Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Jeff Campbell

  “Would they not have taken great care to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves?” Another pause, much shorter than the first. “Their emotions concerning the matter are that strong, then?” Pause. “But is there any reason to suppose their accusations of miscegenation to be well founded?” Pause. “And Brouwer paid for that with his life!”

  To my ears this one-sided exchange was devoid of any meaning. Nonetheless, hearing it served to heighten a fear that had been mounting for some days. Since his dramatic return from the supposed dead that Spring, Holmes had been pushing himself beyond the limits of normal human physical and mental endurance. His days consisted of repeated bursts of frenetic activity, and he appeared not to sleep at night. He ate little and even then at most irregular hours. His features were contorted in a permanent expression of anxiety, and his eyes stared wildly from their sockets. Several times in the past week I had observed him injecting himself from a hypodermic needle. Even his iron constitution could take only so much of such mistreatment, and I had begun to fear that, once again, he might be on the cusp of a breakdown. Now my worst fears seemed to be borne out. But the next morning when I taxed Holmes with the fruits of my nocturnal observations and my deep concern for his health and sanity, his response baffled me even further.

  “Watson, I believe you are well acquainted with a fellow medical man of some repute here in London who is an eye specialist, of Irish heritage but trained in Edinburgh and familiar with ophthalmic practices on the Continent. I now desire to consult him on a professional matter. Would you be so kind as to request such a meeting for me?”

  “Of course, Holmes, but I should tell you that he put aside medical practice a few years ago to devote himself to writing historical novels. Perhaps I should arrange a meeting with another ophthalmological surgeon instead, one active in the field?”

  “I would prefer the original, Watson. We had a brief chat at a social function once, and I was impressed with his clear-headedness and brisk intelligence on matters other than his specialty.”

  “Can you give me some indication of the subject matter. He is bound to ask.”

  My friend said he had been reading about the study of the blood vessels and light receptors at the back of the eye, work that had begun more than a half century ago, and made rapid strides recently with advances in the capabilities of dark-field microscopes and in photography. He believed this scientific technique could yield a means of identifying people by their eye patterns, a potentially invaluable tool in the investigation of crime, and he was considering a monograph on this subject.

  I dispatched a telegram to South Norwood, home to my medical colleague turned author. He replied instantly that he was pleased to give time to the world’s greatest consulting detective, and the meeting was arranged for the following day.

  When Holmes returned to our rooms, he was a changed man. If anything he appeared even more drawn and fatigued but now his features were in repose and his eyes stared no longer. He sank into the basket chair and, after charging his pipe, spoke: “Watson, I fear that I have not been entirely open with you, but I beg you for the sake of our long friendship to hear my defence of this deceit. I also urge you to keep an open mind concerning what I am about to tell you. I ask you to remember that you have professed to regard me, despite some minor personal foibles, as a man of sound moral character and the highest degree of rationality.”

  After this astonishing preamble and without waiting for my response, Holmes proceeded to unfold a tale, the telling of which here will, I believe, explain my decision to delay publication for so long. He began by revealing that he had not gone to the former ophthalmologist to pursue the identification of criminals by retinal scans, but instead to discuss communication with the dead.

  “Holmes, even broaching such a subject is unbecoming in a man of your intellect and reputation for strict ratiocination ,” I protested.

  “As you know, my dear Doctor, I have often compared my reasoning in these recondite matters that come my way to the approach of a serious historian like Macaulay. Using indications culled from various documents, he recreates a picture of a time, a place and the great actors who shaped events. In my own way, using observations of everything from a woman’s spatulate fingers to traces of clay on a shoe, I construct an imaginary picture of how a crime was committed and by whom.

  “So I have no patience with accounts of table-rapping, messages spelled out using Ouija boards, emissions of ectoplasm, or other instances of spirits being able to communicate only through mediums and then only imprecisely. I am also convinced that the spirits of the departed would have neither the desire nor the ability to project some sort of physical presence. Surely projecting an intellectual presence would suffice, especially when communicating with a powerful and attuned mind.”

