Shadows over Baker Street

by John Pelan;Michael Reaves

This message was reinforced by a single gesture. I had used my hands, pressing against the black floor as I struggled to my feet. They were now at my sides. Fingers as stiff and powerful as a bobby’s club jabbed at my waist. The object which Holmes had given me to hold for him was jolted against my flesh, where it created a weird mark which remains visible to this day.

  In the moment I knew what I must do.

  I wrapped my arms frantically around the black altar, watching with horrified eyes as Holmes and the others slipped from the sealed room into the realm of madness that lay beyond. I stood transfixed, gazing into the Seventh Circle of Dante’s hell, into the very heart of Gehenna.

  Flames crackled, tentacles writhed, claws rasped, and fangs ripped at suffering flesh. I saw the faces of men and women I had known, monsters and criminals whose deeds surpass my poor talent to record but who are known in the lowest realms of the planet’s underworlds, screaming with glee and with agony.

  There was a man whose features so resembled those of Lady Fairclough that I knew he must be her brother. Of her missing husband I know not.

  Then, looming above them all, I saw a being that must be the supreme monarch of all monsters, a creature so alien as to resemble no organic thing that ever bestrode the earth, yet so familiar that I realized it was the very embodiment of the evil that lurks in the hearts of every living man.

  Sherlock Holmes, the noblest human being I have ever encountered, Holmes alone dared to confront this monstrosity. He glowed in a hideous, hellish green flame, as if even great Holmes were possessed of the stains of sin, and they were being seared from within him in the face of this being.

  As the monster reached for Holmes with its hideous mockery of limbs, Holmes turned and signaled to me.

  I reached within my garment, removed the object that lay against my skin, pulsating with horrid life, drew back my arm, and with a murmured prayer made the strongest and most accurate throw I had made since my days on the cricket pitch of Jammu.

  More quickly than it takes to describe, the object flew through the angle. It struck the monster squarely and clung to its body, extending a hideous network of webbing ’round and ’round and ’round.

  The monster gave a single convulsive heave, striking Holmes and sending him flying through the air. With presence of mind such as only he, of all men I know, could claim, Holmes reached and grasped Lady Fairclough by one arm and her brother by the other. The force of the monstrous impact sent them back through the angle into the sealed room, where they crashed into me, sending us sprawling across the floor.

  With a dreadful sound louder and more unexpected than the most powerful thunderclap, the angle between the walls slammed shut. The sealed room was plunged once again into darkness.

  I drew a packet of lucifers from my pocket and lit one. To my surprise, Holmes reached into an inner pocket of his own and drew from it a stick of gelignite with a long fuse. He signaled to me and I handed him another lucifer. He used it to ignite the fuse of the gelignite bomb.

  Striking another lucifer, I relit the kerosene lamp that Mrs. Llewellyn had left on the altar. Holmes nodded his approval, and with the great detective in the lead, the four of us—Lady Fairclough, Mr. Philip Llewellyn, Holmes himself, and I—made haste to find our way from the Anthracite Palace.

  Even as we stumbled across the great hall toward the chief exit of the palace, there was a terrible rumbling that seemed to come simultaneously from the deepest basement of the building if not from the very center of the earth, and from the dark heavens above. We staggered from the palace—Holmes, Lady Fairclough, Philip Llewellyn, and I—through the howling wind and pelting snow of a renewed storm, through frigid drifts that rose higher than our boot tops, and turned about to see the great black edifice of the Anthracite Palace in flames.

  The Adventure of Exham Priory

  F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE

  My friend Sherlock Holmes was never quite the same after his return from the dead. I refer, of course, to that long interruption in his detective career, after he vanished from the brink of the Reichenbach Falls and was presumed dead: an illusion which he maintained for a period of three years until the moment when he removed his disguise in my study in Kensington.

  Yet the man who returned was transformed. Before his seeming death, Holmes had been disposed to occasional bouts of melancholy. After his return, I found him to be increasingly saturnine and grim: his periods of good humor became fewer and briefer. Of late, whenever Sherlock Holmes played his violin, he no longer performed barcaroles and waltzes, showing a newfound preference for the darker motifs of Beethoven and Wagner.

