Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not

by Christopher Sequeira

  “But, Holmes,” I cried. “Tell us what you saw when you were no longer present on this earth.”

  Sherlock Holmes was a long time in replying. Perhaps he groped for the words. Possibly his mind needed time to sort out the thought impressions that had been placed into it during his celestial interregnum.

  Nodding to Dr West, he turned his dreamy grey gaze to me, and spoke these words.“The universe is like a great, unfathomable machine. And we mortals are but tiny gears in that immense mechanism. When we break down, the engine of eternity continues to grind on—but not without us. For, when a solitary gear loses its teeth and ceases to function in the mighty engine of the All, it perforce finds new expression through and in other forms…”

  Holmes paused. His words struck me with great force, even though I was not sure what to make of them.

  “Did you see the Almighty?” I pressed eagerly.

  But Holmes failed to offer any response on that critical point. Instead, he murmured, “My gratitude to you, Dr West, for this grand opportunity, and to my good friend, Watson, for enabling me to plumb successfully this final enigma. Having done this, I see no further reason to persist as a corroded and toothless old gear in an infinite construct that constantly replaces and replenishes its own mechanistic parts. Thus, I insist upon going forward into my new form—the present one having served me admirably during my allotted lifespan. Thank you again.”

  With that, Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and fell back upon the pillow, expiring for a second and final time. The expression on his features, haggard as they were, was one of supernal peace and contentment.

  I stood awestruck in that moment, my mind a mad whirl.

  I turned to Dr West for understanding, but the American had taken himself and his monstrous past out of the farmhouse and into the astringent sunlight, apparently crushed by yet another failure of his fiendish aims.

  I never saw him again. I never wished to. West was charged as a common deserter, but never found. One imagines he made his secretive way back to the United States, where he continued his ghastly career.

  As for me, although my own years now grow short, I think often of the final words of Sherlock Holmes, and ponder their existential meaning. That he had stared into eternity and carried back a shred of understanding seemed to me beyond all doubt. But the words Holmes had employed to convey his insights were insufficient to the task. I imagine that whatever visions he perceived in his mind’s eye, they belong to the category that more learned men than I call the ineffable.

  That said, I look forward to the day that I see my close friend again in whatever far vistas he sought, and is presumably now exploring to the full extent of his unsurpassed ability…

  The Angel of Truth

  I. A. Watson

  I

  “Jane…I need you.”

  My heart lurched. It was a long time since Dr John Dee had said that to me.

  I blinked sleep out of my eyes and peered across my bedchamber. My scholarly husband stood in the doorway, candlestick in hand, but he was not undressed for bed. Nor did his eye gleam with desire, or even droop with wine-lust. His face was pale beneath its greying beard. He looked scared.

  I sat up quickly. “What’s wrong? The children…?”

  “Sleeping in peace,” my husband assured me. “I…need you in my workshop, Jane.”

  I shuddered. It was nearly two years since I’d last heard those words from him. Those words had preceded the effective end of our marriage.

  Yet I’d seldom seen John so white with fear as he was now; certainly not since that last shattering night in damned Trebona.1 His hand trembled, quivering the candle to send crazy shadows spidering across the rafters.

  I glanced across at the cot-bed where month-old Madina slumb­ered. The other children slept in a nursery under the attic eaves.2 I looked back at John. I tried to keep my voice steady. “What must I do?”

  He heard the tremor. “Nothing like that,” he frowned. We never now discuss my part in his former experiments. “It is—Jane, I have succeeded!”

  “Succeeded at what?” I began, but some nuance of expression in his face warned me of his meaning. “You mean you have found one? Brought one?”

  My husband nodded. “At last. In greatest need. Perhaps that was what was lacking before—need. Need most dire!”

  I misunderstood him then. I thought he referred to our reduced straits, near-bankrupt after our long sojourn overseas, returned four months since to a house burned and plundered by the ignorant and the jealous who thought Dr John Dee a sorcerer or necromancer. I even dared hope he was speaking of the parlous state of our marital relationship, so sundered that we merely staggered through the motions of matrimony. I did not yet know of the darker problem with which he wrestled.

  His beard was matted, I noticed irrelevantly, and his garments were creased with many hours of uninterrupted labour. I reviewed when I had last seen John, and wondered that a time had come when his three days’ absence from our board could pass without my notice.

  “You’re saying—claiming—that your experiments have worked?” I clarified. “That you have summoned…”

  “An angel,” John insisted. “I have summoned the Angel of Truth.”

  He swallowed hard. So even my brilliant husband had doubted whether his rites and calculations would ever bear fruit.

  John pressed a night-robe at me. “Hasten. There isn’t time for…for anything! He is come—it is come—but who knows how long the bindings will hold? I need your aid, to shore up the circle, to take notes as I question the being. Please, Jane…I really do need you. Please?”

  As long as it was since John had come to my bed, how much longer since he had allowed me at his work? Perhaps he wouldn’t have called upon me now had not our fallen circumstances robbed him of all other assistance.

  I almost turned him down. Bitter words rose at the back of my throat. And yet—an angel! And John, shocked and vulnerable as I had not seen him for so long. John, needing me.

