Brittle rapping startled him. Turning sharply, he saw a constable frowning through a window.
Conan Doyle opened the door.
“Unusual to see you at this late an hour, Sir Arthur.” The constable peered into the shop, straining to see its back corners. “Is everything all right?”
“Perfectly. I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to come here and catch up on some work.” It had been more than four decades since Conan Doyle left Edinburgh, and yet his Scottish burr remained thick.
“You’re certain nothing’s wrong?” the constable persisted.
“Absolutely. Thank you for your concern.”
The constable gave him a troubled nod, seeming baffled about why one of the most revered authors in Great Britain was wasting his time in this strange shop and why he now lived in a small flat just down the street rather than at one of his large country houses.
Only when Conan Doyle closed and locked the door did the constable continue along the misty street, his footsteps receding.
Stillness again enveloped the shop.
Of course, everything was definitely not all right, but what troubled Conan Doyle wasn’t anything that a constable could correct.
He faced the first display that patrons saw when they entered—not that the shop enjoyed many patrons. Conan Doyle’s name was featured prominently above titles that he’d spent much of the past ten years writing but that hardly anyone wanted to read: The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, The Coming of the Faeries, The Case for Spirit Photography, The New Revelation, The Vital Message, and The History of Spiritualism.
No preposterous fictions here. No supercilious Sherlock Holmes, who solved improbable mysteries about homicidal hounds and trained serpents. No fawning Watson, who was so befuddled that he should never have been allowed to acquire a medical degree. To the contrary, these particular books contained the truth, and yet the world didn’t care. Visitors didn’t even need to buy these books. They could borrow them. It didn’t help. Nor did Conan Doyle’s exhausting lecture tours throughout the United Kingdom and around the world—to the United States, Canada, France, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. People came to hear him only because they wanted to know why a man whose name was associated with Sherlock Holmes couldn’t stop talking about ghosts and faeries.
The floor creaked as Conan Doyle walked toward the rear of the shop. His shoulders were so broad that he needed to shift sideways between rows of bookshelves. He came to murky stairs, their wood protesting as he descended toward the dark basement.
At the bottom, a damp chill greeted him. Emerging from an archway, he turned an electrical switch on a wall. Overhead lights chased the long room’s shadows, their glow reflecting off glass cases and framed photographs, creating an otherworldly effect. Some visitors, no matter how skeptical, might have felt uneasy and even fearful about coming down here in the middle of the night, but Conan Doyle felt comforted by the truth before him.
After all, here were photographs of actual ghosts and faeries. Here were the wax gloves of a spirit’s hands. Here were a Syrian vase, a Babylonian clay tablet, and a pile of Turkish pennies that had materialized on a séance table. Here were intricate drawings of flowers that someone under the influence of a spirit had impossibly created within seventeen seconds. Here was a brilliant seascape that a woman without any artistic training had painted while under a spirit’s influence. Here were pages of automatic writing that mediums had scribbled, responding to questions that loved ones asked and that only the departed could answer correctly.
How can anyone see these proofs, and not be convinced that the dead are capable of communicating with us? Conan Doyle wondered in despair. I need to try harder, to write more books about the afterlife, to travel to more cities and countries and give more lectures.
Seeking reassurance, he turned toward a photograph of three faeries next to a waterfall. He was reminded of a painting that his father had—
A creak of footsteps on the stairs surprised him. Had the constable returned to make certain that nothing was amiss? But how would that be possible? The front door was locked. Had someone broken into the shop? To what purpose? If hardly anyone bought or even borrowed the shop’s books, why would somebody go to the effort of stealing them as opposed to burglarizing the valuable contents of the garment shop next door?
“Who’s there?” he called.
The creak on the wooden stairs became louder as the footsteps neared the bottom.
“Mary, is that you?”
Conan Doyle’s daughter—from his first marriage—managed the shop. Perhaps she’d come here in the middle of the night to attend to a pressing detail she’d suddenly remembered.
