by George Mann
And he turns his head, and looks directly up at me, and smiles a withered, toothless smile.
* * *
It is hours later, when the sun is finally setting, when once more I hear a knocking – quiet, yet insistent – at my front door. Wearily I open it, and there stands Annabel, beaming at me, holding up my mother’s somewhat muddy silver locket.
“It was in my rosebushes!” she cries. “They must have dropped it when they ran away. I switched my light on when I saw them, you see – they must have realised they’d been spotted, and made a run for it. Imagine going to all that effort and not even getting away with what they came here for!”
I take the locket. Annabel’s grin falters as she sees my unsmiling face, but she rallies.
“I expect they’ll let poor Harriet go now,” she says breezily. “They won’t be able to prove anything now, I shouldn’t think.”
Quietly, I say, “They certainly will not. Because you are going to tell them what really happened. For Harriet’s sake.”
Annabel flushes furiously, but her voice is almost as weak as the old man’s. “What… what do you mean?”
“Nobody climbed my trellis,” I say. “No one was in my house. You didn’t see any black men. To do you justice you didn’t steal any of my other jewellery, although I suppose you must be in financial need. I’ll even do you the courtesy of believing you meant to find the locket all along. But even so, you were prepared to damage my property, terrorise me in my bed, waste the police’s time and see Harriet wrongfully arrested.”
“Oh, God.” Annabel’s hand is at her mouth. “Oh, God, Lucy. I’m so sorry. I’m afraid I’ve been a frightful shit. I hoped you’d never find out. But… I’ve been so stupid. I lost a lot of money on the horses… well, a little at first. But then I tried to win it back, and I kept trying, and now it’s far too much. I can’t afford not to sell the house, and I can’t afford…”
Her self-justification ebbs away on the beach of my disinterest.
“The police know, Annabel,” I tell her. “Or they will soon. It’s out of my hands. If you go and tell DI Critchley what happened, I won’t press charges. I’ll even act as a character witness, if it comes to it. But I will not have Harriet suffer any more, do you understand?”
She nods, starts to say something, then stops and nods again. She turns away. There’s guilt in her expression, and despair for the future, but there is also something in her face I recognise.
Annabel Finch is relieved to have been unmasked.
* * *
I am not, as you may well understand, a woman to harbour illusions. I know that Harriet Youngblood will always suffer the effects of colour prejudice, just as I have done for all of my life, just as my parents did last century in Atlanta. I do not know whether the London Harriet grows up in will allow her to exercise her mind in the law, or force her into some form of drudgery, domestic or industrial.
I cannot begin to imagine what kind of Britain she will inhabit when she reaches my age, although I can only hope that it will treat its immigrants with more respect and humanity than the likes of Critchley do now.
I know, though, that today Harriet is spared the worst of what the present can offer, and for that I am profoundly grateful to you.
Because I recognised you; of course I did. Your laugh, a hoarse echo of the clear peal of my childhood; your slender fingers, gnarled and arthritic; your eyes, the skin around them creased and soft like old crepe paper. I recognised the names, too, as any of Dr Watson’s readers would have done: all three of them, but especially the name you were addressed by as you were leaving.
And yet I wonder, still.
I was asleep when you arrived. One hears of inspiration coming to poets in their dreams, but also of scientists finding there some crucial piece of analysis that has eluded their waking minds. Had I already realised subconsciously that Annabel had betrayed me? Fond though I have been of her – though not any more, I am afraid – she has never been exactly reliable.
Your passing left no evidence; none, at least, that I am competent to detect. All that you left behind was a truth I might have stumbled upon myself, given time.
The alternative – that the world-renowned detective who briefly went by the name Altamont is not, as all his devotees have long imagined, dead, but has survived into extreme old age, and is once again dabbling in his old line of work – is surely no more plausible, and would be far more sensational if it were known.
What was it Billy would have had you doing that was more important? Not beekeeping, surely. That job carries its own physical demands, and a man who is – as you would have to be by now – over a hundred years old, would surely need to find some less active, more cerebral way to occupy his time.
In that case, I can understand your need for an alias in your second retirement. If it were known that you were once again practising criminal investigation in the second half of the twentieth century, the world would trample a path to your door.
I could make my own enquiries – we old ladies have a knack for being inquisitive, and our information networks are spread widely. Given your state of health, I cannot imagine that you travelled far to come here. There cannot be many centenarians in the world named Altamont, and I dare say I could find with little difficulty where you are living – if you are alive outside my dreams at all, and not in some untended grave in a quiet churchyard in the Sussex countryside.
