Death on a Pale Horse

by Donald Thomas

  We both turned to Albert Gibbons. The sergeant brushed a hand across his whiskers. His pale blue eyes still watered a little. He had listened patiently to every word of my friend’s denouncement. He now spoke quietly but firmly.

  “Whatever I know, gentlemen, you shall hear. That is all that I can now do for Captain Joshua Sellon. Until I was pensioned last year, I served in the Provost Marshal’s corps at Portsmouth. To this day I remain at the disposal of those who choose to put their confidence in me. Sometimes I run little errands and sometimes I listen for information. Most of the time I am only the commissionaire of Landor Mansions. It is better that way. The Crown estates being the landlord here, I like to think that I still owe my employment to Her Majesty.”

  Then came the rest of the story.

  “Captain Sellon was one of my gentlemen for the last few months. I entered apartment 49 in Carlyle Mansions last night before he had yet arrived from his post at Aldershot Garrison. I had kept my eyes open upon these buildings, seeing who came and who went. I felt, though I could not prove it, that our enemies were closing on us. Not much was ever kept in that room, but I had every reason to believe that the broken strap and the French medal ribbon were there.”

  “Why?” Holmes inquired.

  “They were being kept for the major so that you might see them today. Acting as sentry, I took it upon myself to take them into custody during the small hours of this morning. No one else was in the apartment at the time. Captain Sellon arrived a little before seven. I was to report to him. I did not go across at once. The less we were seen together the better. My duty now is to turn these so-called trophies into evidence against the men who contrived so many deaths. I believe I did right.”

  “To be sure, you did,” said Holmes reassuringly.

  “So many deaths, sir. Mrs. Major Putney-Wilson’s, Colonel Pulleine’s, the Prince Imperial’s, Captain Brenton Carey’s among them. And now Captain Sellon’s.”

  “How were you and Captain Sellon found out?” I asked.

  Sergeant Gibbons shrugged.

  “Given the time, it would not have been impossible for our enemies to discover who occupied those mansion rooms and for what purpose. A good many leases in quieter parts like this are known to be Army tenancies. Men like Captain Sellon do not rest. They move on, always a little ahead. This time he did not move quickly enough.”

  He glanced down at his hand and then looked up.

  “I fear that the captain was killed this morning because he could not surrender these souvenirs to a man who stood over him with a gun—and he would not have surrendered them even if he could. I am to blame for that.”

  “But where did Captain Sellon get these gruesome souvenirs from?” I asked.

  “From Mrs. Captain Brenton Carey. They waited for her in a postal packet on her return to England. There was no letter, just the assurance that neither the death of her husband nor that of the Prince Imperial was a stroke of misfortune. To make her live in the knowledge that she had been terribly wronged and there was nothing she could do about it, to the delight of her persecutor. To put her on his trail, to occupy her thoughts and dreams until he was nearer to her than the husband she had lost.”

  “And they had not counted on the poor lady taking these treasures to the Provost Marshal as evidence in a criminal conspiracy,” I said hopefully.

  But Provost Sergeant of Marines Albert Gibbons, as I still think of him, demurred at this.

  “They had not counted upon the friendship and loyalty which had existed between the families of Carey and Putney-Wilson. They had not counted upon the good lady using a friend who had also suffered, using him as an ally to seek the assistance of yourself and Mr. Sherlock Holmes. That was a miscalculation I hope they will come to regret.”

  “The medal ribbon and the holster strap,” I asked: “What is to become of them now that you have them?”

  Albert Gibbons smiled gently at me.

  “As to that, sir, I have instructions to follow. Mr. Lestrade knew nothing of them before he came over here with you this afternoon. With the greatest respect, sir, Mr. Lestrade is a civilian and the matter in hand is one for soldiers. By tonight, that strap and the ribbon will be put away carefully. Put away where it would take the Brigade of Guards to get them out again. It is sufficient to our plans that you have seen them.”

