by H. G. Parry
“I think of how it fits into the wider story, and I concentrate on that—but this isn’t my reading. I don’t know where it fits. I don’t know what kind of reading it is.”
I took his word for it. I know nothing about literary criticism, or bringing things out of books. If a mechanic tells me he can’t fix my car because the thingumajig will no longer connect with the whatsit, I don’t bother to argue.
“Well, it seems large and scary,” I said instead. “I haven’t read the book, but I thought the Hound of the Baskervilles turns out to be a normal dog?”
“Nobody pictures that,” Charley said. “Not in the early parts. You’re not supposed to.”
The cry came again, louder this time, and this time there was a decided bump against the door. Charley flinched, and took a step backward.
“Are you okay?” I asked, though I understood why he might not be. My own heart was pounding.
Charley took a while to respond. “Oh… yes,” he said. “Just… this is sort of my worst fear come to life right now.”
“Isn’t Hound of the Baskervilles one of your many favorite books?”
“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t scare me to death. The opposite, actually. When I was five I couldn’t even open it unless I was hiding under the bed with a flashlight.”
“I remember.”
“I know it’s not really a ghost dog from the depths of hell. I know Holmes proves it’s a hoax. But that isn’t the experience for the early parts of the book. Oh God.”
This last came involuntarily as the door shook and rattled; on the wood outside, I heard hard nails scrape.
“Do you have anything to fend it off with?” I asked. “You know: a poker, or a baseball bat or something.”
He shook his head vigorously. “I don’t have a working fireplace and I don’t play baseball. Anyway—it’s the Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s not going to be deterred by a flailing stick.”
“Steady,” I said, as if my blood hadn’t turned to ice. “What about a kitchen knife?”
“In the top drawer.” He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. “But honestly, those knives can’t even cut tomatoes anymore. I keep meaning to get them sharpened. Hold on—there’s Excalibur, if I can find Le Morte Darthur again.”
“I’m not going to attack a spectral dog with a medieval sword, Charley! They shoot it in the original story, don’t they? If you must bring something out from the pages of a book, don’t you have books with guns?”
“It’s not that simple,” he said. “It has to be—I don’t know, it would have to be an important gun, one with meaning and context. I can’t just reach in and pull out a hot dog because the protagonist eats one on page twenty-six.”
“I thought you said everything in a book has meaning.”
“It does! That doesn’t mean it means what you want it to mean!”
“Well, find one that does! You’ve got a whole bloody library here!”
“I don’t—there’s Chekhov’s gun, obviously. But I don’t know if I have that anywhere—maybe in Abrams’s Literary Terms—”
The door shuddered; the blow shook the house and set the lights above us swinging. A book fell to the ground, with a soft thud like an echo. I could hear growling, and that terrible, rhythmic panting. The door’s hinges groaned.
“It’s going to be through in a moment,” I said. “We need to move.”
There was no response, and I turned quickly. I realized then, rather belatedly, how scared he was. Charley talks very fast when he’s nervous, or ill at ease; when he’s truly, deeply terrified, he goes quiet. Right then, he was not only quiet, but frozen. I felt a familiar protective tug in my chest, and as usual I pushed it away.
“Charley!” I snapped.
He still didn’t move; it was only when I grabbed him roughly by the shoulder that his eyes flickered toward me.
“Upstairs,” I told him. There was literally nowhere else to go: Charley’s flat has no back door, and if it did there would be nowhere to run that way but a bush-covered gully. “Move!”
With a supreme effort of will, Charley shook himself out of whatever had him in its grip, nodded quickly, and started to run as I pushed him away. He stumbled, picked himself up, and made it to the stairs, me close behind him.
He had reached the top and I was on about the third stair when the door flew from its hinges. The hound was in the room.
I’ve seen some strange things emerge from books over the years—you should have seen the house when Charley was reading Kafka—but I’ve never seen anything like that creature. I suppose it was a dog, but it more closely resembled a cart horse crossed with a gargoyle: enormous, so black it made the dark around it look gray, with luminous green fire roaring from its open mouth and coiling about its neck and flanks like a lion’s mane. It growled, like a freight train rumbling through, and its eyes gleamed red. I only caught a glimpse of it as I froze in horror, and then I was tearing up the stairs and through the door that Charley was holding open.
I collapsed onto the ground at the foot of Charley’s bed, and he slammed the door shut. There’s not a lot of furniture in that room—honestly, it’s a bed in a cocoon of books—but there’s a small writing desk by the window, and I got up to help Charley drag it in front of the door. We were both breathing hard, and he was shaking visibly. I probably was too.
“Did you see it?” he asked me.
“No,” I lied—I knew he hadn’t, and he was frightened enough without hearing the details of that thing. “Look, that’s not going to hold it for long—the front door’s much sturdier, and it tore through that like paper.”
“No.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes. “No, I know. Give me a second, I’m thinking.”
“Well, hurry up.” I could hear the sound of padding footsteps on the staircase.