But in that case, wouldn’t she have called out as he himself had, demanding to know who was in the shop?
Conan Doyle stepped backward when a shadow appeared at the bottom of the stairs. The shadow didn’t belong to Mary but instead to a tall, thin man emerging from the murky archway.
The man wore an Inverness cape, the grey color of which matched the figure’s intense eyes. He was perhaps thirty-five, with an ascetic face, a narrow chin, a slender nose, high cheekbones, and an intelligent forehead that was partially covered by a deerstalker hat.
The basement became damper and colder.
“My dear fellow, you’re as pale as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Sherlock Holmes said.
Conan Doyle felt a tight pain in his chest. “If you were indeed a ghost, I’d rejoice.”
Holmes surveyed the photographs of faeries, the wax gloves of a spirit, and the pages of automatic writing. “Then look joyous. You murdered me, and yet here I am: proof of what you’re looking for.”
“Proof?”
“Of life after death.”
“I’m still asleep. I never woke from my nightmare. Those fools who send me letters asking for your autograph might think you’re real, but—”
“Then how can I be standing here, talking to you? Why are you responding to me?”
“I didn’t murder you.”
“Perhaps you prefer a more delicate word such as ‘killed.’”
“You never died. When you and Moriarty grappled on the ledge, it was only he who plummeted into the Reichenbach Falls.”
“But you didn’t believe that at the time,” Holmes corrected him. “When you wrote ‘The Final Problem,’ you truly intended to get rid of me. You even bragged to your mother that you’d seen the last of me, even though your mother begged you not to do it.”
“You’d become a burden,” Conan Doyle protested. “Readers wouldn’t let me write about anyone else.”
“Ha. You earned a fortune from writing stories about me, and that’s a burden? Tell that to my Baker Street Irregulars when those little beggars are desperate for their next meal. Then eight years later, when you needed more money, you suddenly decided I wasn’t a burden after all. So you wrote another novel about me, but even then I remained dead, because you had my hound adventure occur years before you killed me. Then a magazine offered you even more money to write a story that showed I hadn’t actually died at the Reichenbach Falls, so you invented that nonsense about Moriarty falling alone while I escaped to Tibet. Tibet? Is that the best you could think of? Obviously you lacked conviction. You can’t fool readers, though. They sensed that something was amiss, that it wasn’t really I in those later stories, only someone to whom you gave my name. Certainly I’m not an aged beekeeper. As you can see, I’m still in my thirties. Ghosts don’t age.”
“Take off that blasted deerstalker hat.”
“Readers prefer it.”
“I didn’t include it in any of my stories about you.”
“But Sidney Paget had the inspiration to put it in one of his illustrations of me. Now readers imagine it when they read about me. It’s as real as if you’d written it. But if it troubles you . . .”
Holmes removed the deerstalker hat. Now that his forehead was fully exposed, it seemed even more intelligent, his receding hairline emphasizin
g the height of his brow.
He set the hat on a counter next to a photograph of wispy light in a dark room.
“Ectoplasm?” Holmes asked, referring to a placard in front of the photograph.
“The strongest evidence so far.”
“There are various types of evidence. I see that you walked in Hyde Park today, that you’re unusually troubled, and that you have limited domestic help,” Holmes said.
“Yes, yes. I’m not impressed by your parlor tricks. Remember, I invented them. There are spots of mud on my shoes and my trouser cuffs. The mud has a reddish color that’s typical of sections of Hyde Park. The mud would have been removed if I had sufficient domestic help, but at the moment, I have only the assistance of a single housekeeper: Mrs. Hudson.”
“Mrs. Hudson is my housekeeper,” Holmes reminded him.
“A slip of the tongue. Mrs. Murray. My housekeeper is named Mrs. Murray.”
