Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Campbell, Jeff; Prepolec, Charles

  Unfortunately my detective interest was immediately sidetracked by another book, Alan Frank’s The Movie Treasury: Monsters and Vampires with a garish cover image of Christopher Lee being staked. Suddenly I wanted to see monster movies, and lots of them. Happily every Saturday afternoon there was a Creature Feature program on television to feed that particular craving. More importantly it had the added benefit of sending me back to the literature. I ended up reading Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The House on the Borderland, Carnacki the Ghost Finder, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and who knows how many horror anthologies edited by the late Peter Haining. My interest in fantasy had shifted away from the bright and shiny, clean cut heroes of childhood and drifted down the dark gaslit alleys of the macabre. Comic books grew less important and gave way to somewhat more esoteric reading materials. Yup, you guessed it; puberty had begun to work its own peculiar magic! Sexual repression seemed to be the order of the day as my fantasy worlds began to take on a distinctly Victorian tinge. It seemed to me that the era was simply one big heavily populated playground for monsters, madmen and murderers, and thanks to Hammer Films on television, apparently they all looked an awful lot like either Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing.

  While my reading interests went all over the map at that point, bloody 80’s horror, trashy true crime thrillers, Herbert’s Dune series, Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, and God knows what else, the concept of an almost homogenous Victorian nightmare world remained firmly lodged at the back of my mind. My teen years came to an end and on a fateful day in 1986 I found myself in a comic shop. Browsing the racks I was drawn to the brightly painted image of Sherlock Holmes standing in a graveyard. It was the cover of the first issue of Renegade Press’ Cases of Sherlock Holmes. The text was Conan Doyle’s “The Beryl Coronet”, but it was accompanied by the wonderfully atmospheric black and white artwork of Dan Day. Was that Peter Cushing’s face staring out at me? Yes, it was, although in the next panel it was Basil Rathbone’s, and in the one after that John Barrymore. Hmm, that Victorian playground concept was flashing back into my mind so I picked it up, went home and read it. Here was that Sherlock Holmes guy that I kept running across, but largely ignored, throughout my childhood. Sherlock Holmes, turned out to be calm, cool, insightful, larger than life fantastic hero and best of all, he lived in my Victorian fantasyland. By the next day I was in a used bookstore looking for a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I found myself reading the words “To Sherlock Holmes she was always the woman”, and considering I was floundering after a bad break-up with my girlfriend, I was utterly and completely hooked. By the weekend I had Peter Haining’s The Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook and discovered there was a whole world of Sherlock Holmes related material out there, including something called a pastiche. Back to the used bookshops I went. Fred Saberhagen’s The Holmes-Dracula File fell into my hands, Loren D. Estleman’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes followed suit, then Manly Wade Wellman’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, and oh look, Phil Farmer’s Wold-Newtonry was back in my life with The Adventure of the Peerless Peer. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought the Victorian era was a literary fantasyland, but best of all, my new hero, a classic one that seemed to embody the best qualities of all my childhood interests, served as a guide through this nightmare world. To be sure, some of it was truly dire in terms of quality writing, but it was the most fun I’d had in a lifetime of reading, and fun is the key to entertainment.

  Flash forward some 20-odd years and here I am, still having fun in my Victorian fantasyland and exploring the ever-expanding world of Sherlock Holmes. From the distance an early 21st century vantage point provides, the idealized Victorian and Edwardian world Sherlock Holmes inhabits is to the modern reader, in its own way, as strongly realized and alien a fantasy setting as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Baum’s Oz and just as much fun! Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes will, I hope, communicate some of that sense of fun that I’ve been enjoying all these years.