“I know,” he repeated. Then his face lit. “Of course, obviously…”
He dived for one of the piles of books that circled the walls. I ran my eyes around the room quickly, looking for anything to use in case of the worst. There was a paperweight on the desk, but that would be like throwing a pebble at an elephant. I went instead for the desk lamp, which had a fairly solid metal base, and ripped the plug out of the wall so I could hold it like a club. The scratches were at the door again; I heard growling and whining, and then the door quivered on its hinges.
“Charley!” I urged, then groaned as I saw which book he had pulled out from the bottom of the pile. “Oh, not him again…”
There was a flare of light, and then a familiar figure was standing beside us.
I hate it when Sherlock Holmes comes. I didn’t use to mind so much when I was little, although the way he and Charley talked always made me feel left out and—I suppose—superfluous. But since that day when I was eighteen, I’ve always felt his cool gaze on me had something of real disdain. Most of Charley’s creations presumably know about that day, depending on the memories they carry from him; Uriah Heep was only the first to mention it. But Holmes was there. He knows firsthand what I did—or didn’t do. And I’m sure he’s probably deduced more about me from it than Charley would have the heart to.
“Dr. Sutherland,” the great detective greeted my brother. As usual, he showed no surprise at suddenly finding himself in a twenty-first-century house. “Always a uniquely unexpected pleasure.”
My brother’s images of Sherlock Holmes have shifted over the years, but he can never be mistaken for anyone else: tall and lean, with dark hair, a hawklike nose, and piercing eyes (not literally piercing, fortunately—that can happen). This version looked a little older and more human than the ones I’d seen in my brother’s teenage years, but still absolutely formidable.
“We’re in the middle of a crisis here,” I told him.
“So I gathered,” Holmes said, a little coolly, I thought, though I might have been oversensitive. “When two people are hiding in a bedroom whilst the door is being battered from the outside, it’s not difficult to deduce a crisis is i
n progress.”
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Charley said. He had shut The Sherlock Holmes Novel Omnibus and scrambled back to his feet. “But the Baskerville hound is outside, and you dispatch it so well in the book…”
“How kind of you,” Holmes said, with a smile in his direction. He looked at the closed door, which was trembling under repeated blows, and tilted his head to one side as he considered. “But I’m afraid that won’t work in this case. That is no mere hound you have outside the door. You have the nightmare version, the version of legend, and I’m afraid it will be very much impervious to bullets. It was believed to be, after all, before I shot it.”
“But you can do something?” The panic was rising in Charley’s voice again. “Please, you have to. It’s your book.”
“I can’t do anything,” Holmes said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to handle this yourself.”
“How’s he supposed to do that?” I demanded. “There’s a—I don’t even know what that thing is outside the door!”
“You know what it is, Doctor,” Holmes said to my brother. He was perfectly grave now, and ignoring me completely. “A cross between a bloodhound and a mastiff, aided by a cunning preparation of phosphorus. And mortal—not supernatural. You simply need to read it back the way it should be.”
“But it’s not mine this time!” Charley protested. “I can’t put it back.”
“Perhaps not. But you can argue with its interpretation. You do it all the time—on paper, at conferences. Think of it as an academic dispute. And in this case, you may consider yourself justified by the text itself. You would correct a colleague or a student who tried to read the hound as a pure Gothic monster, would you not?”
“Of course. It’s an ordinary dog. You unmask it through deductive reasoning. The entire book is about the power of science and intellect to disprove fear and superstition. But…”
“Exactly,” Holmes said. “This… creature out there, whatever it is, is a misreading and an affront to the most basic Sherlock Holmes scholarship. Correct it. That, after all, is how I truly defeat the monstrous hound, is it not? Not merely by shooting it. By disproving its very existence.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Yes, you do.” He took my brother by the shoulders, and looked into his face. I was focused on the door, but still there was something hypnotic about his voice. My ears were drawn to it, even under the sounds of our death trying to tear its way to us. “You know why the reading is wrong. You know the clues my author placed in the text to hint at the hound’s proper origins. You know how the text resolves itself. You know the thematic reasons why there cannot be a ghost in the universe of Sherlock Holmes. Your only difficulty is that, at this moment, you are in a state of terror. Your heart rate has increased, your breathing has quickened, your pupils have contracted, your muscles have tensed, and you are no longer thinking clearly. That is precisely the effect the hound is designed to have. It scares people to death. Sir Charles Baskerville died of heart disease and terror at the sight of it; the convict on the moors broke his neck trying to escape it. You need to overcome your fear, and quickly, because when it breaks through that door—as it assuredly will—it will almost certainly be too late.”
Charley shook his head. “I can’t—”
“You can,” he said firmly. “Sutherland, I am not in the habit of flattering people with false estimates of their abilities. You can.”
The door was creaking under the strain now—fortunately, the landing was too small to give it a run-up, or it would have battered it down already.
“Rob,” Charley said. “What did it look like?”
“I said I didn’t—”
“I know, but you must have—you wouldn’t have been so far behind me if you hadn’t stopped to look. Please, I need to know this.”
“It was huge,” I said. “And black. And breathing fire. It was—I don’t know—”
“‘Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog’?”
“Yes.” There was fog creeping in from under the door now. It was deathly cold; I saw the hair rise on the back of my hands as they gripped the lamp. “That.”
