*
And yet the appearance of the gentleman himself at precisely eight o’clock the following evening seemed to bear out everything that Mr Holmes had predicted. It was a day made busy by the duties associated with new lodgings. Mrs Hudson was up well before dawn and by the time I awoke had already been attended by Scraggs and a small army of similar boys who had been dispatched all over London with different orders relating to our comfort and provisioning. I spent an exciting morning assisting Dr Watson in the unpacking of his many packing cases until Mrs Hudson, deciding Dr Watson was better able to begin the sorting of his artworks without my aid, sent me off to communicate to Scraggs some additional requirements.
It was one of those rare November days when the sun pierced the fog and suffused the streets of London with a golden haze that softened for a few hours the harsh lines of brickwork and stone. Scraggs proved in high spirits and endeavoured to convince me that it was my duty to accompany him to Smithfields where, he promised, he would be able to point out to me an associate of his in the butcher’s trade who could provide Mrs Hudson with the finest Tamworth sausages in the kingdom. However, conscious of events awaiting me in Baker Street, I determined that on this occasion I would return promptly, the better to prepare myself for a glimpse of our mysterious correspondent. For all that, it was growing dark by the time I began to make my way back to Baker Street and the warmth of the day had evaporated into the chill of incipient fog. I shivered as I sensed in the fading light the menace of the night returning, and my footsteps quickened as the shadows grew deeper, while the gradual lighting of the lamps accelerated the gathering darkness.
Imagine then the feelings of relief and happiness on my return to find the shutters closed for the night, fires already blazing in the grates and the warm, rich smell of a deep stew wrapping itself round Mrs Hudson as she surveyed with imperturbable satisfaction the domestic scene.
‘Oh, Mrs Hudson, ma’am,’ I gulped, half aghast at the evidence of so much labour in my absence.
‘Your timing, Flottie, is perfect. I thought you would wish to keep a good eye on that rascal Scraggs to make sure that everything about our delivery was in order, so I took it upon myself to get the fires going and the lamps lit. But now I’ll be putting my feet up for a moment or two with a glass of the sherry that Mr Rumbelow’s office saw fit to send round this morning. I shall leave it to you to finish off the knives and forks and when you’re done we’ll go up to the linen room and have a go at the rest of the silver. And I daresay you’ll be interested to answer the door tonight should the gentleman with the unusual ink care to call in person.’
So while Mrs Hudson sat by the fire, turning the pages of a large tome that had been delivered to her by special messenger that morning, I polished cutlery with all my heart and soul, until it shone in the lamplight like the steel of a guardsman’s sword. Up in the study, Mr Holmes nestled in thought as deep as his armchair, the drawing of his pipe and the lazy clouds of tobacco smoke the only evidence that the great mind was at work under the inert exterior. Opposite him, Dr Watson leafed idly through one of the illustrated periodicals that were sent to him by subscription. Eight o’clock seemed a long time coming and through both rooms an unacknowledged current of expectation crept like a low draught.
When the knock at the door finally came, I jumped like a startled sparrow for all that I had spent the previous hour anticipating it. It was a very different knock from the previous evening, low but repeated very rapidly three or four times as if the visitor were in a state of barely suppressed agitation. My eyes turned to Mrs Hudson who remained unmoved beside the fire, her concentration apparently unbroken.
‘If you’d be so kind, Flottie,’ she asked without looking up, but I noticed that her glass had been rested on the hearth and she no longer seemed to scan the printed page in the way she had before.
When my excitement had been mastered sufficiently to allow me to open the door, Mr Nathaniel Moran proved to be a sallow gentleman of around thirty years of age. Indeed so closely did his appearance conform to the image I had created from Mr Holmes’s description that any doubts I had harboured about the great detective’s perspicacity were instantly and completely set aside. Beneath ginger whiskers his face was unnaturally pale, as if recently ravaged by illness. He was a strongly built man whose movement and appearance suggested a good deal of natural grace, yet his demeanour and manner betrayed a hesitation or nerviness that did not sit comfortably with his strong features or a pair of cool eyes. When I took his coat I noticed that the clothes beneath were old-fashioned in cut and designed for warmer climes. Inwardly marvelling at Mr Holmes’s prescience, I proceeded to announce the visitor to his expectant hosts.
