The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by edited by John Joseph Adams

  "I guess you'd say he's . . . an antiquarian." Colby's voice was hesitant, as if picking his words. "One of the most remarkable students of ancient folklore and legend in the world. Indeed, it was in the hopes of studying with him that I came to Oxford. I am—I guess you might call me the intellectual black sheep of the Colby family." He chuckled again. "My father left the firm to my brothers and myself, but on the whole I've been content to let them run it as they wished. The making of money . . . the constant clamor of stocks and rail-shares and directors . . . From the time I was a small boy I sensed there were deeper matters than that in the world, forgotten shadows lurking behind the gaslights' artificial glare."

  Holmes said nothing to this, but his eyelids lowered, as if he were listening for something behind the words. Colby, hands clasped, seemed almost to have forgotten his presence, or mine, or the reality of the stuffy summer heat. He went on, "I had corresponded with Carstairs Delapore on . . . on the subject of some of the more obscure Lammas-tide customs of the Welsh borderlands. As I'd hoped, he agreed to guide my studies, both at Oxford and, later, among the books of his private collection—marvelous volumes that clarified ancient folkloric rites and put them into contexts of philosophy, history, the very fabric of time itself! Depewatch Priory . . . ."

  He seemed to come to himself with a start, glanced at Holmes, then at me, and went on in a more constrained voice, "It was at Depewatch Priory that I first met Mr. Delapore's niece, Judith. She is eighteen, the daughter of Mr. Delapore's brother Fynch, a spirit of light and innocence in that . . . in that dreary old pile. She had just returned from finishing-school in Switzerland, though plans for her come-out into London society had run aground on the family's poverty. Any other girl I know would have been pouting and in tears at being robbed of her season on the town. Not she! She bore it bravely and sweetly, though it was clear that she faced a lifetime of stagnation in a tiny mountain town, looking after a decrepit house and a . . . a difficult old man."

  From his jacket pocket Colby withdrew an embossed cardboard photograph-case, opening it to show the image of a most beautiful young lady. Thin and rather fragile-looking, she wore her soft curls in a chignon. Her eyes seemed light, blue or hazel so far as I could tell from the photograph, her hair a medium shade—perhaps red, but more likely light brown—and her complexion pale to ghostliness. Her expression was one of grave innocence, trusting and unself-conscious.

  "Old Viscount Delapore is a grim old autocrat who rules his son, his niece, and every soul in the village of Watchgate as if it were 1394 instead of 1894. He owns all of the land thereabouts—the family has, I gather, from time immemorial—and so violent is his temper that the villagers dare not cross him. From the first moment Judith declared her love for me, I offered to take her away from the place—to take her clean out of the country, if need be, though I hardly think he would come after her, as she seems to fear."

  "Does she fear her grandfather?" Holmes turned the photograph thoughtfully over in his hands, examining the back as well as the front most minutely.

  Colby nodded, his face clouding with anger. "She claims she's free to come and go, that there's no influence being brought to bear upon her. But there is, Mr. Holmes, there is! When she speaks of Viscount Gaius she glances over her shoulder, as if she imagines he could hear her wherever she is. And the look in her lovely eyes . . . ! She fears him, Mr. Holmes. He has some evil and unwholesome hold upon the girl. He's not her legal guardian—that's Mr. Carstairs Delapore. But the old man's influence extends to his son as well. When I received this—" He drew from the same pocket as the photograph a single sheet of folded paper, which he passed across to Holmes, "I begged him to countermand his father's order, to at least let me present my case. But this card . . . " He handed a large, stiff note to Holmes, "was all I got back."

  The letter was dated August 16, four days ago.

  "My best beloved,

  "My heart is torn from my breast by this most terrible news. My grandfather has forbidden me to see you again, forbidden even that your name be mentioned in this house. He will give no reason for this beyond that it is his will that I remain here with him, as his servant—I fear, as his slave! I have written to my father but fear he will do nothing. I am in despair! Do nothing, but wait and be ready.

  "Thine only,

  Judith."

