Occult Detective

by Emby Press

  “I told you to guard our prisoner,” snapped Holmes at Watson as they plunged after the escaping Crow.

  The footing was treacherous and they slid down the narrow trail on cascading rock rather than making a controlled descent. Watson ended up on his posterior more than once, but he quickly rebounded to his feet. Holmes, however, quickly developed a method of riding the loose rock, keeping his balance as he skied down the the precipitous slope. Consequently, Holmes was the first to reach the spot where they had tethered their horses to the stunted tree.

  Here, he found Crow standing next to Watson’s horse, soothing its fears by speaking to it and stroking its head. It seemed unharmed, but Holmes’s horse, was another matter, for it lay on its side, shaking in the last spasms of death, its throat ripped out, and the dark blood staining the ground.

  Holmes raised his pistol and approached the Indian as he calmed the horse. “Hold there, murderer!”

  “Don’t let your short-sightedness blind you to the unknown,” responded Crow. “Who do you think it was who was responsible for the death of your horse?”

  Since Crow didn’t seem disposed to flee or offer violence, Holmes crouched down beside the horse whose flanks quivered in its final throes and examined the wound that had killed it. “It appears as if teeth ripped open the equine’s jugular.”

  Watson appeared now, saw Holmes inspecting the dead horse, and trained his Beaumont-Adams at Crow. “What did this?”

  “You’ll have to reach your own conclusions,” answered Crow, but his attention was not focused upon Watson or the gun that he held in his fist. Instead he peered into the gloaming of the surrounding landscape. “I’ve offered you the answer to your questions, but you’ve rejected them.”

  “Maybe you’ll find me more open-minded than my associate,” said Watson.

  Holmes spoke from over the dead horse as he prodded at the wound. “Dr. Watson, do not let this man’s ravings influence your objectivity. He is clearly suffering from delusion, and the fact that he is not currently offering us violence does not change the fact that he murdered Lord Reginald Kinsey.”

  Crow pointed to the slope of the butte, and there among the scrub and rock was crouched a slavering fiend in the form of the man who once was Lord Reginald Kinsey. His jaw was unnaturally distended, beyond human form or function, and great fangs, stained and dripping crimson, protruded from the mouth. “If I have murdered Lord Kinsey, why is he sitting atop of that rock?”

  The horse next to Crow whinnied in fear, strained against the scrub tree to which it was tethered and uprooted it completely, then fled down the rough and precipitous path toward the base of the butte.

  Holmes rose with a strange expression upon his face. “This is a most curious turn of events.”

  “Lord Kinsey?” called Watson. “Come down from your perch. We carry a message from the executor of your family estate. You are the heir to the family for …”

  Lord Kinsey craned his head toward the rising moon and let out a horrible ululation which raised goose flesh on Watson’s arm. Then he leaped from the stone upon which he crouched, and bounded down the slope at an awkward and uneven gait, which involved the use of his arms as well as his legs to propel himself forward at incredible speed.

  Watson was quicker on the trigger than the long-faced detective and managed to fire three .442 caliber shots from his Beaumont-Adams before the malformed and maniacal Lord Kinsey reached him. Each of the bullets struck the onrushing madman, splattering thick black ichor that was unlike the blood of any man upon which Watson had ever performed surgery. After each bullet penetrated, Kinsey’s flesh closed up around the bullet, knitting and leaving naught but a puckered button of shriveled flesh in the same spot through which the bullet had passed.

  Then the fiend that was formed in the semblance of Kinsey bowled Watson over, forcing him to the ground. Watson fired the last two bullets from his five-round pistol, directly into Kinsey’s torso, black ichor splattering his own face and body. The beast grunted, but was not deterred from leaning down, misshapen jaws distended and foul, fetid breath curdling Watson’s nostrils.

  As Kinsey’s jaws drew near to rip out his throat, Watson attempted to throw the fiend from him, but the thing had an unnatural strength that was beyond that of even a stolid man like Watson. Seeing his intrepid companion’s predicament, Holmes came up alongside of Kinsey and fired his Webley directly into the side of the fiend’s skull. Flesh and bone ruptured at the impact of the bullets at such short range, and Kinsey was visibly jarred by the blows, but again the brain, bone and the flesh began to knit even at the moment the damage was done.

