Warlock Holmes--My Grave Ritual

by G. S. Denning

  “Thank you, Dr. Watson. Such… such a funny little thing, isn’t it? I mean… to keep myself safe… what a peculiar method of… don’t you think?”

  Holmes stepped up behind her and said, “Thank you, Miss Hunter. I believe that will suffice. You may go with my thanks and the knowledge that, when you need my help, you shall not despair of it. Watson’s too, I’ll bet.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course,” she spluttered. “Well… thank you both and I’ll just be off, shall I?”

  “Do try to take care of yourself, won’t you?” Holmes asked.

  “I’d like to,” she said with a shrug, “but I’m afraid I intend just the opposite.”

  * * *

  That wretched little blighter Holmes did it just to distract me—of that much, I am certain. And do you know what?

  It worked.

  Over the next several days I continued my clumsy investigations of Moriarty’s criminal empire and the mysterious woman who so endangered Holmes and myself. But… oh, I don’t know—my heart just wasn’t in it.

  Look, it’s not as if my distraction was without reason! Violet Hunter was in very real and significant danger. True to her word, she marched straight out of 221B to the local barber, sacrificed her hair, sent a telegram to Jephro Rucastle and reported to the Copper Beeches the very next day—she sent a letter that told us as much. After that: nothing. Frustrating, terrifying silence.

  So yes, I spent my days chasing after snippets of information on Moriarty and the Woman. Yet I found myself hastening back to Baker Street whenever I could to check the post. To see if we’d had any telegrams. Of course, there was the possibility that no danger at all loomed over Violet Hunter. Perhaps her new employer was simply an eccentric. If such was the case, would Violet feel any need to send word?

  Then again, dead people don’t send a lot of telegrams, either.

  At last, on a drizzly Wednesday, Mrs. Hudson brought up a telegram.

  I shall be at the Black Swan Hotel in Winchester at noon on Saturday. Can you come? HUNTER

  Though the telegram was devoid of any real news, though it failed to say whether Violet’s fortunes had been fair or foul, I nevertheless rejoiced to have any sign of her. Even Holmes seemed relieved.

  Though he also made fun of me.

  Look here, I needed to get my best suit cleaned—it was long overdue. Oh, and pressed. And then tailored. And then re-pressed, because it had been tailored. And I needed a haircut. And some cologne. All of these errands were things I should have done anyway, but their proximity to Violet’s visit—and the rabid enthusiasm with which I pursued them—caused Holmes no end of merriment. I had it all done by Friday morning, which left me precious little to do for the next twenty-four hours but just walk about 221B, glancing at the clock; then I’d pace, then check the clock again, then I’d pick up something that belonged to Holmes or me and just shake it and shake it and shake it! Then I’d check the clock again.

  At last, Saturday morning arrived. I dragged Holmes to Waterloo Station. Thence, to Winchester. Thence, to the Black Swan. There, on a couch by the window, we found Violet Hunter. As soon as we came in she rose and said, “Gentlemen, I’m glad you came! Things have been so strange, I simply… er… Dr. Watson, have you… have you curled your hair?”

  “Ah, yes. It’s the fashion, nowadays.”

  “Is it?” Miss Hunter wondered.

  “We told him it was,” Holmes said, exploding into fits of laughter.

  I went red with rage. Holmes bent double and laughed so hard he nearly toppled over.

  “Very nice. It suits you,” Miss Hunter said.

  “Thank you,” I replied, and made a mental note to KILL EVERYONE I KNEW!

  “I’m sorry, Watson. I’m sorry,” Holmes giggled, breathless and teary. “I only thought Miss Hunter might feel better if she had a partner in hair misfortune.”

  Now it was Miss Hunter’s turn to blush. She raised a hand to where her copper locks weren’t and gave a sad little smile. With her diminutive frame, her profusion of freckles and that chopped hair, she rather looked as if one of the London street lads had put on a dress. Nevertheless, her resolve and self-confidence remained undimmed.

  As did my respect for her.

  We adjourned to the lunch room. As we settled in to dine, Violet leaned in and began her tale.

