It was, indisputably, a giant moth.
Even Sherlock Holmes, hard-headed rationalist that he was, could not help but feel a twinge of atavistic fear as he beheld this unnatural entity hurtling through the air. Its jigging, uneven flight was exactly that of a moth, as was the rippling motion of its wings. A thick, tapered abdomen and a pair of curved antennae were equally moth-like attributes. What made it exceptional was, of course, its size – beyond question, it was six foot from wingtip to wingtip, and almost as long from head to tail – and its luminous red eyes, bright as any train lamps, which Holmes caught brief flashes of as the thing retreated further and further into the distance.
Grier came thundering into the room. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Is Harry all right?”
“I have him,” said Sir Henry. He was on the bed, clutching Harry to his breast and shielding the child’s head with one hand. “Holmes! What is out there? What do you see?”
Grier joined Holmes at the window. “By all that’s holy! Is that what I think it is, Holmes?”
“It’s the moth, isn’t it?” said Sir Henry, his voice cracking. “I knew it. I knew it would come back sooner or later. First Audrey, and now…”
At that moment, a cloud passed in front of the moon. All at once, the scene outside was cast into darkness. Holmes squinted, desperate to keep track of the moth, but it was gone, swallowed up by the gloom. Eventually, a minute or so later, the moon reappeared. Holmes scanned in all directions from the window, but the giant insect was no longer to be seen.
“Well?” said Sir Henry. “I’m right, aren’t I? The moth is here, trying to get in.”
“The moth was here,” said Holmes. “Not any more. Sir Henry, stay in this room and comfort your son. Grier? Fetch a lantern. We are going outside.”
“Outside?” said Sir Henry. “Are you mad? That blood-thirsty abomination could come back.”
“Is there not a pistol beside the front door still?”
“There is.”
“Then we shall take that with us, as a hedge against such an eventuality.”
Downstairs, Holmes and Grier emerged from the front door at a cautious pace, the former brandishing a lantern, the latter Sir Henry’s pistol. The night wind buffeted their faces and made the branches of the trees thrash and seethe. Each man had donned an overcoat over his nightclothes and had put on his boots without socks.
“Stick with me, Grier,” said Holmes. “Keep an eye out and, should the moth return, feel free to fire every last bullet you have into it. That should bring it down.”
“With pleasure. What shall you do?”
“What I do best: look.”
So saying, Holmes moved along the side of the house towards its south-facing elevation, lighting his way with the lantern. He stationed himself below Harry’s bedroom window and inspected the ground there. Then he proceeded outward in a line perpendicular to the Hall, crossing the garden until he reached the fence. This course followed that which had been taken by the moth. Grier hovered at his back, watchful as an owl. Holmes straddled the fence and continued onward in a straight line, over the undulating moor. The wind hissed through the thick grass and rattled the clumps of gorse.
After the two men had gone a couple of hundred yards, Holmes halted and went down onto his hands and knees, setting the lantern on the ground beside him. He bent his head towards the grass until the tip of his nose was mere inches above it.
“Footprints?” said Grier.
“Not as such, but rather a small but well-trampled patch of earth,” said Holmes. “The grass stems are freshly flattened. It is apparent as much to the nose as the eye. Grass that has just been trodden on exudes a distinctive sharp smell. Someone stood here only minutes ago, shifting around from foot to foot in such a way that I cannot make out individual prints, only their cumulative impact.”
“This ‘someone’ being the moth’s owner.”
“It could certainly be the case that this is where the moth went after it flew away from the house, returning to its waiting master.”
“Stapleton. He bade the moth fly to Harry’s window and summoned it back when the task of frightening the boy was done.”
“A plausible enough scenario.”
“Or…” Grier began.
“Or the moth, which is a skinwalker, alighted here and reverted to its other form, that of a witch,” said Holmes. “Is that what you were about to say?”
“No. Well, yes, I was, until I stopped myself.”
