Warlock Holmes--My Grave Ritual

by G. S. Denning

  “Agh!” said the same three.

  Grogsson raised his tankard in admiration. “Dat bird’s well hard!”

  With a grim determination in his eye and a gritted beak (yes, it turns out beaks can be gritted) the goose struggled to its feet, shook the loose rope off its left wing, and lunged straight towards me. Yet, at the last moment, a sideways glance over my shoulder gave me to realize I was not his intended target. The window! He wanted me to duck out of the way. It was all part of the goose’s plan. I threw myself into his intended path. He collided with my face, honking his frustration.

  “Grab him!” I cried. “He’s going for the window.”

  The goose rewarded me for making his plans public by lashing at my left eye with his beak. I managed to turn away, but it nevertheless drew blood and set my eye to throbbing. As I collapsed backwards, already reflecting how lucky I was not to be half blind, he kicked me in the throat and reversed direction.

  “The door!” shouted Lestrade.

  Grogsson lunged between the goose and his second avenue of escape and barked, “No! You stay!”

  Again, the foul fowl turned aside. Though his wing was badly injured, he flapped clumsily to our mantelpiece.

  “He seems to be going for your gun, Watson,” Holmes noted.

  And do you know something strange: he was. I’d been cleaning the thing earlier and had left the case open, atop the mantel. I had only a moment to wonder how a Christmas goose proposed to make use of a large-caliber pistol, before his head pecked down into the open case and re-emerged with something shiny in its beak.

  “He’s got a bullet!” shouted Lestrade.

  With a gleam of triumphant malice in its eye, the goose flipped the bullet down into the fire.

  “What the ’ell?” demanded Wiggles, as we all dived for cover. “Why’s ’e so smart?”

  “Why’s he so mean?” I shouted back from my hiding place behind the sofa.

  An instant later, the cartridge discharged. The bullet spanged off the lamp by the table and rebounded towards the door, blowing a nice hole in our elephant’s foot umbrella stand. The spent casing spun out of the fire, dropping embers across the floor and bouncing off the back of Grogsson’s head. Grogsson gave a roar of rage and Holmes admitted, “You know, Watson, I’m beginning to come around to your assessment of our turkey.”

  “It’s a goose, Holmes.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it seems to be unusually gifted.”

  “The window, again!” I cried, for our gifted goose had let none of the advantage gained by its distraction be wasted. Even at the instant the bullet discharged, it began a wounded, sideways flap towards the one open window. At last, Lestrade joined the fray. Moving with the preternatural speed of his kind, he leapt into the goose’s path. One hand closed around the unfortunate bird’s head, the second around its neck.

  “Raaaaaaaaaaar!” Lestrade screamed, and yanked with all his might. With a visceral squelch, the goose’s head came away from its body.

  “Rhaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” cried Lestrade again, and upended the headless bird above him. One of the peculiarities of Lestrade’s physiology is how very far he can open his mouth. Now he dropped his head back until his eyes were staring out the window behind him and the entire top of his head was naught but a fang-lined maw. Above this, he suspended the still-twitching goose, whose lifeblood sloshed down from its severed arteries into the waiting gullet below.

  Well… if I’m honest, a great deal of it wound up on Lestrade’s shirt and my floor, but…

  “Rhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahr!”

  At last the crimson gush diminished to a few odd drips. Lestrade lowered the hapless corpse to his side, re-hinged his head into its regular approximation of human form and realized just how many of his friends were staring at him, aghast.

  “Wait! No!” he said, pointing a remonstrating finger at all of us. “I warned you I was going to do that! It was always part of the deal!”

  Wiggles and I stood agape. Holmes wiped a little glob of goose neck off his sleeve, kicked an ember back into the fireplace and said, “No, no. It’s fair play. He did warn us.” He then reached for the bell and gave a ring. In a moment the door opened to reveal a suspicious Mrs. Hudson.

  “It seems we are to have turkey for dinner. I wonder if you’d mind cooking it up for us.”

  “Not your housekeeper,” Mrs. Hudson growled.

  “No, but I thought—”

  “Not your friend.”

  “I thought you might join us for dinner.”

