Warlock Holmes--The Sign of Nine

by G. S. Denning

  Then Holmes’s.

  Then Hopkins’s.

  At last, satisfied he wouldn’t break free, we all heaved a mutual sigh of relief. “Let’s get him flipped over and see what we’ve got, eh?” Holmes suggested.

  “I don’t think he’s quite human,” Lestrade opined.

  Grogsson nodded and rubbed at the massive red mark on the side of his face where Cairns had slapped him. “Not reg’lar,” he agreed.

  “I don’t suppose he is…” Holmes mused and began a close examination of the old sealskin coat Cairns had tied around his waist. Holmes unwrapped the sleeves and pulled it free. As he held it up, I realized it was less well finished than I had originally thought. Less of a sealskin coat and more of a… well… just a skin.

  Behind Holmes, Cairns stirred, saw what Holmes was holding and gave a frantic, “Ork! Ork! No, please! That’s mine! Give it back!”

  “And what if I don’t?” Warlock wondered. “Would you be bound to my will for eighteen years? Could I even force you to marry me?”

  All the color drained from Patrick Cairns’s face. He looked quite aghast.

  “Gentlemen, I think what we’re dealing with, here,” said Holmes, tapping his lips thoughtfully with one finger, “is a selkie.”

  “Eh?” Grogsson grunted.

  “Seal folk. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never heard of them? By the gods, Grogsson, if you’re going to keep on being a policeman—and a monster yourself—don’t you think you ought to read up on your mythical creatures? A selkie is a shape-shifter. They mostly take the form of a seal, but they can remove their skin and walk about as a man. Any who finds the coat while they’re in human form has power over the selkie for eighteen years. Folk tales are full of sailors who force beautiful selkie women to marry them. I strongly suspect Mr. Cairns here to be part seal. Or… judging by the size of him…” Holmes gave the skin he was holding an exploratory sniff. “…Yes. Sea lion, I should think.”

  “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? That’s mad! Do you know how crazy you sound right now?” Cairns asked. Yet, it was clear the man was a better harpooner than liar. His wide, nervous eyes betrayed him. Seeing he’d fooled nobody, he gave one of our chairs a vicious kick and shouted, “Here now, give that back or I’ll kill you!”

  “Like you killed Peter Carey?” Holmes suggested. “I don’t know how Watson figured it out, but the more I see, the more I suspect Black Peter Carey was the last fellow to hold this skin. Am I wrong?”

  “It’s no business of yours!” Cairns insisted.

  “No? But as we’ve caught you dead to rights—and even more to the point, as I’m holding this coat—why don’t we discuss it, eh?”

  Patrick Cairns looked as if he wished to protest, or even simply refuse to answer. Yet he could not. After just a moment of shaking—fighting the words that strove to escape—he burst forth with a sudden cacophony of self-incrimination.

  “Not my coat! In all the years I knew him, Black Peter Carey never managed to get my coat off me. No. It was Juuuhgh-juhyor’s!”

  “Who?” Holmes wondered.

  “You know her as Mrs. Peter Carey.”

  “Oh dear,” said Holmes. “Just like in the tales, eh?”

  “She was the love of my life! My favorite bride out of all my harem!”

  “Your what?” I cried, rather taken aback.

  Holmes waved me down. “He is a sea lion, Watson. Different folk have different customs. Now, Mr. Cairns, tell me: did it come off as in the tales? Peter Carey found Juuuhgh-juhyor out bathing in her human form and seized her skin?”

  “And brought her aboard his ship—naked and dripping—to amuse him!”

  “Oh dear. I fear this story has taken a bit of a dark turn,” Holmes reflected. “I mean, I expected a certain amount of murder, but this is quite another thing entirely.”

  “I followed them all the way back to London,” Cairns continued. “I took off my skin and walked the land. I found Carey and begged him to return Juuuhgh-juhyor to me. I won’t lie. I won’t say I didn’t threaten his life, but he said he’d hidden the skin where I’d never find it—that Juuuhgh-juhyor would never return to the sea if I didn’t do as he said.”

  “So you obeyed him? For eighteen years?”