  One evening in April of 1901, I was detained in my Harley Street consulting surgery with an urgent case. In consequence, I did not return to our rooms in Baker Street until well past sunset. I found Holmes clad in his old smoking jacket, seated near the sideboard with an expression of doom on his countenance whilst he peered at a strange ill-shapen object clutched between his long fingertips.

  “Hallo, Watson,” said my friend, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “I see that you have been draining a patient’s mastoid infection.”

  “Two infections,” I said, astonished. “But how did—”

  “Never mind that, Watson. Come, what do you make of this?” As I seated myself, Holmes pressed the strange object into my hands.

  It was a carved piece of stone, roughly nine inches long, of some black mineral resembling basalt. The object was highly polished and deeply curved—concave on one side, convex on the other—yet so thoroughly weathered as to suggest that this artifact was of an immense age. At one edge, the stone was broken and jagged. “It appears to be a fragment off the rim of a large bowl or dish,” I ventured.

  “Exactly so, Watson. Observe that the rim’s curvature is uniform: this was part of a circular object, not an elliptical one. By measuring the fragment’s arc, I have established that this was once part of a dish some thirteen feet in diameter. And the object is exceedingly weathered, yet the broken edge is still sharp, and the jagged surface at the edge is still dark and glossy . . . so the original object is ancient, but this piece was broken off quite recently. What else do you see?”

  I brought the fragment closer to the electrical lamp. The convex surface of the black stone was incised with weird hieroglyphs and runes. Then I turned over the broken stone so as to view the dish’s inner surface. And now I felt a sudden revulsion as I saw that the concave side of the bowl was crusted with a dark russet-colored stain resembling coagulated blood.

  “Holmes,” I said. “Wherever did you get this?”

  “Sent to me in the morning post,” said he calmly. “The parcel bore a postmark from Anchester, which my gazetteer identifies as a village of the Welsh Marches. It was enclosed with a most intriguing letter, concerning—wait, there is the door.”

  Our housekeeper had brought us a visitor: a man above the middle height, sallow-faced and exceedingly distraught. His hair was dead white, his countenance haggard. His clothes were well tailored and immaculate, yet they hung from his frame as if there were a scarecrow within them.

  The visitor’s face was an astonishment. He appeared to suffer from some congenital deformity, to a degree I had never encountered in my medical studies. His cranium was exceedingly narrow, with a receding forehead and chin, watery green eyes, and a flattened nose. Above his celluloid collar, there were several rows of oddly deep creases in the sides of his neck. The skin of his face and hands was peeling, as if from some cutaneous disease, and his fingers were strikingly short in proportion to his hands. “Came up to London as soon as I could, in spite of the engine change,” he gasped, in a breathless whisper which put me in mind of a fish out of water. The visitor spoke in a cultured voice which betrayed no regional accent. “And then the cab horse lost a shoe in Great Portland Street, so I got out and ran the rest of the way. Which one of you is Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”

  “I have that honor, sir,” said my friend. “And it is clear to me that you are Jephson
Norrys. Your family are from Cornwall, yet you reside in the Welsh Marches. You are a man of some prosperity, but in recent months you have been keenly agitated.”

  The newcomer had been pale, yet now he turned ashen. “Black magic!” he exclaimed. “You must have read my letter, but how could you have known my—”

  “Simply a matter of deduction,” said Sherlock Holmes, pointing to our visitor’s waistcoat. “Your watch chain bears an ivory pin, in the shape of a black cross upon a white field: that is the flag of Cornwall. But the ivory is yellowed with age, indicating that the pin came to you as an heirloom . . . from your father perhaps, but at any rate from a Cornish forebear. If you had traveled here to London from Cornwall, your railway journey would have ended at the Great Western terminus in Paddington Station . . . but you mentioned Great Portland Street, which is in the opposite direction. The nearest railway station in that neighborhood is Euston . . . and the shortest route from Euston to Baker Street, along the Marylebone Road, passes through Great Portland Street. I need hardly consult my Bradshaw’s Railway Guide to know that most of the rail lines arriving at Euston Street station originate in Birmingham. Yet you mentioned an engine change, so your journey must have commenced before Birmingham: perhaps as far west as Shrewsbury, on the Welsh border. If you had traveled from as far away as Wales to get here, your journey would have required two engine changes . . . but you mentioned only one. So! East of Shrewsbury, yet west of Birmingham, eliminates all territory excepting the Welsh Marches. I have just received an urgent letter from Jephson Norrys of Anchester, and you are evidently he.”

