Shadows over Baker Street

by John Pelan;Michael Reaves

  I must apologize if I have drifted into the sort of tedious travelogue I earlier promised to avoid, but it is important to impress upon you, at this point in my account, my state of mind, the odd and disquieting effect the abbey had elicited from me. I am not someone accustomed to such emotions and generally regard myself as a man not the least bit dogged by superstition. I told myself that whatever I felt was no more than the cumulative product of light and shadow, compounded by some exhaustion from my long day, and was only what most any other rational man might feel gazing upon those ruins.

  At West Cliff, I was at once distracted from my intended goal, the Liassic shales themselves, by the extraordinary sight of a schooner run aground on the eastern side of the quay, across the Esk, and quickly realized that I was, in fact, seeing the very schooner, the Demeter, which I’d heard discussed with such excitement and foreboding over breakfast. I assure you, Dr. Watson, that the dead Russian ship cut a peculiar and lonely spectacle, cast up as she was on the jagged shingle of Tate Hill Pier, at the foot of East Cliff and the old graveyard. Her pathetic, shattered masts and bowsprit at once put me in mind of the tall spines of some pre-Adamite monster, not an odd association, of course, for someone in my profession. The tangled rigging and torn canvas hung loose, sagging like some lifeless mass of rawhide and sinew, flapping in the ocean’s breeze.

  And once again, that unaccustomed sense of dread assailed me, though even stronger than it had before, and I admit to you that I considered turning at once back toward the comfort of the inn. However, as I have said, I count my freedom from baser beliefs and superstitions as a particular point of pride, and knowing there was nothing here to fear and determined to have a look at the alum beds, not to be deterred by such childish thoughts or emotions, I began searching for some easy access to the beach below me, where I might better examine the rocks.

  Within only a very few minutes I’d located a spiral, wooden stairway affixed to the cliff near the wall of the quay. However, the years and ravages of the sea had done much damage to the structure and it swayed most alarmingly as I carefully descended the slick steps to the sands below. Having finally reached the bottom, I paused briefly and stared back at the rickety stairway, sincerely hoping that I might find an alternate means of reaching the top again. The tide was out, revealing a broad swath of clean sand and the usual bits of flotsam, and I rightly supposed that I still had a good hour or so to look about the foot of West Cliff before setting out to discover such an alternative became a pressing concern.

  Almost at once, then, I came across the perfectly preserved test of a rather large example of spiny echinodermata, or sea urchin, weathered all but entirely free of the alum shales which had imprisoned it for so many epochs, and deposited on the sand. I brushed it off and examined it more closely in the sunlight, unable to place either its genus or species, and suspecting that it might perhaps be of a form hitherto unrecognized by paleontologists; I deposited my prize in my right coat pocket and continued to scan the steep rocks for any other such excellent fossils. But, as the evening wore on, I failed to spot anything else quite as interesting, all my additional finds consisting in the main of broken pieces of ammonoid and mussel shells embedded in hard limestone nodules, a few fish bones, and what I hoped might prove to be a small fragment from one of the characteristic hourglass-shaped flipper bones of an ichthyosaur. I glanced out to sea, and then back to the dark gray rocks, trying to envision, as I had so often done before, the unimaginable expanse of time which had transpired since the stones before me were only slime and ooze at the bottom of an earlier and infinitely more alien sea.

  “You are a geologist?” someone asked at that point, a man’s voice, giving me a start, and I turned to see a very tall, gaunt man with a narrow, aquiline nose watching me from only a few feet away. He was smiling very slightly, in a manner that I thought oddly knowing at the time. For all I guessed, he might well have been standing there for an hour, as I have a habit of becoming so intent upon my collecting that I often neglect to glance about me for long stretches.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “A paleontologist, to be more precise.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Of course you are. I would have seen that for myself, but I’m afraid the wreck has had me distracted,” and the man motioned in the direction of the quay, the Esk, and the stranded Demeter beyond. “You are an American, too, and a New Yorker, unless I miss my guess.”

