“Did you see or hear anything else unusual around the scene?”
“No, no, just the body. And the blood. All the blood…” He trailed off, his attention turning back groundward.
“Were there any other tracks,” asked Holmes, “besides Dancer’s, near the body?”
“I didn’t see any,” Brizzen mumbled.
“But would you have?”
“Of course. I told ya, my peepers are good.”
“You might have seen, but would you have noticed? Is it something that your mind would have called attention to?” Brizzen looked puzzled, so the boss continued. “Close your eyes for a moment. Just try to pull up in your mind a picture of what you saw. Now look around that picture, not just at the body, but around it, the land next to it. Think about the sounds you heard, the…”
He stopped when he saw that Brizzen had broken down in tears.
“He’s thinking about all the blood again,” I said. “You’ve lost him.”
As we headed back toward the snowmobile, I asked, “Did you really need to bring up his trick riding? That seems like a little bitty matter at this point.”
“I needed to do something to get his mind off the crime scene,” Holmes explained, “just for a moment. To distract him from the immediate tragedy, just to clear the shock so that I could get some answers.”
“That didn’t last long. You got some answers, did they help?”
“I won’t know that for sure until I get the big answer.”
• • •
We were heading back toward the information shack, planning to check the recent satellite imagery and radar data to see if there was any sign of an outside interloper, when the boss looked back, slowed for a moment, then changed course. I tried to signal the way to the information shack, just to make sure that there wasn’t some error, but we headed towards the toy production shack instead. It wasn’t until we were dismounting the snowmobile in the parking shelter just outside the shack that Holmes spoke.
“How could I have been so long blind, Wuzzin?” he said. “I spent so much time looking for the tracks that weren’t at the scene that I failed to fully consider the tracks that were there.”
I tilted my head, as if seeing the world from a slightly different angle would help me see his point. “You mean Brizzen’s? Gee whiz, boss, I cannot think of why he’d’ve killed Dancer.”
“Oh, he gets written off not even with a ‘why’ but with a ‘how.’ He’s not a third as high as the top of Dancer’s head. To lay blows where they landed, he’d have needed some sort of hammer with a handle twice as long as he is tall. Were he able to wield such a weapon, he’d had to have struck the poor creature with force and at an amazing rate to get in all that damage before Dancer fell to the ground. Not to mention his dragging the weapon to and from the location would have left a trail. No, it’s not his tracks I’m talking about. It’s Dancer’s.”
He paused a moment to let that sink in, as if giving me four seconds to dwell on it would bring to my little mind the understanding that it had taken his amazing brain an hour to achieve. As you can well expect, I proved a disappointment in this regard. “Dancer’s?” I asked, to turn the conversation back over to him.
“Her tracks clearly showed the signs that she was running at a high speed, and indeed a reindeer has a reasonably high speed for a land mammal; not as fast as a gazelle or a coyote or a Mongolian wild ass, but fast nonetheless. But the land speed of a reindeer has nothing on the airspeed of one who can fly. Whether rushing toward something or fleeing some attacker, Dancer would have done it much more quickly had she flown…and in the case of an attacker, heading to the sky would have taken her where most attackers could not possibly have followed. But she didn’t fly, and that leads me to only one conclusion:
“Dancer was not a flying reindeer. Not anymore. At least, not reliably. Age had finally taken her ability, as it will eventually take abilities from most of us.
“Once we accept that, the rest of the picture becomes instantly clear. Why were the other reindeer acting more on edge than usual? It surely wasn’t just Dancer’s absence; the members of the team are apt to be wandering off at any given moment, so her not being there was not unusual. No, they knew what had happened because they had done it. It may have been one of them or some of them or all of them that had done it, but they all knew it had been done. The objects that had smashed Dancer’s head were the flailing hooves of reindeer. That is, logically, how a flying reindeer would attack an earth-bound one, from above.”
“But Holmes, that’s icky! It’s…it’s…it’s not ‘cannibalism,’ but there must be a word for killing a member of your own species,” I said, floundering in my hunt for language.
“Of course there is. It’s ‘murder.’ We don’t use that term when a man kills a bear or a bear kills a man. ‘Murder’ is an intraspecies concept.”