  The delicate pink paper, scented with patchouli and with the faint smoke of the oil-lamp by which it must have been written, was blotted with tears.

  Her father's card said merely:

  "Remove her from your thoughts. There is nothing which can be done."

  Burnwell Colby smote the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, and his strong jaw jutted forward. "My grandfather didn't let the mandarins of Hong Kong chase him away, and my father refused to be stopped by Sioux Indians or winter snows in the Rockies," he declared. "Nor shall this stop me. Will you find out for me, Mr. Holmes, what vile hold Lord Gaius has upon his granddaughter and his son, that I may free the gentlest girl that ever lived from the clutches of an evil old man who seeks to make a drudge of her forever?"

  "And is this all," asked Holmes, raising his eyelids to meet the American's earnest gaze, "that you have to tell me about Carstairs Delapore and his father? Or about these 'lurking shadows' that are Delapore's study?"

  The young man frowned, as if the question took him momentarily aback. "Oh, the squeamish may speak of decadence," he said after a moment, not off-handedly, but as if carefully considering his words. "And some of the practices which Delapore has uncovered are fairly ugly by modern standards. Certainly they'd make my old pater blink, and my poor hidebound brothers." He chuckled, as if at the recollection of a schoolboy prank. "But at bottom it's all only legends, you know, and bogies in the dark."

  "Indeed," said Holmes, rising, and held out his hand to the young suitor. "I shall learn of this what I can, Mr. Colby. Where might I reach you?"

  "The Excelsior Hotel in Brighton." The young man fished from his vest-pocket a card to write the address upon—he seemed to carry everything loose in his pockets, jumbled together like cabbages in a barrow. "I always stay there," he explained as he scribbled. "It was how Miss Delapore knew where to reach me. How you can abide to remain in town in weather like this beats me!" And he departed, apparently unaware that not everyone's grandfather rammed opium down Chinese throats in order to pay the Excelsior's summer-holiday prices.

  "So what do you think of our American Romeo?" inquired Holmes, as the rattle of Colby's cab departed down Baker Street. "What sort of man does he appear to be?"

  "A wealthy one," I said, still stung by that careless remark about those who remained in town. "One not used to hearing the word 'No.' But earnest and good of heart, I would say. Certainly he takes a balanced view of these 'decadent' studies—to which the Delapores can scarcely object, if they share them."

  "True enough." Holmes set letter and note upon the table, and went to the bookcase to draw out his copy of the Court Gazette, which was so interleaved with snipped-out society columns, newspaper clippings, and notes in Holmes' neat, strong handwriting as to bulge to almost double its original size. "But what are the nature of these folkloric 'practices' which are 'fairly ugly by modern standards'? Ugliness by the standards of a world which has invented the Maxim gun can scarcely be termed bogies in the dark.

  "Carstairs Delapore," he read, opening the book upon his long arm. "Questioned concerning his whereabouts on the night of the 27th August, 1890, when the owner of a public house in Whitechapel reported her ten-year-old son Thomas missing; a man of Delapore's description—he is evidently of fairly unforgettable appearance—seen speaking with the boy that evening. Thomas never found. I thought I recognized the name. Delapore was also questioned in 1873 by the Manchester police—he was in that city, for no discernable reason, when two little mill-girls went missing . . . I must say I'm astonished that anyone reported their disappearance. Mudlarks and street-urchins vanish every day from the streets of London and no one
inquires after them anymore than one inquires the whereabouts of butterflies once they flitter over the garden fence. A man need not even be very clever, to kidnap children in London." He shut the book, his eyes narrowing as he turned his gaze to the endless wasteland of brick that lay beyond the window. "Merely careful to pick the dirtiest and hungriest, and those without parents or homes."

  "That's a serious conclusion to jump to," I said, startled and repelled.