“Of course. Soon you’ll have as addled a memory as you gave to dear old Watson. He can’t keep dates or names consistent from one story to the next. He can’t even keep straight how many wives he had. Two? Five? I confess that even with my superior powers of deduction, I’m unable to determine the exact number, although it’s probably two because you yourself had two. And with regard to my ‘parlor tricks,’ as you call them, you didn’t invent them. You learned them from Dr. Bell at the University of Edinburgh medical school. By the way, you didn’t ask me how I knew that you were unusually troubled.”
“Obviously because I’m here in the middle of the night.”
“I’d have known you were troubled even if we were speaking on Victoria Street at noon. You have a mark on your lower lip, where you’ve been chewing it.”
Conan Doyle raised a hand to his lip, suddenly aware of how tender it felt. “Please leave me alone. Go away and solve a mystery.”
“Solving a mystery is precisely what I’m doing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You, my dear fellow,” Holmes said. “You’re the mystery. This business about ghosts and faeries. People worry that you’re delusional.”
Conan Doyle stepped forward, clenching his fists. “Never say that to me.”
“My apologies. Kindly relax your hands. Although you were once a pugilist, that was many years ago, and if you couldn’t walk the short distance to this shop without feeling out of breath, I doubt that an altercation between us would have a successful conclusion for you, especially because I’m an expert in boxing, baritsu, and singlestick fighting. To change the subject, do you recall that Watson climbed the steps at 221B Baker Street many times before I asked him how many steps there were? He couldn’t answer the question. Together, he and I climbed the steps while we counted to seventeen. I told Watson, ‘You see, but you do not observe.’ That’s an interesting comment, given that your specialty as a physician involves diseases of the eyes.”
“I fail to see the relevance.”
Holmes pointed toward the photograph of the faeries at the waterfall. “That photograph was produced by combining two images in what is called a double exposure.”
“Prove it,” Conan Doyle demanded.
“I cannot unless I have the original two images so that I can demonstrate how the illusion was created.”
“Then you don’t know for certain. The photograph of ectoplasm that you ridiculed—”
“I did no such thing. I merely implied doubt. Were you at the séance where the ectoplasm appeared?”
“I was.”
“Did you see the ectoplasm?”
“I did not. But the medium did and told my photographer to press the shutter on his camera.”
“After the plate was removed from the camera and developed, this image appeared?” Holmes asked, pointing.
“Yes.”
“Your friend Houdini would perhaps—”
“Mr. Houdini is no longer a friend. He insulted my wife.”
“—would perhaps suggest that the medium had prepared a photographic plate beforehand and substituted it for the plate that was in the camera.”
“But our plate was marked,” Conan Doyle emphasized.
“Perhaps an assistant to the medium had the opportunity to examine the photographic plate prior to the séance and apply an identical mark on the plate that was eventually substituted.”
“‘Perhaps’ is not proof.”
“Indeed.” Holmes reached into a pocket and removed a large, curved pipe.
“I didn’t give you a calabash pipe, either,” Conan Doyle said disapprovingly.
“But the great actor, William Gillette, used it as a prop when he portrayed me on stage. It looks more dramatic than an ordinary straight pipe. Illustrators took to including it in their depictions of me. Now people imagine it whenever they think of me. It’s as real as the deerstalker hat.”
Holmes tamped shag tobacco into the bowl of the calabash.
“Do you absolutely need to? There’s no ventilation down here,” Conan Doyle objected.
“The smoke will cover the odor of the mildew.” Holmes prepared to strike a match.
“Stop. These exhibits are delicate. The smoke will damage them.”
Holmes sighed. “Very well. But I suspect that the spirits wouldn’t mind the aroma. They’re probably desperate for a puff now and then.”
“That isn’t humorous.”
“No humor intended. Convince me, my dear fellow. Why did you suddenly believe that there are spirits in an afterlife—spirits who can communicate with us?”
“I don’t expect that a man who’s obsessed with the surface of things will understand, but my belief wasn’t sudden at all. When I set up my medical practice in Southsea, near Portsmouth—”
“Southsea. Aptly named. Almost as far from Edinburgh as it’s possible to go and still remain in Great Britain,” Holmes noted.