  “I am,” I replied, though by this point I confess that the stranger was beginning to annoy me somewhat with his questions. “Dr. Tobias Logan, of the American Museum of Natural History,” I introduced myself, holding out a hand which he only stared at curiously and smiled that knowing smile at me again.

  “You’re hunting the sea monsters of Whitby,” he said, “and, I gather, having blasted little luck at it.”

  “Well,” I said, taking the urchin from my pocket and passing it to the man, “I admit I’ve had better days in the field.”

  “Extraordinary,” the tall man said, carefully inspecting the fossil, turning it over and over in his hand.

  “Quite so,” replied I, relaxing a bit, as I’m not unaccustomed to explaining myself to curious passersby. “But, still, not precisely the quarry I had in mind.”

  “Better the luck of Chapman, heh?” he asked, and winked.

  I realized at once that he was referring to the discovery of William Chapman in 1758 of a marine crocodile on the Yorkshire coast, not far from where we were standing.

  “You surprise me, sir,” I said. “Are you a collector?”

  “Oh no,” he assured me, returning the urchin. “Nothing of the sort. But I read a great deal, you see, and I’m afraid few subjects have managed to escape my attention.”

  “Your accent isn’t Yorkshire,” I said, and he shook his head.

  “No, Dr. Logan, it isn’t,” he replied, and then he winked at me once again. The man turned and peered out at the sea, and it was at this point that I realized that the tide was beginning to rise, the beach being appreciably more constricted than it was the last time I’d noticed.

  “I fear that we shall certainly be getting our feet wet if we don’t start back,” I said, but he only nodded his head and continued to stare at the restless, gray expanse of the sea.

  “We should talk at greater length sometime,” he said. “There is a matter, concerning an object of great antiquity, and uncertain provenance, that I should very much appreciate hearing your trained opinion on.”

  “Indeed,” I said, eyeing the rising tide. “A fossil?”

  “No, a stone tablet. It appears to have been graven with hieroglyphics resembling those of the ancient Egyptians.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but you’d surely be better off showing it to an archaeologist, instead. I wouldn’t be able to tell you much.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow and looking thoughtfully back at me. “I pried it from those very strata which you’ve spent the last hour examining. It’s really quite an amazing object, Dr. Logan.”

  I believe I must have stared at the man for some time then without speaking, for I am sure I was too stunned and incredulous to find the words. He shrugged, then picked up a pebble and tossed it at the advancing sea.

  “Forgive me,” I said, or something of the sort. “But either you’re having me on or you yourself have been the victim of someone else’s joke. You’re obviously an educated man, so—”

  “So,” he said, interrupting me, “I know that these strata are too old by many millions of years to contain the artifact I’ve told you I found buried in them. Obviously.”

  “Then you are joking?”

  “No, my good man,” he said, selecting another pebble to fling at the tide. “Quite the contrary, I assure you. I was as skeptical as you when first I laid eyes upon the thing, but now I am fairly convinced of its authenticity.”

  “Poppycock,” I said to him, though I had many far more vulgar expressions in mind by this point. “What you’re proposing is so enti
rely absurd—”

  “That it doesn’t even warrant the most casual consideration of learned men,” he said, interrupting me for the second time.

  “Well, yes,” I replied, somewhat impatiently, I’m afraid, and then returned the urchin to its place in my coat pocket. “The whole idea is perfectly absurd, man, right there on the face of it. It runs contrary to everything we’ve discovered in the last one hundred years about the evolution and development of life and the rise of humanity.”

  “I suspected,” he said, as though I’d not even spoken, “at first, that someone might have planted the artifact, you see, that perhaps I had stumbled upon a prank aimed at someone else. Someone who, unlike me, makes a habit of collecting shells and rocks and old bones on the seashore.

  “But I was able to identify—oh, what is it that you geologist fellows say? The positive and negative impressions—yes, that’s it. The positive and negative impressions of the tablet were pressed quite clearly, unmistakably, into the layers of shale immediately above and below it. I have succeeded in recovering them as well.”