  Kinsey threw a backhand at Holmes and sent the detective flying ten feet, his body crunching along the gravel, and his deer hunter cap breaking free.

  “Use my pistol!” cried Crow to the pinned Watson.

  Watson heard the Indian cry out to him, and this reminded him that he had indeed thrust Crow’s pistol into the waist of his pants, and even now it and Crow’s tomahawk were digging into the small of his back—though he had scarcely noticed due to the slavering fiend perched upon his chest. He abandoned his Beaumont-Adams pistol to the rocky earth and wrenched free the eagle-butted Colt Peacemaker, thumbed back the hammer and fired directly into Kinsey’s gaping maw.

  Unlike the bullets from the Beaumont-Adams and the rounds from Holmes’ Webley, the bullets caused a visual perturbation of the thing that looked like Lord Reginald Kinsey. The fiend shrieked and hissed as the bullets squelched in the ichor that ran, instead of blood, in his veins. The lead balls passed through the roof of the mouth and smoke rose from the wounds, filtering between bloodied fangs.

  Watson kept firing and Kinsey recoiled, buying the Englishman a few more moments of life, and keeping his jugular intact for a moment more. But though the fiend jerked back from the Englishman’s throat, he still remained atop Watson, keeping him pinned to the earth. Watson tried to roll away, but succeeded only in turning to his side. He felt the tomahawk being wrenched free from his belt and then he caught a glimpse of raven hair and of Crow’s savage visage as he rose up, brandishing the tomahawk.

  For a moment, Watson thought that Crow had been in league with Kinsey all along, and that Crow was taking this opportunity—now that Holmes was down—to split his skull, but instead the Indian brought the tomahawk’s blade down so that it crunched through Kinsey’s ribs and imbedded in Kinsey’s heart.

  Kinsey groaned, staggered from Watson three paces and dropped upon the ground, apparently dead. Crow did not jerk free his tomahawk, instead he left it in the creature’s heart. Watson pulled himself to his knees and found that his limbs were shaking, then he found the strength to push himself to a standing position.

  He stepped forward to examine Lord Reginald Kinsey’s body, but Crow put a hand out, arresting his forward progress. “Don’t touch the tomahawk. If you remove the steel from his heart he will revive.”

  “That’s utter insanity …” muttered Watson.

  “So it would seem,” said Crow, “but even the steel in his heart may not be enough. Where is my other tomahawk—the one you removed from his heart when you dug him out of his grave?”

  “Aah … in Holmes’ saddlebag.” Watson had been somewhat shaken by the encounter and now he remembered his associate and rushed to the detective’s side. “Holmes! Are you well?”

  While Dr. Watson ministered to Holmes, Crow recovered his tomahawk from the saddlebag of the detective’s slain horse. Then he fell to the grim task of separating Kinsey’s limbs from his body, before dragging the gory remnants up to the open grave and casting the parts in. When Holmes had recovered his wits sufficiently to climb, with Watson’s aid to the top of the butte, they found Crow shoveling the loose dirt back into the grave.

  Crow cast a glance at Holmes and saw that he was holding a compress to his head where it had struck a rock when he had been cast aside by Lord Kinsey. He said nothing, set aside his jacket and hat, and continued shoveling until the thirteen feet of grave w
as refilled. Then he began to mound seven stones.

  “You do realize,” said Holmes, “that you are coming with us when you have finished your task. You are still a murderer and must go to trial for your crime.”

  “He saved my life,” objected Watson. “Surely, that must buy him some leniency.”

  “A generous act,” admitted Holmes, “but it does not diminish the need for justice.”

  “Justice?” questioned Watson. “Apparently, we were mistaken about Kinsey being murdered in the first place—and if Crow killed him this evening, don’t you think it was justified?”

  Crow hoisted the seventh stone and grunted as he raised it to the apex of the mound, then dropped it into place where it settled with a sharp crack.

  Holmes held his freshly reloaded Webley at his waist, aiming it in the direction of the Indian. “I’m disappointed in you, Watson. We examined Lord Reginald Kinsey quite thoroughly, and he was indubitably deceased. Tell me how you would account for his sudden resurrection, so that he could be killed twice?”