  “As for the rest, sir,” I suggested to Norrys, “your shirtfront and your suitings are expensive and new: tailored for a man of your own height but of wider girth, for they hang slackly on your body. You have clearly lost a great deal of weight in recent weeks, due to some nervous condition.”

  Jephson Norrys mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Yes! It’s true, as you say. Mr. Holmes, I was told that you are the only man in England who can help me. Will you take my case?”

  Sherlock Holmes nodded. “Your letter fascinates me.” Turning to myself, he remarked: “I may have need of a good medical man for some business in Anchester. What say you, Watson? Can I rely on you to suspend your Harley Street practice for some few days?”

  I looked at our visitor, and I confess that my selfless desire to assist Jephson Norrys was mingled with my selfish urge to study his medical symptoms more closely. “I will gladly throw in with you,” I replied.

  “Thank the heavens for that,” said our trembling visitor. Then the gaze of his watery eyes fell upon the dark basalt fragment which Holmes had left on the sideboard. “You have examined what I sent you, then?” asked Norrys, indicating the black stone. “Mr. Holmes, I’ll wager you’ve never seen such an object before.”

  “On the contrary,” said Sherlock Holmes. He reached into his pocket and drew forth a hexagonal object roughly six inches across, and set this on the sideboard alongside the ancient fragment.

  It was a dish of some sort, graven from black basalt and weathered with age. Along the outer rim of the six-sided dish, I beheld a weird series of hieroglyphs and runes from some alien script. The inner surface of the dish was flecked and caked with what appeared to be coagulated blood . . .

  “Wherever did you get this, Holmes?” I asked him.

  “That bloodstained dish has been in my possession these past ten years,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes. “Perhaps it is time that I told you, Watson, of my encounter with the Reichenbach Horror.”

  The next few hours contained much activity. I sent a telegram to one of my Harley Street colleagues, urging him to take charge of my patients until my return. “It would be well for us to go armed, Watson,” said Holmes as he packed a valise. I retrieved my Webley Bulldog revolver and some of the recently invented 6.25-grain cordite cartridges while the housekeeper summoned a hansom to fetch us to Euston Street station. Holmes and Norrys and I caught the late train to Birmingham, securing a first-class compartment for ourselves.

  Jephson Norrys showed symptoms of extreme exhaustion, so I gave him a sleeping draft. Before he quaffed this, Norrys pressed a loose-leaf memorandum book into my friend’s hands. “Read this, please. It will explain much,” said Norrys, in that peculiar gasping voice. As he fell deeply into slumber in a corner of our compartment, I stethoscoped him and was astonished to discover that his cardiac rate was in the bottom range of human limits. A man in such a state of nervous agitation should exhibit a heartbeat like a trip-hammer . . . yet the slow pulse of Jephson Norrys indicated a metabolism more appropriate to some cold-blooded amphibian. Still, his respiration was regular, and Norrys seemed safe for the moment. As he slept, his mouth opened and closed silently, suggesting the respiration of a fish.

  Holmes looked at me ruefully. “Watson, old friend, how long have you known me?”

  “This past January, when Queen Victoria died, also marked twenty years since you and I first clasped hands at St. Bart’s,” I reminded him.

  “And yet I fear that you have never truly known me.” Holmes drew a black perfecto from his cigar case while the train carried us through the dark network of railway tunnels northwest of London. “You may recall, Watson, our encounter with the Sussex Vampire. I remarked at the time that I disbelieved in ghosts or supernatural agencies. I implied that I have always disbelieved.”

  For a long moment, Sherlock Holmes merely lighted his uncut cigar and paused reflectively. “What do you recall of my encounter at the Reichenbach Falls?”

  “There were two different versions of the truth,” I said. “You and Professor Moriarty went over the precipice together, and died. Later, it transpired that only Moriarty fell, and you chose to counterfeit your own death.”