  “On the day I arrived, Mr. Rucastle picked me up at Winchester Station in the dogcart. He was in high spirits and seemed greatly relieved I had come. As we drove he joked—on several occasions—pointing at the horse who drew us and explaining that he was sorry, but the actual dog had the day off. I laughed politely, but… well… the size of the traces… the oddly shaped harness… The rig was poorly suited to a horse or pony and I rather wondered if the thing had been designed for a dog, though it would have to be of monstrous stature.

  “When we arrived at the Copper Beeches, it was just awful! Sure enough, there were two copper-colored beech trees, flanking the door. Bright copper. Painted so, by no expert hand. Inside, the home is just as bad. There are six or seven rooms still in service, but the bulk of the house is shut up, dusty, and dark. There is practically no staff. Only Mrs. Toller—who does all the cooking and cleaning—and her husband. Mr. Rucastle describes Mr. Toller’s duties as ‘fixing this, fixing that and seeing to the animals’ but it would seem that a better description might be ‘emptying every bottle from here to Manchester’. Mr. Toller is grim, gristled and, I think, never entirely sober. Oh, and Mrs. Rucastle! Her behavior is most unsettling. She’s a sad, colorless, smile-less sort of person. She wears an expression of constant worry and oppression. Yet the moment she saw me, she burst from the front door, crying, ‘She’s perfect! Oh, just perfect!’ and threw her arms around my neck, weeping.

  “There are, I think, at least two secret residents. I frequently hear noises coming from the sealed portion of the house. I have seen Mr. Toller bearing food there. He has a key attached to his watch-fob. On my second day, as Mr. Rucastle showed me about, he said we must go to the kennel. He led me into the forest, at the back of the house, to one of the outbuildings. His usual joviality dimmed somewhat as we approached it, and I can see why: the thing is a massive stone structure. This kennel looks large enough to service probably twenty dogs, but only one lives there. I have not seen it, but I heard it, for as we approached it threw itself at the door, barking and snarling. Though the door is constructed of four-inch timbers, I still feared it might break through, such was its ferocity. Mr. Rucastle told me, ‘We don’t have to stay, my dear. I just wanted to bring you here and let you know: this beast will be loosed onto the grounds, some nights. He’s enough to dissuade any thief, you know, but he’s a rough one. Why, even I do not feel safe around him. Toller’s the only one he’ll pay any heed to. So, I wanted you to know that it is best to stay inside of an evening, eh? A moonlight stroll in the woods could be as much as your life is worth!’”

  I raised one finger and noted, “Miss Hunter, your description of the Copper Beeches has been incomplete. You have told us nothing of the child you were engaged to govern, young Barghest.”

  Miss Hunter’s look became particularly dark. “He is a monster, not a child. He describes himself as mouse-reaver, rabbit-eater and pain-bringer. These are not idle boasts. I cannot fathom why any small creature is stupid enough to wander within two miles of the Copper Beeches, but they do. Oh, they do. And when Barghest gets his paws on one… well… he makes them last for hours. Tiny little screams that echo through the hallways… He had one that lasted half a night, once, but they all fall quiet in the end.”

  “And Mr. Rucastle allows this?” I asked, scandalized.

  “He encourages it. Of course, the first time it happened, I stepped in to correct Barghest. It is a governess’s duty, after all. Though I had just arrived, still I raised my voice. The severity of such behavior demands at least as much. Yet Mr. Rucastle came in, placed a hand on my shoulder and made a calming gesture—by which he meant I should cease. Later, he jokingly
apologized and said that Barghest must be allowed his peculiarities. After all, he claimed, there is no property so important as aggression to make a truly great statesman. He thinks his son shall grow to be a statesman! Never! A criminal, of course. A ravager and a strangler, I shouldn’t wonder. But a statesman? Ha!”

  “Hmmmm,” Holmes reflected. “A most unusual lad, indeed.”

  “And there’s more,” said Violet. “He has strange absences. Though my duties would be light in any case, I have long periods of inactivity when Barghest is… well… just gone. Mr. Rucastle says he’s off playing in the woods, or visiting his friends. Barghest has no friends. Only victims, I am certain. On perhaps the third day I was there, I protested that it was most irregular for a governess not to know where her charge was, especially at nine o’clock at night. But the Copper said he was not concerned and that I must become used to such interruptions. He opened up a disused old room full of dusty novels of no great quality and said that in Barghest’s absence I might indulge myself to anything I found in ‘the library’.”