  Throughout this rambling rumination I’ve made mention of a number of Conan Doyle’s contemporaries and successors who worked the rich vein of fantasy fiction. In the stories ahead you will perhaps find echoes from some of their works or their characters. The connection may be very subtle or it may come through loud and clear as it does in Barbara Hambly’s “The Lost Boy”, a bittersweet tale of Sherlock Holmes and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Considering Conan Doyle’s one-time collaboration and longtime friendship with Barrie, it is a perfect starting point for our collection. Christopher Sequeira’s “His Last Arrow” is a cautionary tale, possibly inspired by Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation of The Book Of The Thousand Nights And A Night, which drives home the adage that you should be careful what you wish for as Watson appears to have brought home more than a war-wound from his time in Afghanistan. Barbara Roden’s “The Things That Shall Come Upon Them” contains our first pairing of Holmes with a classic ‘psychic detective’, in this case Hesketh-Prichard’s groundbreaking Flaxman Low. Holmes and Low both find themselves investigating, from decidedly different perspectives, strange occurrences in a house that is sure to be familiar to readers of M. R. James’ “The Casting of the Runes”. The Flaxman Low stories are a perfect example of Conan Doyle’s direct influence on a contemporary, as the Low stories began appearing in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898, less than a year after Hesketh-Prichard met Conan Doyle at a writer’s dinner. Another, earlier, writer’s dinner was also a meeting point for Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, who’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray, seems to have an echo in M. J. Elliott’s “The Finishing Stroke”, a grisly tale of art gone wrong. Martin Powell brings in Conan Doyle’s other great creation Professor George Edward Challenger in a Boy’s Own/pulp styled two-fisted adventure tale that could only be called “Sherlock Holmes in the Lost World”. In Rick Kennett and A. F. (Chico) Kidd’s “The Grantchester Grimoire”, Holmes meets his second ‘psychic detective’. In this case it is arguably the best known, and certainly best loved, example of the breed, William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Kennett and Kidd have previously collaborated on a highly recommended collection of Carnacki pastiche available under the title No. 472 Cheyne Walk (Ash-Tree Press 2002). In “The Strange Affair of the Steamship Friesland”, a direct follow-up to “The Five Orange Pips”, journalist Peter Calamai presents Holmes with a unique method of correcting an early failure after consulting a certain familiar doctor with an address in South Norwood. Lewis Carroll’s Alice may have disappeared into another world, but any comparison with J. R. Campbell’s “The Entwined” stops right there, as the girl in this story dreams of nothing that could be described as a Wonderland. An aging Watson finds himself faced with the horrific power of strong remembrances when Chris Roberson delves into the untold tale of “Merridew of Abominable Memory”. When a private investigator on the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles finds himself faced with a corpse that won’t stay down he turns to the greatest detective still living for help, bringing together influences as widely removed as Bram Stoker and Dashiell Hammett in Bob Madison’s humorous and hardboiled story “Red Sunset”. Our final entry takes a decidedly different turn in that Sherlock Holmes is nowhere to be found; instead Kim Newman has Professor Moriarty, along with Colonel Moran, waging a highly personal and often hilarious War Of The Worlds in “The Red Planet League”.

  At the beginning of this long-winded and wandering introduction I wondered what the impact of fantastic fiction on an impressionable child, might be? Well, now you know, in my case it eventually led to the creation of the book you hold in your hands. A little horror, a little pulp-style thriller, a little comic book adventure, a little ghostly spook story, a little bit mystery and hopefully a whole lot of fun. Not your traditional selection of Sherlock Holmes stories by any means, but what is the fun of that? After all, as Watson noted in The Speckled Band “…he refused to associate h
imself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual and even the fantastic…” so why should we?

  Enjoy!

  Charles Prepolec, 2008

  The Lost Boy

  The Lost Boy

  by Barbara Hambly

  When the Darling children disappeared without a trace from their nursery one night, their father took the case at once to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  Mrs. Darling came to me.

  “You know how George is,” she said, when the first spate of anguish, of terror, of speculations both probable and grotesque had been talked out over tea. I had been in the Darling night nursery innumerable times, listening to the tales Meg Darling — Meg Speedwell she had been, when first I knew her at Mrs. Clegg’s dreary boarding school in the north of England — would tell small Wendy, smaller John, and baby Michael of pirates, mermaids, red Indians and the fairies that dwell in Kensington Gardens.