My heart was racing as I felt a surge of panic take me over. My speech became more rapid and higher-pitched than even my normal elfin tones. “Oh, this is a disaster. This is ruination. The mission will be scuttled! The deliveries will not happen! No gifties for the kiddies! This is unprecedented!”
“Calm yourself, Wuzzin. The mission will go on as planned.” Holmes hung his goggles over the handle of the snowmobile.
“You won’t have the seven reindeer you need! Even if just one of them committed this foul deed, removing the murderous individual leaves you with an insufficient team!”
“I will not be removing anyone from the team, Wuzzin. You are acting as if this was a case of human or elf society, where what we most value is protecting the individual, and thus must condemn the killer. But that comes because the biggest danger to our societies come not from outside but from within—more true of humans, with our range of base and vile instincts, than of you elves, of course. The animal kingdom is different. They haven’t overcome their outside predators the way that humans have. Animals will protect the group even if it requires sacrificing the individual, as it did today. And to my team, the group is the mission and the mission is the group. The team exists to help me make the annual deliveries. Anything that interferes with that is a challenge to the group.
“You assumed from the very beginning that this attack was done in order to scuttle my mission this year, yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Had I hitched up the full team and Dancer had become dead weight, the mission would have failed; not immediately perhaps, but before most of the deliveries had been done. Do I wish that the reindeer had had some way to communicate to me or to their handlers that there was a problem, so that we could simply have removed Dancer from the team and let her live out the rest of her natural life as a no-longer-flying reindeer? Most certainly. But I cannot hold judgment against animals for seeing the problem and addressing it in a way that was within their abilities.”
This was a dark moment for me, knowing that our mission of joy had such a bloody cost attached, but the boss would not let me linger on it.
“Come now, Wuzzin! Christmas Eve rushes ever closer, and there is still so much to be done. As sad as Dancer’s death is, it would be sadder still if her death were in vain. There are toys to be checked, and Huzzin’s one elf short at the moment!”
With a clap of his hands, Sherlock Holmes rushed into the toy production shack, and I followed along as well as my shorter legs would allow.
About the Authors
DEREK BEEBE is the author of the fantasy novel It’s a Wonderful Death, and his short stories have appeared in the Tales of Fortannis collections. His web page is www.DerekBeebe.com. He is a regular contributor to the podcast network WhenNerdsAttack.com. He lives in Pennsylvania and spends far too much of his life on television, movies, and books.
This is KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO’s second story with Shirley Holmes & Jack Watson, following “Identity” in the previous Baker Street Irregulars anthology. He hopes they will have many more adventures. He's written more than fifty novels, more than seventy-five short stories, more than fifty
comic books, and a metric buttload of nonfiction that he hasn’t even attempted to count. His oeuvre ranges from media tie-in fiction in dozens of different licensed universes (among them Star Trek, Supernatural, World of Warcraft, Doctor Who, Aliens, Marvel Comics, and tons more) as well as original fiction in both the fictional cities of Cliff's End and Super City as well as the somewhat real locales of Key West and New York City. Find out less at his website at www.DeCandido.net.
NAT GERTLER is a professional Peanuts nerd, as well as the publisher of the About Comics line and the creator of Licensable Bear™. A graduate of Simon’s Rock Early College, he’s written or co-written about two dozen nonfiction books (winning a Ben Franklin Award in 2016), various short stories, over a hundred comic book tales, and a TV episode or two (well, one). He lives in Camarillo, California with his wife Lara and however many kids they have.
NARRELLE M. HARRIS writes crime, horror, fantasy, and romance. Her thirty-plus works include vampire novels, erotic spy adventures, queer romance, traditional Holmesian mysteries, and the Holmes/Watson romance The Adventure of the Colonial Boy. In 2017, her ghost/crime story Jane won the Body in the Library prize at the Scarlet Stiletto Awards. www.narrellemharris.com.
GORDON LINZNER is the founder and former publisher of Space And Time magazine. A lifetime member of SFWA, he is the author of three published novels and dozens of short stories in publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine, Eerie Country, Tales By Moonlight, Swords Against Darkness, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Bruce Coville’s UFOs, Museum of Horrors, and Altered States of the Union, among other magazines and anthologies.