  “It sounds as if Jephro Rucastle hardly expects you to spend any time with the boy he claims you will be shaping,” I noted. “Indeed, he’s blocked your chief attempt to correct his behavior. I suspect he may have other reasons for wanting you in residence.”

  “It seems I might have been called there to fill a vacancy, Dr. Watson.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I got to the Copper Beeches, there was already a bedroom made up for me. It’s pleasant and feminine, but the items were clearly not purchased for me, for they are old and several of the drawers in the dresser are locked. Mrs. Rucastle has several times mentioned how much she misses her daughter, Alice, who has wed and moved to Philadelphia. I think some of the clothing and effects repurposed for me used to belong to this Alice, but here’s the strange thing: the house contains no picture of her. None. Plenty of Barghest, several of Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle and even one with the Tollers, too. But none of Alice.

  “Now I strongly suspected that some truth of her might be found in the chest of drawers in my room. I kept my clothes and the braid of hair that I’d had to cut off in the top drawers, but the bottom drawer was locked, and thus a mystery to me. Luckily, I am the sister of a troublemaker and had come to the Copper Beeches prepared to do a little mischief of my own. My brother’s old lock-pick saw me quickly into the lower drawer. Look what I found.”

  From her handbag, Miss Hunter withdrew a long braid of copper hair.

  “They… they moved your hair from the top drawer to the bottom? But why would they do such a thing?” I spluttered.

  “I wondered the same,” said Violet. “But it turns out they hadn’t. This is what I found when I examined the upper.”

  She reached into her bag a second time and drew out a second plait, laying it beside the first. The color match was practically exact. Even the length could not have differed by more than a quarter of an inch.

  “Oooooooooooooooooh,” said Holmes. “I don’t like this at all!”

  “It gets worse,” Violet assured him. “Mrs. Rucastle spends entirely too much time at the dining-room table. She’s got a permanent mess of old crosswords, calendars, dice and odd-shaped little bones. She will spend hours poring over the crosswords and calendars. She rolls the dice and bones over them, then whispers to herself about the results. Early on Tuesday morning, she was engaged in this strange practice when she suddenly leapt up with a yell, circled Tuesday on the calendar and ran to find her husband. I was in the library so I saw her go and—from just down the hall, I heard Mr. Rucastle’s voice answer her panicked mutterings. He said, ‘You are certain? This very afternoon? Oh, dear me. Oh dear.’

  “Now, do you remember when we first met, I told you Mr. Rucastle said he might wish for me to sit with him for a time, wearing a certain electric blue dress?”

  “Nope,” said Holmes.

  “I recall it,” I said.

  “An hour later, as I emerged from the library, I found Mr. Rucastle waiting for me in the hall. He smiled and said, ‘I see you like to read, eh? I happen to be a bit of a novelist myself. Only an amateur, but perhaps you might read some of my works to my wife and me this evening? Oh, it does a world of good for a writer to hear his scribblings out loud, you know. So much easier to hear where you’ve been obtuse than to spot it on a page. Tell you what, I’ll have that electric blue dress I mentioned laid out for you. Later you must wear it—as you agreed you would, when you came here— and you can sit with us and read to Mallory and me! Won’t that be nice?’ He then wandered off and left me to my own devices until afternoon.

  “Just after luncheon, I went up to my room and found the dress in question. Mr. Rucastle had been a bit vague in describing it—on purpose, I am certain. He’d used a quirk of our language to his advantage.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The dress is actually periwinkle blue.”

  “Eh? Then why would he—”

  “And it’s electric.”

  “Oh!” shouted Holmes and I, together.

  Holmes wiped a tear from the corner of one eye and noted, “I don’t like her stories, Watson. They’re scary!”

  “There are wires and electrodes all through it, with special underclothes so the copper plates can touch bare skin—”

  “Make her stop, Watson!”

  “Two long cords which end in naked copper cables trail from the back. Oh, and there’s a little hat to match, with electrodes that rest against both temples and the base of the neck.”

