Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon

by James Lovegrove

  Eve shoved back her chair, tottering to her feet. Her thighs bumped the table, making silverware and stemware jump.

  “It is never going to end, is it?” she said fretfully. “I thought I was safe. I thought the mighty Sherlock Holmes would be my bulwark against this nightmare. I thought… I thought…”

  She sagged to the floor, dissolving into tears. I moved to help her. Her shoulders heaved.

  “Dr Watson,” said Thaddeus Allerthorpe in a voice like a rumble of thunder, “what in heaven’s name is going on? What have you done to my daughter?”

  “Nothing. I – I have made a miscalculation, that is all. We must get Eve to her room, and I will tend to her there.” Embarrassed as I was, my only instinct was to look after the young woman. “Will someone help me with her?”

  The assembled Allerthorpes were agog. Had Erasmus been present, I imagine he would have rushed to his sister’s side. As it was, nobody stirred in response to my entreaty.

  “Very well.” I hoisted Eve upright, whereupon she practically swooned in my arms. I caught her, supporting her weight.

  This second, even more dramatic collapse provoked uproar. Now, at last, someone came to my aid – the distant cousin whose name escapes me. Together, she and I sat Eve in her chair, and smelling salts were fetched. Eve was roused from her stupor, and the two of us escorted her upstairs. I did not look back as I exited the dining hall. I did not want to see Holmes’s expression, for I knew it would be full of recrimination.

  Chapter Fourteen

  MY LONG NIGHT OF PENANCE

  An hour later, I had reassured myself that Eve was not in any danger. The cousin had settled her in bed and I had administered a dose of Eve’s own chloral hydrate. The young woman was now sound asleep, and her face, in repose, was no longer etched with lines of torment.

  I found myself a chair, positioned it outside her bedroom door and sat. I was feeling all kinds of fool. I was resolved to keep a waking vigil, in case Eve should come to during the night and require my services. It was my fault she had had this fainting fit; my fault she had relapsed into the fraught condition from which she had previously shown a marked recovery. The least I could do, then, was look after her.

  I could blame my slip of the tongue on the wine. I had drunk plenty of it, and it had lowered my inhibitions. Still, that did not excuse what I had done. Given my brother’s predilections and the abyss into which they had sunk him, I try to be temperate when it comes to alcohol. On this occasion I had failed. I had let myself down, and in the process let down Holmes’s fragile-souled client – and, for that matter, Holmes himself.

  Assorted family members stopped by to enquire after Eve’s welfare. Some were sincere, some prying and some scathing. On a couple of occasions I was asked to account for Eve’s mention of the Black Thurrick. The subject of Lady Jocasta’s legacy was also raised. I refused to give a specific answer regarding either line of enquiry. I told my interlocutors that it was none of my business, by which I wished them to understand that it was none of theirs.

  Then Thaddeus Allerthorpe arrived and subjected me to a ten-minute tirade, which I withstood with forbearance. I offered nothing in return except contrite apologies and a promise to ensure that Eve received the very best care I could offer.

  “I should think so too, Doctor,” he said. “But only until tomorrow morning. We have a family physician, Dr Greaves, whom I shall summon then.”

  “I will attend to your daughter for as long as is necessary. There really is no need for another doctor.”

  “There is every need, because as of tomorrow morning you are persona non grata in this household. So is Sherlock Holmes. I will see to it that the pair of you are on your way to Bridlington station at the earliest opportunity.”

  I put up a protest, but he was having none of it.

  “You have brought no benefit and caused only trouble,” he said, glowering. “You are done here.”

  It would seem that any of the approval Thaddeus had bestowed upon us that afternoon was now rescinded. Holmes and I were back to being in his bad books, our names inscribed more indelibly in its pages than before.

  Last but not least, Holmes himself came.

  “Dear me, Watson,” he lamented. “What a shambles.”

  “Please, Holmes. Not you as well. I have just had Thaddeus Allerthorpe tear a strip off me, and I am still smarting. I made a mistake. I know it.”