  I dragged the robe over my shift. “Show me your angel.”

  John led down the narrow staircase to his workroom. A complicated chalk circle etched with seven names of God warded the door. The threshold was scattered with salt.

  “John, these are serious precautions for an angel.”

  My husband winced. “We are beyond what we know here, Jane. Beyond aught I have achieved, even with…” He fell silent. He would not name his former associate in my presence. “What is in that room, inside a diagram of conjuration, is far from anything in our experience. Every precaution is necessary.”

  He did not mention his old experiments in an Essex graveyard, nor the Reichstein scryings in which he had involved our son, Arthur. He would never remind me of the Uriel rites in Trebona. He did not need to. I knew how seriously he took precautions in his conjurations. I knew what happened when those precautions failed.

  “He may try to escape,” John warned me. “He may seek to beguile you to breach the circle that confines him. Remember that he is more than he seems. His mind is not as ours. He is dangerous.”

  I wanted to protest. Had John learned nothing? To bring such an entity into our home, where our children lay sleeping? To leash such a thing behind some flimsy line of chalk and salts?

  My husband must have seen the criticism in my scowl. “There’s good reason for this risk, Jane. I swear it. There are…matters of state, of high policy. Matters concerning the fate of nations.”

  I recalled the stream of visitors we had received these past bleak months at Mortlake. I had naively assumed that they were well-wishers, greeting our long-delayed return to England, perhaps bringing comfort and assistance in our reduced straits. I should have known that privy secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s spymaster,3 would never call on the Queen’s astrologer from mere courtesy.

  “What matters?”
I asked John.

  He shook his head. “No time now for that. We must enter my workshop and reinforce the bindings. Paint an outer ring with tincture of hyssop, whispering the Paternoster—Greek, not Latin. Beware answering the creature’s questions. Do not tell him your name.”

  We paused at the threshold. “An Angel of Truth, you said.”

  “Yes. And do we not know, Jane, that there are some truths which must be feared?”

  He had the right of it. I nodded. He clasped my hand—his touch was cold and unfamiliar, a stranger’s grip. He unlocked his workroom door.

  There was light within. Five lanterns were positioned at the points of the pentacle drawn in the centre of the floor. A diagram was inscribed in careful detail across the polished oak, like the sigil upon the portal but much more complicated. Supplementary lines etched out to five smaller circles, each containing a small dish, variously filled with water, incense, flame, iron, and coal. John had bound his guest with the five elements and the secret names of the Creator.

  I gasped. Right until then I had not really believed. A delusion, it might have been; John was well able to fool himself into believing his results more than they really were. Or a trick, to lure me back to his experiments and more vile degradation. But there, inside the magic circle on a high-backed wing-chair, sat a creature unlike any I had seen.

  He seemed almost human. Tall he was, a head higher than most men, thin faced with sharp cheekbones, a hawk-hooked nose, hair drawn back revealing widow’s peaks. His eyes glittered in the lantern-light, sharper and cleverer than anything I had ever seen in mortal man.

  He stirred as we entered, looking up from a contemplation of his long, delicate hands. His fingertips were pressed together, but it did not look like prayer.

  He spoke. “Good evening,” he bade us, “Doctor John Dee. And…” Those narrowed piercing eyes ran over me, “…Mistress Jane Fromond Dee.”

  John gasped. “An Angel of Truth,” he breathed. “I did not tell him…”

  The Angel tutted. “Come, come. If I’m to be plagued with hallucinations, at least allow that my deeper mind will provide me with signs and hints as to what vision I am to experience.”

  John’s hand still gripped mine. It tightened as the Angel spoke. The creature’s voice was deep, masculine, cultured. A scholar’s speech, yet without deference or humility. A cold voice, devoid of emotion or humanity.

  The Angel gestured around the workshop. “Construction, décor, and furnishings bespeak of sixteenth century, yet the items here are not of three hundred years vintage but new. The smell, I may note, is particularly authentic; and the stench, some dried clay upon that matting, and certain sounds beyond your house, suggest a Surrey location close to the Thames. The clutter of your study indicates travel and scholarly endeavour. I perceive you have lately visited the Continent—Nuremburg, Frankfurt, Prague, Cracow and elsewhere. The volumes on your desk…”

  John looked to the content on his table. A new-printed copy of Hariot’s a briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia lay there, carefully bookmarked where John had reached in his studies.

  The Angel made a wide gesture with those artistic fingers. “Those calculations on the chalk-board refer to a revision of the calendar in line with Gregorian principles, making use of the controversial Copernican theories of your correspondent Tycho Brahe. That partially-assembled device on the tool-bench is a replacement sea compass for one recently looted from this study during your European absence.”

  His gaze fixed upon my husband. John shied back a step.

  The spirit leaned forwards. “Your hands display the callosities of a constant writer, a scholar given to using a goose-quill judging by the ink-spots on your cuff. Old acid burns on the backs of your hands suggest a practical chemist. Your dentistry and complexion speak of primitive medical practices. In short, my delusion insists that you are John Dee, Elizabethan mathematician, navigator, astronomer and alchemist. Fascinating.”

