chronicles of one Shadrack House, London’s second most brilliant consulting detective. Along with his companion and biographer, Dr Joseph Whatley, who roomed with him in a flat at 117C Peacock Street, House was the scourge of the criminal world, etc. etc. etc., yada yada yada.

Written in the early 1930s by someone named William Radford Stinson, these stories were the most shameless and relentlessly terrible imitations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes tales that I had ever read, and even though Wicking was paying me to write an introduction to his forthcoming Shadrack House omnibus, practically no amount of money totally compensated for having to endure
Rudimentary, my good Whatley
every other paragraph.

I moaned and cursed him again. Then I realized something: Wicking had given me wide berth as to how I would introduce the stories and had at no time been insistent upon my praising them. Perhaps it would be best to simply tell the truth. Turning to the pad of paper by my elbow, I jotted down a title:
A House is not a Holmes
, then I sat back and watched, almost as an outsider, as the introduction proceeded to flow out of my pen as though under its own power.

If you are reading for enlightenment, you will find more of that in a pub brawl,
I saw myself write.
If you are reading for entertainment, there is more to be found in a seed catalogue. If you are reading to appreciate the style of the writing, be forewarned that you will find a far more exacting command of the English language at any performance by Marcel Marceau.

Chuckling, I continued:
Having acknowledged this, why, then, am I wholeheartedly commending to you, fair reader, the execrable stories contained in this book? For the simple reason that only through familiarity with the worst storytelling ever committed to paper—i.e., the works of William Radford Stinson—will you be able to appreciate fine literary creation.

Or even mediocre literary creation.

Or any kind of literary creation.

Plus, I am being paid to do so. There is no sense in both of us losing money on this deal.

When finished, I sat back and read it over top to bottom, savouring the sort of bitchy invective that might have given Kenneth Tynan pause. Wicking would more than likely ask for my head over it, but he had no one to blame but himself for enlisting me to break a champagne bottle over the prow of this doomed ship.

Glancing at my wall clock, I was startled to see that it was already 5:50. I had promised to meet Jim Redgrave at The King’s Arch at six. But knowing Jim as I did, my tardiness would hardly be a hindrance. I headed for the door, but then at the last minute swept back to my desk and scooped up my introduction. As the current Arts editor for the
Daily Standard
, Jim would no doubt enjoy it.

* * * *

The smoky atmosphere of The King’s Arch pub was as welcome as a fat advance. It was nearly quarter past the appointed hour, and as I had suspected, Jim was at a corner table, contemplating a nearly empty pint glass, his stained green necktie (which was as much a part of the man as his shaggy grey mane) appropriately loosened.

As soon as he saw me enter, he flagged me over. “Forgot to wind the watch again, eh, Len?” he shouted over the din.

“Work,” I called back, snaking my way to the bar where I ordered a lager for me and another pint of bitter for Jim, which I carried over to the table.

“Ah, all is forgiven,” he said, eyeing the full glass. “Sit down, Sir Arthur, sit down.”

Calling me
Sir Arthur
was his way of needling me about having myself given up a position at a daily newspaper to become a mystery novelist.

“So,” he went on, “who has the great Leonard Dobie been killing today?”

“William Radford Stinson,” I replied, pulling out my introduction and handing it to him.

While I sipped my pint, Jim donned his half-glasses and read through the pages quickly, giving several small, snorting laughs in between swallows of bitter. When he was finished, he handed the pages back.

“The Tower has a new executioner, I see,” he said. “You enjoy lawsuits, do you?”

“My publisher said that Stinson died sometime in the seventies, and you know as well as I that you can’t libel the dead.”

“True enough. Just don’t join him through suicide.”

“Come again?”

“Look, Len, you want to savage a Booker winner, you go right ahead, they can take it. Even if they can’t, they’ll pretend they can and console themselves with all their fame and filthy money. In other words, they don’t care what anyone says about them, they’ve got the bloody Booker. But this guy of yours…Stilton, is it?”

“Stinson,” I corrected, “though he has the talent of a cheese.”

“Yes, well, if he was really that bad, then ridicule is redundant. Sure, some may laugh at what you wrote—I laughed at it—but I’m a professional cynic. This will be read by the general public, some of whom might not agree with you.”

“Christ, Jim, you haven’t read this man’s deformed stories.”

“Quite right, I haven’t. Nor do I want to, based on your recommendation. All I’m saying is that it’s possible old Stinson will survive the attack out of sympathy, if nothing else, while you will inadvertently make yourself seem like an arrogant bastard who enjoys dancing on the grave of an inferior.

“You’ve heard of ‘kill the messenger,’ right? Well, try, ‘I’ll never read that messenger again, he’s too nasty,’ on for size.”

He did have a point. No matter what I thought of the lame and lethargic adventures of Shadrack House, somebody out there—perhaps a healthy number of somebodies—might actually like them. If I were to come off too glibly cruel regarding the man’s work I might lose readers of my own. Now I was very glad that I had decided to bring the introduction along for Jim’s perusal.

“I knew it came too easy,” I sighed. “The prose, I mean. The words just rolled out of my pen.”

“Like bitter flowing out of a tap, eh?” he responded, fingering his now-empty glass and looking at me expectantly.

“I bought the last round,” I protested.

“Right, but that was before you put me to work,” he said. “For editing services rendered, one more pint of Fuller’s. That’s cheap, too, considering I’m saving your professional arse.”

I smiled. “Since you put it that way, I’ll get the next two.”

After more than two additional rounds, I left my friend to stagger off to his tube stop and me to mine.