  “Unless the wearer has a full head of hair,” I observed dolefully.

  “I fear so,” said Violet, with a nod. “Well, once I put it on—”

  “You did what?” cried Holmes.

  “The only way to know what was happening was to play along—”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no!”

  “Downstairs, Mr. Rucastle had me sit with my back to the window and gave me a sheaf of papers he described as his manuscript. He asked Mrs. Rucastle to open the window to give us a little air, but the whole thing was the crudest of blinds for her to drop the two wires on the back of my dress out of the window. They then had me read. The work was presented to me as a love story between a woman named Alice and a gentleman named Ampere.”

  “Ampere?” I noted, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes, which Mr. Rucastle insists is a common French name and not a unit of electrical current. His manuscript is rather dialogue-heavy and he made me read certain lines over and over again. Notably, ‘Come to me, Ampere, I await your touch. Now, at last, we can be one.’ As I read it, I became conscious of a subtle shift in the light behind me—as if it were moving, uncertainly. I could just feel the hairs on my back and neck, between the electrodes, begin to prick up. Every time I tried to look around, out the window, Mr. Rucastle demanded my attention for some reason or other. Yet his and his wife’s attention was fixed outside the window. They seemed greatly frustrated and Mr. Rucastle had me switch to another section of dialogue which featured the lines, ‘Why do you shy from me? It is I, Alice, who was promised to you. Come to me, Ampere!’ But after a time, the light faded and the feeling on my skin went away. The Rucastles wilted in disappointment. Jephro took back his ‘manuscript’, said he clearly needed to work on the dialogue and dismissed me to my room.”

  “You said Alice was the name of their missing daughter?” I asked.

  “Indeed.”

  “Well, I think we’ve heard enough,” I declared. “The situation is absolutely monstrous, but I believe we have enough information to draw some useful conclusions. Now, in the interest of your detective training, what do you make of it, Holmes?”

  “Hmmmm…” My companion tapped his teeth with one finger for a few moments then decided, “Real-daughter-offered-to-an-electricity-demon-in-exchange-for-favors-but-parents-hide-her-away-in-the-disused-portion-of-the-house-then-hire-Violet-to-be-a-substitute-sacrifice-because-she’s-the-same-size-same-age-and-has-the-same-color-hai
r?”

  “Bravo, Holmes! Now describe the process by which you deduced it.”

  “Oh, there was none. I just asked myself how a wicked turkey-man would manage his affairs and that’s the first thing that came to mind.”

  “Well, whatever the acumen, I am forced to concur with the result.”

  Violet gave a nod. “It is strange,” she said. “I had begun to think the same. Of course, such things are new to me—my brother’s tales being the only contact I’ve had with your strange and magical world. Yet, if you gentlemen agree with my conclusions… I think I know how to proceed.”

  “Proceed? No, no, no!” I cried. “You must come back with us! The danger, Violet, think of the danger!”

  “Oh, I do,” she said. “Yet, remember the danger that awaits me in the city? I am embracing this new and strange world. Yes, I am happy to have your assistance in my first outing. Yet, that is why you are here, sir: to help me. Not to undermine my resolve. And recall, it is not only my safety that is in question.”

  “Alice Rucastle,” I sighed.

  “I think I may know a path to helping her,” said Violet. “Next month, the Rucastles leave on a brief journey; that is when I shall strike. On Wednesday, when I wired you, I’d asked Mr. Rucastle for permission to come to town to order a new hat. Today, he thinks I’m here to pick it up. Which I did…”

  She indicated an elegant little number, beaded, netted, with a tasteful sprig of feathers on one side.

  “…but I hesitate to think of the damage my reputation would suffer if the rest of my shopping came to light.”

  Opening her bag, she showed us a pair of heavy gardening shears, a roll of black cloth tape, four bottles of strong whisky and a little silver derringer.

  “Well, I’m relieved that at least you’ve made some preparation,” Holmes said.

  I was less convinced. “That is a .19 caliber ‘glove’ derringer. It would take both shots to stop a rampaging mouse. What use it might be against an electrical demon is quite beyond the scope of my imagination.”