  For just a moment, her expression of hatred faltered. She eyed us each in turn, finally letting her gaze rest on the headless goose. “I get to pick the bits I want,” she grunted.

  “A few parts have already been promised,” said Holmes. “Wiggles is to have the feathers and the viscera. Lestrade is to have… do you know what? I think Lestrade has been covered. Other than that, if you would be so kind as to fix it up, I think it only fair that you should get your pick.”

  “Drumstick,” said Mrs. Hudson.

  “Well that’s a relief,” said Holmes. “I thought you’d pick something far more inappropriate.”

  “Both drumsticks,” said Mrs. Hudson, visibly irked that she’d made such a reasonable first offer.

  “Let’s not get greedy,” said Holmes.

  “No, it’s all right,” I told him. “I would suggest that if the Alpha Inn is filling the streets of London with evil geese, which are being hunted by the mind-ruined waste of Lord Holdhurst, we have larger concerns than who gets the drumsticks. It takes hours to cook a goose. I would suggest that the time might be well spent in determining the origin of this bird, of his strange nature, and exactly how he knows the head of our Foreign Office.”

  “And of course, in restoring the fortunes of Mr. Henry Baker,” Holmes insisted.

  “Holmes…” I gave him a stern look, urging him with my eye to focus on matters that… mattered.

  “Watson, it’s Christmas.”

  Lestrade gave a derisive snort. “Holmes, you are riddled with demons. Do you expect us to believe that Christmas is special to you?”

  Holmes rounded on him. “It is a time for friends and families to gather. To share stories and a loving cup. To exalt in happiness and fellowship. It is everything I have been denied and everything I fight to preserve. Of course it is special to me, and if you think I intend to mark the occasion by leaving Henry Baker and his wife to suffer, then perhaps you do not know me as well as you thought. Get your coats, everyone.”

  How strangely masterful Holmes could be at times. As we prepared to go out, Lestrade walked over to Mrs. Hudson and handed her the remains of our most recent enemy.

  “There’s something wrong with its neck,” he told her.

  We all turned to stare at him. “Do you mean that someone has torn its head off?” I suggested.

  “No. Did you see how slowly the blood came out? There’s something in its windpipe, pushing against the arteries,” said Lestrade, with a wounded sniff.

  “Prob’ly a gob-runkle,” Grogsson suggested.

  “A what?”

  Anyone with as few words as Grogsson is naturally uncomfortable when called on to explain himself. He shifted on his feet a moment and then mumbled, “Well… yeh’ve got yer gob, right?” He indicated his mouth. “So if anyfing ever gets runkled down in ’ere and stops fings up… dat’s a gob-runkle.”

  This explanation was generally accepted. Just as we turned to leave, Grogsson shook his empty tankard at us and said, “Hey! It’s cold out dere…” Thus, bundled from head to toe and fortified with Grogsson’s brew, we made our way out among the filthy drifts of snow. To my dismay, Grogsson slipped the whisky barrel’s makeshift straps over his shoulders and brought it with him.

  “Where are we to go first?” asked Holmes. “To see if London is besieged by evil geese, or to save Henry Baker’s Christmas?”

  “We can’t help Henry,” Lestrade muttered. “It’s very nearly the most common Englishman’s name.
There are like to be a quarter of a million Henrys in London. Probably half as many Bakers and hundreds—really, hundreds—of Henry Bakers. We’ll never find him.”

  I rolled my eyes. Much as I would like to have focused on the more pressing elements of the day, I found his intellectual laziness disgusting. “Of course we will. Our Henry Baker is a poor man, Lestrade—he’s unlikely to spend much on cab fares, is he? Indeed, the time you saw him, he was afoot. The Alpha Inn is likely to be very near his house, as is Tottenham Court Road, where you saw him. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was walking home when you met him. Not many folks go about their daily errands carrying a live goose, do they? When we get to the Alpha, we shall inquire about the goose and the man who bought him. Once we are in the right neighborhood, you can describe him to the first constable we see. We are not helpless children, Lestrade. Of course we can track Henry Baker.”