  I knew the distance from that high window to the street below, and that the drainpipe was at the back, not the front, of that narrow brick mansionette in its row of identical dwellings. I knew how big a dog Nana was, and the sturdy Newfoundland’s ferocity where the children were concerned.

  “George says—” Meg began, and then stopped. For a time she sat turning her saucer round and round, forty-five degrees at a time, a habit she’d had when we were girls, and she was thinking about how best to say something that the adults had told us we shouldn’t say or even think.

  And I knew then that what — or who — she was thinking about, was Peter Pan.

  “Do you remember Peter Pan?” she asked, after a long, long time, in the small voice one usually only hears late at night, when the other girls in the bleak cold dormitory have gone to sleep.

  I nodded. I didn’t say, How could I forget? I think Peter Pan was the reason that I didn’t kill myself when I was seven or eight — and it’s a mistake adults make, to think that children who are sufficiently unhappy don’t want to try to end their own lives. Mostly we just don’t know how. That I’d lived through Mrs. Clegg’s ideas of how to operate a girls’ school was entirely because I learned to dream, and in those dreams I’d met Peter Pan.

  It was what we called him, Meg and I, because Meg dreamed about him, too. We both knew he had another name, a real name, and that other children had called him other things over the years. We both knew — the way you do in dreams — that he was more than he appeared to be, and more than he himself realized he was much of the time. We were both certain that it was possible for him to cross through the film that separates the Neverlands from the damp chilly world of girls’ schools, and account-books that don’t add up, and bleak London streets, and knowing one is going to die.

  Meg had told me once back then — and I believed her — that she had seen him do so.

  Now she said — and I believed her — “I saw him in the night-nursery, a week ago.” She watched my face as she said it, knowing of course that John — my John, after whom her own seven-year-old son was named — was a doctor, and fearing that my immediate conclusion would be that she was mad.

  When I said nothing, she went on softly, “It was only for a moment. I dreamed he had rent the film, that separates the Neverlands from us—” That was what we’d called them, Meg and I: those endless skerries of islands, where children go when they dream. “I dreamed the children peeked through, and saw. I woke, and he was there still, looking just as he always did.” She shook her head, at the shared memory of that shock-headed child clothed in skeleton leaves, smiling his ageless brilliant smile.

  “Did the children see him?” I asked, and she hesitated, calling the scene back to her mind.

  “I think so,” she said slowly. “I screamed, and he flew away through the window, like a swallow flies—”

  How well I remembered — though I had not until she said it — the motion of his flight, a darting swoop, the tiny lights of whatever fairies he had with him just then flicking in his wake.

  She whispered, “He left his shadow behind.”

  John came home early that evening, though he had stopped at Baker Street to visit with Mr. Holmes. I was ill a great deal that year, and though John kept closer to home than he had before, he also saw a good deal more of Holmes. He would stop at Baker Street for a half an hour on his way back from his rounds. Though I would take a Bible oath that he never so much as mentioned to Holmes his fears for me, nor did Holmes offer so much as a shred of a reassurance that he would have disdained as illogical, still, John would come home comforted, and full of the details of whatever case occupied his friend’s keen mind.

  Thus that evening I heard all about George Darling’s visit to Holmes. “Old George kept his head remarkably,” John said, as he stirred cocoa for us both in a little pan on the bedroom hearth, while I lay among my pillows sorting through his medical notebook. It was my duty always to keep track of his patients, and tot up the bills which half the time John then left uncollected. “Holmes could not have done better. George knew the height of the window-sill from the pavement, the names of the cab-men at the corner of the road; before he came to Holmes, he went through the whole of the rear yard examining the ground there, and found no marks of a ladder, nor smudges on the window-sill, nor signs on the drain-pipe that it had been climbed. Of course Holmes returned to the house with him in any case, but he found nothing, either.”

