“Now I’m the one who fails to see the relevance,” Holmes said.
“Tuberculosis. Three years later, my first wife was diagnosed with the disease. Isn’t it obvious? The spirits compelled me to learn what I could about the latest in treatments. They knew I would soon need that vital information when my wife displayed her terrible symptoms.”
“But there might be another explanation,” Holmes suggested.
“And what would that be?” Conan Doyle asked impatiently.
“You’re a physician. Perhaps you subconsciously sensed the early indications of your wife’s disease.”
“There weren’t any early indications—none whatsoever! My wife thought nothing of joining me on thirty-mile daily bicycle rides. Her lungs were strong. But then, three years later, in eighteen ninety-three, she became ill.”
“Eighteen ninety-three,” Holmes said. “Didn’t your father die that year?”
“It was a difficult time.”
“He was in a mental institution near Edinburgh, I believe.”
“I prefer not to discuss my father’s illness.”
“Alcohol addiction,” Holmes said. “I gather that on one occasion, when he couldn’t obtain gin or wine or beer, he drank furniture varnish. He sold his clothing in order to buy alcohol. The bed linen. His sketches. Children’s toys. Anything. Please, remind me of what your father sketched.”
Conan Doyle stood straighter. “I told you I prefer not to discuss my father’s illness.”
“Were you able to journey to Edinburgh and attend his funeral?”
“Unfortunately, my wife’s tuberculosis prevented me.”
“And while all this was happening in eighteen ninety-three,” Holmes said, “you killed me.”
“I didn’t kill you! Only Moriarty plunged into the falls! How many times must I explain it?”
“As far as you were concerned, I was dead. Whoever that imposter is in the later stories, it isn’t me. But let’s move on. It wasn’t until fifteen years later, in nineteen eighteen, that you published The New Revelation and your readers finally learned about your belief in spiritualism. They were surprised that you’d shifted from an interest in science to mysticism.”
“There’s nothing mystical about it,” Conan Doyle protested. “Twenty years ago, people would have mocked me if I’d said that voices could travel great distances through the air, and yet Marconi’s radio accomplished what until recently would have been thought a supernatural occurrence. Science will eventually prove that an afterworld exists just as certainly as this world exists.”
“Your first spiritualist book coincided with the end of the war.”
“Yes, the blasted war.” Conan Doyle looked down at the stone floor. “I imagined that the conflict would be noble, that a cleaner, better, stronger nation would come out of it. How wrong I was.” His voice faltered. “How far the war was from anything that was noble. So many died, and so brutally. I wasn’t prepared.”
“One of the dead was your son, Kingsley. Please accept my sympathy,” Holmes said.
“He was the second child that Touie and I had,” Conan Doyle managed to say. “By then, my relationship with Kingsley wasn’t the best. He went to war to defend our nation, of course, but I suspect that he also took risks to prove himself to me. He was wounded at the battle of the Somme. He seemed to be recovering, but then the Spanish Influenza took him down. And my brother, Innis, died in the war. And my brother-in-law, Malcolm. And another brother-in-law . . .” He didn’t have the strength to say the name. “And two nephews. And . . . So many of them gone. Surely it couldn’t be forever. Surely their souls hadn’t merely ceased to exist. At séances, my son contacted me, assuring me that he was contented and that he’d met my brother over there and . . .”
Again, Conan Doyle’s voice dropped.
“Perhaps that’s when your true conversion to spiritualism occurred, not many years earlier,” Holmes suggested. “Could your intense grief have made you want to believe desperately that your son and your brother and all the others weren’t truly dead?”
“It was more than my emotions playing tricks on me.” Conan Doyle pointed angrily. “Do you see those wax gloves of a spirit’s hands?”
“Indeed.”
“Prior to a séance, an associate and I prepared a container of heated wax. A dim red light allowed us to see the medium lapse into a trance. Suddenly a spirit’s hands plunged into the heated wax. As suddenly, when the hands emerged, they disappeared, leaving these wax gloves on the table. Look at the cuffs on the gloves. They’re the size of a man’s wrists. If the hands were those of an ordinary person, the gloves couldn’t have been removed without being damaged. The only way these gloves could have survived in the perfect way that you see them is if the hands became disembodied.”
“Master illusionist that he is, Houdini would perhaps—”
“Don’t mention his name.”
“—suggest the following: The hands that plunged into the heated wax were those of the medium’s assistant. The assistant withdrew his wax-covered hands into the darkness beyond the pale red light, leaving wax gloves that had been prepared in advance.”
“You sound exactly like Houdini. But I anticipated his usual smug objection. The gloves couldn’t have been prepared in advance. I put an identifying chemical into the wax, and the wax of these gloves contains the same chemical.”
“When did you obtain the chemical?”
“The day before the séance.”
“If I had been the medium’s assistant, I’d have observed your activities for a few days before the séance. When you went to the shop to buy the chemical, I’d have followed. When you left the shop, I’d have entered the shop and found a pretense to persuade the shopkeeper to tell me what you’d purchased.”
Conan Doyle stared at him. “But you don’t know for certain that such a thing happened.”
“That is correct.”
