“Of course, there is an alternative, gentlemen,” came a clear voice. We looked up and saw Holmes standing in the doorway.
Gregson shook Holmes’ hand warmly. “Glad to see you, sir. You have a theory, already?”
“Not one theory as yet, Gregson, for I have in fact conceived of eight workable hypotheses based on the facts as I know them from your men outside and my first glance about this room. However, I am optimistic that I can eliminate several with a proper examination of this scene,” said Holmes.
Holmes examined the quiver, he pulled a lens from his inside coat pocket to look at its entire surface, and then he carefully studied the remainder of the arrows. He then looked carefully at the dead man, paying particular attention to the scalp of the deceased, especially at the back of the head. He sniffed at the remains of a cup of tea found on a side-table, and then performed a number of calculations in a notebook drawn from his pocket. He clucked and looked around the room. From out of another pocket he drew a long-stemmed pipe and idly tapped it against his leg. Having replaced the pipe, he stood near the centre of the room and slowly turned around in a perfect circle; I could see he was surveying the room again, but particularly the shelving, until at one moment he paused — staring, his eyes darting back and forth over the rows of books — I followed his gaze intently hoping to see a volume recently displaced or some other item out of the ordinary, but all seemed in perfect order and no different to any other shelf.
But it was clear Holmes saw something I did not, and he was quite aware that both Gregson and I were scrutinizing him. He darted forward to the book case and, professorially, held up a hand.
“Note, if you will, that although this room is relatively free from dust — indicating it is regularly cleaned — that on this shelf, and this shelf alone, there is a great streak of dust — five furrowed streaks of dust, in fact. What does this suggest?”
I looked to where Holmes pointed. “Why, that could be a dusty hand-mark.” I exclaimed. I felt a weird queasiness as I said it for I had earlier examined the shelf myself and seen nothing of the print in the dust.
“Indeed,” said Holmes, “as if someone were firmly grasping the edge of the shelf while they exerted some effort to pull free one of the books tightly placed there, correct?”
“Yes, that is feasible,” I said, and noticed Gregson nodding in accord.
“My, how we can see without properly observing!” Holmes then said triumphantly. He grasped the shelf where the dust-mark was and pulled whilst holding in a knot of wood. There was a clicking sound followed by a creak and Holmes suddenly pulled an entire section of book case from the wall to reveal a hidden doorway and some sort of descending stair case!
Words were limited to exclamations of amazement as we swiftly followed Holmes down, below the building, and through what appeared to be some sort of sewer tunnelling that finally terminated after coming up through an empty cellar doorway behind a public house around the corner.
Holmes immediately saw an empty cab-stand across the street and sprinted over to an adjacent newspaper seller’s box, where he engaged the lad in a quick exchange and contributed lavishly to the boy’s takings for the day.
“We are in luck, the boy saw our man and he knows the cabbie who picked him up quite well; they often chat when things are slow. His name is Charles Netley. His number is 522.”
Gregson beamed. “Right-o. I’ll arrange for Mr. Netley to be interviewed and we’ll soon have the address to which this fellow was delivered. Would you like to come along for that part of the investigation, Mr. Holmes, Doctor?”
Holmes rubbed his hands together briskly, and agreed that we would.
Holmes and I were dining at Simpson’s some hours later when an officer from Scotland Yard interrupted us to advise that Inspector Gregson had news of the case. We immediately abandoned our meal and after paying our surprised hosts we headed off in a Scotland Yard-arranged carriage. It was not long before we reached a quiet street in Camden and alighted to find our friend the Inspector surreptitiously watching a particular house.
“Gentleman, a week ago that house was let to a fellow who arrived with a large selection of items bound for the British Museum. The Museum had paid a small fortune for these acquisitions and was planning a major exhibit about them.
