Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #10

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  A shot fired from the bar’s entrance. Sarah Cole walked in with her gun raised above her head and trailing vapour. “Gentlemen, you may all leave now. Your lives depend upon it.”

  A mass of people filed in behind her. Everyone at the bar and seated at tables rushed out the door or tumbled out of the windows. Sarah Cole’s party all wore masks. Some were mere eye masks, while others concealed their faces or even hid their whole heads.

  She walked up to me, her gun pointing at my chest. “Good evening, Doctor Watson. I’m relieved you could attend.”

  I sipped a rum and said nothing.

  Brandishing a violin, one of her revelers began a dance tune. Several walked behind the bar and started helping themselves to liquor. The bar-tender crept away into a broom closet.

  “Doctor Watson, where is Sherlock Holmes?” she asked.

  My heartbeat fluttered as I lied. “I don’t know.”

  Sarah said, “Then I must await his arrival.” One of the partygoers handed her a champagne bottle and she poured herself a glass. By now, the ball was filled with masqueraders dressed as asylum-dwellers. A bald, wrinkled old man wore a grey uniform and carried a rake, even dancing with it and clutching it as he danced with others. Leeches spotted a doctor. A man with manacles loose on his hands gripped the unfastened ends of a woman in a strait-waistcoat.

  She wetted her lips with champagne. “So tell me, where is Malcolm Beamish?”

  I took another sip. “I do not know his whereabouts either.”

  “Then tell me where I may find your colleague, Mister Holmes.”

  “I cannot say, madam.”

  Anger flared in her eyes and her complexion flushed. “You come to me so foolishly?”

  I lifted my own revolver from my pocket and held it at my side. “Sherlock Holmes cannot be responsible for anyone’s death. Nor can I.”

  Suddenly, a small cadre of lunatics surrounded us. They looked prepared to dispatch me. Sarah Cole said, “You will not live long enough to fully regret that you arrived without him.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, madam, but I’m pleased to return the gift of surprise!” one of the men said in Holmes’s voice. Instantly, he clutched her and two others came from behind to man-handle her into submission. Clawing and biting, she thrashed and contorted.

  “Holmes! Is that you?” I said.

  “It is me, but barely,” he said with teeth extended beyond his lips. Long hair grew over his eyes and his face was mottled with scabs. The policemen looked similarly transformed but instead, they had been carefully disguised by Holmes’s mastery of makeup and costume.

  The public house’s doors were unlocked and a mass of constabulary rushed in to subdue the others. I sipped my gun back in my pocket as a struggling Sarah Cole was forced away.

  “A word, Mister Holmes! I beg you!” she called out as they pushed her through a back door.

  Holmes nodded and motioned to the men restraining her, then he walked up and looked into her dark eyes.

  With a surge of strength, she pulled an arm free from a constable. She strained toward Holmes. Her left hand clung onto his forearm, and her head drooped, touching his shoulder.

  Holmes gestured to the constable who refrained from reining her back.

  She whispered, struggling not to cry. “Why do you condemn my irresistible impulses?”

  He pulled her arm against his torso. She leaned against him, resting against his chest. He lifted her chin and kissed her. “There is a wide gulf between justice and freedom, my dear Miss Dayton. Just as Doctor Beamish must learn this, so must you.”

  He stepped away and let the men grab her tightly again. As they pulled her outside, out of our sight, she howled beastlike in her agony.

  Holmes turned to me. “I must be sedated soon, or the illness inside will no longer be contained. If I am not cured, I can only become the most dangerous criminal London will ever meet.”

  * * * *

  That night, Holmes took a bed at Selfridge Hospital. Mycroft and I stayed through the night at his side. We induced a fever in Holmes by injecting him with a solution from a tropical disease. He lay in bed for days at the threshold of death, sweating and shivering, a thermometer under his arm and his washcloth always moistened by perspiration. When the tropical disease was cured, his fever abated.

  “Were you able to discover the antitoxin among Doctor Beamish’s things?” Lestrade asked when he came to visit at Holmes’s bedside.

  I shook my head. “Beamish lied, creating a narrative to justify his pursuit of Elizabeth Dayton.”

  “Then how did you cure Holmes?”

  “The fever in essence boiled his blood, killing the disease, much like pasteurizing milk destroys microscopic creatures.”