  “And now I must present a third version,” said Holmes, while our express train rattled through Watford without stopping. “Neither I nor Moriarty went over the falls. At the brink of the falls, Moriarty brandished a pistol and urged me toward a nearby footpath. At gunpoint, he ushered me downhill to the waterfall’s lowest cataract. Here we encountered a cliff face of solid granite, curtained with overgrown vines. Moriarty urged me forward, and I discovered that the solid cliff was actually two separate walls of rock, with a narrow passage between them concealed by a membrane of vines. Passing between the vines, and still held at gunpoint, I found myself entering a cavern . . . utterly dark, except for the weird glow of phosphorescent lichens oozing from the cavern’s walls. Moriarty followed at my heels. It was clear to me that he knew in advance of this place’s existence, and had brought me here for some grim purpose.”

  Sherlock Holmes extended his cigar case to me. I accepted a torpedo cigar and took out my cigar cutter as Holmes resumed his narrative: “Inside the cavern, three robed and hooded figures stood awaiting us. Moriarty addressed them in a tongue unknown to me, although I fancy it resembled ancient Chaldean. Moriarty pointed at me, and by his gestures and intonations, I grasped his general meaning: ‘Here is the man whom I agreed to give you.’

  “But then, in the half dark, one of the hooded figures reached out with inhumanly long limbs and snatched Moriarty’s revolver while another of the figures pinioned my enemy’s arms. I heard Moriarty cry out in English: ‘No! Not me, too! Your master promised that I would go free if I gave you this man!’

  “Something coshed me. I awoke in darkness, with a throbbing headache, and found myself lying supine on cold stone. Something unseen was probing my face: weird tendrils pressed against my features, oozing across my eyelids and my mouth. Watson, my nostrils detected an odor of utter obscenity. From nearby in the darkness, strange chittering voices assailed my ears with high-pitched cries: ’Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!’ Beneath these sounds, I heard the low whimpering moans of a human voice: Moriarty’s voice. Did I say a human voice? Watson, in that dark cavern I heard something in Moriarty’s voice which told me that his mind had cast off the moorings of sanity, and was no longer human. Beneath Moriarty’s anguished
tones, in counterpoint, I heard a damp rapid noise which sounded like dozens of tongues, lapping some unknown liquid repast.”

  I shuddered, and nearly burned myself attempting to light my cigar. “Great heavens, Holmes!”

  “Heaven had no embassy in that dark place, Watson. I had the sense to lie still, hoping my eyes would grow accustomed to the darkness. They did not. Yet by a little whiles, the procession of tendrils across my face slowed and became less frequent while the tongue-lapping sounds attained their hideous crescendo. Something was giving less attention to me, and more heed to the consumption of that unknown liquid. The fingers of my right hand touched something in the dark: something cold and hard, with sharp corners. It came away easily in my hand, yet it was heavy enough that it might serve as a weapon.

  “The unholy tendrils had ceased their explorations now, and all hands—or rather, all tongues—seemed to be devoting full attention to their liquid refreshment. Moriarty’s voice had gone silent. Slowly, carefully, I slipped the heavy object into my pocket and I crept toward light: the one thin gleam in all that stygian dark. The chittering cries were well behind me as I crawled into another chamber of the cavern, lined with more of those luminescent fungi. I looked back for one instant, and against the eerie glow of the fungoids I beheld the shadowed outlines of an immense silhouetted figure with a weird star-shaped head. I turned ’round from this, and dared not look back a second time. As soon as I could see well enough to risk standing erect, I fled uphill along the slope of the cavern, and soon reached the familiar curtain of vines and the outer world beyond. It was nightfall when I emerged, but at least I had the light of a full moon. Watson, believe me when I tell you that I ran from that place at all speed.”

  From his pocket now, Holmes withdrew the hexagonal dish. “This is the object which I found in the cave beneath the Reichenbach Falls. At my first opportunity, I had this dish treated with carbolic acid, to disinfect it and eliminate the stench. But I have never cleaned off these stains, intending to have them analyzed. Nine different chemists—all sworn to secrecy—have examined the stain on this dish.”