  And that, as Sherlock Holmes remarked when we stood outside the mansion block again, was exactly as it should be.

  PART III

  Death on a Pale Horse

  1

  I pride myself that my medical education and military training have made me more observant than most men in the face of a threat. I had scanned Baker Street when “Samuel Dordona” from the Evangelical Overseas Medical Mission arrived. I had watched him as he left. So indeed did Sherlock Holmes. Of course Major Putney-Wilson was absurd in his amateur theatrical disguise. It made him conspicuous rather than unobtrusive. Yet I saw no one who might have been his shadow or who paid him the least attention.

  At Carlyle Mansions, Holmes would have been the first man to notice if we had been followed. Of course, it now proved that we and the entire street were under observation by Albert Gibbons, but this in itself should have been a protection against spies. Civilian and military police have what are technically known as “private clothes” personnel who wear no regimental uniform. I needed no persuasion that Gibbons in his commissionaire’s livery was as much a sergeant of the Provost Marshal’s Corps as he had ever been.

  Sherlock Holmes certainly behaved as if there was no present danger from Moran or his associates. My misfortune was to assume that danger is something which all men and women instinctively avoid. But there are also those to whom danger is the breath of life and who deliberately tempt their foe to combat. They will fight a duel when they might as easily avoid it. Holmes fell precisely into this category.

  No doubt Colonel Rawdon Moran had become our enemy. Yet he could not have murdered Captain Sellon if he had been on the passenger list of a homeward-bound liner which had docked at Funchal in Madeira less than five days before the captain’s death. Holmes had easily confirmed from the shipping line clerk who knew the man: three days at sea and two more on the Transcontinental Express from Lisbon would still leave him on the wrong side of the English Channel at the time that Joshua Sellon died.

  “Hence Ramon,” said Holmes sardonically.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  We were sitting over our glasses of whisky and warm water two evenings later as the sitting-room fire burnt down to a final glow.

  “Hence Ramon. The foreign gentleman who booked the apartment opposite Carlyle Mansions, from which Lestrade insists the bullet was fired. The man who booked it but never arrived to occupy it. You noticed, of course, that the name Ramon is a childishly obvious anagram for Moran?”

  It had not occurred to me until that moment because my mind had been occupied by other things, but I thought it best to say, “Of course.”

  “It cannot have been Moran who murdered Joshua Sellon if he was not even in England. That is why he taunts us with his anagram. I doubt whether he any longer commits his own murders, except on special occasions. To use such a foolish pseudonym as Ramon is once again the old game of ‘Catch me if you can.’ We are not allowed to forget that he is the puppet-master of murder. He pulls the strings, and we are his marionettes who dance to his commands.”

  “What practical use is that to him?”

  “The greatest use, old fellow. It is intended to rattle our nerves, to unbalance our judgment, and to tip us headlong into doing something foolish. Now, if you do not mind, I think I shall retire for the night with a volume of Mr. George Meredith. He is the only master of fiction who I can tolerate for very long. I have intended for some time to re-read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first endeavour and in many respects still his best.”

  And so a remarkable few days in our lives came to an end, bringing in its wake what I think of as the night in question. A night of
terror.

  2

  I had known fear on the battlefield, where I expected to find it. But then I had been in company with my comrades. Terror, I was to learn, is faced alone. There is no comrade to turn to, no rhyme nor reason to what is happening. The image of Captain Joshua Sellon’s body lingered ghostlike in my mind, but that was far from the irrationality of terror.

  I learned that terror is not the ghost before the eyes, like some student prank played with an owl’s hoot and a white sheet. It is a heart-jump of fright at what has become inexplicable, as if one were waking in the silence and stillness of one’s very own coffin. It is a brief irrational movement, alone in a familiar room, caught in the corner of the eye. The flicker is quick as a darting mouse, where there can be no mouse. Or a sudden shriek that teases the very edge of hearing, where no one else can hear it. Terror at its worst comes in solitude and silence. In terror, as in pain, each must feel his own.

