Voysden had been absent from the club for a fortnight, and I assumed he had conquered his addiction. However, when he next appeared, his face was haggard and wan, his whole demeanour that of a man utterly defeated by life. He played recklessly all evening, losing money hand over fist and drinking a great deal, too. In the end I drew him aside and counselled that he should call it a night and head homeward.
“He’s gone, you know, Watson,” Voysden said, slurring his words.
“Who’s gone?”
“Didn’t you hear? My father. Dead. Dead as a doornail.”
“I am most sorry to hear that, Voysden. My sincerest condolences.”
“It was in the papers. Surprised you didn’t see. Happened just three, no, four days ago now. He died slowly and horribly. Bled to death from a wound.”
“My goodness!”
“Yes. Previously undetected haemophilia. He cut his hand and the bleeding just would not stop.”
“Awful.”
“It was no accident, though.” A queer kind of grin crept over Voysden’s face, full of rage and contempt. “It was Knowles who did it.”
“Knowles? Who is Knowles?”
“Lawrence Knowles. My father’s assistant. Jumped-up little scrounger. Tried to ride Dad’s coattails to success. I was wise to him all along, but I think my father was starting to twig, too, because the two of them were becoming more and more estranged. Knowles killed him. I know he did. I know how, what’s more. I just can’t prove it. Knowles has been cunning. Too cunning. But he did it, sure as black is black.”
“Now listen here, Voysden,” said I, “if what you’re saying is true, then justice needs to be served. And I know just the man to serve it.”
“Who’s that?”
“Have I not told you about my friend Sherlock Holmes?”
“No.”
At that time I had not yet published any of my chronicles of Holmes’s exploits. The manuscript of A Study in Scarlet was even then with Ward Lock & Co., like a newly built ship on the slipway, soon to embark upon its maiden voyage in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Holmes was steadily garnering a reputation throughout London, but his accomplishments – my fictionalised versions of them, at least – had yet to become renowned the world over.
I swiftly explained to Voysden what Holmes did, whereupon he gave a vigorous shake of the head. “‘Consulting detective’? No, Watson. Not at all. I won’t hear of it. The police can’t help me and neither can your friend. And even if I thought he could, I can’t afford to pay him. You know how straitened my circumstances are.”
“Pay? Pshaw! I shall take care of that. It won’t cost you a penny.”
“I really can’t—”
“I shan’t brook any argument,” I said adamantly. “Come along.”
I led Voysden, against his protests, to Baker Street. I practically had to drag him by the scruff of the neck. I will admit, Lovecraft, that I had taken pity on the fellow. I had long thought him worthy of compassion and I felt that if I could help him now, it might go some way to making up for the number of times I had siphoned money off him (for I was not any more scrupulous than my peers at the club when it came to exploiting the weaknesses of others at the table). It might also do something to bolster his sense of self-worth and restore the balance of his mind. In short, both of us would benefit.
Holmes was abed, but I knocked him up. He emerged from his bedroom dishevelled and disgruntled.
“What is this, Watson?” said he, fastening the cord of his mouse-coloured dressing-gown. “Do you realise the hour? Have you been drinking?”
I confess I was not sober, though I was not nearly as far gone as Voysden. “I have brought a poor unfortunate in need of your help, Holmes. His father has been murdered by an unscrupulous-sounding villain who appears to have covered his tracks well. Well enough that the police cannot lay a finger on him, at any rate.”
“Not necessarily that well, then,” Holmes said with that air of faint scorn he was wont to adopt whenever reference was made to the crime-solving prowess of Her Majesty’s Constabulary.
“This is a terrible mistake,” said Voysden. “I should not be here.”
“Come, come!” my friend declared. “If you are troubled, then you are exactly where you need to be, Mr…?”
“Timothy Voysden,” I said, when Voysden himself seemed reluctant to venture his name, “meet Sherlock Holmes.”
“Voysden?” Holmes’s somewhat bleary gaze brightened discernibly. “Not Voysden as in Sinclair Voysden?”
“You knew my father?”
“Knew of him. An anthropologist of some repute. I saw his obituary in the Times just this morning. Haemophilia, was it not?”
“So it is said.”
“But he was more than a mere anthropologist,” Holmes added. “What was it he called his specialised field of study? Xenoanthropology.”
“Quite a mouthful,” I said.
“The study of ancient cultures believed to be not of this earth. He assembled quite the collection of supposedly extraterrestrial artefacts, did he not, Mr Voysden?”
Holmes, in qualifying his statements the way he did, was being deliberately coy. He knew as well as I that otherworldly entities existed; there was no “believe” or “suppose” about it. But in the presence of others we had both of us learned to exercise caution, for fear of appearing credulous and perhaps even mad.
“My father travelled the world, unearthing relics or buying them from antiquaries,” Voysden said. “It was his life’s obsession.”
“And you are of the opinion that he did not die of natural causes?”
“Voysden reckons his father’s assistant is the culprit,” I interjected.