Holmes surprised me again by adding to Gregson’s information. “Yes, Inspector, and an anonymous letter was received by the head of Collections that the bulk of the material was not authentic, that what had been examined in Cairo was carefully substituted en route to England, and the real artifacts were in fact being shown to French Museum officials next week — this was part of a systematic stratagem to sell worthless copies that the Museums would be far too embarrassed to publicly admit they had been cheated, or so I’ve been advised by my Baker Street Irregulars.”
I was astonished. I had been with Holmes all day and his ability to progress a case whilst scratching a violin or smoking a pipe was as marked as ever. I had seen him go to the door once and take a note from a street urchin, but had not inquired what it meant at the time.
Gregson nodded. “The culprit is in that house, I am sure you are right, but let us be clear, gentlemen, this is a ruthless, ambitious man. The fact he knew the location of Pethebridge’s secret exit-way suggests that he knew of its existence beforehand, and that tells me that Pethebridge was likely his accomplice.”
Holmes clapped the inspector on the shoulder. “Yes, Pethebridge was to authenticate the fakes, not expose them, but some dispute between the two men destroyed their plan.”
We quietly approached the house. Lights were on, but no sound could be heard. Gregson and his officer went first, and knocked on the door.
Amazingly it swung open at their touch. They paused, listening, but no sound came, so with the two official men at the front the four of us entered the house.
The place was almost bereft of furnishings, save for the living room where a chair and table gave the room some sense of habitation, and a roaring fire filled the grate. On the mantelpiece, over the fire, there rested an unbroken arrow just like the one that had killed Pethebridge, and above the arrow, on the wall, hung a framed photo of a collection of soldiers and native tribesman loosely gathered around together. I studied it carefully and found myself rudely surprised. I turned to Holmes. I felt ill, I felt as if I did not know what I was talking about, but the words tumbled from my lips as if forced.
“This man in the centre, the one in local garb — Holmes, he’s the man who came looking for you this morning! Faroukhan! He is much older now, but that is him, I’m certain.”
Holmes seemed stunned. “Watson, I dare say you are right, and this bodes poorly for us. I fear that what you say means he meant me ill, that he knew I would be consulted in a case like this. Can a man this well prepared be caught off guard by such an obvious approach as we have just made? Perhaps we had better—”
There was a blood-curdling cry and I turned.
Faroukhan stood in the room with a scimitar raised before him.
He lunged at Holmes with the weapon but the detective dived for the floor. The blade followed, but was stopped by the table, and sent wood splintering in all directions. The sword-wielder turned to me, and I felt my life was to end there. He shook his head, actually looking at me with sadness, when without warning, Gregson’s pistol sounded three times, and bullets tore through Faroukhan’s neck and chest. He seemed struck with disbelief but still he clutched the sword. Again, he turned towards me, this time he did move forward, but only to collapse against me, his fingers grasping for my coat.
Faroukhan’s lips parted one last time, but only to spill frothy blood while his eyes pleaded with me. He died then, his hands so tightly locked on my shirt-front that I had to pry them free. In one was an object that I could feel before I even looked at it. I was struck with a desire to conceal it, to examine later, when the horror of this moment was behind me. I discreetly pocketed the item.
“An ugly, demented affair, ol
d fellow. The anxiety of which I should have been able to spare you, had I been less concerned with my own sense of drama,” Holmes said. “Forgive me, old friend, I am not yet used to having you at my side again.”
I did not know what to say, but there was much going through my mind. I was silent until we arrived back in Baker Street, where I then excused myself to have an early night.
Before I went to bed I looked at the triangular piece of stone that I had earlier secreted in my pocket; it was identical to the one I had found on our own mantel.
That night I slept fitfully. After struggling for several hours I arose, and in the darkness I dressed and went quietly out into the night. At first I just walked the city’s thoroughfares aimlessly, but eventually found myself standing before the empty house in Kensington that I had lived in with my wife. Although I owned it I scarce knew what to do with it and had not put it up for sale or lease. I realized, as I stood there in the dark, that I was expecting her to return at any time and allow us to step back into the home we once shared so contentedly, and I knew then, that it could never happen.
