Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years
The Beast of Guagming Peak
Water from the Moon
Mr. Sigerson
The Mystery of Dr. Thorvald Sigerson
The Case of the Lugubrious Manservant
The Bughouse Caper
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Reichenbach
The Strange Case of the Voodoo Priestess
The Adventure of the Missing Detective
Cross of Gold
God of the Naked Unicorn
I
II
III
IV
Also by Michael Kurland
About the Authors
Notes
Copyright Page
Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years
An Introduction
Michael Kurland
I don’t want to keep you from reading these wonderful stories any longer than necessary, really I don’t. So just a few brief words to tell you what this book is all about.
This book is all about the world-famous consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. It chronicles, through the eyes of an assortment of different people, a series of adventures of the great detective that have not previously been presented to the public. Indeed, some of them his amanuensis Dr. John Watson knew nothing about. Holmes did so like having his little secrets.
There has been much speculation over the past century by those who speculate about such things as to what Sherlock Holmes did during the three years not chronicled by Watson; the so-called missing or hidden years. Or, as they have been termed by avid Sherlockians, the “Great Hiatus.” For those of you not as familiar with the life of the famous consulting detective as you should be—and there will be a test in next week’s class—let me explain.
In his memoir entitled “The Final Problem,” written sometime in 1893, Dr. Watson writes:
It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.
He goes on to tell us how, some two years earlier, Holmes had an encounter with his archenemy Professor James Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, which resulted in the deaths of both Moriarty and Holmes, whom Watson describes as “the best and wisest man whom I have ever known.”
But it turned out that the encomium was a bit premature, as was revealed in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” where Holmes returns after a three-year absence, causing Watson to faint for the first time in his life when he turns and sees Holmes standing there. Holmes’s excuse for keeping Watson in mourning for three years is inadequate, as is his relating of his experiences while he was gone:
I traveled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head Llama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I’m sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpelier, in the south of France.
Let’s look at a few of the problems. First, in “The Final Problem” Holmes describes Moriarty as “the Napoleon of crime.” And yet Watson has never heard of him before. Holmes is ready to lay down his life to rid the world of this menace that he never bothered to mention to his best friend and biographer. Sure. The story begins when Holmes goes to Watson to tell him that he (Holmes) is in immediate danger of death by airgun. That Moriarty and his whole gang will be rounded up in a few days, but until that is accomplished Moriarty is gunning for him. So there is nothing for it but Holmes must flee the country and travel about Europe.
Now I ask you, if someone were trying to kill you, and you knew that he was to be arrested by the British police in a few days, would you skip over to Europe, knowing your enemy would follow, and thus put himself beyond the arrest warrants of Scotland Yard? Would you not, perhaps, spend a couple of days camped out on Lestrade’s couch in his Scotland Yard office until the arrest was accomplished?
And then Holmes puts on one of his clever disguises to meet Watson on the Continental Express. Watson, of course, is not disguised, indeed could not successfully wear a disguise if his life depended on it. Are we to believe that it would never occur to Moriarty or his henchmen to follow Watson if they lost track of Holmes?
There are more problems with the story Watson relates in “The Final Problem,” but we must assume that Watson believed what he was told and that any chicanery was purely Holmes’s. I leave it for you to find the logical inconsistencies with the note, the stick, and the fight itself. I will now skip lightly over to “The Adventure of the Empty House,” and we shall examine the holes in Holmes’s explanation of where he had been for those three years.
I traveled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head Llama.
Which was a good trick, as the nearest llamas, head or otherwise, were some 3,000 miles away in South America. For, as Ogden Nash pointed out: “The two-I llama, he’s a beast.” Holmes, if he was there at all, was communing with the one-I, or priestly, version of the genus Lama.
There’s also the fact that, when in 1903 a British expedition headed by Lieutenant Colonel Younghusband forced its way into Lhassa, there was no mention of a Norwegian named Sigerson or any other European ever having been in the holy city before.
You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I’m sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend.
And why should it have? Nowhere in the chronicles of Holmes’s adventures except at this one damned spot is there any indication that Holmes spoke Norwegian.
I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office.
It must have been an interesting visit indeed, for Khartoum had been captured and destroyed by Mahdists (a religious sect who believed that their leader, one Muhammad Ahmad, was the Mahdi [Messiah], but had no sense of humor about it) back in 1885. Six months after the sack of Khartoum the Mahdi died of typhus and, after a short tussle among various interest groups, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, called the Khalifa (successor), took control of the Mahdists, ruling from the town of Omdurman. On September 2, 1898, Herbert (later Lord) Kitchener overthrew the Khalifa, in a pitched battle before Omdurman, and the Khalifa was killed in another battle at Umm Diwaykarat in November of 1899.
Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpelier, in the south of France.
Montpelier is the capital of Vermont. Montpellier is a city in the south of France.
“It is an old m
axim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Holmes says in “The Beryl Coronet.” And again, in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” he tells Watson, “You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles.”
So what can we glean from these, admittedly trifling, mistakes in Watson’s, or Holmes’s, narrative? Merely that Holmes told Watson a fanciful tale, designed to assuage Watson’s curiosity, but bearing scant relation to the truth.
“What is truth?” asked Pontius Pilate. We’ll try not to get so metaphysical here. The truth of where Holmes spent those missing years may lie within this book; or perhaps it’s just a collection of rollicking good tales, no more or less truthful than the story Holmes told Watson.
Einstein showed us1 that what we perceive as the passage of time is determined by our frame of reference. So if some of these stories seem to have happened both before and after each other, it’s merely because each author had a different frame of reference. The stories put Holmes in the Himalayas, in Thailand, in the Duchy of Bornitz, in New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, above the Arctic Circle, and some even less likely places. They are worthy additions to the Holmes universe, and I am proud to present them to you here.
Read and enjoy!
Michael Kurland
Somewhere near Reichenbach Falls,
January 2004
I dedicate this book to the authors herein
and thank them for their imagination,
their wit, and their industry.
The Beast of Guagming Peak
Michael Mallory
“Wake up, Colonel Mackay, it’s time for dinner,” the nurse said, gently shaking the elderly, wheelchair-bound man out of a snoring sleep. The man’s sunken eyes opened, and he looked up at her. A right cutey, was the first thought that passed through his mind, almost an angel—and she fancies me to boot. Mentally, Colin Mackay reckoned himself to be about thirty-eight. Physically, however, he was seventy-seven years old, and felt every day of it. At least I still have my dreams, he thought. Even a wheelchair could not slow down his dreams. He smiled at her, revealing his ten remaining teeth, and she gave him a dimpled smile back. “What did I miss, Cynthia?” he asked.
“Nothing, Colonel, but it’s time for dinner, though I’m afraid we don’t have meat today.”
“No matter,” Mackay muttered, straightening himself up in his wheelchair and wincing from the pain in his right hip, which he had broken two years earlier. “I’ve been through worse.”
Cynthia stepped around behind the chair and pushed him into the dining room of the retirement home, where the table was already set. Nine other military pensioners were seated there, all from various wars, though none of them went as far back as the Boer conflict, which was Mackay’s first taste of gunpowder. As usual, some of the men were grumbling over the failings of the menu.
“Damnable war’s been over for seven years and still no meat,” said Glendower, an army man, who was always complaining about something. “I just hope I live long enough to see the end of these shortages.”
Rooney, late of the Royal Air Force, said, “Ah, there could be an entire corned beef in front of you, and you’d still spend so much time complaining that you’d miss it entirely!”
Some of the men laughed, one uttered, “hear, hear,” and Glendower simply snorted and turned away. But the banter at the table ceased when Mackay settled behind the head of the table. “Good evening, Colonel,” they each said, in recognition of the fact that he was the highest-ranking man among them.
“Good evening, lads,” Mackay returned, and dinner commenced.
After the meal was finished, Mackay was the first to be moved away from the table, as always. Cynthia pushed him back into the sitting room, close to the crackling fire. It was December, and the staff of the home had begun to hang up Christmas decorations.
December 1951, the old man mused … King George VI, the great-grandson of the sovereign who had ruled during Mackay’s first twenty-eight years and who had lent her name to an age, and in whose name Mackay had first picked up a rifle and bayonet, now sat on the throne. Her great-grandson. Mackay could hardly believe it. He had been through three different wars and had escaped more bullets than any man ever had a right to. He had been in and out of more scrapes in his life than most men would have thought possible, and still he had managed to last into the start of the second half of the twentieth century. Certainly it was a bother and a burden to have lost the ability to walk, but the fact that he was here at all, when so many of his compatriots had fallen, was little short of astounding.