“You were wise to do so.” Holmes straightened up. “If luck were on our side, there would now be a trail of neat footprints, showing the direction taken by our miscreant as he arrived at and, more importantly, departed from the scene.” He tutted. “However…” He aimed the lantern’s beam ahead, oscillating it slowly from side to side. Even without its light it was possible to make out an expanse of flat, rocky ridges which began just a leap away and spread outward in a broad swathe to the left and right, row upon row of them. Their pale, moss-flecked surfaces glimmered like waves at sea. “There is no hope of finding spoor on such terrain. Somewhere out there, even now, our foe is watching us from a place of concealment. I am convinced of it. He has done his wicked work and is quietly gloating as he sees us flounder.”
“I am willing to spend as long as it takes searching for him,” Grier said, “and when we find the villain in whatever cranny he is hiding in, I shall drag him out by the scruff of the neck and give him a good thrashing.”
“Your resolve is as worthy as it is misplaced,” said Holmes. “See the cloud bank amassing to windward? We will soon lose the moonlight altogether, and then a darkness will descend that is nigh on impenetrable. It is clear that our enemy knows the moor well and is more at home on it than you or I. After all, he did not choose this spot by accident. He knew it afforded him the opportunity of escaping without leaving a trail. If we hunt for him using our lantern, its light will give away our position and make it even easier for him to elude us; and if we eschew the lantern, we shall stumble about like blind men, with no hope of finding him at all. No, Grier, we must accept, if only with the greatest reluctance, that we have been outfoxed. For tonight, at least.”
“I have just had a terrible thought, Holmes,” said the American, looking back over his shoulder at Baskerville Hall. “Suppose this has all been a ruse. Suppose you and I have been lured away from the house deliberately.”
“The notion did occur to me even as we were leaving the Hall,” Holmes said. “I weighed up the probabilities and decided that, on balance, it was unlikely.”
“Still, Sir Henry and Harry are on their own in there, and I do not like it. We closed the front door but did not lock it, and an accomplice could be sneaking inside even as we speak. I am going back. There may not be a moment to lose.”
Suiting the action to the word, Grier spun on his heel and hastened off the way they had come. Holmes followed, matching his pace to the American’s. His own disquiet, he told me, was hardly as great as that expressed by Grier, but all the same he felt a certain apprehension. He wondered if he had been overconfident. Perhaps he ought to have instructed Grier to remain behind at the house to safeguard the baronet and his son. If, in a moment of inattention, he had allowed himself to be decoyed, and the two Baskervilles were to suffer as a result, he would never forgive himself.
No sooner were Holmes and Grier indoors than Grier sprinted up the stairs, calling out Sir Henry’s name.
To Holmes’s relief, and doubtless more so to Grier’s, there came a soft answer from Harry’s bedroom.
“Here.”
Both men slowed their pace. The baronet’s voice was taut but evinced no greater panic or distress than earlier. They re-entered the bedroom to find the pair on the bed, just as they had left them, Sir Henry still hugging Harry tight. The only difference now was that the boy was asleep in his father’s arms.
Sir Henry put a finger to his lips, indicating that they should speak in a whisper.
“He has j
ust this minute dropped off,” he said.
“All the better for him,” said Grier. “Perhaps, in the morning, he will wake up and think it all a bad dream.”
“Let us hope so. I am going to stay with him the rest of the night. I am not letting him out of my sight again for a single moment, not until this whole thing is over. Am I to take it that your quest was fruitless?”
Holmes gave a rueful shrug of the shoulders. “Our quarry got away.”
“You have seen the moth for yourself now. Do you doubt any longer that it is real?”
“No, it is real enough. Whether it is as real as it seems, or indeed corporeal, is another matter.”
“You are being enigmatic.”
“Merely circumspect. I am only just beginning to grasp what forces are at work here and do not wish to postulate anything, even tentatively, before I am in possession of the full facts.”