I found a cab and sent it hurrying through the night to the house where Faroukhan had dwelt. Giving the cabbie a small financial incentive I bade him wait whilst I circled the property. Finding a window at the back of the house I smashed it, unlatched the frame, raised it and climbed inside.
Having turned up the gaslight I stood in the room looking at the picture on the wall. After a few moments, or perhaps an eternity, I found the front door, went out to the cab and after giving the driver some instructions, sent him back into the city.
It was cold, so I relit the fire and waited…
Holmes arrived an hour later — I heard the cab approach and met him at the front door, letting him in, I stood watching as the cab driver drove off. Holmes looked sympathetically at me.
“Watson, I never get your limits. But one thing is doubtless, old friend, I am acutely aware of how compassionate a fellow you are. You worry about the family of this man, Faroukhan, do you not?”
I nodded. I showed him the large framed photograph which I had taken down from the wall during my vigil.
Faroukhan was many years younger, as he laughed and joked with the soldiers, but he was not the only one. I pointed to an officer in the picture, one I had not observed before, no matter how impossible, there was no mistaking the man in the back of the shot if you looked closely enough. It was myself in uniform, one of the optimistic souls in a dirty war in a strange land, where friends were few.
Holmes nodded. “He had been friendly to you and the rest of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, had he not? You considered him a man whose reports from enemy lines had saved you all from a horrible death — the man who had got word the enemy was coming and enabled you all to break camp and escape before an attack came, is that not so?”
“Yes,” I said. “He was a man who believed that he had shared an honor with us, one that would last beyond the day we ever saw each other again, and it was largely due to me. When I had arrived in his village I had treated his niece and saved her from an agonizing fever, succeeding more by luck than any of the limited medical supplies I had to hand. He swore an oath promising a bond to me from that day onwards.”
“Yes,” said Holmes. “So how did this obligation come to be twisted into such evil intent? What misfortune befell this poor, superstitious fellow that turned him against you so?”
“I suppose that is the explanation — of course.” I said. I sighed, exhaustedly, and bent over a little, steadying myself on the nearby armchair. “I think I have punished myself enough, Holmes, would you help me hang the photo back up again?”
Holmes clapped me on the back softly and then turned to heft the picture. “Rest easy, old friend, it shall take me but a moment.”
With both his hands full and the picture partially obscuring his view of me, Holmes could not see me pull, from inside my coat, the last of the bronze arrows, where I had hidden it by tearing a hole in the lining. Using both hands, and all the strength I could muster, I plunged the arrow into my friend’s chest.
Instantly he dropped the picture and screamed. One of his hands flailed out at me, catching me on the face. My nose was smashed and I actually heard the cartilage break a moment before blood began to gout from it. I instinctively jumped as far back from Holmes as possible in my state, and watched him slowly sink to his knees, blood spurting from his chest, his arms jerking like some strange puppet.
He slumped to the floor, then onto his side and was screeching as he struggled, weakly, to pluck the arrow from his chest. The ichor that flowed from the wound and down his shirt-front, was no longer red, but was changing even as I watched, turning as black as his eyes. Finally, only one hand tugged uselessly at the arrow imbedded in his body. The other began to scratch the floorboards, effortlessly digging deep furrows in the hard, smooth surface. It was clear there was terrific strength in that form, but thankfully it could do nothing against the enchantment of the arrow.
Then, Holmes began to spasm and twitch; the heels of his shoes beating an awful tattoo on the floor. He began to weep but only briefly, soon he was silent, simply twisting and jerking like a landed fish breathing its last.
He looked at me. I shuddered, for the hatred I saw in those coal-black eyes was incalculable; it was the fierce burning hatred of one natural enemy for another.
Then, Holmes finally died. His body began to change, to warp and take on a different hue, his hands knotting and twisting as if suddenly desiccated by years of age. What he became was a creature that only resembled a man in base configuration, but this was no man, of any kind. Blue-skinned, blue as a corpse, its skin was more a lumped and pitted hide. The limbs were much, much longer than Holmes’ had been and now stuck out in an ungainly fashion from the sleeves and trousers of the clothes it had adopted. The hands were six-fingered, without nails and like the roots of plants, long and gnarled; the feet seemed equally distended, lying slack within Holmes’ boots.