  “The error, arguably, was mine. I should not have sworn you to secrecy about the twigs. You are too honest a fellow. Dissembling is not your forte.”

  “I know you are only trying to make me feel better, and it won’t wash. I have ruined everything. The case is over. We are to be thrown out of the castle first thing tomorrow. Thaddeus made that clear to me in no uncertain terms.”

  “To me, too. Before he came to you he spent a while ranting at me in his private study. The words ‘charlatan’ and ‘swindler’ were bandied about, and towards the end of this ad hominem attack I believe the possibility of legal action was even aired. By that point, I had rather stopped listening; and besides, I know an empty threat when I hear one. He also gave me to understand that he is calling in the family physician.”

  “Yes. Dr Greaves. I hope the fellow is competent.”

  “Did he mention to you that he wishes this Dr Greaves to interrogate Eve, with a view to establishing the soundness or otherwise of her mental state?”

  “That did not come up in the conversation. What if Greaves finds her mentally defective?”

  “Then he will certify her as such, and she will not receive her inheritance.”

  I bristled. “Dash it all! It just gets worse. And when you were starting to make some headway with the case, too.”

  “Well, it is to be regretted,” said Holmes philosophically, “but if we are no longer welcome, we are no longer welcome. The Allerthorpes will just have to handle their problems without us.”

  “It is Eve I feel the most pity for.”

  “As do I. However, if Dr Greaves does not deem her insane and she can last out the next three days, then at least her legacy is secured. You are not coming to bed, I take it. Your position on that chair is very much one of a sentry at his post.”

  “Until tomorrow morning and our unceremonious eviction, I remain Eve Allerthorpe’s physician.”

  “Then I shall bid you goodnight.”

  “Goodnight. And, Holmes? I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said he with a dismissive wave. “Comestibles aside, there is little I shall miss about Fellscar Keep.”

  And so began my, as I thought of it, long night of penance. Slowly the general hubbub in the castle settled down as the Allerthorpes, in dribs and drabs, turned in for the night. By around ten o’clock a hush had descended over the place, and by eleven I reckoned myself the only one on the premises who was still awake. Silence filled the stairwells and the long, winding corridors, a silence broken now and then by the lonely sigh of the wind outside and the odd tick, creak and groan such as any building makes, however small or large, at night – as though nothing, not even a manmade structure anchored to the earth by its mass and its foundations, is ever truly at rest.

  For the most part I just sat. Once in a while I would get up and walk around in order to ease a cramp in my leg or restore feeling to my numbed backside. I leafed idly through a novel, which I picked out from a bookcase nearby. It was a historical romance whose content struggled to hold my interest – my literary tastes erring more towards the contemporary and the sensational – and eventually I abandoned it. I then busied myself reciting the bones of the hand, starting with the distal phalanges, the intermediate, the proximal, and progressing from there through the metacarpals and the carpals and onward into the arm. I did the same with the feet. This was a technique I had developed while attending my surgical course at Netley, to help keep me awake when on call at night. It had also served to cement knowledge of human anatomy in my memory.

  Midnight struck, a number of timepieces ch
iming the hour near and far within the castle. By one o’clock, I was struggling to keep my eyes open. Though I knew I should stay alert in case Eve needed me, I also knew that, were I to nod off, I would doubtless hear if she called out in distress from her bed and would be up and running in seconds. Surely, I thought, I was permitted to snooze, if only for a few minutes. No one could begrudge me that, especially after the night I had had before.

  Once the decision was made, my body succumbed to sleep almost instantly. I jerked awake some while later, thinking I had just had the briefest of naps, only to discover that it was gone four. I peeked in on Eve, who was still sound asleep, then went to fetch myself a glass of water.

  Just as I was returning to my chair, I heard the scream.