Dr Watson immediately jumped to his feet and made Mr Moran welcome while his colleague made only a desultory effort to rise, then sank back into his armchair, his eyes barely open and his smoking uninterrupted. Before I could withdraw, Dr Watson had already established his guest in a chair by the fire and gallantly followed behind me to hold the door as I passed through it. For a brief moment each of us met the gaze of the other and I fear my wild curiosity must have communicated itself to the good doctor in that exchange of glances for, instead of pushing the door closed, he closed one eye in a half-wink and the door, unseen in the shadows, remained open a good inch or more.
The linen room was little more than a store room opposite the study. Soon after our arrival Mrs Hudson had colonised it for domestic purposes and now the effect of Dr Watson’s charity was to enable someone placed in its doorway a narrow line of vision across the slim corridor that separated the two rooms, through the open door, into the heart of the study itself. With a casual nonchalance that only served to reveal my precise motives, I sauntered into the tiny room and edged the pile of waiting silver to the place that best allowed me to follow events in the other room. To my great surprise Mrs Hudson, on climbing the stairs and finding me in this position, raised a questioning eyebrow but made no attempt to prevent my inexcusable breach of manners, so that when Mr Moran began to speak his words were as clearly audible to us in our niche as they were to Mr Holmes by his hearth.
‘Gentlemen,’ Moran began, ‘I hope you will excuse me for disturbing you at this hour and for the brevity of my note to you last night. I am only too aware how irregular my conduct must seem.’
‘Nonsense, sir. Dr Watson and I never stand on social niceties. Besides, you have been suffering from a fever, I perceive.’
For a moment Mr Moran seemed genuinely taken aback and he took a moment before he replied.
‘I see your reputation is richly deserved, Mr Holmes. Even in Sumatra, where I have passed the last seven years of my life, word had reached us of your talents.’
‘Sumatra, you say?’ returned Holmes casually, raising an eyebrow in the direction of Dr Watson. ‘A place with a rich native fauna, I imagine.’
Again Mr Moran seemed startled.
‘Indeed, Mr Holmes, as I am only too well aware. It is partly just that aspect of the country which has brought me here tonight. That and other attendant details which I trust a man of your talents will be able to make something of.’
‘Perhaps if you were to start at the beginning, Mr Moran, and confine yourself to the facts of the case …’ He settled deeper into his chair and sent another cloud of tobacco smoke drifting out towards the linen room where I had just begun to polish the same candlestick for the third time. Mrs Hudson had taken up the small candelabra and, with her back turned to me, was working away with crisp, powerful strokes.
‘Mr Holmes, the story I have to tell is not one that I tell lightly. Like yourself, I am a passionate believer in scientific knowledge. Yet I now find myself beset with the most unscientific and superstitious apprehension.
‘My father, sir, was a successful merchant who found in his dealings in Malaya the means to a substantial fortune. If I had wished it, I could have continued his ventures upon his retirement but my father and I quarrelled and, with the impetuosity of
youth, I vowed to make a fortune of my own that would surpass his and prove to him how far short his estimate was of my true abilities. I had acquired a good practical knowledge of trade in the tropics and through an acquaintance I was introduced to four others, young men such as myself, whose daring and determination promised to make up for any lack of capital. After much discussion we decided to seek our fortunes in Sumatra. There is a string of islands there off the west coast which have been untouched by the big trading concerns. We formed the Sumatra and Nassau Trading Company operating out of Port Mary and took an oath on our lives that we would labour shoulder to shoulder until our fortunes were made.’
Down the thin line of light, I saw Moran shiver.
‘On arrival, sir, Port Mary proved to be little more than a dispirited collection of huts containing a handful of transitory Europeans and a small population of Chinese. Around it, the jungle rose like a mountain, swathed in mist, encroaching on the town at every opportunity, and at night the cries of strange creatures invaded your dreams. It was as if the island itself resented our intrusion and was trying to reclaim our outpost as its own. And the people were no more welcoming. From the Chinese there was blank indifference, and beyond the town we faced the suspicion and hostility of the natives. From the day of our arrival, a dreadful loneliness began to engulf us.