  “I’m sure you did,” I said doubtfully.

  “But, even more curiously, this isn’t the first such inappropriate artifact, Dr. Logan. Two years ago, a very similar stone was found by a miner up the coast at Staithes, where, as you surely know, these same shales are mined for their alum. I have seen it myself, in a private cabinet in Glasgow. And there was a third, discovered in 1865, I think, or 1866, down at Frylingdales. But it seems to have vanished and, regrettably, only a drawing remains.”

  The man stopped talking then, for a moment, and gazed toward the walls of the quay. From where we were standing, one could just make out the splintered foremast of the ill-fated Demeter and he presently motioned toward it.

  “There are dark entities afoot here in Whitby, Dr. Logan. Ay, darker things than even I’m accustomed to facing down, and I assure you I’m no coward, if I do say so myself.”

  “The tide, sir,” I said, for now each wave carried the sea within mere feet of where we stood.

  “Indeed, the tide,” he said in a distracted, annoyed way, and nodded his head again. “But perhaps we can talk of this another time, before you leave Whitby. I will be glad for the chance to show you the tablet. I will be here another week, myself. I would rather prefer, though, if you kept this matter between us.”

  “Gladly,” I assured him. “I have no particular wish to be thought a madman.”

  “Even so,” he said, and with that enigmatic pronouncement at once began the perilous ascent up the rickety stairs to the Pier Road. I stood there a bit longer, watching as he climbed, expecting those slippery and infirm planks to give way at any second, dashing him onto the rocks and sand at my feet. But they held, and seeing that the sea had already entirely engulfed the beach to the west of me, and having only the high and inaccessible quay wall to the east, I summoned my courage and followed him. By no small stroke of luck, I also survived the climb, though the structure swayed and creaked and I was quite certain that my every footfall would be my last.

  By now, Dr. Watson, I have but little doubt that you must have begun to understand why Ogilvey has urged me to write you. I have read in the press several accounts of the extraordinary Mr. Holmes’s death in Switzerland, and I hope that the remarkable possibility, which I will not explicitly suggest here, but rather let stand as an unstated question for your consideration, will bring you no further pain. I have been made well aware of the great friendship that existed between you and Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and had not my reason been so vexed and controverted by the bizarre events at Whitby last August, I would have preferred to keep the encounter forever to myself. I would never have been led to reflect at such length on the identity of the man on the beach, a man whose appearance and demeanor I think you might recognize.

  But I should continue my story now, and must continue to hope that you see here anything more than the ravings of an overtaxed mind and an overindulged imagination.

  By the time I had at last finished my climb and regained secure footing at the crumbling summit of West Cliff, storm clouds were moving swiftly in from the southwest, darkening the murmuring waters of the Esk and creating an ominous backdrop for the abbey ruins. Fearing that I might lose my way among the unfamiliar streets should I attempt to discover a shorter route back to the hotel, I hurried instead along Pier Road, retracing my steps to the inn on Drawbridge Road. But I’d gone only a little way when the wind and thunder began and, in short order, a heavy, chilling downpour. I had neglected to bring an umbrella with me, thinking that the day would remain pleasant and clear, and not having planned on the walk down to the beach beforehand. As a result, I was now treated to a most thorough and proper soaking. I must have made for a dreary and pitiful sight, indeed, slogging my way down those narrow, rain-swept avenues.

  When at last I reached the hotel, I was offered a hot cup of tea and a seat at the hearthside. As tempting as the latter was, I told the innkeeper that I preferred instead to retire at once to my room and acquire some dry clothes and rest until dinner. As I started up the stairs, he called me back, having forgotten a message that had been left for me that afternoon. It was written on a small, plain sheet of stationery and read, as best I can recall:

  Toby, will call again first thing in the morning. Please await my arrival. Reached Whitby earlier than expected. I have much to relate re: unusual fossils found in Devon Lias and now in my care. Are you familiar with Phoenician (?) god Dagon or Irish Daoine Domhain? Until the morrow,

  Yrs., E. P.