  Crow put his hat back on his head.

  Watson seemed embarrassed by the question. “I don’t have an explanation, Holmes—but I do know that when I was stationed in India I saw some of the yogis do some strange things, and the tribal shamans in Afghanistan they could …”

  “Deceptions and sleight of hand,” interrupted Holmes impatiently. “There is a simple enough explanation for the things we experienced here tonight—a rational explanation, and not one that resorts to the mummery of the supernatural, which is a sanctuary of the feeble-minded.”

  “Why, thank you, Holmes,” replied Watson, who could not miss the insult. “I can always count on you for a few kind words. So how do you explain Kinsey’s resurrection?”

  Crow lifted his folded buckskin jacket and thrust his hand inside.

  “Let me start by explaining that the corpse we discovered at the bottom of this thirteen-feet deep grave was indeed Lord Reginald Kinsey as we originally deduced. That he was missing upon our return was merely an act of removal. Someone dropped into the grave, put Kinsey’s shoes upon his feet and carried the dismembered body out of the grave. Note that it was someone with precisely the same size of feet.”

  Watson looked at Crow’s booted feet. “His feet are larger than Kinsey’s.”

  “It was not our savage friend that removed the body,” said Holmes with an enigmatic smile, one he often wore when he was tantalizing his audience by slowly unraveling the mystery that his brilliant mind had already solved. “Remember, Watson, he arrived after we did.”

  Watson chewed on the inside of his mouth. “So why were there no footprints approaching the grave?”

  “A simple matter of brushing them out with a branch broken from the scrub brush. I’m certain that if we examine the butte we will find the scrub brush which donated its branch to cover the perpetrator’s approach.”

  “So,” said Watson, “if Reginald Kinsey was indeed dead—murdered by Lone Crow—then who was it that attacked us this evening?”

  “You might recall,” said Holmes, “how I visited the telegraph office of the rail camp before we struck out after Crow. I was seeking confirmation for something I had been suspecting for a long time.”

  “What was that?” asked Watson.

  “How would you account for the similarities in appearance between the dead Lord Reginald Kinsey and the man who attacked us tonight?”

  Watson shrugged. “Perhaps an identical twin?”

  “Precisely!” replied a triumphant Holmes. “While we’ve been absent 21 Baker Street, and England as a whole, I’ve asked an associate to look into the genealogical records of the Kinsey family. It turns out that the night Reginald Kinsey was born, there was a second son born to his mother—an identical twin named Roald.”

  “And how is it,” asked Watson, “that we were asked to find the rightful heir to the Kinsey family fortune and the executor never bothered to mention this twin named Roald?”

  “Because he was a sickly and malformed child and was recorded dead at birth,” said Holmes.

  “Yet he did not die?”

  “The evidence was before your own eyes,” said Holmes. “Because of his deformity he must have been shunted into an orphanage.”

  Now Watson began to follow Holmes’ logic. “And so his motive in following his exiled and older brother to the colonies was to kill him, so that he would become the only heir to the Kinsey family fortune.”

  Holmes’ long visage cracked a smile. “Now you are thinking, Watson! And there we have an explanation that sweeps away the fallacious and obscuring taint of the supernatural and replaces it with cold hard logic.”

  Watson hesitated as if he was unsure he should speak. “But what of the Roald Kinsey’s healing flesh? I saw the bullet wounds close up before my own eyes. I’m a physician. I’ve treated many bullet wounds in Afghanistan and I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  Holmes’ eyes swept toward Crow. “That would be where our poor deluded savage comes in. Like the shamans in many cultures he is adept at at producing a phenomenon called Mesmerism, which includes the ability to implant a subtle suggestion in others’ minds—often without them realizing it—so that they see or believe things which just aren’t there. Isn’t that so, Mr. Crow?”

  “I’ve seen such things occur,” said Crow, “but it seems to me that you are equally adept at explaining away things that do exist. The Kinsey family is under a curse. If you examine the birth records you will see that for the last century every first born child had a twin that died at birth and that every first born child was thought to have gone insane by the age of thirty. This was not happenstance. It came about because of a mating of the matriarch Ellen Kinsey with a supernatural entity, which takes over the body of the first born of every following generation when it has fully matured.”