  “I regret that I missed the raid that captured Elizabeth Dayton, but why gamble on such a risky manoeuvre?” he asked.

  “She would remain elusive until Doctor Beamish was brought to justice. Holmes, however, could not effectively prosecute Beamish alone, nor would he involve the Metropolitan Police on hearsay of an escaped patient against her doctor. Consequently, our only recourse was to capture Miss Dayton. From her, we could obtain evidence to arrest Doctor Beamish.”

  He asked, “And what about the others taken in the raid?”

  “Lunatics, criminals, and ne’er-do-wells following Elizabeth Dayton’s magnetic personality as Sarah Cole. The ones who returned to asylums gave evidence against Sarah Cole as to the charge of aiding their escape. Many of the criminals offered testimony against her regarding crimes conspired to commit together.”

  “Damned dangerous, Watson,” he said.

  “Considering our success, I hope you’ll overlook the risks,” Holmes said, waking in his hospital bed.

  Doctor Beamish’s remaining patients troubled me. Like Elizabeth Dayton, they did not desire to be cured, yet they were dangerous if left untreated. Their names were taken, and many were found later, law breaking as they were without consciences from the disease rampant in their veins. Some were treated and returned to regular life. Those captured the night of the ball were housed in Millbank, which had already been emptied for its planned destruction. Unable to reconcile the two halves of her psyche, Elizabeth Dayton hung herself in her cell. She was buried as Sarah Cole, a stranger to her own parents, her body unable to heal itself from the dark features, extended teeth, and protruding brow of the mysterious disease.

  MUSE WITH SEVEN PERCENT, by Christian Endres

  Holmes lay on the sofa all day, shielding his eyes with an arm that still had the belt fastened around it. Suddenly, the detective supinely turned his head in my direction—the first time he ever moved after two hours past—and opened his eyes blinking.

  “What is the matter?” my friend asked with enough exhaustion in his voice to last an entire cricket team after a hard-fought league match. The detective reminded me of a tired, once proud lion in the midday heat of the savanna, whose glory days were long past.

  I sat on the chair in front of Holmes silently for quite some time, my elbows propped on my knees, face buried in my hands; I saw Holmes through a small gap between my fingers.

  I did not wish to see more of him or the world in general.

  Frustration had been eating away at me for days and had finally gnawed itself a tunnel to my soul. I had not been able to put a proper line onto the paper for weeks—the inquiries of my agent and my publisher had long since dropped any hint of politeness or concern; they only sounded demanding and threatening now. Even my publisher in the States had insinuated to Mr Murdock and Mr Nelson, my lawyers in New York, that he would not accept any more delay and was ready to take up legal measures, should the new manuscript not find its way onto his desk soon.

  But should I have related all that to Holmes? What did he know of the troubles that befell a writer? Had he not often enough smiled at my work as chronicler and considered me with more than only friendly mockery? Moreover, writer’s block was no crime, thus it could not really interest the great dete
ctive.

  Maybe I judged my friend too harshly back then. To be sure, his state—once more owed to his preceding devotion to the hated syringe filled with a seven percent solution of cocaine—was not fit to lighten up my mood. Quite the opposite. To see this brilliant man stretched down on the sofa like this hurt my soul.

  “Watson?” Holmes’s voice sounded infinitely tired, as if every syllable took more strength than he could muster.

  I lowered my hands and looked at the detective with a vacant expression.

  “My muse got lost,” I answered curtly. “And that even you can hardly retrieve for me, Holmes.”

  Even if in his state he detected my brusqueness, Holmes took no notice. Phenomenally slowly, he swung his long legs from the sofa and heaved himself into a sitting position. It took him two attempts to finally get up on his feet.

  “Lost items are my speciality,” he mumbled unconvincingly, before scuffling off to his room on shaky legs.

  I followed him with my eyes, grimacing every time he had to support himself on a piece of furniture.

  Holmes’s befuddled offer of help made my heart grow even heavier and miserable.

  There was no improvement when my friend returned to the parlour five minutes later. He still wore his dressing gown and looked like he was the Grim Reaper’s brother: his hair unkempt, his cheeks hollow, his pale skin blue-veined and exhibiting a sickly sheen.