  I nodded, and the part of me that had years since ceased to believe in that small, shining boy with the wonderful smile wept with sickened shock, that the three children John and I loved as if they were our own might at that moment be dead. Or if not dead, in the hands of the human horrors that he and I both knew too well populated the adult world.

  John wrapped his hand around mine as he handed me my cocoa. “They’ll be all right, Mary,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Holmes will find them. They’ll come to no harm.”

  I whispered, “I know.”

  The medicine I was taking then was bitter and strong. Though it gave me the sleep I needed, it also sent dreams, more vivid than I had known in adult life. In dreams that night I walked in Kensington Gardens, leaving the paths that John and I followed on our summer afternoon strolls and seeking the tree-hidden stillness along the far end of the Lake, where the fireflies’ reflection played above water like black onyx. This was where the fairies lived, Meg had whispered to me when we were children. This was where Meg herself had disappeared one evening when Mrs. Clegg had brought the lot of us down to London for I forget what occasion — it wasn’t a treat for us, that was all I knew — and had not reappeared for almost two days. Mrs. Clegg had hushed it up, of course, and pretended that it hadn’t been more than a few hours. But though we were quite small — five or six — I remembered it clearly.

  It had been two days.

  And Meg had told me, that she had been in the Neverlands, with Peter Pan, for what seemed to her then to have been many weeks. She was never quite the same after that. Happier, as if she carried in her heart the assurance that things would all come right in the end.

  I knew, too, from conversations with Martha Hudson, that Mr. Holmes’ logic and studies extended far beyond what people like John — bless his kindly, literal heart! — regard as the Real World.

  Thus I wasn’t at all surprised to see Mr. Holmes in Kensington Gardens, walking quietly in the cool blackness barred with moonlight, not only listening but touching the tree-bark, the grass-blades, the dew upon the leaves as he passed. I couldn’t imagine how he knew about Kensington — Mrs. Clegg had certainly never reported that long-ago disappearance of her charge to the police — but he moved like a man who knew the place well, and knew what he sought. When a fairy darted in a sparkling skim of pale-blue light across the lake-surface he only stopped, as it swooped up before him, hung in the darkness a yard in front of him for the space of a second or two, then whipped away.

  Whether Mr. Holmes carried something in his pockets that signaled the fairies of his benign intent — and I think he must have — I di
d not know. But they flickered from the woods, followed him thicker and thicker, as he walked unerringly toward the belvedere that only exists in the park sometimes, usually after the sun goes down: the rest of the time you cannot find it, no matter how systematic your search. But Holmes went straight towards it, coming out of the circle of willows to see it standing in its little meadow, with the fairies hovering around it like dragonflies above standing water in the darkness.

  And as he came into the open, about thirty feet from the ghostly circle of marble pillars, he met Peter Pan.

  Or, rather, Peter seized Holmes by the sleeve and dragged him back into the willows: “Hist! Beware!” His dagger wrought of meteor-iron, its handle carved of dragon’s bone, caught the moonlight in his other hand.

  Holmes dropped at once to one knee at the child’s side, so that their eyes were nearly level; followed his gaze toward the open meadow, the belvedere. “What is it?”

  “It’s the Gallipoot,” whispered the child. “The Thing Cold and Empty. It haunts the zone of shadow between your world and the Neverlands. It waits for the veil to open, so that it can slip through and hunt.”

  “What does it hunt?” asked Holmes.

  “Souls on this side,” Peter replied. “Dreams on the other. It slices them up and swallows them, and all the little pieces of them wave shrieking about it like bloody flags in agony, forever.” His eyes burned somberly. It was hard to tell from where I stood, half-hidden among the willows, whether Peter was pretending or not, because he did pretend … only the things that he pretended often came to pass. “I’ve sought to drive it back through the belvedere into the zone of shadow, but it’s eluded me, and I dare not call upon my henchmen, for it would make short work of them.”