Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Jeff Campbell

  I did not know whether at that moment I qualified as a soul or a dream. All I knew was that this was real, this was happening in Kensington Gardens, even as I lay deep in sleep at John’s side not many streets away. If it caught my soul, I would never wake up.

  I had thought Holmes would play one of those strange airs that he learned in Tibet, or the weird gypsy music that he sometimes coaxed from his violin. But he played the air from Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major for Lute, and the Gallipoot drew closer — I could smell it, hear the trapped souls screaming, feel its nearness in the bone-hurting cold. When it broke from the trees I tried to cry out in my sleep, tried to scream so that John would wake me, but I couldn’t. It was well I didn’t, for I realized a moment later that if I screamed it would become aware of me, come for me…

  It rolled, oozed, surged toward the belvedere, and the exquisite melancholy song of the flute didn’t waver, though the screaming of the trapped and devoured souls rose like the wail of storm-wind. Through its darkness the marble pillars glimmered, then vanished, and I felt in my bones the wrenching of the fabric of the world as it struck.

  A shriek like a thunderclap pierced my skull like lightning, and in the blackness that swallowed the moonlight, I saw the flash of Peter’s knife—

  Then Holmes was stepping down the shallow platform of the belvedere, the world normal again and as it should be, tucking his bone flute into his pocket with one hand.

  In the other hand, he held Peter’s knife.

  “Give that back!” Peter came leaping out of the belvedere, grabbed for Holmes’ arm.

  Holmes sidestepped him like a dancer. “When the Darling children return to their home, you shall have your knife back.”

  “Who are the Darling children?”

  Peter doesn’t always remember things.

  “Wendy, and John, and Michael,” said Holmes. “The children who went away with you to the Islands last night.” I don’t know how he learned this — perhaps he’d only guessed it, until he actually encountered Peter — but then, as I said, Holmes studied extensively the writings concerned with other realities than those of the material earth. Someone, at some time, must have written about the Neverlands — or the Islands, as they were apparently also called, and they had other names as well. Certainly Meg was not the only child who had inexplicably disappeared, without any traceable sign of human agency, in Kensington Gardens or elsewhere.

  Peter said, “They’re my friends. Wendy is to be my mother, and take care of me, and look after my Lost Boys in a secret house below the ground.”

  Holmes nodded gravely. “You are renowned for looking after your friends,” he said, as one recalling a legend — or a set of instructions, as to what one must say to a dragon or a fairy — “in the face of any and all danger to yourself.”

  Peter smote his chest proudly. “I am.” Peter never could resist renown.

  “Then promise me this,” said Holmes. “When the Darling children return home — as return they will, one day — promise me that you will see to it, that they will do so on the day after they departed. That way,” he added, “you will have your knife back in only two days.”

  The fairies were gone, and the moon sinking, as Holmes walked back toward the paths of the more populated parts of the Gardens. In the shadows of the willow circle he stopped, as if at a sound, and turning his head his eyes met mine. He had encountered the fairies, and Peter — not to mention the fearsome Gallipoot — without a blink, but now his eyes widened, first startled, then filled with shocked grief. “Mrs. Watson?” he asked softly.

  I know that we do not look the same to others, when we encounter them in dreams.

  I put my finger to my lips, and slipped away.

  Holmes and Peter met a number of times that summer, usually in Kensington Gardens, where Holmes would go walking when all of London slept. Peter did get his knife back within two days, for as Holmes understood from those strange — and sometimes very ancient — accounts of mysteriously-appearing children over the centuries, time spent in that other world is notoriously elastic, and bears no relation to the seasons by which we live.

  As my illness ran its course I would dream of them, when sleeping under the influence of my medicines. Holmes taught Peter boxing and single-stick on the fringes of the lake by moonlight, and the intricacies of baritsu throws, in exchange for whatever Peter could tell him of the worlds that lie beyond our own. Peter, for his part, was fond of displaying his knowledge. Though his accounts varied wildly from interview to interview, still I think Holmes gleaned sufficient information to unlock certain clues in those cases that he never told John about. I know that it was from Peter that he learned the secret behind the events at Rowson Priory, and the riddle that saved his life and John’s, years later, during the affair of the Covyng Stones.