‘And yet what we called the town soon became, for all its shortcomings, our refuge. For those islands are a wild place, Mr Holmes. A place of savage beauty and dark, muttering superstitions. The tribes worship the forest and its spirits, each of which appears to Western eyes more cruel and vengeful than the last. Before we had been on the island three days, we received a visit from their chief priest. Our presence there offended the spirits, he told us. If we remained our ventures would fail. If we failed to respect the spirits of the island we would pay with our lives.’
Dr Watson shifted slightly in his seat and I found I had paused in my polishing. Moran coughed nervously. Only Mrs Hudson and Mr Holmes appeared unmoved.
‘The jungle which we hoped would provide our fortune is dark and threatening. It contains creatures unknown to European science – spiders the size of birds, venomous snakes no bigger than your thumb, a bestiary of the disgusting and the frightful. And amongst these creatures, taking their animal shapes to work their mischief, are any number of malevolent spirits.
‘Three in particular are revered by the savages. First there is the tiger spirit, who represents life and vitality. Then there is maki, a spirit who takes the shape of the purple cobra and who represents both death and sleeping. These two are more respected than feared. But between them comes enoki, the stealer of souls, and this is the spirit who truly provokes terror. Just as vermin are drawn to carrion, so enoki is drawn to the evil in men’s hearts. Where there is vileness, enoki feasts. He comes at night and nibbles at the evil in you, growing more rapacious with every visit, until your whole soul is devoured. For those destroyed in this way, there is no death, no sleep, just an empty eternity waiting for enoki to return to feed on you once more. In native legend, enoki, if he is ever seen at all, takes on the form of an enormous carrion rat, and tales are told of sick men visited in the dark by a foul creature which sits upon their chests to await their passing. They feel its weight, smell its evil breath, but see nothing at all.’
The silence that followed was distinctly uneasy, broken finally by a faint tutting from Dr Watson.
‘Oh, come now, sir,’ he spluttered, ‘that’s a bit much, isn’t it? Rats of giant proportions stalking invalids and whatnot. It’s enough to make one feel quite uncomfortable. Surely you aren’t asking us to believe such stories?’
‘On the contrary, Dr Watson, I am very much hoping that you and Mr Holmes will show them to be nonsense. But let me continue my tale.
‘Mr Holmes, I will not dwell on the early years of our venture. Suffice it to say that I learned to my cost why the riches of the islands had remained for so many years unexploited. Of the five of us who set out with such high hopes, two were to find nothing but a grave in that unforgiving jungle; the first, Whitfield, was taken by fever within a month of our arrival. That left Postgate, Neale, Carruthers and myself determined to persist in our venture. We stayed afloat by selling a little opium to the Chinese but the natives remained resistant to our overtures and without their assistance the island’s wealth was beyond our reach.
‘This stubbornness began to provoke us and we began to sneer at their superstitions. In a light-hearted moment I even commissioned a seal depicting the imaginary rat and used it on company correspondence. Yet we were not to be deterred, and a new line of business suggested by Neale seemed set fair to prosper – only to be overtaken by a sequence of events that led to the ruin of our ventures and may yet, I believe, cost us our lives.’
There was another pause as Moran mopped his brow. Watson shifted uneasily again and a little shudder passed softly down my spine as though something of the damp jungle loneliness that Moran described had crept into the room. Mrs Hudson, habitually stern, seemed sterner than ever, but there was something about the faint nodding of her head that, if she were listening at all, expressed a cryptic satisfaction in the gentleman’s tale.
After gathering himself, the visitor continued.