“How interesting,” said Holmes. “Mr Voysden, kindly make yourself comfortable in the sitting room. I shall be but a moment.”
I escorted Voysden to the chair habitually reserved for Holmes’s clients, where he sat wringing his hands. I made every effort to reassure him that he had nothing to be anxious about. Indeed, his worries were at an end, I told him, for with Sherlock Holmes on the case, the matter would be satisfactorily resolved in no time.
When encouraging words did not work on him, the offer of a brandy did. Voysden gulped it down and seemed to settle. His manner was acquiescent, as though he was finally able to accept that help was at hand.
Holmes entered, fully dressed, and presently his pipe was in his hand and he was probing Voysden for details.
Voysden began by painting a portrait of his father: a rather aloof man, a widower for the majority of his son’s life, heir to a fortune large enough to allow him to spend his days solely in pursuit of his great passion. He had started out as a conventional anthropologist, travelling extensively through Africa, South America and the islands of the Pacific and studying the indigenous tribes with intent to disprove the prevailing theory that these peoples were evolutionary throwbacks, “living fossils” as it were, inferior to the European races. Rather, he was of the view that such cultures had developed in parallel with our own and, far from having been left behind by the march of progress, were no less advanced and complex, merely different.
This made him a heretic among his own kind and earned him a great deal of opprobrium. Voysden senior further alienated himself from his peers by branching out into a discipline of his own, based upon the increasing evidence he was finding of visitation by beings from space, not only in ancient times but today. He began to acquire objects – stone carvings, statues, domestic utensils, trinkets and suchlike – which either were fashioned from material not native to this planet, or demonstrated methods of manufacture whose sophistication was far beyond that even of modern mankind, or denoted alien imagery or purpose, or indeed all of these things at once. Many of them had been venerated as religious icons by tribespeople, while others had simply been handed down through the generations as heirlooms, their original provenance unknown. Some, such as a hand axe made of coral which washed up on the shores of Maiana in the Gilbert Islands, s
uggested its creator belonged to some subaquatic humanoid species. Not only that, but Voysden inferred that the creatures were contemporaneous, likely dwelling on the ocean bed nearby; for the weapon appeared newly minted.
Thus did he amass what he considered a compelling argument to back up his theories, while at the same time his scientific reputation degenerated to the point where audiences for his lectures at the Royal Society openly laughed at him. Regardless, he doggedly pursued his researches, enlisting the aid of Lawrence Knowles, a young amateur whom he met while investigating the ruins of a lost civilisation in the remote Andes. Timothy Voysden, meanwhile, was more or less ignored and left to his own devices; hence, perhaps, his waywardness and moral turpitude. His father, one got the impression, was the kind of man for whom paternal duty came a poor second to the fulfilment of his own desires.
Then came tragedy.
“My father had lately returned from Nineveh,” Voysden said, “where he had been searching amid the newly excavated ruins of a Mesopotamian civilisation hitherto unknown to historians but believed to date back to pre-Assyrian times. The site had been denuded of its treasures, but he hoped something might have escaped the archaeologists’ attention. Alas, he came away empty-handed. Then, while visiting a souk in nearby Mosul, he met an Arab, a dealer in antiquities, who claimed he possessed a mysterious carved stone which came from the site.”
“Something the archaeologists had missed?” said Holmes.
“In a manner of speaking. It was in fact found by one of the labourers working on the dig, an unscrupulous rogue who secreted the stone in his robe, unbeknownst to his masters, and slipped away to sell it for personal gain. The dealer, Ali Hassan by name, bought it from the fellow for a small consideration and said he would be willing to part with it to my father for the right price. He muttered something about the stone being cursed, but whether that was to deter my father or further pique his interest, I cannot say.”
“I would imagine it had the latter effect,” Holmes averred. “This Ali Hassan sounds like a canny operator and would seem to have had the measure of your father. A Westerner with a penchant for exotic artefacts can hardly resist the lure of an item with a curse supposedly attached. Such rumours lend lustre, as a gilded frame does to an oil painting.”
“Quite so, Mr Holmes. Certainly, as soon as my father clapped eyes on the stone, he knew he wanted it. Those were his exact words to me. He paid Ali Hassan a princely sum for it, as well.”
“Presumably you have seen this carved stone for yourself.”
“I have.”
“Describe it.”
“It is just shy of four inches long from tip to tip and made of some metallic mineral that my father was never able to identify – a silvery substance with iridescent streaks. In shape it is a regular octahedron, with intricate designs engraved upon all eight faces. Those designs are not pictorial but neither do they correspond to any known form of script, hieroglyphic or otherwise, at least so my father determined. That, however, was not what fascinated him about the stone so much as what it was reportedly capable of.”
“Tell me more.” Holmes leaned forward in his chair.
Voysden seemed reluctant. “Here, sir, I would crave your indulgence, for we enter the realm of the improbable.”
“The improbable can sometimes simply be the as yet undiscovered.”
“Be that as it may, what I have to report now may be regarded by some as purest fantasy.”
“Allow me to be the judge of that.”