  But about such matters as Red Indians and pirates, Peter found Holmes shockingly obtuse. And Holmes had enough of Peter in himself, to take umbrage when a boy who didn’t quite come up to his elbow scoffed at his researches into the habits of the Cherokee and Sioux. “They’re not Sioux, they’re Indians,” Peter almost shouted at him. “And they’ll scalp any white man who comes in their midst!” I think they finally parted over Holmes’ contention that the giant ants that lived on one island of the Neverlands archipelagoes could not exist because it was scientifically impossible for them to breathe. “You’re wrong,” cried Peter. “You’re wrong, I’ve seen them — I’ve slain one with my knife!”

  He stamped his foot, and the impact launched him glittering into the air. He was gone before Holmes could speak.

  I think Peter would have cheerfully made up the quarrel, had he remembered to go back to the Gardens, but he didn’t. Peter does forget things, and people, too, alas. Nearly a year went by, in which Holmes would patiently walk the byways of Kensington Gardens, looking for the paths that had once led him to the belvedere beyond the willow circle — paths that were no longer there and never had been. Holmes continued elsewhere his education in the lore of the Beyond Realms through other connections in London: through a strange young antiquarian who had a house on the Embankment, and the white-haired proprietor of a junk-yard at the end of Fetter Lane.

  It was Peter who came to me, for help in finding Holmes again.

  I was delighted to see him again. My illness weighed heavily on me just then, made worse by the fact that I knew John was nearly frantic, between the costs of caring for me, and fear that I wouldn’t pull out of it, and the sheer insanely mundane burden of running a house. I had dreamed more and more of the Neverlands, hearing in the distance the pounding of the surf on their shores, and the singing of the mermaids among the rocks, but this was the first time Peter appeared in one of the dreams. It wasn’t in the Neverlands, either, but in my own bedroom — John had taken to sleeping on the couch in his study, for fear of disturbing me — and when Peter swooped in through the window I could see he was almost incandescent with rage.

  “Mary, where’s Holmes?” he demanded, as if it hadn’t been decades since we’d parted. He grabbed my hand, and as he pulled me to my feet I was as we all are in dreams, perfectly healthy and much younger than in real life. “You have to show me where he lives. I need him.”

  He was as he had always been. I was as well, the long blonde hair that had been cut off with my illness (that’s how sick I was) now lying intact again in pigtails on the shoulders of my white nightgown, and my nails chewed off short. (I’d quit biting them the minute I left Mrs. Clegg’s).

  Of course I said yes immediately, and being Peter, he completely forgot about putting fairy-dust on me to fly until we were standing on the window-sill, and then Ten Stars had to remind him: Ten Stars was the fairy he flew with by that time, and much less jealous by nature than her predecessor. Tinker Bell would never have bothered to keep a human — dreaming or not — from crashing to the pavement. To do her justice I don’t think Tink ever really understood why it wasn’t funny.

  We flew over London, something I had al
ways wanted to do. And it was as glorious as I had always known it would be.

  It was not so very late: Big Ben was striking eleven in the distance as we stepped through the window at 221B Baker Street. We entered through the bedroom that had been John’s, now crammed almost floor-to-ceiling with Mr. Holmes’ books and souvenirs. I could hear the strains of Mr. Holmes’ violin from the parlor, smell strong shag tobacco with an intensity I hadn’t experienced since I was a child. By the sudden chill on my bare ankles I knew that Peter and I had stepped from dream into reality, and panic filled me at this thought. Peter, still keeping a grip on my hand, barged through the parlor door saying “Holmes!” but I hung back in the shadows, suddenly shy of meeting, in my changed dream-state, a man I knew as an adult in the cold adult world.

  Holmes had already started up from his chair and the violin was out of his hands — I think he had a pistol tucked behind the chair-cushion — but he saw it was Peter and his eyebrows went up with astonished delight. The next second his glance went to me, still half-hid in the dark bedroom doorway, and his expression changed, but before he could speak, Peter jabbed a finger at him and snapped,

  “You have to help me, Holmes. I am being accused of kidnapping — kidnapping! — and you must help me clear my name!”