‘It was a day in October, just over a year ago, that things began to unravel. Postgate had been on a short expedition into the interior looking for minerals. Postgate liked these expeditions. The cold watchfulness that surrounded our days in Port Mary was beginning to get to him and he was drinking too freely. He used these expeditions to escape our disapproval and to discharge a great deal of ammunition at any target the jungle provided. When he returned that day he was literally whooping with elation, a dead creature the size of a spaniel hanging from his saddle. A small crowd gathered as he dismounted and in front of everyone he whirled the thing around his head, shouting my name. ‘Moran!’ he cried, ‘I’ve shot their precious rat! Come and look at this!’ And it was in truth a remarkable specimen, easily the largest creature of its kind I’d ever seen. It’s fur was black, its tail furred like a squirrel’s. It had mean, powerful jaws and vicious claws. ‘Eater of souls indeed!’ he cried. ‘Let’s see what they make of this!’ And before I could stop him, he had attached the carcass to the string of our flag pole and was hoisting it high above our compound.
‘That night Postgate got drunk. Neale and Carruthers put him to bed, leaving me on the veranda, eyeing the jungle with unease. Postgate’s had been a silly, juvenile gesture but it made me afraid. That may seem absurd to you but in the tropics shadows take strange shapes. That night I slept badly, my dreams full of horrible images, and when I awoke it was to find myself staring at something more horrible still, something on my pillow, little more than an inch from my face.’
Mr Moran broke off his tale to pass a hand across his weary features.
‘It was the carcase of a rat, a rat of ordinary size, skewered by a narrow blade through my pillow, into the bed frame below. A carcase so fresh that the blood still seeped from it, so fresh I swear to you that its limbs still twitched. And stuffed in its mouth, cut from my head while I slept, was a lock of my own hair.’
Safe in the linen room by the small pile of unpolished silver, I could see both Holmes and Watson lean forward slightly. Mr Holmes’s pipe was long since set aside and now his eyes were alert and searching, trained on the speaker with a vital intensity. The fire was dying down and flickering shadows played over the faces of the three men. I imagined the dark malevolent night drawing in around Moran’s jungle dwelling and I shuddered.
Moran took a deep breath and continued his tale.
‘I quickly learned that I was not alone in this horror. My colleagues had all received the same visitation, and I think it’s fair to say that all of us were badly spooked. There was an old man in Port Mary, half native and half Chinese, and we sought him out in hope of an explanation. He told us that the meaning of the objects we had received was clear. It was the curse of the high
priest, calling down upon us the spirit eroki. Now, he told us, coolly as you like, the spirit would visit each of us in turn and would begin to eat away at our souls. When he had taken enough – enough for him to claim possession of us – we would die. We would die by the knife of the high priest, guided by the spirit’s hand, but death was only the beginning. After death, our torment would begin in earnest, as eroki would return to feast upon us for the rest of eternity.
‘The following morning, I found that Postgate had risen early, taken a mule and was gone. Two days later he was back. A rubber prospector called Cartwright emerged from the interior with his dead body strapped across the mule. Cartwright brought the body to our offices and told us how he had been disturbed in the night by the sound of a man’s screams. In the islands off Sumatra, a scream in the night is not necessarily something to investigate, but there was something in these screams that Cartwright could not ignore. ‘It was as if a man’s soul was on fire,’ he said – and Cartwright is not a man given to poetry. At dawn he had set off in the direction of the noise and in a small clearing he found Postgate, still bent in agony but cold to the touch. Around him lay the few things he had taken with him – his gun unfired, some food untouched, an empty bottle or two of liquor.
‘Beyond, but for the marks of birds and animals, the leaf mould was unmarked by any footprints save those of Postgate and Cartwright himself. And when he turned over the body, Mr Holmes, he found blood on the man’s fingers and face. But it was his eyes that caused a hardened man like Cartwright to recoil in horror. For where his eyes should have been there was nothing. Nothing but thick-caked blood. The spirits had taken his sight, Mr Holmes, and he had died in the agony of their vengeance.’
The Tell-tale Stain
†
To say the room fell silent would be a considerable understatement. For a full five seconds there seemed to reign not a silence but an absence of sound like a vacuum that drew from everyone all power of speech. Then abruptly the vacuum broke and sound came rushing back.
Mrs Hudson and the Spirits’ Curse Page 4