“Then you haven’t disproved the validity of these wax gloves, any more than you disproved the validity of these photographs.”
“Granted. Earlier, you said that Houdini insulted your wife.”
“My second wife, Jean, is herself a medium. She receives messages from an Oriental spirit named Pheneas. These visitations began five years ago. With her deep honesty, Jean at first resisted the impulses, wondering if perhaps she subconsciously self-willed them. But eventually, through her inspired automatic writing and through a process in which she lapsed into a trance, Jean and I became convinced that the visitations were authentic. Through Pheneas, we received messages from my mother and my brother and our son and all our other dear departed loved ones.”
“I gather that Houdini is skeptical about your wife’s ability,” Holmes said.
“If the wretch had expressed his doubts to me personally, I would have perhaps made allowances! But instead he did it publicly, telling American newspapers—the newspapers, mind you—that my wife’s . . . that she’s . . . a fake! Equally unforgivable, he accused me of thinking I was a Messiah come to save mankind through the mysteries of spiritualism. He claimed that I misled the public with teachings that are, to use his words, ‘a menace to sanity and health.’ I never spoke to him again.”
“Understandably,” Holmes said.
“Pheneas has been immensely helpful. He warned me that if Jean and I went on a proposed trip to Scandinavia last year, the consequences would have been dire, perhaps a horrible accident. But through Jean, Pheneas approved of a resort in Switzerland for the same vacation. Pheneas also approved of the new country house that I bought for Jean to stay in while I’m here in London, doing what I can to attract people to this shop.”
“You mentioned that your mother, brother, son, and other dear departed loved ones visited you through Pheneas. Did that include your first wife?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t that seem strange?”
“Touie didn’t approve of my interest in spiritualism.”
“But now your first wife woul
d know that you’re right. She ought to be happy to tell you so. What about your father? Was he one of the loved ones who visited you from the afterlife?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? At one time, didn’t your father say that he received messages from the unseen world?”
Conan Doyle didn’t reply.
“The sketches that your father drew. What was their subject?” Holmes asked.
“What are you up to?”
“I’m merely attempting to solve a mystery. What was the subject of your father’s sketches?”
They regarded each other, neither of them speaking for at least a minute.
“Faeries,” Conan Doyle finally said.
“Faeries and phantoms. One of your father’s drawings is a self-portrait in which demons swirl around him.”
“Alcohol made my father insane. He sketched what his poisoned mind caused him to see.”
“Or perhaps . . .”
“Every time you say ‘perhaps’ . . .”
“Perhaps your father actually did see faeries, demons, and phantoms, so horrifying that he used alcohol to try to stop the visions. Perhaps alcohol didn’t cause the visions. It might have been the other way around. Could your father’s visions have caused his need for alcohol?”
“But that would mean . . .” Abrupt understanding made Conan Doyle stop.
“I’m only considering every possibility,” Holmes explained.
“I want you to leave.”
“We haven’t finished our conversation.”
“Leave. Now. If you don’t respect my wishes, we might indeed have the physical altercation that almost happened earlier.”
Holmes considered him and nodded. “Very well. The mystery might be better solved by you instead of me. But the clues are all before you.”
Holmes stood, put on the deerstalker cap, and walked toward the archway.
“Good night, Sir Arthur.”
He climbed the stairs, his tall, thin figure disappearing, the creak of his footsteps becoming fainter.
Silence settled over the museum.
Conan Doyle stared toward the shadowy stairs for a long time. At last he turned toward the photograph of the three faeries next to a waterfall. When he’d last looked at it, he’d been reminded of a sketch that his father had drawn in which faeries lay among blades of grass in a field.
Somehow that recollection had made him imagine a visit from Sherlock Holmes. The intense chill Conan Doyle felt told him that he was in fact here in this basement and not in his bed still enduring a nightmare.
The power of imagination never failed to astonish him: wide-awake trances possessing him, prompting him to envision a lost world of dinosaurs, the White Company of the Hundred Years’ War, and . . .
Sherlock Holmes.
“The clues are all before you,” Holmes had told him.
Or rather, something in my mind made me imagine that he told me, Conan Doyle thought.
Although he would never have admitted it, his characters often spoke to him. It didn’t seem strange to him, but he knew what others would think if he admitted he heard voices. His father had heard voices. “Voices from the unseen world,” his father had told people.
And look where his father had ended.
“Perhaps your father actually did see faeries and demons,” Holmes had suggested. “Could your father’s visions have caused his need for alcohol?”
“But that would mean . . .” Conan Doyle hadn’t dared to finish his thought.
What would it mean? he asked himself. That my father was insane? Did my father consume massive quantities of alcohol to drown the faeries and demons he saw?
Conan Doyle leaned close to the photograph of the faeries. Holmes had said that the photograph consisted of two images combined in a double exposure. It wasn’t the first time Conan Doyle had heard that criticism. Skeptics were quick to offer objections that they couldn’t prove.
“You see, but you do not observe,” Holmes had said.
Conan Doyle leaned even closer toward the photograph. Was there possibly a blur around the fairies? Did they resemble children made to look extremely small?