“Would you like the newspaper, Colonel?” Cynthia asked, handing him a copy of that day’s London Times. Mackay always got first crack at the paper, which was not an elaborate courtesy, since only two or three of the other pensioners ever bothered to read it. The old man pulled out a pair of glasses from his sweater pocket and flipped through the pages, finding it hard to develop interest in what the Bank of England was forecasting for the new year economically, or what Winston Churchill had to say about the chances of the cease-fire talks in Korea. He was about to fold the section up when a photograph on page twelve suddenly caught his eye. Reading the text underneath it, he muttered, “Crikey.”
“Did you want something, Colonel?” Cynthia asked.
“My dear, could you get me closer to the light, please?” he asked, and the young nurse complied, wheeling him closer to the table and lamp, which allowed him to see the photograph more clearly.
The photo had been taken by Eric Shipton, who was mountaineering through the Himalayas alongside a chap named Michael Ward. It showed an enormous footprint, vaguely human in shape, but the length of an ax head, one of which had been placed next to the print in the photo for comparison. What struck Mackay about the print, though, was not the size but the fact that it appeared to have only four toes. “Good God,” he uttered.
He reread the accompanying article, more slowly this time, his mind barely able to contain the news that was being offered: the footprint, according to the Times, was the most conclusive proof yet of the existence of the mirka, the metoh, the kang-mi, the yeti, or, as it had come to be known in the Western world, the Abominable Snowman.
As he continued to stare at the photo, the room began to turn cool. The Christmas decorations faded from view and the hardwood floors turned white and powdery. His lungs began to ache, and he seemed to have to fight for every breath. He was a young man again, a mere nineteen years old, fit as a bull, and possessing a mouthful of hard, white teeth. He walked through the freezing cold with the powerful legs of an athlete.
He was on the mountain again. On the mountain. Once more facing the danger …
Colin Mackay could no longer feel his legs, which was not a good sign. While still a relative novice at climbing, he had nonetheless seen a number of men succumb to the suddenness of frostbite and vowed that it would not happen to him. He was not about to part with a precious limb before his twentieth birthday. But he could not deny the numbness … no, it was not even numbness, it was the total absence of feeling, an emptiness of sensation as pronounced as the total deprivation of color that stretched as far as he could see in every direction. White … nothing but white. Keep moving, he commanded himself, forcing his lungs consciously to measure every cold, fire-stinging breath, and keeping his mind alert by running Gilbert and Sullivan songs forward and backward in his mind. When the point came that he was no longer able to concentrate on precisely what was meant by commissariat, Mackay would know that the mountain had won.
But he would not succumb easily, not while there was a fragment of thought in his mind or a cubic inch of oxygen in his body.
How in blazes had he managed to lose all contact with the others? How long had he been trudging through the snow and wind without the benefit of a compass, desperately hoping to find any sign that would tell him that he was in proximity to the rest of the expedition? How far away was the camp?
Far enough for your legs to lose all feeling, he thought grimly.
“No,” he spoke, expelling a precious breath. There had to be a way back. He had been no more than ten minutes away from the camp when the wind had suddenly gusted, knocking him over, whiting out his vision, and covering over any tracks that he had made with blown snow. From that moment on, Mackay was effectively lost. Why had he been the one ordered to go out and track down the source of the mysterious cry they had all heard, a howl so eerie and foreboding that he could not believe Foss’s judgment that it came from a lost sled dog? Why had not Foss been sent out? He was the more experienced mountaineer, after all. But it had been he, Mackay, whom the captain had sent, and the captain was in charge.
He continued on, though his steps became more labored. Finally he knelt and packed the snow around his legs, praying that, somehow, that would allow the feeling to return. He had heard other mountaineers talk about packing a frostbitten limb in ice, and could not imagine how that would work, but it was better than doing nothing.
As he sat there, quoting the fights historical from Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical, Colin Mackay suddenly had the terrible feeling that he had gone mad. How else could one explain the thin stream of black smoke that appeared out of nowhere in the distance? At first he thought it had to be his imagination, or worse, a hallucination announcing the beginnings of a seizure caused by altitude sickness. But as he watched, there was no mistaking the curl of the line of smoke. Someone, somewhere, up ahead, was burning something!
Mackay began to trot toward the line of smoke, never letting it out of his sight, refusing to succumb to a whiteout again, drinking in each breath and holding it as long as he could to prevent himself from panting and wasting oxygen. He still had no feeling in his legs, but they continued to move at his command. He would make the site of the smoke or die trying, he thought, and Colin Mackay had no desire to die trying.