  That was precisely the possibility Holmes had explored in his visit to the author and former ophthalmologist, who turned out to be well studied in spiritualism. But what had prompted this interest, I asked, as my bewilderment and anxiety increased. In silent answer he extracted a newspaper clipping from his pocketbook and handed it to me.

  A shocking discovery was made late last night by members of the River Police from the new Blackwall Station. A police launch, on patrol in the Thames, came upon the body of a man floating in the water at the entrance to Blackwall Basin. Although the body was already partly decomposed, papers in an oil skin pouch identified the unfortunate soul as Jan Brouwer, the First Officer of the steamship Friesland out of Rotterdam which tied up at the West India Docks here only days ago. Because there were no signs of violence upon the body, the authorities are treating the death as the type of misadventure that is sadly all too common along a waterfront populated by establishments where sea-going men are encouraged to consume excessive amounts of alcohol.

  “That is very regrettable, to be sure. But I fail to see anything that would lead anyone to a belief that the spirits of the departed could communicate with us, either corporeally or by intellect alone,” I said with some asperity.

  “Of course you are correct, Watson, that the newspaper account by itself contains no obvious indication that spiritualism plays any part in this unfortunate incident. Yet when I read about Brouwer’s death I experienced a reaction that has happened to me only twice before. Somehow I knew there was more to this tragedy than met the eye.”

  Spurred by what he frankly admitted to be nothing more than a non-rational ‘intuition,’ Holmes had hurried to the police and was fortunate to find the case in the charge of an old acquaintance, McFarlane. He observed at once that the police examination had overlooked the absence of discoloration around the mouth common in drowning. With McFarlane’s approval he was able to open Brouwer’s chest cavity.

  “The incompetence of the police is quite astounding, Watson. There was no water in Brouwer’s lungs. The man was dead before his body went into the river. With that knowledge I examined the body closely and discovered that he had suffered a blow to the head, not enough to break the skin but almost certainly sufficient to render him senseless. As well, his eyes betrayed tell-tale sign of asphyxiation, and inside his nostrils I detected several small fibres of wool. From this evidence I concluded that the poor man had been smothered after being knocked unconscious, quite possibly with a cap held fast over his mouth and nose.

  “I left the morgue convinced that Brouwer’s death was the result of an assault, almost certainly premeditated, and therefore murder. But I had no client, no particular reason to place the investigation of this commonplace crime above the others on which I am engaged, and so I resolved to simply forget about it.

  “But here’s the rub, Watson. I couldn’t banish Brouwer’s tragedy from my thoughts. No matter how much I willed it otherwise, my mind returned constantly to that subject throughout the day. I began wondering whether I was suffering from a malignant brain fever brought on by overwork. Then that night, sitting in this chair, I heard a voice.”

  “Sherlock Holmes hearing voices!” I ejacu
lated. “My good friend, why did you not confide in me immediately?”

  “If I myself had begun to doubt my own mental stability, my dear doctor, I could well imagine how you would have responded. Until now I had always insisted there were no such things as spirits and ridiculed anyone who believed in them. Yet you see me before you today apparently rational and sane, so I implore you to listen to the rest of my tale.”

  Of all the stories I had heard in that sitting room over many years, the one that Holmes told that evening was the most astonishing, and it was but the first act of the even more astonishing drama that was to follow shortly and which nearly cost us our lives.

  The first phrase that my friend heard urgently repeated by that spectral voice was chilling. “Brouwer was murdered by the same men who murdered me,” Holmes quoted.

  “I tried to ask questions, but I had no more success at first than Hamlet and his colleagues when they were addressing the ghost on the battlements of Elsinore,” Holmes said. “Then abruptly the voice varied its refrain.

  “‘Brouwer was murdered by the same men who murdered me, John Openshaw.’”