“The stone came in a little wooden box, swaddled in cotton wrapping, and Ali Hassan warned my father to take the utmost care with it. He should never touch it barehanded, but rather, if he must handle it, he should wear thick gloves. Preferably he should leave it in the box and never take it out. The reason for this was simple. The stone’s edges and vertices were tremendously sharp, Ali Hassan said. So sharp, they could cut a man in such a way that the wound would never heal.”
“Hum! Is that so?” Holmes affected airiness, as though dismissing out of hand this preposterous-sounding assertion. I could tell, though, that he was intrigued, and also that the very idea of a strange stone with such a distinctive property was not at all extraordinary to him. It was not extraordinary to me, either. In the seven years that had passed since our terrifying escapade in Shadwell, where Holmes and I had first learned of the sinister supernatural substratum which ran beneath the mundane world, we had encountered much that was bizarre and inexplicable, not to say downright unfathomable, and we were well accustomed to it, if not quite inured.
“I would reject the idea myself,” said Voysden, “but my father was altogether more uncritical. He told me that Ali Hassan had cited, as proof, the fact that the labourer from whom he had bought the stone managed to prick his finger on it when picking it up. The injury, though slight, was still bleeding nearly six months later. No matter what bandaging or unguents were applied, nothing could stem the flow.”
“Again, sheer hyperbole, I am sure. A fable to make the stone seem altogether more exotic and alluring, to one with the right temperament. Do you not agree, Watson? In your medical opinion, can a wound of such slightness fail to heal?”
“Under normal circumstances, no,” said I. “Coagulation of the blood and the growth of new tissue allow the body naturally to repair all but the deepest of lacerations.”
“Nonetheless, my father took Ali Hassan’s advice seriously,” said Voysden. “When he got the stone home, he added it to his collection still in its box. He put it in a locked, glass-fronted cabinet, where it kept company with other items that he deemed, for one reason or another, too dangerous to remain on open display. There it stayed, until one fateful afternoon the week before last.”
“What happened?” Holmes asked.
“My father had removed the stone from the cabinet in order to study it. As usual, he took the precaution of donning thick leather gloves, and avoided all contact with the edges and vertices when holding it. At no point did the stone penetrate the material of the gloves, and he was unhurt when he returned the stone to its box and the box to the cabinet.”
“And yet somehow he sustained a cut?”
“That he did. It occurred later, after he had put the stone away. And yet the stone was still the cause.”
“How can that be?”
“At dinner that night, as the port was being served, my father reached into his jacket pocket in order to fetch out his tobacco. As he groped around for his pouch, his hand encountered a different object – the stone. It gashed his palm.”
“I see. Thus was created a wound.”
“Not a deep one, nor a long one, but a wound all the same. Hissing with pain, my father stared at his palm. Blood was flowing freely. I staunched the cut with a table napkin, creating a temporary bandage, and subsequently we applied surgical tape, gauze and salve. My father then turned out the contents of his pocket, and there was the stone, smeared with his blood. At that point he did not panic. There was nothing to indicate that the stone did indeed have the power to cause irreparable damage to flesh, other than the word of an Arab antiques dealer who may well have been spinning a yarn. Even the following morning, with the wound still pouring forth blood, my father remained steadfast in his conviction that all would be well. Yet by evening his resolve was faltering.”
“There was still no sign of healing?”
“None. Blood continued to flow as though the cut were freshly inflicted. By that time we had gone through all the available dressings in the house, and the maid had been despatched to the chemist to buy more.”
“Over the course of twenty-four hours I estimate your father may have lost as much as a pint of blood,” I said.
“At least,” said Voysden.
“And the loss, if it continued at such a rate, might well exceed his body’s capacity to replenish supply.”
“He was certainly looking pale and starting to feel faint, and thus we called for the doctor. He examined the wound and pronounced himself
mystified. The only diagnosis he could come up with was that my father must suffer from hitherto-latent haemophilia. Yet there is no history of it in our family.”
“It is not always an hereditary condition,” I said. “Sometimes it may develop spontaneously. Had your father exhibited any symptoms beforehand? Headaches? Unexplained bruising? Bleeding in the joints or from the gums?”
“No. The doctor declared that he had never seen such a severe case. Nor could he understand why the sides of the cut were not knitting of their own accord. He inserted stitches and told my father to eat plenty of red meat. He assured us the bleeding would stop eventually.”
“But it did not,” said Holmes.
“My father…” Voysden reached out to me with his empty brandy glass, and I refilled it. “It took him a fortnight to die, all told. The stitches failed to close the cut. The blood simply oozed out through the gaps between them. All we could do was keep sopping it up. I suggested to the doctor that he perform a blood transfusion, I being the donor.”
“I would be surprised if he agreed to that,” I said. “The procedure is hazardous to both him who gives and him who receives.”
You must appreciate, Lovecraft, that it wasn’t until early this century that Karl Landsteiner discovered the different blood groups, paving the way for safe transfusions. Before then, the medical fraternity shied away from the practice, with justification.
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 10