  John gestured for me to begin my work reinforcing the circle. He picked up his hickory stave, to command the Angel if he could. “You know much that no mortal could,” he told the spirit, “but I charge thee now to speak thy name!”

  “Holmes,” the Angel replied, without hesitation or chagrin. “William Sherlock Scott Holmes.”4

  “Homes?” John puzzled. No book I had ever seen, nor any of my husband’s reading judging by his expression, chronicled an entity of such a name. And there had once been many volumes of angel-lore on the shelves of Mortlake, before our house had been plundered in our absence and damaged by fire. It was not only our personal relationship that was wrecked and gutted on our return to England.

  “Sherlock Holmes,” the Angel corrected us. “From the Old English holm and the Norse holmr, meaning holly tree. But this is irrelevant. I note from your easel that you are studying a manuscript which I have seen before—or later, might perhaps be a more accurate tense.”

  The spirit directed our attention to the vellum codex that John had left open on his writing slope. I had not seen this document before, but was amazed and enthralled by it. A fold-out triple page was rendered with beautiful depictions of plants and animals, accompanying a text in some coded language that I did not recognise.5

  John’s brows rose even further. “You…know this tome? I have only recently acquired it. It is said to be the work of Roger Bacon.”6

  “I am intimately acquainted with it, my dear doctor,” the Angel replied. “Indeed, I suspect it to be the primary and immediate cause of my remarkable current delusion.”

  John brandished his hickory wand. “I charge you, explain!”

  “I was retained by representatives of the Society of Jesus from the Villa Mondragone at Frascati, Italy.7 This document had been extracted from their archive. They believed the thief had brought it to London, and therefore sought out my assistance in recovering the codex. This I did—the problem was elementary. Having recovered the tome I naturally inspected it in my Montague Street chambers8 to verify that it was the stolen item and to study the remarkable cypher it employed.”

  John looked uncertainly at the thick volume with its narrow strange-charactered script. “You…decoded this?”

  The Angel looked rueful. “I had scarcely begun when what I assume was some fungal toxin dusted onto the sheets took its effect and triggered this remarkable sensory delusion. I posit an interaction with other chemical agents which I have utilised of late to direct and divert my cognitive capacities. A fourteen percent solution of…9 No matter. It seems the most rational response to my hallucination to treat it as real until my mind resolves itself to conventional reality once more.”

  I did not understand Holmes’s words, though he spoke them as if they had sense and meaning. I am not sure even John followed, though his is the most acute mind I have ever known.

  “I am John Dee,” my husband admitted to the spirit in the circle. “Late of John’s College Cambridge and the University of Louvain, Fellow and Under-Reader at Trinity, Dean of Gloucester, Freeman of the Mercers’ Company…”

  “Yes, yes,” the Angel interjected. “I am somewhat familiar with you and your work. Mathematicall Praeface to The Elements of Geometry of Euclid of Megara laid down some basic principles of calculation. General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Art of Navigation pioneered some excellent practical applications of science and mathematics. I was not so impressed with Parallaticae commentationis praxeosque nucleus quidam—too much superstitious astrological nonsense without clear evidence.”

  John frowned. “The work was well received in several European courts. Prince Laski, King Stephen Batory, Emperor Rudolph himself…”

  “There will always be fools to admire foolish unsupported theories,” Holmes snapped. “Your Heparchia Mystica - On the Mystical Rule of the Seven Planets—was confounded nonsense.10 Your Paradoxal Compass, however, was an admirable advance in po
lar navigation. You should have refined your studies to the geo-mathematical and astronomical, where they would have been much admired.”

  John advanced as if to remonstrate with the Angel’s brutal critique. I caught my husband’s shoulder. “He goads you to cross the circle, John.”

  The spirit mused for a moment. “An occasional correspondent of mine even dedicated his volume The Dynamics of an Asteroid to you.”11

  “He is testing you, John,” I warned.

  My husband looked closely at the gaunt figure that regarded him across the enchanted circle. “Not testing me,” John reasoned. “He is reading me, as a man might read a text. See how he scans the room, every book and paper, every instrument, missing nothing. If he provokes me it is to observe my reactions and learn from them.”

  “Most perspicacious,” the Angel of Truth remarked. “However­…our encounter, ephemeral as it might be, is clearly for some purpose. If one follows the logic of the situation as it presents itself, you have gone to remarkable lengths to obtain a consultation on some problem that perturbs and perplexes you, doctor.”

  John raised his stave again. “Yes. I charge and conjure thee, Angel of Truth, to answer fully and freely in revealing the plot aimed against Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth.”

  The spirit snorted. “You don’t require an Angel of Truth, then, Dr Dee. You require an Angel of Detection.” He seemed amused.

  I turned to John. “What’s this? There is some conspiracy afoot against the queen? Is that why Walsingham came to Mortlake of late?”

  There was a time when I would have recognised my husband’s intense concern at some intractable problem. There was a day when he would have told me about it. Even now he looked a little shamefaced. “Walsingham came to me in confidence, to see if I could explain…” He paused, unsure how much he should tell me.