  “I had to! Would you trust a man like Peter Carey? Even when the time was up and the spell was broken, what would he do? Would he give Juuuhgh-juhyor back her skin and let her return to me, or would he keep it hidden? He told me he’d only give the skin back if I served him. So, I did. I went aboard the Sea Unicorn and took up that hated harpoon. For eighteen years I betrayed my kind; I led that bastard against the seals and the whales, and made sure his ship was stuffed with my bloody kin. It was I who really paid for that grand house where he kept my love a prisoner! Where he kept the daughter that should have been mine!”

  “Yep…” Holmes reflected. “Bit of a dark turn, indeed.”

  “Now the eighteen years is set to end in less than a week,” said Cairns, “but there was a dark edge to my hope. I feared Peter Carey would not be true to his word. As a mystic creature, I had no power to go back on my promises. But he did. And wouldn’t he? He was a blackguard if ever there was one, with a soul rotted by drink. Yet, I hadn’t spent eighteen years in his damned company without learning a thing or two. See, I remember a night about eleven years back… We’d come across a yacht in storm-tossed seas earlier that day. The crew had abandoned her, for there were only one soul left.”

  “John Hopley Neligan?” I hazarded.

  “That’s right. An’ the captain took him on board. One old box and a tattered ledger—that’s all Neligan had. Now, I don’t know all your human ways, but I think the papers in that box were worth a fair amount.”

  “Indeed they were,” I said.

  “And Captain Carey knew it,” said Cairns, with a grim nod. “Being a creature of the sea, I don’t mind a storm as much as most. I like to take the air, even when it’s blowin’. So I was out on the deck that night, when John Neligan come to the rail, lookin’ somewhat green. There he was, lettin’ his dinner out into the sea, when Peter Carey come up behind and tipped up his heels. Over he went, into that black water, and nothing ever got said about that box and that ledger. Then again, if Black Pete had somethin’ to hold over my and Juuuhgh-juhyor’s heads, maybe we had somethin’ to hold over his!”

  “Ah,” I said. “And that’s what you were doing in the cabin, the night of his death. You were negotiating your continued silence for the return of your mutual wife’s seal skin?”

  Cairns nodded. “He were pretty well along with drink when I showed up. And he had a lot of weapons within easy reach. I didn’t mind. I knew if he came at me, I could kill him pretty quick. But then, could I find the skin? That’s the only thing that worried me. He sat me down, poured me a glass of rum, talked about old times. Then… then he said he had a gift for me…”

  “Which an uninformed investigator might have thought was a gift for him,” I interjected. “And that is why I set Grogsson on you the moment I learned your name. After all, it only made sense for that gift to be from Peter Carey if he happened to be presenting it to someone with the same initials. It seemed unlikely that Carey—a nonsmoker—had been given a brand-new tobacco pouch made of…

  “…made of…

  “Oh.”

  Holmes gave a sympathetic little cluck. “I do remember thinking Mrs. Carey seemed to be a rather put-upon sort of person. But I’ll admit, I hadn’t recognized the extent of it.”

  “And now she can never come back to the sea!” said Patrick Cairns, and burst into tears. The four of us stood for a few moments, watching this confessed murderer—oh, how I hope the reader will forgive the term—blubbering in the middle of our floor.

  “All right,” said Holmes after a time. “Raise your hand, everybody who thinks Peter Carey was a right bastard and anybody who’s willing to cut up his imprisoned bride’s seal-skin so she can never return to the seal-life and seal-husband she loves, then presents a tobacco
pouch made of that same skin to the seal-husband just to gloat about it, deserves anything he gets.”

  Four hands went up.

  “Now, raise your hands if you think Mr. Cairns should be punished for what he did.”

  No hands.

  “Very well, it’s unanimous,” said Holmes. “Of course, we’re still going to have to turn you in. Hopkins needs credit for solving this case and Scotland Yard needs someone other than Grogsson to blame. We’re going to have to see justice is done.”

  Patrick Cairns howled, “I don’t care what happens to me, now that—”

  “I said ‘justice’ not ‘a hanging’,” said Holmes. “I don’t think this will be very hard to put right. Fortunately for us, this entire conversation has occurred while the only non-monster representative of Scotland Yard is conveniently unconscious. Strange how well these things work out, isn’t it?”