  Holmes said that he almost bit through the stem of his pipe in astonishment. As contemporary readers of my writings would have known then (and possibly readers of this account will still recall) Openshaw was a young man who sought Holmes’ help when threatened by former members of the Ku Klux Klan. They believed he had custody of family papers implicating them and some now-prominent Southerners in criminal activities in the years after the American Civil War. My friend had outlined a course of action that might have placated the KKK, but Openshaw was fatally assaulted and dumped into the Thames that very evening. As I recounted at the time, this had a profound effect on Holmes, who vowed to make retribution for Openshaw’s murder a personal crusade, saying:

  “If God sends me health, I shall set my hand upon this gang. That he should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his death—!”

  Within the day, by making full use of his remarkable deductive and reasoning powers, Holmes had identified Openshaw’s killers. They were the captain and two other crew members of the barque Lone Star out of Savannah in the state of Georgia. That very morning the ship had sailed for America, but Holmes instantly put into motion a plan that would guarantee the three murderers were brought back to London to stand trial. Alas, that never happened. A shattered sternpost carved with the initials “L. S.” was spotted far out in the Atlantic, and the barque and all aboard her were presumed to have perished in a fierce equinoctial gale.

  “But in fact the barque did not founder in the storm. Openshaw explained that to me, once we began talking freely. That and very much more,” declared Holmes.

  I regarded my friend closely. It was obvious that he was in deadly earnest and not deceiving me with some cunning stratagem, as when he led me a few years previously to believe he was dying from a nameless ‘coolie disease from Sumatra’. I decided to remain silent, although harboring grave misgivings about where the conversation was leading. Holmes may have sensed my unease, for he begun speaking more and more rapidly, rushing through the next part of his story.

  To his astonishment and relief, Holmes had found this supposed spirit of John Openshaw bore him no malice and was not seeking revenge for having been so casually sent to his death. Against the three KKK members, however, he was set on deadly retribution. For that reason his spectral form had joined the Lone Star before it quit the Albert Dock.

  “Openshaw told me that what did founder in those dreadful gales was the mail-boat carrying my letter to the American authorities laying out the case for a charge of murder against the three men. The faster mail-boat had overtaken the barque before the storm struck, and the bag containing that note was among the wreckage recovered by the Lone Star. Hoping for negotiables or even currency, the KKK murderers opened all the envelopes and thus discovered that their crime was to be exposed.

  “As I remarked at the time, they are cunning devils. Openshaw told me how they dumped overboard the sternpost and some other fittings to make it appear that their own ship had sunk with all hands. Then they put into a port in the Caribbean, paid off the Finns and Germans who made up the rest of the crew, changed the name of the ship and sold it.”

  Seldom pausing even to draw breath, Holmes continued with this remarkable tale of what he had learned from a bodiless spirit. The three men signed on to a Dutch steamer called the Friesland, where the ringleader, James Calhoun, was quickly appointed Second Officer on the basis of having his captain’s papers. The Friesland had called at London several times in the intervening years, but Openshaw had not been able to contact Holmes anywhere in London using mental projection.

  “Of course, he had no way of knowing that I, too, was then deceased,” Holmes said with what sounded suspiciously like a chuckle.

  Finally, there arrived the necessary confluence, with the Friesland, the three murderers, the spirit of Openshaw and a very much alive Sherlock Holmes all present in the great metropolis at the same time. Before Openshaw could attempt to penetrate the consciousness of the master detective, however, fate once again intervened. The First Officer had resigned when the Friesland docked. Calhoun confidently expected to be promoted, but was pipped at the post by one Jan Brouwer, whose father was a significant investor in the shipping line and a prominent planter in the Dutch Antilles. While some resentment on Calhoun’s part was perhaps understandable, his animosity toward Brouwer escalated into pathological hatred after hearing a rumor of Negro blood in the Dutchman’s family several generations back. Aided by his two KKK companions on the Friesland, he staged a repetition of the murderous attack on John Openshaw seven years previously. All this was witnessed by Openshaw’s spirit.