It would be such a pleasure if we could meet again. I would talk with you properly this time. We might reminisce together about all that happened then, when we were both so very young.
But, no. If you are real, then you are entitled to your privacy.
Yours is one mask that I shall leave in place.
About the Editor
George Mann is the author of the Sherlock Holmes: The Spirit Box and Sherlock Holmes: The Will of the Dead, the Newbury and Hobbes and The Ghost series of novels, as well as numerous short stories, novellas and audiobooks. He has written fiction and audio scripts for the BBC’s Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes. He is also a respected anthologist and has edited Associates of Sherlock Holmes, Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and The Solaris Book of New Fantasy. His new novel, Wychwood, is out in September 2017. He lives near Grantham, UK.
About the Authors
Stuart Douglas is the author of the Titan Books Sherlock Holmes novels The Albino’s Treasure and The Counterfeit Detective, as well as the forthcoming The Improbable Prisoner. He is the founder and owner of Obverse Books and is responsible for the official resurrection of the character of Sexton Blake after fifty years. He has written numerous short stories, novellas and non-fiction pieces, in addition to editing over a dozen anthologies. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and three children.
Jonathan Green is a writer of speculative fiction, with more than sixty books to his name. Well known for his contributions to the Fighting Fantasy range of adventure gamebooks, he has also written fiction for such diverse properties as Doctor Who, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, LEGO, Judge Dredd, and Robin of Sherwood. His work has been translated into eight languages.
He is the creator of the Pax Britannia series for Abaddon Books and has written eight novels, and numerous short stories, set within this steampunk universe, featuring the debonair dandy adventurer Ulysses Quicksilver. Steampunk and dieselpunk have left their mark on his latest gamebook publications as well, Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland and The Wicked Wizard of Oz.
He is the author of an increasing number of non-fiction titles, including the award-winning You Are The Hero: A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and he has recently taken to editing and compiling short story anthologies, including the critically-acclaimed Game Over, Sharkpunk, and Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu.
To find out more about his current projects visit www.jonathangreenauthor.com and follow him on Twitter @jonatha
ngreen.
Stephen Henry is an author of many parts who has worked in the tabletop games and video game industry for over a decade. He lives and works in Nottingham, England.
Andrew Lane is the author of twenty-four novels and nine non-fiction books, along with over thirty short stories. He is probably best known at the moment for his series of eight YA novels about Sherlock Holmes’s adventures as a teenager.
Mark A. Latham is a writer, editor, history nerd, proud dogfather, frustrated grunge singer and amateur baker from Staffordshire, UK. An immigrant to rural Nottinghamshire, he lives in a very old house (sadly not haunted), and is still regarded in the village as a foreigner. Formerly the editor of Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine, Mark dabbled in tabletop games design before becoming a full-time author of strange, fantastical and macabre tales. His Apollonian Casefiles series, and his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Betrayal in Blood, are available now from Titan Books. Visit Mark’s blog at thelostvictorian.blogspot.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @aLostVictorian.
James Lovegrove is the author of more than fifty books, including The Hope, Days, Untied Kingdom, Provender Gleed, and the New York Times bestselling Pantheon series. He has written four Sherlock Holmes novels, The Stuff of Nightmares, Gods of War, The Thinking Engine and The Labyrinth of Death for Titan Books, and a Holmes/Cthulhu mashup trilogy, the first volume of which – Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows – came out in 2016, with a second, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities, to follow in late 2017. His latest series is the Dev Harmer Missions, an outer-space action-adventure series, beginning with World of Fire and World of Water.
James has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award and the Manchester Book Award. His short story “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story. James’s work has been translated into fourteen languages.
His journalism has appeared in periodicals as diverse as Literary Review, Interzone, SFX and BBC MindGames, and he is a regular reviewer of fiction for the Financial Times and contributes features and reviews about comic books to Comic Heroes magazine. He lives with his wife, two sons, cat and tiny dog in Eastbourne, not far from “the small farm upon the Downs” to which Sherlock Holmes retired.
David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. Since 1975, he has collected literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fanfiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes Volumes I and II, Sherlock Holmes and a Quantity of Debt, Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins, and the forthcoming The Papers of Solar Pons. Additionally, he is the editor of the three-volume set Sherlock Holmes in Montague Street (recasting Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt stories as early Holmes adventures), the two-volume collection of Great Hiatus stories Holmes Away From Home, the pre-1881 Sherlock Holmes: Before Baker Street, and the ongoing collection The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories. He is a licensed civil engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. Since 1984, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat from autumn to spring. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make the trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes pilgrimage to England, with return pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!
