“Please, Dr. Watson. Help me. Dear God, I swear this killer cannot be human.”
“Lestrade, I do not have Holmes’ deductive powers. I cannot fill his shoes, and never could, in spite of what people expect of me. You have clever enough boys at the Yard.”
“They won’t listen to the ravings of an old codger like me.”
“Tea, gentlemen?”
Mrs. Race appeared in the hallway.
“No. That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Race. Mr. Lestrade is leaving.”
She backed away and retraced her steps to the kitchen. I looked back into the room and could see Lestrade’s shoulders, and spirits, sink as he admitted defeat. His skin seemed even more pallid and he seemed even older than before as he hoisted himself up out of the armchair and shuffled slowly towards me.
He saw a first edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles lying nearby and picked it up. “Why did you put me in the story? I always wondered. I was away on holiday in Bognor at the time.”
“Artistic license,” I said. “You have done well out of it. Don’t complain. I hear you do well on the lecture circuit.”
He grunted. “You portrayed yourself much more of a fool than you were, to make him look the genius. Why did you do that? I’ll bet the dry old stick never thanked you for it.”
“He was my friend.”
When I had escorted him to the front door the old inspector gave one more parting remark before he left. “By the way, you want to feed your dog.”
“What dog?” I asked.
“The one I heard as I waited in the hall earlier. Sniffling and mewling at the back door, it was. Desperate to get in.”
I did not tell the retired inspector: I had no dog.
Perhaps my guilt had brought it back. Acting through the magnifying glass of the medium’s powers, amplified by our talk that evening of Holmes’ most celebrated adventure, it had been formed from ectoplasm and expectation. Now the un-real thing had returned to torment our fragile human bodies and fragile human souls. To defy our deep-set illusion that we could grasp and tame the physical world and all that was in it.
Unable to rest, I took it upon myself to visit one or more of the sitters at the séance to make sure they had seen what I had seen; to confirm my fears or deny them.
Mr. Bythesea and Mrs. Sharman were elusive, but I tracked own Mrs. Coventry to her home between Spitalfields Market and Liverpool Street. With the aid of the telephone it was not difficult to trace such an unusual name. The family struck me as hard up, but there was no lack of hospitality, quite the reverse, as is often the case with the working-classes. Her husband, a book-binder’s apprentice, was at work when I called. The tea cups were chipped, and I noticed an empty perambulator in the corner of the room; one from which, I surmised, she found it hard to be parted. But I was full of my own anxious concerns.
“This may be hard to you to grasp, Mrs. Coventry, but I strongly believe now that we conjured up something in the dark of the séance room…. Something from our minds…. Or that used our minds to materialize….”
I waited for her to react, but she did not.
“It’s important for me to know exactly what you saw when we joined hands, when the light went out, when Mrs. Hebron’s control spirit, Silver Tree, told us to picture something in our minds’ eye. Do you remember, we talked beforehand about my friend Sherlock Holmes? His cases as a detective? We discussed especially the ghastly Hound of the Baskervilles…
She said simply: “I saw my child.”
With a lump in my throat, I almost replied: And I saw mine.
My brain was on fire. Perspiration layered my brow. If the demonic creature was at large, then, it was my responsibility. I had created it, and therefore it must be in my gift to uncreate it in the same fashion. But what fashion? I had no alternative but to revisit the medium’s house in the hope that what could be done could be undone by the same esoteric and unfathomable process.
But I was to be cheated in that endeavour. When I sounded the door bell, which I did repeatedly, there was no reply. I hammered with my knuckles.
“One knock for yes, two knocks for no, mate,” said a voice belonging to a butcher boy wrapping sausages.
“Where is she? Mrs. Hebron, I mean? And Mr. Hebron for that matter?”
“Gone back up north, mate. To be with family. Natural under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“Violent death, Bound to hit you for six. What with them two being so close and all. Still, they had their faith to…”
“Death?”
His face swam in my vision. My eyes could not focus.