  Fortunately for us, the Alpha Inn was a lowly enough establishment to be open on Christmas Day. It was one of those places where the working-class lonely came to forget they had nobody. And indeed, when they were there, they had each other. As we neared, the clink of cups and the sound of laughter filled our ears. The proprietor was an honest-looking, heavy-browed man who welcomed us inside with a friendly wave. He had his hands full with the Christmas crowd, but he made his way over to us in short order and asked, “What may I do for you gents?”

  “You ran a goose club this year,” I said. “We have reason to believe you provided a goose to Mr. Henry Baker, is that right?”

  “Yeah, I got a bird for Henry,” the barman said, letting his gaze wander over our strange group of friends. “Er… he’s all right, ain’t he?”

  “Why do you ask?” I said, levelly. “It’s not because you realize you sold him a highly dangerous killer goose, is it?”

  “Look here!” the barman roared. “Someone had to take it! And Henry din’t have all his pennies in. By all rights, he shoulda had no goose at all. Instead, he got the biggest of the lot, so what’s his complaint, eh?”

  “Merely that he’s been killed by a demon goose, on Christmas.”

  The bartender staggered back in guilt-struck horror.

  “No, no, my good man,” I told him. “Henry is all right. I only needed to know if you were an unknowing participant or the proprietor of some sort of wicked-livestock distribution center. Am I right in assuming not all of the geese you sent out this year were possessed by evil?”

  “Just the one. Gawd, he was a right piece of work. Always coughing, like he’d had somethin’ runkled right down his gob. Still, he was smart as you like and none too kind. I never been afraid of a bird before, but…”

  “Where did you get him?”

  “From Breckinridge—one of the goose-dealers at Covent Garden. See if I ever go back there again. Say, you’re sure Henry’s all right, right?”

  “We did want to check on him. Do you know where he lives?”

  “Some way down near Goodge Street, but I don’t know it exact.”

  “We’ll find it!” said Holmes, raising a glass of Scotch he had no intention of drinking.

  “We will, but not right now. There is some chance that this Breckinridge has stayed open to sell some last-minute geese, but that chance decreases with each passing hour. We must make haste to Covent Garden.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  We made a Christmassy sort of haste. I went by the straightest path, but my companions—overcome by the spirit of the day and the spirit Grogsson brought—made it an occasion for raucous caroling. Though I had not realized it, misfit policemen and lycanthropic urchins each had their own particular brand of carols and took a queer pride in teaching them to one another. Most popular were “I Arrest You, Merry Gentleman” and “Baby Jesus, Stop Your Noise”.

  We were exceedingly lucky to find our man that day. Covent Garden Market was not actually open for business and the entire area was almost deserted. The only people we saw were a few beggars, some young friends out walking and one vicious-looking goose vendor. Breckinridge was a large, burly man with hairy arms and an eyepatch. Despite the snow, he stood in nothing but an apron and shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. He wore the sort of expression designed to communicate that he’d punch you if you didn’t buy a goose, kick you if you tried to haggle the price, and beat you within an inch of your misbegotten life if you attempted to point out the market was closed and he probably ought to just go home.

  “Rough-looking fellow,” Holmes muttered.

  “Never mind that,” said I. “Watch as I cleverly manipulate him into telling all we wish to hear.”

  I strode up to the man and said, “Breckinridge?”

  “I am.”

  “Got any geese left?”

  “Think I’d be standin’ round here in the cold if I didn’t?”

  “I’m looking for one as good as those you gave the Alpha Inn. Do you happen to have any of that batch left?”

  His good eye narrowed. “Here now! What’s everybody so worried about that particular batch of birds for, eh? Everyone comin’ round askin’ for ’em! You and that crazy politician, too! Where’d I get ’em? How long have I kept ’em? Where’d I sell ’em to? Well look here: they was good birds. I gave good money for ’em, I took good money for ’em and that’s an end to it. That’s commerce and we can do without all the questions!”

  I decided to bait the man. “Meaning you do not know the answers,” I scoffed.

  “Oh, don’t I? Bring the book, Jim!”

  A shabby-looking lad of nine or ten stumbled up with a gigantic hard-backed tome and pushed it onto the counter next to Breckinridge.