  Though rightly intrigued and excited at the prospect of the new Devon fossils which Purdy had mentioned, I was quite completely baffled by his query regarding Phoenician gods and those two words of unpronounceable Gaelic. Deciding that any mysteries would readily resolve themselves in the morning, I retired to my room, where I at once changed clothes and then busied myself until dinner with some brief notes on the urchin and other specimens from West Cliff.

  I slept fitfully that night while the storm raged and banged at the shutters. I am not given to nightmares, but I recall odd scraps of dream where I stood on the shore at West Cliff, watching as the Demeter sailed majestically into the harbor. The tall man stood somewhere close behind me, though I don’t think I ever saw his face, and spoke of my wife and child. I finally awoke for the last time shortly after dawn, to the smell of coffee brewing and breakfast cooking downstairs, and the comforting sound of rain dripping from the eaves. The storm had passed, and despite my rather poor sleep, I recall feeling very rested and ready for a long day prospecting the seaside outcrops with Purdy. I dressed quickly, and armed with my ash plant and knapsack, my hammer and cold chisels, I went down to await my colleague’s arrival.

  However, at eleven o’clock I was still waiting, sipping at my second pot of coffee and beginning to feel the first faint twinges of annoyance that so much of the day was being squandered when my time in Whitby was to be so short. I am almost puritanical in my work habits and despise the wasting of perfectly good daylight, and could not imagine what was taking Purdy so long to show.

  The terrible things that soon followed, I must tell you, occurred with not the slightest hint of the lurid or sensational air that is usually attached to the macabre and uncanny in the penny dreadfuls and gothic romances. There was not even the previous day’s vague sense of foreboding. They simply happened, sir, and somehow that made them all the worse. It would be long weeks before I would begin to associate with the events the singular trepidation, indeed the genuine horror, which would gradually come to so consume my thoughts.

  I was reading, for the second time, a long article in an Edinburgh paper (the paper’s name escapes me now, as does the precise subject of the article), when a young boy, possibly eight years of age, came in and announced that he’d been sent to retrieve me. A man, he said, had paid him sixpence to bring me to West Cliff, where there had been a drowning in the night.

  “I’m sorry, but I am not a medical doctor,” I
told him, thinking this must surely be a simple case of mistaken identity, but no, he assured me at once, he’d been instructed to bring the American Dr. Tobias Logan to the beach at West Cliff, with all possible haste. As I sat there scratching my head, the boy grew impatient and protested that we should hurry. Before I left the hotel on Drawbridge Road, however, I scribbled a quick note to Purdy and left it with the proprietor, in case he should come in my absence. Then I quickly gathered my belongings and followed the excited boy, who told me his name was Edward and that his father was a cobbler, through the narrow, winding streets of Whitby and once again down to West Cliff.

  The body of the drowned man lay on the sand and clearly the gulls had been at him for some considerable time before he was discovered by a beachcomber. Yet, despite the damage done by the cruel beaks of the birds, I had no trouble in recognizing the face of Elijah Purdy right off. Several men had crowded about, including the constable and harbormaster, none of whom, I quickly gathered, had paid the boy sixpence to bring me to West Cliff.

  “First that damned Russian ghost ship,” the constable grumbled, lighting his pipe. “Now this.”

  “A foul week, to be sure,” the harbormaster muttered back.

  I introduced myself at once and then kneeled down beside the tattered earthly remains of the man whom I had known and of whom I’d been so fond. The constable coughed and exhaled a great, gray cloud of pipe smoke.

  “Here,” he said. “Did you know this poor fellow?”

  “Very well,” I replied. “I was to meet him this very morning. I was waiting for him when the boy there fetched me from the inn on Drawbridge Road.”

  “Is that so now?” the constable said. “What boy is that?”

  I looked up and there was, to be sure, no sign of the boy who had led me to the grisly scene.