“Drowned, sir. Didn’t you hear? Mrs. Hebron’s body was found in the Thames at Wapping near New Crane Stairs, fished out by a couple of mudlarks. Heck of a state by all accounts. Not much left to identify her. Coppers reckon she must’ve fell off a ferryboat and got churned up in the propellers, the way she was ripped all to pieces like that. It’s a mystery.”
It was no mystery to me. I fled before the urge to void my stomach got the better of my mask of composure.
That night I woke up layered in sweat and weeping like a babe in arms. The housekeeper held me in her arms. I took her for being my wife, who had died twenty years before. She held me to her bosom. A wave of sadness overcame me. I thought myself married, and not a widower twice over. The pain of Mary dying childless filled me with all-consuming remorse, for I had been unable to give her what she required most to live a happy life — a son or daughter. With bitterness I realised that, for all the things Holmes had taught me, he never taught me how to live with that. And I never hated him for it. Never.
When my sobs had reached a plateau and hollowed me out, I asked her what had brought her to me.
She said, “The howls, sir.”
“Howls? Of a dog?”
“No, sir. The howls were your own.”
Within the week, with cold dread, I read of another terrible death, this time in Hartlepool. A woman mutilated beyond recognition and eviscerated by — the police claimed — a woodcutter’s knife no more than one inch across. Did the authorities now know more than they were prepared to say? Did they, like me, strive to see a hideous pattern emerging? Of which they dare not speak?
What would Holmes do? How many times had he used the wretched words ‘You know my methods — apply them’. Well now I would. Whatever that supernatural consanguinity I felt in the séance room represented, the scucca had to be confronted.
The Hell Hound evaded me in Hartlepool. I followed him to Widnes. There I learned of the startling case of a babe-in-arms torn, battered and discarded like so much meat, the father, a collier, accused of it. In the cell I held his giant hand, still engrained as it was with the soot of the pit, and said I believed him innocent.
“Bless you, doctor,” he said, trembling and yellow-skinned with alcoholic poisoning. “You are right. A beast did this, not a man. A beast.”
In Macclesfield I felt the demon close but he exhibited the cunning of his breed. I fell a length of stone steps, damaging my hip and knee, and lay in the pouring rain till a lamp-lighter found me.
Back in London Mrs. Race forced me to keep to my bed. She called Dr. Stanley and I heard them whispering outside my bedroom door. She talked about ‘ranting and raving’ —why? To what other patient was she ministering?
I heard her say: “Is it a fever, doctor?” The other voice replied: “No…. Not a fever, I fear…”
To my horror another false accusation hit the headlines, this time a guardsman in Bristol who was said to have slaughtered three women in a house of ill repute. A decorated individual. Medal of gallantry. Preposterous. The Hound was challenging all reason. But I realised now, that was exactly its job.
Impatient though I was to return to my mission, I could not shake the influenza. It left me terribly weakened and in the end my stubbornness was no match for Mrs. Race’s persistence. She made an appointment at St. Thomas’s and a tribunal of stiff-shirts looked at my lungs.
I said I could still run a mile and not be breathless but they looked at me sceptically, more concerned with asking me moronic questions about the date and the name of the Prime Minister. I became bored and told them I had more pressing business. There was a murderous creature at large; a fiendish Hound which had breached the very border between the psychical and physical universes. They asked me if this beast represented Death. I laughed that it did not ‘represent’ anything, it simply was — and I alone must stop it.
After scribbling in his book, the Chief Jackass suggested that I ‘take a rest cure’ — perhaps a leisurely cruise of the Mediterranean. It would renew my energy, sorely depleted by the illness. And would I come back in two months, to ‘reassess’?
I said I had nothing to reassess. A younger, pimply cohort said, more bluntly, that at ‘my time of life’ all kinds of health complications ‘both physical and mental’ can become serious if left unmonitored. I told the laddie that I was a general practitioner long before he was a twinkle in his father’s eye, and did not require a lecture on medicine from him, thank you very much. Would that be all? It would. I left.
I stomped off down the corridor The meeting preoccupied me, because I was sure that the exit doors were one turning left then one turning right, however that only led to a dead-end.