  The boy’s name was Robert Lewensham and his father was the Earl of Wylcourt. Peter didn’t know these things, of course; Holmes looked them up while I poured us all out tea. Peter’s account was only that Bobbie had come with him to the Neverlands twice — “He’s a tremendous sport and the Black Knight of Ravensmire lives in terror of his blade,” — after first meeting him in the bleak fells of Yorkshire, where one of Ten Stars’s relatives had gotten lost and Peter went to find her.

  “This last time, he didn’t get back home,” Peter said. “It isn’t my fault. Bobbie knew the way. Only now his father’s hired men — wizards, some of them quite wicked — to find him, and the King of Dreams is saying, that this kind of thing can not be tolerated, and that if need be he will shut the Gates of Horn and Ivory that lie between this world and the Neverlands, so that no one may cross. He’s always saying things like that,” Peter added sulkily. It was the first time I’d ever heard him mention the King of Dreams. “And it isn’t fair.”

  “It isn’t,” I added, a little timidly. “What about all those children who’ve never gone to the Neverlands, Mr. Holmes? What becomes of them?”

  Holmes glanced across at me, the line between his brows telegraphing his uncertainty. In the shadows he had thought he’d recognized me, but sitting on his sofa before the fire — where so many times I’d sat in my adult life, all dressed up in proper gray delaine with a corset, bustle and husband — I could see he didn’t know why he’d thought so, or who he’d imagined I might be.

  “What indeed?” Holmes remarked dryly, and turned back to Peter, who was devouring biscuits left over — like the contents of the teapot — from Holmes’ own tea earlier that evening. “Might your friend have been seized by something that haunts the space between the worlds, like the Gallipoot? There are other things as well—”

  Peter waved impatiently with a biscuit. “We can get away from them,” he boasted — by we, I assume he meant, himself and his Lost Boys. “The Gallipoot only eats people like pirates and Red Indians and black knights.”

  “Does it, indeed?” Holmes had crossed the room to the most recent of his scrapbooks, and the newspapers piled on top of it, sorting through the headlines of the past week with swift sureness, as if he knew exactly what he sought, which indeed he did. “I thought this sounded familiar,” he remarked in a moment, and extricated the York Evening Star from three-quarters of the way down the stack. “Robert Lewensham, Viscount Mure — h’rm — heir to the Earl of Wylcourt — born 1885 — police are seeking gypsies — believed to have vanished on the Yorkshire fells three miles from the village of Kethmure — bird-watching — blue jacket, blue cap — A shocking paucity of detail.” He plucked out another newspaper, handed it to me, got another for himself.

  I’d worked with John enough to know what Holmes sought, and located the follow-on article without trouble. “They add little,” I ventured, after scanning the columns. “They do say, Bobbie disappeared on the ninth—” I looked at the date of the paper in my hands, then turned, shocked, to Holmes. “Is the paper you have the day before this one?”

  Holmes nodded, regarding me again with that questing speculation in his eyes. “So the papers — and presumably, the police — didn’t learn of it until the twelfth. Either the boy’s guardians are singularly neglectful, or they had some reason to believe him safely elsewhere for two days. This last time, did Bobbie say he’d been visiting anywhere?”

  “Bobbie never visits anywhere,” replied Peter promptly. “He goes to school in the city, and when he’s at his home he’s alone.” For the first time since I’d known him, Peter’s voice had a note of real distress in it, of concern, not that he, Peter, was being accused of kidnapping children from the real world, but that his friend was somewhere in trouble. And that his friend lived the sort of life that he, Peter, had all his existence fled.

  When he’s at home he’s alone. There was a dismal world of Mrs. Cleggery in those six words.

  “Most interesting.” Holmes pulled another scrap-book from the overflowing shelves. “Do the fairies often get lost on the fells?”

  Peter nodded. “Mostly they find their way back at dawn. Ten Stars’s cousin Cloverberry’s just a little fairy, though, barely more than a bud, and you know how fairies are. Ow—!” he added, because Ten Stars, who was sitting on Holmes’ desk blotter, indignantly threw a collar-button at him. “I met him when I was looking for Cloverberry.”