  Perhaps worst of all, terror is malignant because it pounces in familiar surroundings, like a loyal guardian turned traitor. It immobilises the brain and annihilates reason. On that night, in my own Baker Street room, I knew that what could not be happening to me was none the less happening. And yet I was a man who would laugh outright at a ghost beyond the window-glass or a spirit knocking on the wall.

  It began when I woke drowsily and without apparent reason from an uninterrupted sleep. I felt as though I had risen suddenly and rapidly from a far greater depth of unconsciousness than usual. The speed of it had almost left me dizzy. I could not at first tell where I was or guess what the time might be, except that it was deep night. My surroundings were out of kilter. I could not recognise the dim landmarks of my familiar surroundings. Had the room changed its shape, or had I been taken somewhere else? Reason told me that I must be in the bed where I had fallen asleep.

  I was aware at first only of light filtering into a dark room. If it was my own room, the bed and the light were in the wrong place and at the wrong angle. Nor was this the familiar reflection of yellow street lamps at my curtains’ edge. The light was thick and tawny, as if I lay under foul water or something opaque had blemished my vision. Suddenly I could feel a cold draught where the curtains of the window above me might be. They were wide open, not pulled together as I had always left them when I went to bed.

  My first thought was that there must surely have been an intruder. Where was he? I had the sense to lie quite still and give no indication of having stirred. I went back quietly in my thoughts through the first seconds of consciousness. I believed that perhaps I had heard a whispering at my ear and even a laugh. Yet now I heard nothing, nor could I see anyone. So after all I must be alone in my room, if it was my room. What of the objects around me?

  As I looked cautiously, it seemed that someone or something had also changed the angle of a chest of drawers, if it was a chest of drawers. Perhaps that was what had made me think the bed had been moved. Though it was dark, I began to get my bearings again. Waking at night, I have always had some innate sense of time. I now felt that it must be three or four o’clock in the morning. But I could see no clock face and could hear no bell.

  Someone, somehow, must be watching me. There was no sense to it otherwise. But why? I still made no movement to betray my consciousness. I listened meticulously. At this hour, no sound came from the street at the front of the house. A very faint mouselike scratching was audible from the slates or brickwork outside the back wall. I could tell there was no moon but only starlight at the rear. It was framed by an open window with the curtain drawn aside, rising above me where there should be no window. I moved my eyes as far as I could. Had there been a burglar? I would surely not have slept through the coming and going of a housebreaker.

  As my sight adjusted to the faint light of the stars, I made out something luminous. Or, rather, it was something seen in a faint and tawny glow. I saw now that the chest of drawers had indeed been moved to provide a flat surface. A murky half-light fell upon an object that seemed to be standing upon it. Yet the object had no explicable outline. I twisted my head a little. The thing was just above me, blocking my vision at this angle. The light was not falling upon it but coming through it. I saw that it was not even on the chest of drawers itself, but in the window embrasure.

  Something had been left there or strung up there. Someone had come and gone. Now I was alone in the room. I pulled myself up and sat looking at the thing. It was not stationary, but moving or twisting at a slant as it came slowly into my view. What the devil was it? There was such an unclean light within it. I felt a shock of repugnance that it had been so very close all the time and I had not known it. It was like waking to find a snail moving on one’s cheek or a rat licking one’s neck.

  The object was not even standing on the window-sill, within the casement or embrasure. When it moved as it did, I knew it must be suspended in the opening, not quite touching the surface. It was, after all, bottled in a jar of some sort, a curious amorphous shape, almost translucent, as if it had been fished from the depths of the sea.

  I looked more closely at the only feature I could begin to distinguish from the rest. I doubted for no more than a second or two. It was surely a human ear that appeared to float before me in a tawny liquid. As I looked, it turned very slowly away. Wet hair, dark in colour, drifted about it, for all the world like weed in tidal shallows. Thick though the light might be, I knew my eyes were not playing tricks upon me. As it twisted away, I was looking at the upper section of a bare brown neck, severed from its shoulders. I had seen a score of cadavers in the course of my training, but never before one in which the entire head had been cut off so cleanly from the body to which it belonged.