Perplexed now, I checked the sign stencilled on the wall and quickly retraced my steps, but the corridor leading to the consulting room in which I’d had my interview now had no door. I tried the one behind me … it was locked.
I told myself not to panic. I had simply made a mistake. There was a way out. There had to be. But now when I looked for direction signs there were none, and when I looked around for someone to ask, there was nobody.
My heart beat faster.
I saw an arrow to the staircase. Had I come upstairs? I could not remember, and the more I tried to, the more obscure my memory of coming there became. A feeling of vulnerability almost immobilized me. Only in a mechanical fashion did I manage to keep myself moving.
I descended. The stairs were unlit and punctuated with puddles I charitably assumed to be water. The peppermint walls became progressively more chipped and peeling. The mezzanine doors were chained with padlocks and, though my reason told me this could not be the way I’d entered, my instinct told me to carry on towards the hum of a generator and the prospect of light. Soon I could hear only my own footsteps and breath; nothing else. A mariner adrift, I was feebly unable to navigate my position. The breath bounced back at me — low, slavering, foam-flecked, a cold nose running along the linoleum floor, sniffing blood.
One door lay ajar and I saw a woman’s face, set in a strapped contraption, was half taken away, the flaps of her cheek and eyelid pinned back. The iris revolved and looked at me.
I backed away. Turning swiftly, I found another door unlocked. Within, a naked man lay half-covered in a sheet, his head turned away from me, his arm shorn off to the shoulder, the jagged yellow bone of the upper arm sticking out like a broken branch. His leg was twitching uncontrollably.
I hurried down the corridor, aware now that either side of me stood low carts upon which human forms were covered with white sheets, some of which covered wounds seeping through in reddish-brown stains. On one — I swiftly drew back my hand — a steel bowl rested, in which was collected the crimson, eel-like coil of a digestive tract.
I moaned and it echoed back to me as a contemptuous snarl. Something had brought me there for a purpose? What? My powers of logic were taxed to breaking point. But they would not break — I wound not break. He would not have me.
I heard the scratching of paws behind the double doors ahead of me.
I charged at them with palms outright and threw them open, immediately confronted by five marble slabs with five men in surgical gowns bent over them, all of whom looked up. The cadavers laid out were both male and female. All had been ripped apart, disfigured and disembowelled, their innards missing, hands and heads severed, hardly an inch of flesh untarnished by a dapple or spray from claw-sliced arteries or bitten veins. I knew at once these obscene off-cuts of an abattoir were not result of any human hand or mere accident.
This I tried my best to explain to the mortuary attendants, even as their strong arms pulled me away, but they would not listen. I had to scream at the top of my voice, and still they insisted I leave. Other men came — more burly and more insistent. They forced me to the floor, but still I tried to make them see reason. Yes! Reason!
“Don’t you see?” I pleaded with every fibre of my being, even as they restrained me. “Oh God! Don’t you see? They have all been ravaged by the teeth of a gigantic hound!”
You asked me, sir, to set this down with all the clarity I could muster. I have been here several weeks and have had ample time to assemble my thoughts on the subject. At this moment I have not a shred of doubt that the satanic creature, this Hell Hound, is abreast in the world for a purpose.
TO DEFEAT LOGIC.
TO TEAR THE RATIONAL
FROM OUR SMUG THROATS.
I must point out that I have said repeatedly to your colleagues that I neither care nor warrant being in this institution. When I have voiced this opinion, however, I am only met with gales of laughter.Yes, I am sure that all your patients claim to be perfectly well, but you forget I am a TRAINED DOCTOR and any sign of insanity would be quite obvious to me.
I would also direct you to the fact that, whereas other inmates are — yes, the word again — irrational, I am perfectly cogent in my actions at all times. My intellect is utterly undiminished: vide this MS. My ‘marbles’, sir, are intact.
