Shadows over Baker Street
Page 1
Shadows over Baker Street
Edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan
BALLANTINE BOOKS
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
A STUDY IN EMERALD (1881) | Neil Gaiman
TIGER! TIGER! (1882) | Elizabeth Bear
THE CASE OF THE WAVY BLACK DAGGER
(1884) | Steve Perry
A CASE OF ROYAL BLOOD (1888)
Steven-Elliot Altman
THE WEEPING MASKS (1890) | James Lowder
ART IN THE BLOOD (1892) | Brian Stableford
THE CURIOUS CASE OF MISS VIOLET STONE (1894) Poppy Z. Brite and David Ferguson
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ANTIQUARIAN’S NIECE
(1894) | Barbara Hambly
THE MYSTERY OF THE WORM (1894)
John Pelan
THE MYSTERY OF THE HANGED MAN’S PUZZLE
(1897) | Paul Finch
THE HORROR OF THE MANY FACES (1898)
Tim Lebbon
THE ADVENTURE OF THE ARAB’S MANUSCRIPT
(1898) | Michael Reaves
THE DROWNED GEOLOGIST (1898)
Caitlín R. Kiernan
A CASE OF INSOMNIA (1899) | John P. Vourlis
THE ADVENTURE OF THE VOORISH SIGN (1899) Richard A. Lupoff
THE ADVENTURE OF EXHAM PRIORY (1901)
F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
DEATH DID NOT BECOME HIM (1902)
David Niall Wilson and Patricia Lee Macomber
NIGHTMARE IN WAX (1915) | Simon Clark
CONTRIBUTORS
COPYRIGHT
As always, for Kathy . . .
And for Jennifer, thanks for making this happen.
—J. P.
For Art Cover and Lydia Marano.
—M. R.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
“A Study in Scarlet”
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
—H. P. Lovecraft,
“The Call of Cthulhu”
INTRODUCTION
The deerstalker hat, the pipe, the tobacco-filled slipper on the mantel . . . the image conjured, whether of Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Irons, or the reader’s own conception, is unmistakable. The most recognizable figure in English-language fiction is, without a doubt, that of Sherlock Holmes. For more than a hundred years the stories of the Great Detective using the razor-sharp blade of ratiocination against evil have captivated an enthusiastic readership throughout the world.
Numerous studies and related works, from biographies to encyclopedias that scrupulously list each minor character and setting, have been written over the decades. There have been films, radio dramas, plays, comic books, TV series, and even a couple of cookbooks. The number of unauthorized pastiches runs well into the hundreds. Holmes is one of the most fascinating characters in literature; the concept of a man solving the most difficult and challenging of puzzles by pure logic and deductive ability still strikes a chord with both writers and readers over a century after the character first appeared in The Strand Magazine. We can always count on Watson’s chronicles of the world’s first consulting detective to end with the comforting knowledge that all can be explained; there is no darkness too deep to be illuminated by the light of intellect and reason.
But what if . . .
What if Holmes and Watson were to be confronted by things outside the realm of human experience? What if the inconceivable proved to be true? What if there were places, entities, concepts in the cosmos that man not only did not, but could not, understand?
The “Cthulhu Mythos” cycle of H. P. Lovecraft is only a shade behind that of the Holmes canon in the number of adaptations and works that it has influenced. Ever since Lovecraft postulated the existence of Arkham, the Necronomicon, and the Great Old Ones in the pages of Weird Tales, scores of other writers have been inspired to compose their own visions of his outré mythology. The Mythos implies that the reality we know is narrow and constricted—that lurking just beyond the boundaries of sanity are beings of vast power and malice that ruled this world before mankind, and that intend to do so again. What strange events were caused by these powerful alien entities in the twilight days of the nineteenth century? How might the Great Detective fare as humanity’s defender against beings of incalculable knowledge and might?
We asked eighteen of today’s best mystery, fantasy, and science-fiction writers these questions. The answers are to be found in this book, which is the first such authorized by the Doyle Estate in many years. You may see slight differences in each author’s perception of the characters. This is to be expected; we all, (as the Great Detective himself would attest) observe things a bit differently. We trust that ardent Holmesians will find no discrepancies in the chronology presented here. Are these tales all to be considered part of the official canon or merely loving tributes from modern scriveners? That’s for you, the reader, to decide.