“And your point is?”
“Just an observation. Please continue.” Holmes gestured with the unlit pipe. “When you set up your medical practice in Southsea . . .”
“I had a friend there: Henry Ball. Southsea was a bohemian community that enjoyed discussing new ideas. Mediums and séances were a popular topic. Henry and I participated in several attempts to contact the other world—table rapping, automatic writing, and so forth. We decided that since thought transference was essential to communicating with the dead, we’d conduct an experiment. He and I sat back-to-back, with pencils and notepads in our hands. He’d draw something on his pad and concentrate on it. Then I’d try to imagine what he was thinking and draw it. Neither of us had any artist’s skill. What we drew were stick figures and geometric shapes. Amazingly I often reproduced what was on Henry’s pad, and Henry did the same with regard to shapes that I had drawn.”
“Fascinating,” Holmes said. “In what year did you conduct these experiments?”
“Eighteen eighty-six.”
“When you started to write your first novel about me: A Study in Scarlet.”
“As a matter of fact, now that I think of it, yes.”
“A creative period for you. And what was your marital status at the time?”
“I married my first wife the year before, in eighteen eighty-five.” Memories of Louise, of that long-ago innocent time—his fond nickname for her had been Touie—made him pause. He shook his head. “Where are you going with this?”
“I’m merely looking for context.” Holmes shrugged and sat in a chair next to a photograph of a ghost’s head floating above a man in a doorway. “Kindly continue.”
“Because of the successful experiments that Henry and I conducted, we were motivated to go to more séances. What made the difference for me was an evening when a medium spoke in several voices and then wrote frantically on a notepad, referring to me as a healer. But I hadn’t been introduced as a physician, so the medium couldn’t have known that. Then the medium astonished me by writing a note in which the spirit told me not to read Leigh Hunt’s book.”
“Why was that astonishing
?” Holmes eased back in the chair, crossing his long legs.
“I had a book by Leigh Hunt next to my bed! I was just about to start reading it. How could the medium have possibly known this?”
“Perhaps . . .”
“Perhaps what? Say what you’re thinking.”
“When you arrived for the séance, did the medium’s assistant ask you and your friend to wait in an anteroom?”
“That’s the customary procedure.”
“Perhaps the medium stood on the other side of a wall and listened to your conversation, learning personal details, repeating them later, claiming to receive this information from a spirit. Did you have any religious convictions that prepared you for your belief in a spirit world?”
“Not at all. I was raised as a Roman Catholic. When I was nine, I was sent to a Jesuit preparatory school and then a Jesuit college. All told, I spent eight years in those schools, but the only afterlife I hoped for was one in which the priests would stop beating me. No, nothing prepared me for my interest in the spirits.”
“Nine is an early age for your parents to have sent you away.”
“My family life was . . .”
“Yes?”
“It isn’t relevant,” Conan Doyle said. “My belief in the attempts of spirits to reach us was reinforced in eighteen ninety. I remember vividly that the month was November. I read an item in the British Medical Journal about a conference that was about to convene in Berlin. The subject of the conference was new ways to treat tuberculosis.”
Holmes gestured, encouraging him to proceed.
“I can’t explain the urgency that suddenly compelled me,” Conan Doyle said. “All at once, I knew that it was essential for me to go to that conference. I packed a bag and immediately departed for Germany.”
“Leaving your wife and your almost two-year-old daughter,” Holmes noted.
“That’s why my urgency is so difficult to explain,” Conan Doyle emphasized. “I had every reason to remain with my family. Earlier that year, I’d studied ophthalmology in Vienna. Then I’d moved my family to London, and suddenly I felt a desperate need to travel yet again, to go to Germany and attend a conference about a disease that wasn’t even related to my specialty. My abrupt journey didn’t make sense. But I soon understood why I’d felt the urgency.”
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes Page 11