  As my companion finally paused for breath, I testily interjected. “Holmes, do you honestly believe in the existence of spirits and credit what one of them supposedly tells you as a true account of events?”

  “Pray keep your mind open just a short time longer, my dear doctor. Initially, as you might imagine, I was distrustful and convinced that I was suffering from what Shakespeare called ‘paper bullets of the brain.’ I was also concerned that Openshaw, if indeed this spirit was a true manifestation of the man, must bear me some ill will for the cavalier treatment he suffered at my hands. That second fear evaporated as we talked at length over the course of several nights. I feel more attuned to him now than to any other person, save yourself of course.”

  At this juncture Holmes shot me a bemused glance. “Indeed, you may have gathered that much from your covert overhearing of our most recent nocturnal consultation.”

  “The concern about my mental state I addressed by my visit to your medical colleague in South Norwood. You may not be aware that he is a member of the Society for Psychical Research and also, most importantly, a man of science utterly devoted to the supremacy of rationality. He assured me that communication with the departed has been scientifically documented in a number of cases. As well, it is widely believed among psychical researchers that communication from spirits is the basis for what we sometimes term intuition. That would certainly help explain my actions the day I learned of Brouwer’s death.”

  Here Holmes came to a stop and arched his eyebrows at me in obvious inquisition. Reluctantly I responded.

  “I remain far from convinced of the existence of either an afterlife or of spirits of the dead who communicate with the living. All you have told me so far could be explained as the workings of your own mind pulling together items, as you said earlier, to construct an imaginary picture of how a crime was committed and by whom.”

  “A hit, a palpable hit, Watson. And it is because of the risk of real hits that I entreat you, on the basis of our long friendship, to set aside these doubts for the moment and join me in the investigations I must undertake to keep faith with John Openshaw. I have reason to believe these may involve serious physical danger, and I would be far more comfortable with you beside me, armed with your service rev
olver.”

  I immediately assured Holmes that he could rely on me, for indeed I could not possibly have declined such an appeal. He explained the need for quick action, since the Friesland would undoubtedly leave port once new cargo was loaded. A quick journey in a hansom cab had us climbing that ship’s gangway within the hour. The captain, a stolid Karl Neustaedter, was most co-operative. He took pains to emphasize that Brouwer had been appointed First Officer on the basis of merit, not family connections. They had sailed together previously on another ship where Brouwer had been a conscientious and more than competent Second Officer. He had upgraded his qualifications since, and the captain had been pleased to find him available in London on such short notice.

  “Have you signed on another First Officer then?” I asked.

  “Mr. Calhoun has been named to that position on a probationary basis. It was obvious from the start that he expected to get the post, but I had misgivings about his close friendship with the two other Americans aboard. Any suspicion of favoritism would have quickly created tensions and resentment among the rest of the crew, who mostly hail from Asia. I am trusting that Mr. Calhoun will keep a check on his deplorable tendency to disparage anyone not of the white race. But here he comes now.”

  The man who approached had skin that shone like burnished mahogany, made the more striking by a white goatee and the blazing white of a dress uniform.

  “Request permission to go ashore, Captain. I need to complete arrangements for Brouwer’s service and burial tomorrow.”

  “Of course, Mr. Calhoun. But first these two gentlemen were wanting a word with you about Mr. Brouwer’s mishap. Let me introduce the famous detective Sherlock Holmes and his colleague Dr. Watson.”

  Betraying no surprise, the First Officer spoke even before we had finished shaking hands. “I’m right pleased to make your acquaintance, gentlemen, and am willing to give you whatever time is needed for your inquiries. But the undertaker is even now expecting my arrival. Would it be possible for you to return this evening, say at two bells of the first watch, when we could talk at our leisure?”