  “Um… I’m not so sure, Holmes,” I said.

  “Eh?”

  “I’m just looking over at Inspector Hopkins now and… does anybody else see him… breathing?”

  “Really?” asked Holmes, his face a mask of horror.

  I knelt down and pressed two fingers to the side of Hopkins’s throat. My heart sank. In a hoarse croak, I told my companions, “It’s as I feared. This man is dead.”

  The four of us exchanged horrified glances. Actually the five of us, if one includes Patrick Cairns and—seeing as he’d just been informed he was responsible for the death of a detective inspector of Scotland Yard—one probably should.

  “All right,” said Holmes, beginning to sweat. “All right, but he’s not very dead.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s not like his head’s off!”

  “It might as well be, Holmes. The man has no pulse! He isn’t breathing!”

  “But if he were, he’d be fine, right? I mean, it’s not like someone’s run a sword through him or anything!”

  “Holmes,” I said, in my darkest, most warning tone, “you’re not thinking of doing anything are you?”

  “But it’s my fault, Watson!”

  “How?”

  “Well because you were so doomed, two days ago. And I got to thinking about Hopkins who was so fresh-faced and eager and not-at-all-doomed and I thought, ‘What if I took just one strand of Watson’s soul—the one with all the doom on it—and tied it to Hopkins? That might take a bit of the pressure off Watson, eh?’”

  “You bound my soul to Hopkins?”

  “Just the doomy part!”

  “Holmes, no! Look what you’ve done!”

  “Well it’s your fault too, Watson! You promised you’d be careful.”

  “I was!”

  “Oh? Were you? Were you just super careful today? Or did you happen to start off a Grogsson fight in the middle of a crowded room?”

  “Er… well… I um… I did do that, I suppose.”

  “Well then,” said Holmes. “It seems we are all agreed.”

  There was a flash. And a world-shaking boom. And the sun went out. And the air filled with the voices of a thousand demons, shrieking with triumph.

  Hopkins jerked bolt upright and drew a panicked breath.

  Lestrade went even paler than usual. “Holmes, no,” he said. “Death is final. Death is important.”

  “Oh, pish-tosh. Not to me.”

  Cairns, Grogsson, Lestrade and I exchanged worried glances as the sunlight slowly returned through the windows behind us.

  “What… what happened to me?” Hopkins asked.

  “That depends,” said Holmes, brightly. “What do you remember?”

  “We interviewed Mrs. Carey and her daughter and then… and then… there were a thousand voices laughing at me as I spun away into an infinite nothing.”

  “Don’t worry about that last part, eh?” Holmes encouraged. “The important thing is: you’ve solved the crime!”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes, and we were all very impressed. Don’t you remember how you reasoned it out?”

  “Um… no.”

  “Well, I’m sure we can remind you…”

  * * *

  It was not difficult to ensure that Inspector Lanner be the one to arrive in Scotland Yard’s Black Maria. Indeed, when he heard his protégé was claiming to have solved his first case—and the company in which he had accomplished said feat—it might have been quite the task to stop him. Lanner and two constables listened while Hopkins told all he “remembered” about his pursuit of the case. Lestrade stood by, hanging his head in shame that he had not beaten this promising new detective to the critical deductions. Torg, of course, had been dismissed. His inability to sustain even the most innocent fabrication dictated in no uncertain terms the necessity that he be elsewhere.

  We modified the story as little as we could. Clearly, Cairns wished to blackmail Carey with the knowledge that Carey had killed Neligan and absconded with the securities. The fact that the non-smoking Carey was presenting a tobacco pouch to someone with the initials P.C. seemed to make the case against Patrick Cairns fairly inescapable. Congratulations were in order for catching one murderer, who had slain a second murderer and for clearing the name of an innocent (if somewhat dead) country banker.

  The details of Juuuhgh-juhyor’s skin and the fact that Patrick Cairns was in some sense her husband and spent half his time wandering about as a sea lion were the only details omitted.