  Chapter Fifteen

  LEAPING TO A CONCLUSION

  It was a female scream, and my first instinct was that it had come from Eve’s room. I flung open the door, but the girl remained exactly as she had been when I had looked in a few minutes earlier: snoring softly, her eyes closed. My sudden, precipitate intrusion did not disturb her.

  I shut the door and stood in the corridor for several moments, ears pricked. The scream, though brief, had been full of panic and terror, and had come as such a shock that the hairs on my body had stood erect and were only just now wilting again. I waited for it to be repeated, but that did not happen.

  Where had it come from? Close by, I thought, but not too close. This narrowed down my options somewhat, but in a place as vast and maze-like as Fellscar Keep, pinpointing the origin of the sound was still going to be a challenge.

  “Think, Watson,” I said to myself out loud. “Apply Holmes’s methods, if you can.”

  Concentrating, I replayed the scream in my head. What had been my immediate thought upon hearing it? That it had emanated from Eve. Eve, however, was patently not its source.

  Then, if it had not come from her room, but had seemed to, might the scream have come from beyond the room?

  Now I was getting somewhere. Yes. The scream had been outdoors.

  Eve’s bedroom was situated at the tip of the north wing, occupying the entirety of the far end of its third floor, with windows on three sides looking out to the east and west as well as to the north. The scream could have come from any of those three directions.

  I re-entered the room, more circumspectly this time. I padded across the rug and peered out between the curtains of each set of windows in turn.

  Moonlight shone down upon the lake. A part of me was loath to gaze out over that frozen expanse of water in case, as Eve had done, I should spy a hunched, sack-carrying figure loping across the ice. Absurd though I knew this notion to be, the trepidation I felt was real enough. It was a genuine relief to see nothing out there but blank, empty whiteness.

  From the west-facing window, I could make out the portion of the castle on that side. From the east-facing window, the view was much the same. There was the east wing, looming like some craggy cliff against the star-strewn sky. Of the two wings, the east was the wilder looking, its architecture somehow more disorderly, replete with more excrescences than the west, as though its design had been inspired by nightmares. Or was my imagination imbuing it with such a phantasmagorical aspect simply because I knew that Perdita Allerthorpe had committed suicide there and that a ghost, possibly hers, was reputed to walk its halls? Was I, as Holmes had said, bending reality to conform to expectation? No, I did not think so. Regardless of its notoriety, Fellscar’s east wing outdid the rest of the castle in presenting a crazed, menacing aspect to the world.

  I was all set to back away from the window and attempt some other means of fathoming where the scream had come from, when my eye fell upon a shape on the lake. It lay a few yards out from the foot of the castle, humped upon the ice; small, angular, odd, a thing of dappled black and white.

  I squinted in order to sharpen my focus, and I noted that there was something awfully familiar about the shape’s outline. The irregularity of it. The jumble of it.

  My mind harked back to the Battle of Maiwand. To fallen soldiers littering arid ground. The haphazard splay of their limbs. The sprawled, uncaring dead.

  My breath caught in my throat. In that moment I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was looking at a corpse.

  Minutes later I was pounding on Holmes’s bedroom door. He emerged in nightshirt and dressing gown, smoothing his sleep-mussed hair down.

  “What is it, Watson? Why are you knocking me up at this ungodly hour?”

  Urgently I explained, and in no time my friend was dressed and accompanying me to the east wing. We arrived in the self-same corridor we had visited during the day, and there we encountered a little girl in nightclothes. The child was wandering up and down, dragging a ragdoll behind her and looking sleepy and confused. She could not have been more than five or six years old. I recognised her as the little girl whom I had terrified at lunchtime when describing how Grimesby Roylott fell foul of his own deadly swamp adder.

  “I heard a strange noise,” she said to us. “It woke me up.”

  “Which is your room?” I asked her in gentle tones.

  The girl pointed.

  “Why not go back to bed?” I encouraged. “There is nothing to worry about.”

  “Why are you here?” she challenged. “Did you hear it too? It sounded like a lady screaming.”