* * * *

I thought no more about the introduction until the next day, when I received a call from Wicking asking when he might receive it.

“Soon,” I promised, and immediately set to work on a more serious version, which did anything but flow out of my pen. I strained to find anything good to say about William Radford Stinson and I finally settled upon such vague pronouncements as:

Credit must go to Stinson for not attempting to duplicate the style and voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but rather for taking the established archetypal character and placing his own distinctive stamp upon it.

Let the readers find out for themselves how atrocious that distinctive stamp was.

Once I had handwritten the first draft (the only way I can compose, even today), I typed it into the computer and, after giving it a quick once over, saved it. I would go over it again in the morning and then email it to Wicking, and good bloody riddance.

But I had no sooner risen from my writing desk than another thought struck me. Could the generous endorsement of such worthless hackwork do just as much damage to my reputation as the indictment of it?

“Oh,
damn
you, Graham Wicking!” I moaned aloud once again. If the man really had to republish complete tripe, why couldn’t it at least be complete tripe with some kind of historical relevance, like the works of Anne Radcliffe?

Sitting back down, I popped up the second introduction and re-read it. Maybe it was because I was expecting the worst, but it did not read all that glowing. It was fine, and I, frankly, was eager to be rid of it, so after weighing a couple of word choices and cleaning up a grammatical mistake, I opened up an email and attached it.

Before I hit the send button, however, I had another attack of deliberation.
Waffling
, if you must.

“Oh, bloody hell,” I muttered, pulling out the pages for the first, vicious version, and typing it directly into the body of the email. At the top I wrote:

Graham—I was of too different minds regarding Shadrack House, so I am sending you both. Please choose the one you like best.

After sending it, I hoped I had seen the last of Stinson and his maimed creation until the cheque from Wicking arrived.

Alas, that hope was dashed three nights later.

* * * *

It was sometime after midnight, and I had settled into bed and was on the verge of floating off to nightly oblivion when the phone rang. Lurching up, rather disoriented, I began to grope for the phone in the dark room. Finding it, I shouted: “Yes, hello, this is Dobie, who is calling?”

“Good morning, Sir Arthur,” a voice replied.

“Jim, for god’s sake!” I cried. “What time is it?”

“Twelve-thirty-six. Don’t tell me you were asleep. Oh, of course you were, you’re no longer working for a daily like us honest folk, are you?”

“Christ, Jim, what is it you want?”

“Remember your friend, Stinson?”

“Of course. What of him?”

“Yesterday Considine, our managing editor, was on one of his royal tears about his work load. During the course of his rant he dropped a line about wishing he could just disappear into the void like Radford Stinson.”

“What does that mean?” I yawned.

“Exactly what I wanted to know, so I went down to the morgue files and looked up whatever we had on him, just out of curiosity. And guess what I found?”

“He was untalented enough to go into writing films and made a bloody fortune?”

“Sour bollocks don’t become you,” Jim said. “You’d write a film script in a heartbeat if anyone ever asked you.”

He was right, but that was beside the point. “For god’s sake, Jim, tell me what you found.”

“Considine was not speaking metaphorically. Your man Stinson really did disappear into the void. Here, let me read it for you…”

Over the phone line I could hear the rustling of a sheet of paper.

“Headline: ‘Writer is missing.’ Dateline: London. Byline: Ronald Messervy. Copy: ‘Friends of William Radford Stinson of Lambeth, who achieved some success prior to World War II as a writer of detective stories, have contacted the Metropolitan Police to report that the sixty-five year old author has been missing for the better part of a fortnight. He was last seen on Tuesday the twenty-third of July, having appeared at a meeting of a group of devotees of his writings who call themselves the Peacock Street Peculiars.’”

“The Peacock Street Peculiars?” I repeated. “You mean the man actually had a fan club?”

“Even Hitler has a fan club,” Jim rejoined. “But the gist of this is that Stinson left the gathering to go home, and after that he was never seen again.”

“What year was this?”

“Nineteen seventy-four.”

Why had Wicking never mentioned the man’s disappearance? Perhaps he was not aware of it, assuming as he did that Stinson had simply died. All hopes for returning to sleep had suddenly gone away and were replaced by that kind of excitement that occurs when an idea suddenly strikes. An idea so good that it simply has to be explored and written down.

The mystery of Stinson’s fate was far more intriguing than anything the man ever wrote. If I could discover the truth, it would make for a fascinating introduction.

“You still awake, Len?” I heard Jim’s voice ask.

“Yes, no thanks to you,” I replied. “Jim, is that reporter, Messervy, still around?”

“No, Ronnie retired around the time Thatcher left and died maybe six, seven years ago.”

After asking Jim to send me a copy of the article, I rang off. And despite my presumption that I would be awake the entire night, I fell back asleep sometime after 2:30.

* * * *

The next morning I rang up Wicking. “Graham, I need to speak to you about the introduction,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he replied. “I like it, but I don’t understand the cover message. What do you mean, ‘choose the one you like best?’”

“I mean just that, pick the favourable one or the honest one.”

“But I only received the one in your attachment. I particularly like the bit about his distinctive stamp.”

So Wicking had only received the protect-my-arse version? I must have somehow made a muddle of inputting the other one. But it was no matter at this point.

“Look, Graham, I found something out about Stinson last night that I’d like to include as well. In fact, I’d like to redo the entire thing.”

“The one you sent is fine, Len.”

“Even so, the one I’m contemplating will be far finer. It shouldn’t take me long to research it. What’s your absolute drop dead, head-in-the-basket, deadline?”