The thing’s face was just as abnormal. A large, narrow head with a gigantic jawbone and a cranium that extended backwards, the creature looked like some nightmare version of a primitive man, heavy brow-ridge and bulging eyes combined with an over-sized mouth, full of protruding, tusk-like, teeth … the face on the triangular stone.
I collapsed on to a chair and waited in that room for hours, too horror-struck, too filled with shame and loathing, to do anything. Finally, the sun’s rays began to creep into the chamber, and I took to my feet. The natural light, the friend of we who can only pretend to have made this planet our kingdom, gave me courage, and the spell that had afflicted me for so many years was completely lifted from my weary shoulders.
I remembered all. I recalled how I had lain in a ditch in Afghanistan, my body afire with the wounds I had sustained, begging, screaming for Death to come, and crying out to the gods of that strange land to grant me mercy. Death had not come, but instead this djinn appeared, this awful, parasitic creature of antiquity. When it had leant over me and whispered to me in a language I ought not to have understood, I had no will to deny it. It reached into my mind and plucked out my most naïve and childish desires, fuelled by the discontent I had at being a failed medical practitioner, and had asked me whether I would like to have not only my life saved, but my fondest wishes fulfilled, to forever be known as man of courage and heroism, who would be renowned through my homeland as a vanquisher of evil, I said yes! In that moment I would have agreed to far worse. The demon smiled a ghastly smile, pressed an odd triangular piece of carved stone into my upturned palm, and then disappeared as suddenly as he had come.
And so it was that I found myself miraculously rescued by Murray and, with my health broken, returned to England. Once there, young Stamford, in some weird trance, had come to my flea-ridden hovel and taken me to Bart’s hospital where I had descended, as if in a dream, to the morgue, where Holmes appeared like some spectre amongst the cadavers — an event I later glamorized when I wrote
of it. I was to change many a weird event in the next several years as the foul thing performed its work. I suspect the creature had actually created its body, its form, from the cadaver of some poor lost soul lying in Bart’s, some nameless, hapless victim of disease or accident.
So began the years in Baker Street, where my mind and body were put into a strange servitude. The creature would prowl the streets of London, and sometimes, the country-side much farther afield, wreaking terrible murder and misfortune, and then concocting the most perfect, yet utterly fantastic scenarios that would explain the outrages, even affecting the minds of the very victims and witnesses; condemning many a man and woman to imprisonment or even the gallows. At times the creature was content to actually solve genuine crimes, its ability to partially glimpse men’s thoughts made that a simple matter, but it had a perverse sense of drama, and so created strange means of homicide and assault that defied reality but fuelled the fantasy. The speckled-band — that never-before heard of swamp adder that killed the Stoner girl; the impossible serum that transformed Professor Presbury into a creeping man; the impossibly agile, dart-throwing dwarf assassin at Pondicherry Lodge; the chemically irreproducible Devil’s Foot narcotic that slew a room of people instantly; all these were some of the terrible instruments of death that the djinn had conjured into being by sheer force of will, as plot elements in its cavalcade of murder and depravity. All done just so that Holmes and myself could triumphantly appear on stage to explicate and bring down the final curtain with a solution only we could furnish.
A solution I would then write of … for the adulation of millions.
My wife knew, of course. I don’t know how long it took for her to see through the veil of Holmes’ inhumanity, but she knew he was not what he seemed, but she was careful, she never challenged him directly; I am sure such action would have been fatal. No, Mary simply asked me to make a choice, as I had made a choice on that bleak battlefield years before, shivering with pain and ague. I wanted her to stay, but I could not admit why she was really leaving, so ultimately I let her go, because I was weak, I still wanted this life of fame, this life of international acclaim, as a stalwart of justice, and crusader against the wicked.
Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes Page 6