  “It was a fox,” I said. “Do you know the high-pitched bark a fox makes at night? It can resemble a human scream.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded reassuringly. “Are your parents in one of these rooms?”

  The girl pointed to another door. “I went in and woke them up. Daddy was cross, and Mummy told me I must have dreamed it.”

  “You didn’t, but it was a fox, that is all.”

  “You’re not lying?”

  “Heavens, no. Why would you say such a thing, my girl?”

  “Because Mummy said you made it up about the snake.”

  “The snake?” I presumed the girl’s mother had told her that the swamp adder was fictitious, in order to quell her fears. “Well, yes, that was a story. But the fox is real.”

  The child finally accepted my explanation and traipsed off to her room.

  In the interim, Holmes had taken up position at one of the corridor’s windows and was gazing out. Now he said, “If it were in any doubt that your scream occurred, that little lady was the final proof. Her sharp young ears detected it, even if those of everyone else in the east wing, slumbering more soundly than she, did not. And look.”

  His lips were grimly pursed. Going to his side, I gazed out too.

  It was somehow gratifying to see the corpse, lying on the ice nearby, just where I had espied it from Eve’s bedroom. So, after all, this had not been a trick of the mind, my tired eyes construing something innocent as something sinister. At the same time the sight was, of course, dreadful.

  “Who is it?” I asked. “Can you tell?”

  “Not with any degree of certainty, but whoever it is, she is wearing a maid’s outfit.”

  There was no question about that. I was able to descry a black dress, a white apron and a white mob cap.

  “We must get down there,” I said. “There is a chance she may be alive.”

  “Lying so still? The head bent at an unnatural angle like that? I doubt it very much. Nonetheless, you are right. This is a death in suspicious circumstances, and the sooner I am able to examine the body, the sooner I may determine whether or not foul play is involved.”

  “Perhaps we should rouse the rest of the household first.”

  “And cause a hullabaloo? Everyone tearing around like headless chickens, getting in the way? No, thank you.”

  “Just Thaddeus Allerthorpe, then. He deserves to know what has happened.”

  “Not yet. Not until after I have done my bit. Now, I don’t much fancy the idea of climbing out of this window and slithering down the wall to the lake. There are rocks projecting from the base of the island and one might s
prain an ankle when landing upon those, or worse, if one is not careful. I could use a rope, I suppose, fastened to the window mullion, but I wouldn’t know where to find one in the castle. No, without a tether the descent is altogether too risky an enterprise. But I have an alternative plan.”

  Said plan involved first obtaining a dark-lantern, one of which was habitually left beside the front door in case of need. Then we headed outside via the main gate, traversed the causeway, and walked around the perimeter of the lake to the point nearest the east wing. From there we stepped onto the ice and crossed until we reached the spot where the corpse rested. I will not pretend that the last part of the journey was easy or pleasant. My feet kept slipping, and every time the ice creaked and crackled beneath us, my heart was in my mouth.

  Soon enough we made it, but Holmes warned me not to get too close to the body.

  “She has fallen,” he said, shining the dark-lantern upon the poor wretch in front of us. “From some considerable height, it would seem. The impact was severe enough to crack the ice, although not enough that she broke through. The ice must be thicker here than elsewhere, but we should tread carefully all the same. Its integrity has been compromised.”

  So saying, my friend passed me the lantern. He then went down on all fours and, from this position, eased himself fully prone.

  “I am increasing my surface area,” he said, “and thus spreading my weight out over the ice and lessening the pressure I place upon it.”

  “I realise. Just please be careful.”

  “When have you ever known me to do otherwise?”

  I could have cited several past instances when Holmes had acted rashly or with impetuosity, but I chose not to. Instead, I watched, full of misgiving, as he slid forward on his belly until he was within touching distance of the corpse.

  Slowly he performed a circuit around the body, staying prone as much as possible, Meanwhile I kept the lantern’s beam trained upon a point just in front of him, taking care not to shine it in his eyes.