What is more important is that from what I glean from the outside world, the vicious, brutal deaths have not ceased during my incarceration. The Hound has propagated act upon act against our organs, veins, bones, bodies, beings. It is out there, attacking and killing in dead of night, full in the knowledge that we will foist upon its awful SLAUGHTERS any petty ‘explanation’ that will suit us and make us feel safe.
Our denial only makes it more powerful.
Our only hope is that the truth will out … the truth I have suppressed till now….
With these words — this prescription from the doctor, take twice a day with water — only then, perhaps, perhaps, its restless spirit will be at peace … perhaps then and only then will sleeping dogs lie.
This morning when jets of water fired at pressure against my naked body and the steam rose around me in a silvery mist, I saw its red eyes glowing, its ears pricked up, slavering froth dripping from its jaws like ice cream on the face of a baby. It stood up on its hind legs, glowing like a saint. “Now come on, Mister Watson, back to your nice warm bed. Smug as a bug in a rug. Let’s be having you…”
The nurses prattle. Do they not understand? Why will they not understand? Have a word with them. They will listen to you. Tell them I am not an infant. Tell them I was famous, once.
At least they do not put me in the jacket any more.
Finally in my defence, you cannot dismiss me as you dismiss the ravings of the others, clearly, because there is the evidence of your own ears. There is the HOWLING.
Every night. All night…
I hear it. I hear it now. It never ceases.
Do you not hear it too? Please God, tell me you hear it too.
JOURNAL OF DR. CLIFFORD ROYCE-MILLS:
Today with regret I signed the death certificate of Dr. John H. Watson, friend and diarist of the legendary sleuth Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He was found at daybreak in our knot garden at Innes Court, lying in his pyjamas at the gate to the road. Cause of death a heart attack. Of course it is not uncommon for patients with acute mania to wander in an attempt to escape from the grounds.
I telephoned the only number in his file and Mr. Lestrade arrived in the afternoon from London. Sadly, by then Dr. Watson’s bowler and moustache clippers had been stolen, his tweed jacket also no doubt scavenged by the literary mob devoted to all things Sherlockian. One of the nurses must have let the news out and,
no doubt, let the vultures in, for a back-hander. Even the small Toby jug in which he mixed his shaving soap was gone.
Lestrade said he was content to have his memories. He had known Watson the man; the others hadn’t. And that was enough for him.
We found a note book but Watson’s notes were entirely illegible, crisscrossed both vertically and horizontally in the most spidery pencil-marks, turning the pages almost black. It is a pity it did not provide a window to his state of mind at the end. All in all a sad end for a fellow held in such high esteem by the public. Still, the cases he recorded of Holmes’ adventures, documenting the remarkable application of reason to the most tangled of mysteries, would endure.
As I conducted my rounds by the low evening light, a number of the patients reported what they had heard the night before. One said that Dr. Watson had been crying out ‘Home! Home!’ — possibly some irrational desire to return to his house in Mortlake. Another said he heard the doctor exclaim something about ‘a foot’ — but I took that with a pinch of salt. Who knows what strange notions occur in the minds of the deluded?
What is incontrovertible is that the poor old man had applied extreme exertion in trying to open the knot garden door, which had long been padlocked to prevent such an occurrence. The strange thing was that there were footsteps in the mud leading to the exit — footprints that matched his own shoes — however he would seem, bizarrely, to have been walking on tip toes.
Why tip toes?
It intrigues me as I write this before turning off my bedside light. Unusual for something so small to trouble me so greatly, but I cannot remove it from my mind. I am positive there must be a logical explanation. There must.
There must.
The Death Lantern
Lawrence C. Connolly
I walked home from the station. The air felt cool, mild for December in London, and I soon settled into a steady pace — the kind that I have always found conducive to reflection. Soon, memories rose, drawn by familiar landmarks: a public house recalling times with friends, a lamp post rekindling thoughts of a secret rendezvous, a closed door renewing old regrets for things that might have been. I savored them all, lost in my revere until a sudden thickening of the air drew me back to the moment. I say sudden, although the change had surely been brewing for some time, settling around me until the night’s mist hovered so close that I could no longer ignore it.
Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes Page 5