“But you have some kind of theory?”
“A theory without empirical proof is worthless,” said Holmes. “It is a roof without walls. You are simply going to have to trust me, Sir Henry. Soon enough I will have erected those walls, and then we may act decisively and put paid to this moth menace once and for all.”
Chapter Fifteen
A CONSIDERABLE UNDERTAKING IS PROPOSED
“Holmes, I have been thinking,” said Sir Henry as they sat together at breakfast the next morning.
If ever a sentence is a hostage to fortune where Sherlock Holmes is concerned, it is this one. I myself am never so imprudent as to utter it, or anything like it, within earshot of him. Almost inevitably it will elicit a sardonic response along the lines of “Thinking is a practice best left to the professional” or “The brain is a delicate organ – one must take care not to overtax it.”
On this occasion, however, Holmes was charitable, as well he should have been after the alarms Sir Henry had endured the previous night. All he said was, “And what, pray tell, is the outcome of your deliberations?”
The baronet cast a look over at Harry, who had finished his meal and was now squatting in a corner of the dining room, playing intently with a spinning top and oblivious to anything being said at the table. The child seemed little the worse for his night-time encounter with the giant moth. He might even have forgotten it had happened or thought it a dream, as Grier had surmised. At any rate, he had not mentioned it once since waking, and his demeanour was that of someone quite untroubled. Holmes ascribed this to that remarkable resilience of children, which enables them to withstand shocks and upsets with far greater equanimity than any adult.
“I am,” Sir Henry said, lowering his voice somewhat, “going to have the Grimpen Mire drained.”
Holmes’s coffee cup halted halfway to his lips. “I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t see why?”
“I see exactly why. I was simply expressing surprise.”
“Think about it,” Sir Henry insisted. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, his gestures somewhat agitated, even aggressive. “It’s the best way – the only way – to establish beyond all doubt whether or not Jack Stapleton is alive.”
“You mean if you fail to uncover his remains by draining the Grimpen Mire, the only inference to be drawn is that he was never there in the first place.”
“Just so.”
Holmes mulled over the proposition. “It will be a considerable undertaking.”
“Then it is fortunate that I am a man of considerable means.”
“And you will oversee the work yourself?”
“No,” said Sir Henry, with a nod towards Harry. “Remember what I told you last night?” He was referring to his vow about not letting the boy out of his sight. “My place is here at the Hall. However, I am going to prevail upon Brother Benjamin to supervise in my stead.”
“What’s that? Did I just hear my name taken in vain?” Grier walked into the dining room from the kitchen. “By the way, Henry, we are running low on essentials. Your Mrs Barrymore kept a good larder, but unless we wish to survive on tinned food for the foreseeable future, someone needs to go into town today to buy groceries.”
“Are you volunteering?”
“By default. I don’t fancy Holmes will do it, nor you. But what is this thing you want to ‘prevail upon me to supervise’?”
“As a soldier you have been engaged upon construction projects, have you not?” said Sir Henry.
“When I was down near Mexico, our duties consisted of that and little else. My regiment built a number of roads and erected more telegraph lines than I care to count.”
“Then you are just the man for the job.”
“What job?”
“Draining the Grimpen Mire.”
“That’s the huge bog not far from here, yes?” said Grier. “Where…” Understanding dawned in his eyes. “Oh, I get it.”
“Do you think your engineering skills are up to the challenge?”
“I’d have to look over the place to be sure, but I reckon they are. It’ll take manpower, though, and money.”
“You have a blank cheque. You’ll find plenty of casual labourers in the locality with strong backs and a taste for coin. The odd employable layabout too, I should imagine. Recruit as many of them as you think you need and pay them whatever it takes. I don’t care how much it costs. All I care is that it’s done, and done quickly. Does that sound reasonable?”
“But it’ll take me away from the Hall,” said Grier. “Won’t that defeat the whole object of my coming back here?”