  “And is this place near a ring of stones?” From between the pages of the scrap-book Holmes extracted one of his vast collection of Ordnance Survey maps, and spread it on the desk. Craning to look over his shoulder, I saw Wylcourt Hall marked, and the village of Kethmure.

  “In the middle of one,” affirmed Peter. He couldn’t keep out of his voice the awed surprise of one who sees magic done. A small circle within two miles of Wylcourt Hall was labeled, Stone Circle — Fairies’ Dance.

  “And the boy’s father has hired wizards to find him. Well, well.” From the bottom drawer of his desk — the locked one where he keeps certain poisons and lists of names — Holmes brought out a thick, much-dog-eared notebook with a scribbled paper label on it, SPIRITUALISTS — THEOSOPHISTS. Prior to his journey to Tibet, Mr. Holmes had compiled a catalog of known frauds and fake adepts in matters occult, the way he compiled catalogs of every other sort of criminal and confidence trickster he heard of: details cross-referenced in his mind.

  Yet he had returned from those years of travel with a different outlook than he had taken out of England with him. And he had never, even when I first met him, been a close-minded man. I knew — not from John, to whom he never mentioned it, but from Martha Hudson — that Holmes had continued his catalog with the names given him by his various contacts in that portion of knowledge that lies along the boundary between the world we know and the multitude of worlds that we do not, and it was in this rear section of the book that he now searched.

  “Tell me, Peter,” he said after a time, with his long forefinger resting on a column of names, “is there an ill wizard in the Neverlands, who commands a group of black knights? Faceless knights,” he added, seeing Peter’s hesitant frown. Black Knights are as common as black birds, in the Neverlands, and come in all sizes and varieties. “Knights who do not bleed, when stabbed by a foe.”

  Peter’s eyes widened again. Then he quickly readjusted his features, as if he realized how much like a very little boy he looked, a little boy the first time a birthday-party magician produces a penny from behind his ear. Casually, he replied, “That would be Nightcrow. He has a dreadful fortress at the farthest end of the Neverlands. He seldom ventures forth, but sometimes one sees him—”

  Peter’s voice sank. It was the first time I’d seen him
troubled: not frightened, because Peter doesn’t frighten easily, but deeply uneasy. “His island lies within the realm of nightmares. Even the pirates won’t go near it, and they’ll sail just about anywhere.”

  “So I thought,” said Holmes. Looking over his shoulder, I saw — as well as I could make out his strong but nearly illegible handwriting — the entry on the notebook page: Krähnacht, Jakob — 37 Barsham Lane, Deptford — followed by a long series of notations in Holmes’ personal shorthand, which as far as I know only Martha can make out.

  Hesitantly, I asked, “Why would this Mr. Krähnacht wish to kidnap Bobbie, even if he did know where he would come out of the Neverlands? Surely there are children in London—”

  “Obviously,” said Holmes as he drew a half-sheet of paper to him and picked up a pencil, “he was paid to do so. By whom, can be deduced fairly easily once we have the boy himself back safe. Can you bring Peter to this place,” he asked, turning round to me the sketch-map he’d made, “in three hours? It’s down-river a good ways, but I can be there by then in a cab.”

  Mischievously, I said, “Why don’t you fly with us, Mr. Holmes? I’m sure Peter and Ten Stars could fix you up.”

  Peter’s eyes flamed with delight at the thought of Mr. Holmes, Inverness flapping like some vast cinder-hued bird, soaring through the night sky in a trail of fairy-dust. But Holmes shook his head and said primly, “I shall take a cab. Like most adults, I do not travel — at least in this instance — without baggage. I shall see you in Deptford at three.”

  He laid emphasis on these words and met my eye with a look that said, Can you make sure he gets there?

  I gave a tiny shrug and a grimacing nod: I’ll do my best.

  It came to me that he knew Peter as well as I did.

  Barsham Lane lay on the far side of Deptford, far enough back from the river to be half in the countryside still. Number 37 was part of no ribbon-development, but rather lay apart, in its own grounds and about three-quarters of a mile from the last of the suburban villas. It took Peter and me exactly three hours and ten minutes to get there, and we swooped down out of the sky just as Mr. Holmes’ cab was disappearing into the thickness of the river mist, leaving him standing by Number 37’s iron gate.