Iain McLaughlin was born in Dundee on the east coast of Scotland. He still lives there in a house filled with books. He has written more than twenty books and over fifty plays for radio. He has also written short stories and TV scripts. Iain has written for many famous characters and shows including James Bond, Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Richard Hannay, Wallace & Gromit and Sherlock Holmes. He has also written several original thrillers. For a time he was the editor of the Beano comic and has written the Scottish icons The Broons and Oor Wullie.
Philip Purser-Hallard is the author of the trilogy of urban fantasy thrillers beginning with The Pendragon Protocol, which envisages the successors of the Knights of the Round Table as a paramilitary group fighting for the soul of 21st-century Britain. He edits a series of anthologies about the City of the Saved, a technological afterlife created for humanity beyond the end of the universe, in which Sherlock Holmes has been known to appear. His short story “The Adventure of the Professor’s Bequest” (in Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes) deals with the posthumous papers of Professor Moriarty.
As well as writing various other books and short stories, Phil edits The Black Archive, a series of monographs about individual Doctor Who stories published by Obverse Books. For variety (and money), he spends four days a week editing official documents for a non-governmental public body.
He has a wife, a son and plenty of books, but is temporarily between cats.
Michelle Ruda is a bestselling international Nobel prizewinning author – all in her mind. She actually works in TV as a development researcher, the media equivalent of a consulting detective. She discovered Sherlock Holmes in 2013 and her life has never been the same since. This is her first published short story and she is delighted that it’s about Mr Holmes. She has won two short film script competitions with scripts that have been made into films, and has had a number of articles and poems published. In her spare time she enjoys South Korean TV drama, air guitar and haggling.
Sam Stone began her professional writing career in 2007 when her first novel won the Silver Award for Best Novel with ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. Since then she has gone on to write several novels, three novellas and many short stories. She was the first woman in thirty-one years to win the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Novel. She also won the Award for Best Short Fiction in the same year (2011).
Stone loves all types of fiction and enjoys mixing horror (her first passion) with a variety of different genres including science fiction, fantasy, crime and steampunk.
She currently resides in Lincolnshire with her husband David and their two cats Shadow and Freya.
Her works can be found in paperback, audio and eBook.
www.sam-stone.com
Nik Vincent began working as a freelance editor, but has published work in a number of mediums including advertising, training manuals, comics and short stories. She has worked as a ghostwriter, and regularly collaborates with her partner, Dan Abnett, writing novels, and in the games industry. Nik was educated at Stirling University, and lives and works in Maidstone, Kent. She tweets @VincentAbnett.
Dan Watters is a London-based writer, primarily of comic books. His debut graphic novel, the weird neo-noir Limbo, was released through Image Comics in 2016. He is currently working on various comic book titles, including Assassin’s Creed and Dark Souls: Legends of the Flame for Titan Comics, and The Shadow for Dynamite Comics.
Marcia Wilson is a former saltpetre cave tour guide and lifetime advocate of karstic environmental protection. She’s currently in an exercise regime for the Dragon Boat races and holds down the day job in an optical shop between commissions for her illustrations. She’s always reading the SH canon as annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. She is a contributing writer to all but two of the ongoing MX Anthology of New Sherlock Holmes Stories for the renovation of Undershaw and is finishing her third Sherlock Holmes pastiche for MX Publishing.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Associates of Sherlock
Holmes
Edited by George Mann
For the very first time, famous associates of the Great Detective – clients, colleagues, and of course, villains – tell their own stories in this collection of brand-new adventures. Follow Inspector Lestrade as he and Sherlock Holmes pursue a killer to rival Jack the Ripper; sit with Mycroft Holmes as he solves a case from the comfort of the Diogenes Club; take a drink with Irene Adler and Dr Watson in a Parisian café; and join Colonel Sebastian Moran on the hunt for
a supposedly mythical creature…
TITANBOOKS.COM
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Encounters of
Sherlock Holmes
Further Encounters of
Sherlock Holmes
Edited by George Mann
Two collections of Sherlock Holmes stories from a variety of exciting voices in modern horror and steampunk, including James Lovegrove, Paul Magrs and Mark Hodder. Edited by respected anthologist George Mann.
TITANBOOKS.COM
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