From the Far East to New York City to Holmes’s own London, a new and terrifying game is afoot. Sherlock Holmes and his allies have had lengthy experience in confronting the mysterious and the unusual; now they must confront the unknowable and the unspeakable . . .
Here, then, is the world prophesied by the mad Arab Abdul al-Hazred as seen through the eyes of Dr. John H. Watson, Irene Adler, Professor James Moriarty, and others. From Watson’s earliest adventures in Afghanistan to reminiscences written during the Great War after both men had retired, these stories are glimpses of a world where the impossible is real and terrifying.
Strange shadows lengthen over Baker Street, and in R’lyeh dead Cthulhu is stirring . . .
John Pelan and Michael Reaves
Seattle and Los Angeles, 2002
A Study in Emerald
NEIL GAIMAN
1. THE NEW FRIEND
Fresh from Their Stupendous European Tour, where they performed before several of the CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE, garnering their plaudits and praise with magnificent dramatic performances, combining both COMEDY and TRAGEDY, the Strand Players wish to make it known that they shall be appearing at the Royal Court Theatre, Drury Lane, for a LIMITED ENGAGEMENT in April, at which they will present “My Look-Alike Brother Tom!” “The Littlest Violet-Seller” and “The Great Old Ones Come” (this last an Historical Epic of Pageantry and Delight); each an entire play in one act! Tickets are available now from the Box Office.
It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.
But I am wool-gathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.
I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive”; that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.
“Astonishing,” I said.
“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab coat who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave folk, tortured.”
Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.
The gods and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the ––th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness, then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.
I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.
That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leechlike mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog white, into the skin of my now-withered shoulder. I had once been a crack shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world-beneath-the-world akin to panic, which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a hansom cab rather than a penny to travel underground.
Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.
“I scream in the night,” I told him.
“I have been told that I snore,” he said. “Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private, and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”
I smiled and shook my head and extended my hand. We shook on it.
The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveler, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors; many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied.
He was a mystery to me.
We were partaking of one of our landlady’s magnificent breakfasts one morning when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. “There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes,” he said. “We will need another place at table.”
“Very good,” she said, “I’ll put more sausages under the grill.”
My friend returned to perusing his morning paper. I waited for an explanation with growing impatience. Finally, I could stand it no longer. “I don’t understand. How could you know that in four minutes we would be receiving a visitor? There was no telegram, no message of any kind.”
He smiled thinly. “You did not hear the clatter of a brougham several minutes ago? It slowed as it passed us—obviously as the driver identified our door—then it sped up and went past, up into the Marylebone Road. There is a crush of carriages and taxicabs letting off passengers at the railway station and at the waxworks, and it is in that crush that anyone wishing to alight without being observed will go. The walk from there to here is but four minutes . . .”
He glanced at his pocket watch, and as he did so I heard a tread on the stairs outside.
“Come in, Lestrade,” he called. “The door is ajar, and your sausages are just coming out from under the grill.”
A man I took to be Lestrade opened the door, then closed it carefully behind him. “I should not,” he said. “But truth to tell, I have not had a chance to break my fast this morning. And I could certainly do justice to a few of those sausages.” He was the small man I had observed on several occasions previously, whose demeanor was that of a traveler in rubber novelties or patent nostrums.
My friend waited until our landlady had left the room before he said, “Obviously, I take it this is a matter of national importance.”
“My stars,” said Lestrade, and he paled. “Surely the word cannot be out already. Tell me it is not.” He began to pile his plate high with sausages, kipper fillets, kedgeree, and toast, but his hands shook a little.
“Of course not,” said my friend. “I know the squeak of your brougham wheels, though, after all this time: an oscillating G-sharp above high C. And if Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard cannot publicly be seen to come into the parlor of London’s only consulting detective, yet comes anyway, and without having had his breakfast, then I know that this is not a routine case. Ergo, it involves those above us and is a matter of national importance.”