“Good,” Charley said. “Thanks.”
He opened the book to a different page, and began reading.
“Very good,” Mr. Holmes said softly.
I turned back to the door, disturbed as always by the intense concentration on my brother’s face. I knew that look very well: it was there when he brought something out, or when he put something back, but sometimes just when he was reading or writing or staring out the window, oblivious to the rest of the world. I don’t think I ever go that deeply into my own head. I always have the irrational fear that he might not come out.
“All right,” I heard him say to himself. “We’re told that the dog was bought in London from Ross and Mangles, the dealers in Fulham Road. There’s a characteristic attention to prosaic detail, precise locations… and the word used is ‘dog,’ no longer the more Gothic ‘hound’…”
“Be careful,” Holmes instructed. “Keep your focus on the hound outside the door. You want to change it, not create another.”
That was a thought.
The hound was still growling and scratching. The fog was still thick. The door jolted, and the desk scraped against the floor.
“Charley…”
“‘But that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him…’” He was keeping his eyes resolutely on the paper, so tense it was as though he were trying to shy away from the air around him. “That’s classical logic. It’s conditional implication—the ‘if–then’ structure is echoed. And it’s from Watson, which is notable—deductive reasoning is now worked into the fabric of the narration, and not just personified in Sherlock Holmes…”
“It’s getting through,” I said.
Holmes raised a finger to his lips, and I shut up.
Charley drew a breath quickly, as if something had hit him. I heard a startled yelp from outside the door.
“Got it.” He was very pale, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “God, I hate misreadings of Conan Doyle.”
“It’s still out there,” I said, although I had definitely felt a change in the air. The fog had lifted, and with it the terrible sense of oppression; the fear from downstairs loosened its grip on my stomach. That yelp had not sounded supernatural. It sounded like a dog in pain.
(“But that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds…”)
“Let it in, Mr. Sutherland,” Holmes said to me. “And be prepared to use that lamp you’ve been waving so enthusiastically.”
I glanced at Charley, who nodded. I pulled the desk away from the door.
The handle must have already been jiggled, because without that desk, the door swung open on its own. Behind it, teeth bared and hackles rising, was a dog.
It was still a terrifying dog. It was the size of a small lioness, with a jaw that could have cracked a person’s skull in one bite. Something was smeared around its mouth that gave off a chemical glow. It was clearly bewildered and furious. But it was just a dog.
I had time to register this before it sprang at us; on instinct, I jumped in front of it and gave it a sharp rap on the nose with the lamp. It yelped and pulled back, snarling.
“Go on!” I yelled at it, waving the lamp in its direction. “Go on, get out of here!”
It hesitated for a moment. Then, as I lunged for it again, it turned tail and ran. I heard it clatter down the stairs, its great lolloping strides practically overlapping each other, and then there was silence.
“Poor brute,” Mr. Holmes said. “It must have been very confused.”
“I know,” Charley agreed. “I always feel sorry for the Hound of the Baskervilles.”
I took a flashlight and went out to have a quick look around the garden for the hound or anybody who could have conjured it, but there was nothing and nobody to be seen. When I came back to report this, Charley was saying goodbye to Mr. Holmes.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” he asked, a little wistfully. “This could be described as a real mystery now.”
“And I will be here if you require my assistance,” Holmes said. “I always am. But you won’t. Any expertise I have in the manner of your abilities, Dr. Sutherland, comes entirely from your head. It’s time you began to trust it.”
“Uriah Heep knew something about what’s going on,” Charley said. “Do you?”
Holmes shook his head. “No. No, I don’t. If Heep has any specialized knowledge from being a literary character, I regrettably do not share it. But I do have one piece of advice for you, in that regard.”
“What’s that?”
“There is a street.” Holmes sounded uncharacteristically hesitant. “In the heart of the city. Turn off Cuba, go down the Left Bank past the old bookshop, and you should find it. It didn’t exist until two years ago, but now every time you call me through I can feel the knowledge of it tugging at my brain.”
“I’ve been down that way countless times,” I said. “There’s no street there. Just a lot of shops.”
“I know,” Holmes said. “It is utterly impossible, and yet it exists. Which, of course, must mean that it is not impossible at all, merely unlikely.”
“And you think we’ll find answers there,” Charley said.
“I don’t say so. But it may be a place to start.” He shook Charley’s hand, a clear signal that the interview was over. “Good luck, Dr. Sutherland. It really is always a pleasure. Mr. Sutherland,” he added, with a nod in my direction. It seemed a little warmer than usual.
“Thanks for your help,” Charley said, and closed his eyes. The room was briefly suffused with light, and then the great detective was gone.
Charley sank unsteadily onto the sofa behind him, and rested his head in his hands.
I was shaken myself. It was one thing chasing figments of Charley’s imagination around the house. We all, our parents included, saw that as part of the furniture of family life by the time he was six, as we might a dog that ate the couch or an aunt that insisted on buying socks for Christmas. Irritating, but unavoidable. It went, somehow, with the special teachers and the university degrees by fifteen and the heavy tomes on literary theory lying about the place. It went with Charley being in the family at all. This was suddenly much bigger than our family.