DANIEL M. KIMMEL’s book on the history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network, received the Cable Center Book Award. His other books include a history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team; I’ll Have What She’s Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies; and Jar Jar Binks Must Die…and Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies, which was shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. His first novel, Shh! It’s a Secret: a Novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender’s Guide, was a finalist for the Compton Crook Award. His latest book is Time on My Hands: My Misadventures in Time Travel.
STEPHANIE M. McPHERSON is a writer whose work has appeared across a spectrum of media, including The Boston Globe Magazine, the PBS NOVA website, and the national radio show Living on Earth. She earned her Master’s degree in Science Writing from MIT in 2011 and has since written about everything from diabetes to 3D printers in space. This is her first published piece of fiction. She lives in the Greater Boston area with her husband, daughter, and calico cat. You can read more from her at www.stephaniemmcpherson.com.
JODY LYNN NYE lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” She lives northwest of Chicago with one of the above and her husband, author and packager Bill Fawcett. She has written over forty-five books, including The Ship Who Won with Anne McCaffrey, eight books with Robert Asprin, a humorous anthology about mothers, Don’t Forget Your Spacesuit, Dear!, and over 160 short stories. Her latest books are Rhythm of the Imperium (Baen Books), Moon Beam (with Travis S. Taylor, Baen), and Myth-Fits (Ace). Jody also reviews fiction for Galaxy’s Edge magazine and teaches the intensive writers’ workshop at DragonCon. Her web page is www.jodynye.net.
CHUCK REGAN is a big geek who writes a lot of pulp genre crap. www.chuckregan.com.
R. ROZAKIS has the amazing superpower of causing professors and technicians to stare at her lab equipment and say, “I’ve never seen it do that before!” Her current job in marketing in New York City seems so much safer, really. Her biggest argument with her exceedingly patient husband is in what order they should show Star Wars to their preschooler. Previous work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Allegory, Liquid Imagination, Every Day Fiction, and the anthologies Substitution Cipher and Clockwork Chaos.
HILDY SILVERMAN is the publisher of Space and Time, a five-decade-old magazine featuring fantasy, horror, and science fiction (www.spaceandtimemagazine.com). She is also a short fiction author whose most recent publications include, “The Great Chasm” (2016, coauthored with David Silverman, Altered States of the Union, Hauman, ed.), “A Scandal in the Bloodline” (2017, Baker Street Irregulars, Ventrella and Maberry, eds.), “The Show Killer” (2017, TV Gods 2: Summer Programming, Young and Hillman, eds.), and “Invasive Maneuvers” (2017, Love, Murder and Mayhem, Colchamiro, ed.).
SARAH STEGALL writes science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries. Her latest novel, Outcasts: A Novel of Mary Shelley, is about the night Mary Shelley sat down to write Frankenstein. She is the author of the Phantom Partners series, as well as the novel Chimera and the YA novel Farside. Her most recent short stories have been published in Deadworld: A Tribute Anthology to Deadworld and Comic Publisher Gary Reed, and The X-Files: The Truth Is Out There. She researched and helped write the first three Official Guides to The X-Files. Sarah lives in Northern California because the fog hides her better.
MIKE STRAUSS is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon, currently living in Pittsburgh. He works as a full-time freelance writer and content marketing specialist. He has had four stories published in the Tales of Fortannis anthologies, as well as in the previous Baker Street Irregulars.
About the Editors
New York Times bestselling author JONATHAN MABERRY’s latest series Rot and Ruin has just been optioned for film, and other works of his are heading for the big screen as well. He’s a multiple Bram Stoker Award winner and has written for Marvel comics as well. He’s been named one of today’s top ten horror writers. His website is www.jonathanmaberry.com.
MICHAEL A. VENTRELLA’s humorous novels include Bloodsuckers: A Vampire Runs for President and The Axes of Evil. He edits the Tales of Fortannis short story collections, and has had his own stories printed in many anthologies, including Janet Morris’s Dreamers in Hell, Rum and Runestones, Twisted Tails, and The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Archives. His web page is www.MichaelAVentrella.com.
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