  “Where have you last seen your Calliope, Watson?” Holmes asked with a quiet voice, but in great earnest. The way he looked, he had at least shaved off his five o’ clock shadow. I decided to acknowledge his good intentions and overlook the three patches adorning neck, chin and cheek.

  “I don’t know,” I replied with a heavy sigh. Indeed I could not remember when I last had written something useful, apart from prescriptions for my patients.

  “Hm. Well, well. Remarkable.” The fever of the hunt usually lighting up Holmes’s eyes when turning his attention on a new and intricate case, did not manage to penetrate the fog clouding his gaze. “Then we just start in the cellar and work our way upstairs,” he mumbled. When he turned to the door quickly, he started staggering anew like a drunkard and had to support himself on a chest of drawers, nearly knocking down the lamp standing on it.

  “Leave it be, Holmes,” I begged my friend as gently as I could at this moment. I got up, stepped up to Holmes and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate it, really. But you are in no shape to seriously…”

  “Rubbish, Watson!” Holmes rudely brushed my hand aside; again he swayed slightly. “It would be rather ridiculous, if the two of us could not manage to find such a fickle wench hiding away somewhere in our own house. Come, old chap!”

  * * * *

  We must have made a jolly peculiar sight, sneaking through the house like that, with dishevelled hair, in slippers and not exactly wearing our Sunday best.

  Mrs Hudson, at any rate, eyed us suspiciously as if we were two gipsies, when she encountered us in the stairwell.

  “Out of the way, Mrs Hudson!” Holmes called out in passing and clung to the stair-rails like a drowning man. “Divine beings on the run.”

  Holmes searched the laundry room and even the coal cellar with the greatest care—without discovering a single footprint of my muse in the coal dust, of course. The only thing he managed to bring to light was a lot of shards, when he knocked a box of Mrs Hudson’s Christmas baubles off a discarded wardrobe (which Holmes had to shift, believing a secret door to hide behind it).

  “Hmmm.” Holmes pressed his pale lips together. The shadows beneath his eyes were as dark as the briquettes he had just examined through his magnifying glass. “The attic?” my friend asked eventually.

  I sighed resignedly on seeing Holmes’s hopeful expression.

  “The attic,” I agreed, with little enthusiasm.

  But the seldom visited attic above our rooms did not yield up a muse, either, although we were able to secure a few women’s clothes—some of Holmes’s discarded costumes. In addition, I stumbled into a huge and sticky cobweb, whereas Holmes nearly burned down the house when a match dropped from his shaking fingers. We swiftly trampled out the burning spots.

  When to Mrs Hudson’s relief—and mine—we returned to our rooms, we tiredly fell down onto sofa and chair.

  I recalled the last hour and could only shake my head, smiling. A short glance across the low table between us showed me that Holmes smiled to himself exhaustedly but also with a strange contentedness. The way he sat there—his hands in the pockets of his dressing gown, decorated with coal dust and cobwebs, his pointed chin tilted towards his chest—he looked much more like my keen housemate and astute companion. The haze on his eyes had also lifted considerably.

  Suddenly, we both broke out in gales of laughter such as I had seldom encountered with me or Holmes.

  “What fools we are, old friend!” Holmes panted between to gasps of breath, while I wiped the tears from my eyes. “Clattering about the house like dervishes, scaring poor Mrs Hudson half to death! We can consider ourselves lucky she did not show us the door.”

  “It was your idea!” I retorted snorting.

  Holmes nodded, all at once solemn again.

  “Correct. And I do not regret it,” he replied matter-of-factly. “After all, the case is solved.”

  I looked at him with an uncertain grin.

  “It is?”

  “Naturally.” Holmes tamped his pipe and lit it. The match lay absolutely calm within his hand. All of a sudden I realised that Holmes’s voice rang firm and sonorous again.

  What was more, my fellow lodger gave me a sincere amicable smile full of warmth.

  “Write down this queer episode, Watson,” Holmes urged me. “Come! At once! I bet that afterwards the rest of your writing will go much easier. Moreover, your loyal readers would never expect your muse to be that same seven percent solution you usually despise so.”

  A seven percent solution—or a housemate who was not only the Empire’s best detective and actor, but also the best friend a man could wish for.