But if that photograph was fraudulent, then he would need to consider that the photograph of the ghost hovering above the man in the doorway was fraudulent also, and then he would need to consider that the Syrian vase, the Babylonian clay tablet, and the pile of Turkish pennies that had dropped onto a séance table were fraudulent—and the pages of automatic writing, and the ornate drawing of flowers that a medium had somehow completed in seventeen seconds. Certainly Holmes had implied that the wax gloves of a spirit and the photograph of ectoplasm weren’t authentic.
But Holmes hadn’t been here to imply anything, Conan Doyle forcefully reminded himself. No one had actually been in this basement, sitting in that chair. To believe differently would truly be a sign of madness.
And yet . . .
Why did Holmes emphasize that Southsea, near Portsmouth, is almost as far from Edinburgh as it’s possible to go and still remain in Great Britain? Was he suggesting that I felt compelled to put as much distance between my father and myself as I could?
Why did Holmes seem to think it significant that I didn’t go to my father’s funeral? My father died the same year I killed Holmes. Was he implying that by killing Holmes I was somehow finally ridding myself of my father and my fear that I shared his . . . ?
Stop thinking this way, Conan Doyle warned himself.
But he couldn’t stop the voice inside his head.
Did Holmes nod with suspicion when I described all the traveling I did after I was married the first time? Did he seem to think that I suddenly traveled to Germany not because of the tuberculosis conference, but because I wanted to get away from my wife and two-year-old child?
Did he seem to nod with greater suspicion when I described how my second wife was a medium who received messages from the spirit Pheneas about where we should take vacations and whether I should buy another country house for her?
Conan Doyle picked up the framed photograph of the faeries by the waterfall. He made his way to the chair that Holmes had occupied. It troubled him that the cushion felt warm, as though someone had sat in it recently.
He studied the faeries, so innocent, so free of cares.
Did Holmes intend him to conclude that Jean wasn’t a medium at all? That she’d taken advantage of his beliefs in order to guide his actions?
Madness, Conan Doyle told himself. Stop thinking this way. If I believed that Jean was fraudulent, then I’d need to believe that everything in this room was fraudulent, that my life was fraudulent.
He clutched the photograph of the faeries and stared as hard at it as he’d ever stared at anything in his life. He desperately tried to will himself to enter the photograph, to stand with the faeries next to the waterfall whose chill resembled that of this basement. He had a sudden vision that the basement was a crypt and that Holmes was in it, tearing coffins apart, hurling bones into a corner. Bones. Perhaps that’s all his dead son and his first wife and his brother and his brother-in-law and his nephews and his mother . . . and his father . . . had become. No. He couldn’t believe it.
That would be the true madness.
MRS. HUDSON INVESTIGATES
by Tony Lee and Bevis Musson
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DANCING WOMEN
by Hank Phillippi Ryan
“It’s the end of literacy as we know it,” I complained. I leaned back in my swivel chair, plonked my black boots on my desk, and glimpsed the last of the Wednesday sunrise, wisps of pale lavender, still visible behind the coppery foliage of our town’s famous beeches. This morning, however, I was lured from our front window and the glorious autumn by the curious email that had pinged onto my computer. I studied it, perplexed. I recognized the sender, but there was no subject line, nor were there words in the message section. The page showed only a colorful jumble of tiny graphic symbols.
“Clearly, the huma
n need for language is threatened, do you not agree? Once we descend into ambiguous shorthand?” I reached for my white mug of oolong, grumbling, not taking my eyes from the screen, then removed my tortoiseshell spectacles, wiped away an annoying speck of dust with my handkerchief, and put the glasses back on. “What, pray tell, does a smiley-face mean? ‘I’m only teasing’? Or, ‘I’m happy’? Or, ‘you win’?”
“You’re becoming a curmudgeon at age thirty, girlfriend,” Watson warned. She placed her laptop on her desk, flipped the computer open. It trilled into life, and I heard Watson tapping keys as she talked. “By forty you’ll be totally ancient.”
Watson’s not her true name, but it’s what we all call her now, for obvious reasons. Though enthusiastic, and learning quickly, Watson is sometimes somewhat cavalier with details. She constantly attempts to engage in conversation and simultaneously work on her computer. I’ve assured her that cannot be successful, as the human mind is capable of handling only one problem at a time. That problem may be knotty, and require a delicate solution, but step-by-step and total focus, I often have avowed, is the only method with any hope of attaining success.
“Ancient?” I replied. “If by ancient you meant enduring, worthwhile, and eternal, I welcome it, my friend.”
I admit I also welcomed Watson’s contributions to our still-nascent business. Newly emerged from her criminal justice studies after a black hole of time in Afghanistan (where she helped eliminate the despot she nicknamed the Giant Rat of Kabul), she joined me at Investigative Associates this past summer, thus giving partial veracity to “Associates,” since for the previous fifteen months, I had practiced on my own.
Internet-proficient and semper fi, Watson’s research tends to come from a computer. Mine tends to come from real life. The miracle of the internet has become the grail for local law enforcement, even, cautiously, here in pastoral Norraton. But I use my own brain first. And then books. Not that I don’t appreciate the immediacy of a quick Google search. Especially since changes occur so relentlessly these days.
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes Page 12