Lestrade dabbed egg yolk from his chin with his napkin. I stared at him. He did not look like my idea of a police inspector, but then, my friend looked little enough like my idea of a consulting detective—whatever that might be.
“Perhaps we should discuss the matter privately,” Lestrade said, glancing at me.
My friend began to smile impishly, and his head moved on his shoulders as it did when he was enjoying a private joke. “Nonsense,” he said. “Two heads are better than one. And what is said to one of us is said to us both.”
“If I am intruding—” I said gruffly, but he motioned me to silence.
Lestrade shrugged. “It’s all the same to me,” he said, after a moment. “If you solve the case, then I have my job. If you don’t, then I have no job. You use your methods, that’s what I say. It can’t make things any worse.”
“If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend. “When do we go to Shoreditch?”
Lestrade dropped his fork. “This is too bad!” he exclaimed. “Here you are, making sport of me, when you know all about the matter! You should be ashamed—”
“No one has told me anything of the matter. When a police inspector walks into my room with fresh splashes of mud of that peculiar yellow hue on his boots and trouser legs, I can surely be forgiven for presuming that he has recently walked past the diggings at Hobbs Lane in Shoreditch, which is the only place in London that particular mustard-colored clay seems to be found.”
Inspector Lestrade looked embarrassed. “Now you put it like that,” he said, “it seems so obvious.”
My friend pushed his plate away from him. “Of course it does,” he said, slightly testily.
We rode to the East End in a cab. Inspector Lestrade had walked up to the Marylebone Road to find his brougham, and left us alone.
“So you are truly a consulting detective?” I said.
“The only one in London, or perhaps the world,” said my friend. “I do not take cases. Instead, I consult. Others bring me their insoluble problems, they describe them, and, sometimes, I solve them.”
“Then those people who come to you . . .”
“Are, in the main, police officers, or are detectives themselves, yes.”
It was a fine morning, but we were now jolting about the edges of the Rookery of St. Giles, that warren of thieves and cutthroats which sits on London like a cancer on the face of a pretty flower seller, and the only light to enter the cab was dim and faint.
“Are you sure that you wish me along with you?”
In reply, my friend stared at me without blinking. “I have a feeling,” he said. “I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes. I want you with me.”
I blushed, or said something meaningless. For the first time since Afghanistan, I felt that I had worth in the world.
2. THE ROOM
Victor’s “Vitae”! An electrical fluid! Do your limbs and nether regions lack life? Do you look back on the days of your youth with envy? Are the pleasures of
the flesh now buried and forgot? Victor’s “Vitae” will bring life where life has long been lost: even the oldest warhorse can be a proud stallion once more! Bringing Life to the Dead: from an old family recipe and the best of modern science. To receive signed attestations of the efficacy of Victor’s “Vitae” write to the V. von F. Company, 1b Cheap Street, London.
It was a cheap rooming house in Shoreditch. There was a policeman at the front door. Lestrade greeted him by name and made to usher us in, but my friend squatted on the doorstep and pulled a magnifying glass from his coat pocket. He examined the mud on the wrought-iron boot scraper, prodding at it with his forefinger. Only when he was satisfied would he let us go inside.
We walked upstairs. The room in which the crime had been committed was obvious: it was flanked by two burly constables.
Lestrade nodded to the men, and they stood aside. We walked in.
I am not, as I said, a writer by profession, and I hesitate to describe that place, knowing that my words cannot do it justice. Still, I have begun this narrative, and I fear I must continue. A murder had been committed in that little bedsit. The body, what was left of it, was still there on the floor. I saw it, but at first, somehow, I did not see it. What I saw instead was what had sprayed and gushed from the throat and chest of the victim: in color it ranged from bile green to grass green. It had soaked into the threadbare carpet and spattered the wallpaper. I imagined it for one moment the work of some hellish artist who had decided to create a study in emerald.
After what seemed like a hundred years I looked down at the body, opened like a rabbit on a butcher’s slab, and tried to make sense of what I saw. I removed my hat, and my friend did the same.
He knelt and inspected the body, examining the cuts and gashes. Then he pulled out his magnifying glass and walked over to the wall, investigating the gouts of drying ichor.
“We’ve already done that,” said Inspector Lestrade.