  SIMPLICITY ITSELF, by Zack Wentz

  Now I mind me own, guv. Ain’t the sort to ask favours a no one. Take care a me own business and mind me own. But forty pounds, guv, that’s a great lotta lolly to a bloke like you or me, innit. Bloomin’ lot, and I says to meself I been bringin’ the gentleman ’is needs for so long, what w’ ’is reputation and all, I figga askin’ ain’t so big a thing. Just puttin’ a little problem to ’is great mind.

  So’s I’m makin’ ’is special delivery a bit early, few days, all the way from Dover where I’m takin’ care a some other business, seein’ a elbow relation who makes ’is cake by way a solicitin’. Owes me a favour, ’e does, and won’t charge me nothin’ for ’is trouble. Any rate, Mrs ’Udson’s always a bit surprised to see me, and this time more so, seein’ as ’ow Mr ’Olmes din’t ’ave time to warn ’er I was comin’, but I gots me titfer in me ’and, bowin’ low, polite as could be, and she lets me in to see the gent w’ just a nod and a shudder.

  “Mr ’Olmes?” I says, and give a knock and ’e says enter do please so’s I go in and there’s the great man ’isself, sittin’ in ’is fine chair in ’is dressin’ gown, chewin’ on ’is unlit briar.

  Now what anybody does is ’is own affair, I say. Me, I don’t touch the stuff. Bring it to ’im, I will, all ’e likes, but the time I give it a try I thought I was at bloomin’ death’s gate, ’eart goin’ in me ears like it was fit to bust right out me ’ead. I tell you, I can’t see the bloomin’ point.

  Any rate, I says ’ow do you do, sir, still pinchin’ me ’at, all ’umble like, and Mr ’Olmes says it’s fine to see me, as ’e ’as been in recent need, and ’e’s impressed I made it so quick all the way from Dover. Cor blimey, I says. ’Ow’s ’e know I come all the ways from Dover? and ’e says, pointin’ a long, skinny finga at me gallies, the mud is such that only comes from Dover, particularly since only in Dover ’as it today rained.

  Cor, �
�e’s a remarkable man, and I’m sayin’ beg pardon ’bout the mud, leanin’ forward to give to ’im ’is special delivery w’ out walkin’ any more mud ’bout ’is room, right? and ’e looks good and ready to get ’is ’ands on said special delivery, but says we’re to wait a moment for a visit from ’is colleague, who will appear presently, and I ain’t ’eard nothin’ indicatin’ anyone’s approach, but sure enough there’s a ’ard knock at the door downstairs, cheery ’ullo from Mrs ’Udson, more cheery than I got, mind you, and clompin’ up and in comes that doctor gent.

  Now ’e don’t like me one bit. No, sir. Mostly on account a what I bring Mr ’Olmes. Says it’s a detreement to ’is consteetooshin, see. Gives me a look down ’is nose, but that don’t bother me none. I know ’is type.

  “Evenin’, guv,” says I, but not so much as a sniff from this flash fellah. Like I ain’t good enough for ’is eyes.

  “Calm yourself, Watson,” Mr ’Olmes says, smilin’ a bit as ’e says, and the doctor lets out w’ a puff.

  Now, mind you, I ain’t said nothin’ ’bout this favour yet. Not a peep, but Mr ’Olmes is still smilin’ and says to me I must ’ave a certain thing in mind, comin’ days early like I done, and ’e suspects it ’as to do w’ some missin’ brass that I come into inna ’praps unlawful fashion.

  Cor, you coulda knocked me down w’ a ’ow do you do. Yes, sir, I says. ’Ow did ya know, sir? And the doctor bloke gives w’ another puff, eyes rollin’ up like ’e’s beseechin’ the Good Lord ’elp ’im.

  Firstly, ’e says, I’m ’oldin me ’at like I’m chauntin’ lay, griddlin’ inna street, when usually ’alf the time I don’t so much as take it off me ’ead. Second, it’s just ’bout time nethers to pay, but I’m usually well off enough to leave ’im at this time alone, spite a that. Third, I ain’t yet asked for what I’m owed. Four, I coulda just as well gone to the constable if this money were a thing I came into accordin’ to law. All this which leads ’im to believe there’s somethin’ more, and says ’e could go on, but don’t wish to be mutually embarrassin’ to us.