  I am not squeamish by nature. The thing had given me a fright only because it caught me with my guard down as I came to the surface of sleep. For a split second, I had thought I might be still asleep, in a mortuary nightmare of some kind. I had struggled to pull out of it. But what the devil was this object, suspended in the dim space of my own bedroom? A severed head? It turned a little more. I glimpsed in profile the curve of a dark-skinned cheekbone. The tip of a nose came next as the invisible cords that must be supporting its bulk unwound themselves a little more.

  In reaction to this trick, as I thought of it, I now felt a growing anger with the object and the perpetrator. The grotesque image revealed itself a little further—or, rather, it was grotesque by what it did not reveal. It was not a head after all but, much worse, half a head severed vertically. The nose I was now looking at had only one nostril. The profile had only one cheek. The face had only one eye, which was open and blank as it stared at me with the pupil rolled upwards. The mouth had only half a cherry-bud lip at top and bottom. However horrible it might be, my defiance now drew me upright until I sat on the edge of the bed.

  I was on my own ground now. This gargoyle of flesh and blood had got the better of me before I could rally my senses. My momentary instinct had been to call out for someone to come and wake me from a grotesque dumb-show. What a fool I should have looked, lying there petrified by some commonplace relic of the anatomy theatre—a joke at my own expense. The object continued to turn a little more, as if to give its expressionless eye a better view of me. The hair still drifted aimlessly as if in a yellow tide.

  At last this “terror” was nothing but an anatomical specimen such as one passes in a bell-jar along a row of students in a lecture room. Still unwinding at the end of whatever cord suspended it, the jar gradually displayed the human brain that had been laid open for examination, a cerebrum the colour and texture of greyish-brown meat that has been first cooked and then served cold.

  The tightness in my throat had passed as mundanely as a fit of indigestion. Now that I understood what was happening, it was nothing. As a medical student, I had a dozen times examined a brain laid open in just such a manner as this, preserved in a bell-jar of spirit. What floated before me was not borne aloft from the underworld of nightmares, but pickled in formaldehyde. The “thing,”
for I still caught myself thinking of the word, had no more power to harm me. The erratic beat of the heart that had woken me with a jolt was steady again. Reason no longer ran squealing into its corner, like the wainscot mouse on the far rim of human vision.

  I put a lighted match to the gas-mantle. A pale glow strengthened. It fell across the window where the rear wall dropped to a little yard at the back of the house and the roof of a shed for coal and tools, a dozen feet below me. I neither heard nor saw a movement.

  The severed head, or rather the wizened skin of its face, had a colour and texture which suggested that this had been an elder of some Indian tribe. I proved to be a little wrong in that diagnosis, but I was not to know it at the time. Now that I could see the bell jar more plainly, it sat in a shallow dish. The dish itself had been suspended by three chains from the lintel of the window, rather like a hanging lamp in the chancel of a church. That was how it had been kept aloft, apparently floating in the air.

  Only a professional roof-top thief could have put this object and its container in place without rousing me from sleep. By now I knew a good deal from Holmes about the skills of London’s so-called cat-burglars, quite enough to conclude that none could have climbed the outside wall without alerting either of us. Once again I confronted the sightless eye and its floating hair. How had this head been put there—and why—and by whom? No doubt the sole aim was to scare me out of my wits; but for what reason?

  It was not a practical joke. For a second only, I imagined some ingenious pleasantry on the part of Sherlock Holmes. But his whimsies always had a purpose to them, and I was damned if I could see any purpose in this pathological monstrosity. Instead, if it had a dark humour it also had a whiff of mania about it. However eccentric his impulses might be, my friend and housemate was no maniac.