  “In this book, I’ve got complete records of every bird that comes through this shop. I’ve got each bird’s name, see, and a little picture. Above ’em I write where they comes from, and when. Below, I write where they goes to, and when.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I spluttered. “Names? Pictures?”

  “Sketches, yeah. Maybe I’m tormented by guilt, eh? Maybe I’ve come to reflect on the inequity of my career. Like… how come my one life is maintained by the sacrifice of so many hundred smaller, more innocent ones? So maybe I make little sketches of every single bird with big, sad eyes. Maybe it’s a record of each and every goose so accurate as to strain credulity. Maybe there’s little bits of poetry in there, too. Maybe. But you’ll never know it, ’cause this is personal. Now, bugger off!”

  And my inquiry might have ended there, but for a happy chance. As Breckinridge leaned forward and scooped up a cleaver to brandish at me, his apron came away from the front of his shirt. There, protruding from the front pocket, I could see the stub end of a betting slip. Breckinridge was a gambling man.

  I smiled.

  “Well if you won’t be helpful, I’ll just have to start with what I know and go from there. At least I know it was a country-bred bird.”

  “Shows what you know,” Breckinridge scoffed, “for that bird were town-bred!”

  “Oh, I know a bit too much about geese to fall for that,” I replied, waving a finger at him.

  From behind me came a heavy drunken sigh and a gruff, “Argh. Hurry up!”

  “Torg, hush!” said Holmes. “Watson’s being very clever and we mustn’t rush him.”

  Grogsson gave a grunt of annoyance. Undaunted, I continued. “Now look here, my good man. I’ve bet a fiver that that bird was country-bred and I don’t intend to lose—not on some scabby tradesman’s half-remembered word!”

  “Well, you’ve lost your fiver, for it’s town-bred!”

  “Ha! I’ve another sovereign to lay to it! Look here, I’ll bet you a pound you can’t prove it’s town-bred!”

  “Oh? You think you just wave a sovereign around and I show you my private goose diary? Well I told yeh—”

  With a final sigh of vexation, Grogsson stepped past me. He stretched his right hand down near his left hip, then brought it violently up and across, fetching Breckinridge a monstrous backhanded slap to the side of his fa
ce. The blow lifted Breckinridge up and sent him collapsing sideways, down onto his counter and from there to the cobblestones below, utterly senseless. His boy, Jim, stared up at Grogsson with incredulity and horror. Grogsson looked down at him with a perfectly blank expression. At last, he suggested, “Take da day off.” Little Jim nodded once, turned on his heel, and sped off down the street. Grogsson reached down, turned the book to face us, flipped it open to the last few entries, grunted with concentration as he read them over, then announced: “Mrs. Oakshott. 117 Brixton Road. We go.”

  * * *

  By the time we reached Mrs. Oakshott’s home, the day was well along. Darkness had not yet fallen, but it threatened at the edges of the eastern sky, the western tinged with pink. Our goose must soon be ready and our adventure at an end. Though my comrades happily discussed the idea of returning home to a hot bird and further caroling, I found myself growing anxious. I had no desire to leave the matter unsolved. Was it indeed Lord Holdhurst who had attacked Henry Baker? If so, what was the cause of his extraordinary behavior? And, speaking of extraordinary behavior, what the devil had been wrong with our goose? There was a story of intrigue here, one we stood ignorant of.

  I knocked upon Mrs. Oakshott’s humble door. From within came the sound of surprised but merry voices. A moment later the door swung open. Mrs. Oakshott was a gruff but friendly woman in her fifties, with a tight bun of graying hair. From the sounds within, it seemed she had a good company of friends and family over and her expression made it clear she’d like to get back to them.

  “’Ello?” she asked. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mrs. Oakshott?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” sang Holmes, gesturing to the others to join him. “I arrest you, merry gentleman, that’s not your bag of loot! Now come along all quiet or I’ll punch you in the snoot! You stole that from the gov-er-nor, you stole that from the nurse—”

  “Holmes!” I shouted. “Mrs. Oakshott, I’m sorry to bother you, but we came to ask about a batch of geese you sold to Breckinridge, of Covent Garden.”