  Lanner helped Hopkins load his very first criminal into the back of the big black carriage. A criminal who was wearing—and this was a key detail—only Hopkins’s set of handcuffs. And wouldn’t that seem fitting? Lestrade, Grogsson and Holmes had all reclaimed theirs and had no intention of informing Lanner that one set was likely to be insufficient. Hopkins might have had some notion of that fact, but he’d been… er… indisposed for most of the encounter that proved it.

  As they prepared to pull away, Holmes came down to the street to offer his congratulations, and something more. “Here you are, Lanner,” he said. “These were the only other items in the prisoner’s possession: his sailing papers and his coat.”

  Lanner took them with a grunt, opened the door of the Maria, and shoved the bundle unceremoniously into the back with his prisoner. The Black Maria trundled off down Baker Street.

  Though it was in many ways a success, I have several regrets regarding the adventure of Black Peter Blackguard McNotVeryNice. I regret how thoroughly I had allowed my Xantharaxes habit to overcome my mind, body and will. I regret the loss suffered by Juuuhgh-juhyor, for it is always a tragedy to hear of a creature bereft of its place in the world. I regret the death of Stanley Hopkins, and now—in the unfaltering light of hindsight—I regret his resurrection.

  Mostly though, I regret that I was not on hand at Scotland Yard to watch Lanner and Hopkins open the back of that police van to retrieve their prisoner, only to discover a whacking great sea lion.

  The two detectives were so shocked that the beast managed to barge past them and escape down the lane. All London was on alert for the wayward animal by the time that evening’s papers were released, yet strangely, all sightings of the beast seemed to have been limited to within a few streets of Scotland Yard.

  One happy occurrence followed these events, at least. Patrick Cairns and the widow Carey realized that—even if she was never able to return to the sea—perhaps the two of them might make a go of it together on land. Though it might be necessary for Cairns to change his name first. Yes and also, he was absolutely not allowed to keep a harem in a country house in Woodman’s Lee. The third condition was this: in order for the two reunited lovers to have any chance of happiness whatsoever, the loyalty of a certain member of that household would need to be purchased. Luckily, it was for sale.

  At the very reasonable price of one pony.

  THE GANG

  FROM THE DREAM JOURNAL OF DR. JOHN WATSON

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN A HOTEL ROOM ONCE, BUT THE OLD man on the bed has stayed so long it’s his room now. He’s not looki
ng well. His breaths come in harsh wheezes; his skin is even more papery and frail than it was the last time I saw him. Still, there are enough of his toys scattered about—and enough of Moriarty’s too—to quash any doubt. This is Adler, the toymaker.

  He’s propped up in bed, wearing—somewhat to my surprise—a stethoscope. Though he looks as if he ought to be receiving medical treatment, he seems to be administering it, instead.

  To a demon.

  The creature has three legs and three arms. His skin is brown and his stature is all wrong. He’s shorter than a man, and narrower at the hips and shoulders, and he’s… deeper. He runs too far front to back. His eyes shine with a golden light, but he shakes as he moves. His six limbs have no strength.

  Herr Adler shakes his head. “It isn’t working.”

  “Impossible. This creature was immortal!” the demon retorts. I recognize him. Not the voice, that is new. But the tone, which is incapable of hiding its own intelligence or its imperiousness.

  That is James Moriarty, without a doubt.

  “Do you know how long this creature has endured?” Moriarty continues, indicating his borrowed body with one hand. “Its powers of prophecy are sewn deep into human history. The Greeks knew it as the truth that seeped from the fissures in the rock, inhaled by the priestess at Delphi! The Chinese know it as the words of I Ching!”

  “Perhaps,” says Adler, with a shrug. “But that was before you trapped it here. There is a right way to play with our toys, Mr. Moriarty, and there is a wrong way.”

  “No! It should have worked! I gave up my body! I blended our souls! Do you understand, Adler? I gave this creature a part of my self. I have diluted myself in exchange for—well it should have been at least another thousand years of life. At least!”

  Adler shrugs again. “It’s dying.”

  Moriarty opens his mouth to retort. Who knows what he might have said? “So are you,” would have been apt. Yet we will never know, for the body he is riding in interrupts him. The eyes shine with sudden light as a voice as deep as the earth rumbles forth.