“Holmes will remain with me.”
“I’m not sure I shall, as a matter of fact,” said Holmes. “I have plans that require me to be elsewhere, for periods both during the daytime and at night. All related to the case, of course.”
“Then I shall be responsible for my own protection,” said Sir Henry staunchly. “I have managed well enough thus far, before you two came.”
His mind was made up and it seemed nothing could deter him. He wanted the mire drained, and drained it would be.
As it happened, Holmes did not think the idea was a poor one at all. He had far from ruled out the possibility that Jack Stapleton was still alive. It was among the several strands of enquiry that he was exploring in his mind, and to confirm the death, or otherwise, of the lepidopterist would certainly help narrow things down.
He knew, too, that it would give Sir Henry something to dwell upon other than his late wife and the threat to himself and his son, made all the more imminent by the manifestation of the moth at the Hall during the night. If the baronet’s energies were focused even partly elsewhere, it would be a useful distraction and could well prevent him from lapsing back into the maelstrom of madness that had hitherto engulfed him. To have a project, even if it was to be conducted at one remove by someone else, would give him purpose and a sense of accomplishment. It was Sir Henry’s way of fighting back.
“Well, Grier? Holmes?” Sir Henry said. “What do you say?”
Grier looked to Holmes for guidance, as I myself would have.
“I say that you have my blessing, Sir Henry,” Holmes replied, “and that Corporal Grier had better get going, because he has his work cut out for him.”
Chapter Sixteen
FRANKLAND OF LAFTER HALL
Holmes escorted Grier out to the Grimpen Mire, and at his first sight of that swampy morass the American was somewhat disheartened. With a wary eye he surveyed the patches of bright green sedge – that treacherously innocuous-seeming surface layer which masked deep, sucking pools – and the small hills that formed islands of solidity in the mire’s midst. It was another bright morning, but still there was an atmosphere about the place which dampened one’s spirits and even somehow dimmed the sunlight. The trilling of skylarks and meadow pipits had attended the two men on their journey from Baskerville Hall all the way until they had neared the mire. Then the birdsong had dwindled to nothing, and thereafter an eerie hush prevailed, the only sound the sighing of the breeze passing through the sedge’s soft fro
nds and spiky flowers.
“It is not small,” said Grier eventually. “But,” he added, demonstrating the indefatigably optimistic spirit that typifies his nation, “I will tame it.”
Holmes directed him towards the village of Fernworthy, its rooftops just visible a mile distant. There Grier would find shops and also might muster up workers for his great enterprise. He himself, meanwhile, turned his footsteps towards Lafter Hall.
Holmes had not previously met Frankland, the owner of Lafter Hall. He knew the place, for I had pointed it out to him when, at the climax of the first Baskerville affair, he, I and Lestrade had driven past it in a wagonette on our way towards our confrontation with Jack Stapleton. Any knowledge he had of Frankland himself, however, was derived solely from my reports of my interactions with the man. He was aware that Frankland was gruff and liverish; that, in short, he was what one might call “a bit of a character”.
How much of a “character” Holmes soon discovered in emphatic fashion. For, as he left the main road and strolled up the front path of Lafter Hall, he heard from within a bellowing cry of “Where?” Moments later, with his hand grasping the knocker of the imposing, boss-studded front door, he heard the cry repeated, even more loudly this time. “Where?” There followed, in swift succession, a litany of imprecation: “Where, where, where, where, in God’s name where?”
At that point, Holmes knocked. The door was opened by a butler who looked as harassed as his station allowed, which is to say that there was a slight discomfiture in his surface that betokened deep currents of perturbation running beneath.
“Yes?”
“Who is that at the door?” barked the same voice responsible for the reiterations of “Where?” This unseen questioner continued, “Not another lawyer, is it? Or some representative of my daughter, come begging?”
“I am not in a position to say, sir,” said the butler.
Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons Page 10