  “Now, now,” chortled Holmes. “I assure you, Crow, that my mind is not so easily swayed as my partner’s. Dr. Watson—how should I say this—has a more flexible mindset and looser perceptions than my rigidly trained mental faculties will accept.”

  Crow swept away the folds of his buckskin jacket, revealing the eagle-butted Colt Peacemaker that he held beneath. “Let me make this suggestion very clear. The both of you will drop your guns upon the ground and kick them over to me. Before either of you think to do otherwise, I should remind you that I am known from San Francisco to Oklahoma as a fearsome gunfighter. I will not miss.”

  Holmes considered this for a moment. “I have, indeed, heard tell of your skill as a marksman, Mr. Crow.” He tossed his gun upon the ground. “And I prefer not to test your reputation as a gunfighter.”

  Crow glanced toward Holmes’ mustached companion. “Dr. Watson?”

  Watson carefully placed his Beaumont-Adams revolver upon the earth and rose back to a standing position. Crow picked up the two pistols and mounted his horse. “I’ll leave your weapons at the bottom of the butte where you can retrieve them. Oklahoma Territory is not the place to go unarmed. There are dangers of every sort abroad.”

  “Not the least of which is you, I do suppose,” answered Holmes.

  The Indian did not reply to this, and instead gave them one last warning. “Whatever you do, do not dig up Lord Kinsey.” Crow wheeled his dun around and shortly disappeared into the moonlit night, the ringing of his horse’s hooves could be heard for sometime later, and then the sound faded away to be replaced by the chirp of the crickets.

  “Well!” said Holmes. “I think that we’ve successfully completed our charge of locating the Kinsey family heir. In fact, we discovered two of them! But since they are both dead, the family line ends and the estate falls to the disposition of the Crown.”

  “But the murder of Reginald Kinsey?”

  “That’s been solved,” said Holmes with a brightness that surprised Watson. “That our culprit escaped does not diminish that fact. Still, if I did not know better, I might have suspicions that you had something to do with allowing Mr. Crow to r
etrieve his pistol. Did you not have it in your possession at one time?”

  “I did,” admitted Watson. “In fact, I fired three bullets from it, right into Roald Kinsey’s open mouth. However, in the melee of Crow leaping over me to plunge his tomahawk into Roald Kinsey’s breast I must have lost track of the pistol.”

  “An understandable error,” said Holmes. “Also understandable would be a desire to show some leniency to a man who saved your life.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re speaking about,” replied Watson. “Such a thing never would have occurred to me.”

  Holmes laughed, suggesting that he did not for a moment believe Watson’s assertion. “I suggest we make our way to the bottom of the butte and retrieve our weapons. After that, perhaps we can find a way to lure your frightened horse back. You don’t mind sharing horseback, do you? I don’t relish the idea of walking back to the train line.”

  “So we’re not going to go after Crow?”

  “It would be foolishness to try,” said Holmes. “Aside from the consideration that he is an accomplished gunfighter, there is the fact that our one horse will be overburdened by the weight of two men. We have no hope of overtaking him.”

  They began to wind their way down the butte, carefully watching each step. Holmes continued to speak. “We’ve got tickets on a steamer out of New York in three days time. I think it best we get back to the coast. We’ll turn over our findings to the local constabulary and let them deal with Crow the best way they know how.”

  They reached the bottom of the butte and the moonlight revealed Holmes’ Webley, Watson’s Beaumont-Adams and Crow’s second tomahawk resting upon a rock. Holmes hefted the tomahawk. “It seems Crow has left us a souvenir of our adventures on American soil, Watson! Still a bit bloodied by the hacking off of Roald Kinsey’s limbs, I see. I’m not sure it would endear us to polite society to keep such a gory artifact of our travels prominently displayed.”

  “I’ll keep it,” said Watson. “For it was a tomahawk just like this that saved my life—whether it was from Roald Kinsey or from a fiendish doppledanger inhabiting Reginald Kinsey’s body, I will never in certainty be able to say.”