  "It is," Holmes replied. "Which is why I jump to nothing. But Gaius, Viscount Delapore, was mentioned three times in the early reports of the Metropolitan police—between 1833 and 1850—in connection with precisely such investigations, at the same time that he was publishing a series of monographs on 'Demonic Ritual Survivals along the Welsh Borders' for the discredited Eye of Dawn Society. And in 1863 an American reporter disappeared while investigating rumors of a pagan cult in western Shropshire, not five miles from Watchgate village, which lies below the hill upon which Depewatch Priory stands."

  "But even so," I said, "even if the Delapores are involved in some kind of theosophistic studies—or white slaving for that matter—would they not seek rather to get an outsider like Delapore's niece out of the house, rather than keeping her there as a potential source of trouble? And how would the old man use a pack of occult rubbish to dominate his granddaughter and his son against their will?"

  "How indeed?" Holmes went to the bookcase again, and took down the envelope in which he had bestowed Burnwell Colby's card. "I, too, found our American visitor—despite his patent desire to disown association with his hidebound and boring family—an ingenuous and harmless young man. Which makes this all the more curious."

  He held out the envelope to me, and I took it out and examined it as he had. The stock, as he had said, was expensive and the typeface rigidly correct, although the card itself bore slight traces of having been carried about loose in Mr. Colby's pockets with pens, notes, and photographs of his beloved Judith. Only when I brought it close to examine the small dents and scratches on its surface was I conscious of the smell that seemed to imbue the thick, soft paper, a nauseating mix of frankincense, charred hair, and . . . .

  I looked up at Holmes, my eyes wide. I had been a soldier in India, and a physician for most of my life. I knew the smell.

  "Blood," I said.

  The note Holmes sent that afternoon received an answer within hours, and after we had finished our supper he invited me to accompany him to the home of a friend on the Embankment near the Temple: "A curious customer who may fill in for you some hitherto unsuspected colors in the palette of London life," he said. Mr. Carnaki was a thin young man of medium height and attenuated build, whose large gray eyes regarded one from behind thick spectacle lenses with an expression it is hard to define: as if he were always watching for something that others do not see. His tall, narrow house was filled with books, even lining the walls of the hallways on both sides so that a broad-built man would have been obliged to sidle through crab-wise, and through the darkened doorways I glimpsed the flicker of gas-light across what appeared to be complex chemical and electrical apparatus. He listened to Holmes' account of Burnwell Colby's visit without comment, his chin resting on one long, spidery hand, then rose from his chair and climbed a pair of steps to an upper shelf of one of the many bookcases that walled the small study at the back of the house to which he'd led us.

  "Depewatch Priory," he read aloud, "stands on a cliff above the village of Watchgate in the wild hill country on the borders of Wales, where in 1215 King John confirmed the appointment of an Augustinian prior over an existing 'hooly howse' of religion said to date back to foundation by Joseph of Arimathea. It appears from its inception to have been the center of a cycle of legends and whispers: indeed, the King's original intent was apparently to have the place pulled down and salt strewed on its foundations. One Philip of Mundberg petitioned Edward IV, describing the monks there engaged in 'comerce wyth daemons yt did issue forth from Hell, and make knowne theyr wants by means of certain dremes,' but he apparently never reached the King himself and the investigation was dropped. There were repeated accusations of heresy involving the transmigration of the souls of certain priors, rumors which apparently transferred themselves to the Grimsley family to whom Henry VIII presented the priory in 1540, and surfaced in the 1780s in connection with the Delapores, who succeeded them through marriage.

  "William Punt . . . " He tapped the black leathern covers of the volume as he set it on the table beside Holmes, "in his Catalogue of Secret Abominations described the place in 1793 as being a 'goodly manor of gray stone' built upon the foundations of the Plantagenet cloister, but says that the original core of the establishment is the ruin of a tower, probably Roman in origin. Punt speaks of stairs leading down to a sub-crypt, where the priors used to sleep upon a crude altar after appalling rites. When Lord Rupert Grimsley was murdered by his wife and daughters in 1687, they apparently boiled his body and buried his bones in the sub-crypt, reserving his skull, which they placed in a niche at the foot of the main stair in the manor-house itself, 'that evil dare not pass.'"

  I could not repress a chuckle. "As protective totems go, it didn't do Lord Rupert much good, did it?"

  "I daresay not," returned Holmes with a smile. "Yet my reading of the 1840 Amsterdam edition of Punt's Catalogue leads me to infer that the local population didn't regard Rupert Grimsley's murder as particularly evil; the villagers impeded the Metropolitan police in the pursuit of their duties to such effect that the three murderesses got completely away."

  "Good heavens, yes." Carnaki turned, and drew out another volume, more innocuous than the sinister-looking tome of abominations: this one was simply a History of West Country Families, as heavily interleaved with clippings and notes as was Holmes' Gazette. "Rupert Grimsley was feared as a sorcerer from Shrewsbury to the Estuary; he is widely reputed to have worked the roads as a highwayman, carrying off, not valuables, but travelers who were never seen again. Demons were said to come and go at his command, and at least two lunatics from that section of the Welsh border—one in the early part of the eighteenth century and one as recently as 1842—swore that old Lord Rupert dwelled in the bodies of all the successive Lords of Depewatch."

  "You mean that he was being constantly reincarnated?" I admit this surfacing of this Thibetan belief in the prosaic hill-country of Wales startled me considerably.

  Carnaki shook his head. "That the spirit—the consciousness—of Rupert Grimsley passed from body to body, battening like a parasite upon that of the heir and driving out the younger man's soul, as the human portion of each Lord of Depewatch died."

  The young antiquarian looked so serious as he said this that again I was hard-put to suffocate a laugh; Carnaki's expression did not alter, but his eyes flicked from my face to Holmes'. "I suppose," said the young man after a moment, "that this had something to do with the fact that each of the gentlemen in question were rumored to be involved with mysterious disappearances among the coal-miners of the district: Viscount Gerald Delapore, who is reputed to have undergone so terrifying a change in personality at his accession to the title that his wife left him and fled to America . . . and the young Gaius Delapore himself."

  "Indeed?" Holmes leaned forward eagerly in his chair, his hand still resting on the Catalogue, which he had been examining with the delighted reverence of a true lover of ancient volumes. He had hardly taken his eyes from the many tomes that stacked every table and most of the corners of Carnaki's little study, some of them the musty calf or morocco of Georgian bookbinders, others the heavier, more archaic black-letter incunabula of the early days of printing, with not a few older still, hand-written in Latin upon parchment or vellum and illuminated with spidery marginalia that even at a distance disturbed me by their anomalous bizarrité. "And what, precisely, is the evil that is ascribed by legend to Depewatch Priory, and for what purpose did Rupert Grimsley and his successors seek out those who had no power, and whom society would not miss?"

  Car
naki set aside his History and seated himself on the oak bookcase steps, his long, thin arms resting on his knees. He glanced again at me, not as if I had offended him with my earlier laughter but as if gauging how to phrase things so that I would understand them; then his eyes returned to Holmes.

  "You have heard, I think, of the six thousand steps, that are hinted at—never directly—in the remote legends of both the old Cymric tribes that preceded the Celts, and of the American Indian? Of the pit that lies deep at the heart of the world, and of the entities that are said to dwell in the abysses beyond it?"

  "I have heard of these things," said Holmes quietly. "There was a case in Arkham, Massachusetts, in 1869 . . . ."

  "The Whateley case, yes." Carnaki's long, sensitive mouth twitched with remembered distaste, and his glance turned to me. "These legends—remembered only through two cults of quite shockingly degenerate Indian tribes, one in Maine and the other, curiously, in northeastern Arizona, where they are shunned by the surrounding Navajo and Hopi—speak of things, entities, sentient yet not wholly material, that have occupied the lightless chasms of space and time since the days before humankind's furthest ancestors first stood upright. These elder beings fear the light of the sun, yet with the coming of darkness would creep forth from certain places in the world to prey upon human bodies and human dreams, through the centuries making surprising and dreadful bargains with individuals of mankind in return for most hideous payment."