Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Kim Newman

  “Yes,” said Swann, doubtfully. “How do you know that those marks weren’t there beforehand, sir?”

  “Well, firstly the books themselves. There are many of them, to be sure, but they’re stacked neatly and well kept except for these few. And consider, are there other marks, Constable Swann? The shelves, the surfaces not covered in books are clean, dust-free. I’d say our Mrs. Roundhay—” gesturing towards the kitchen where the housekeeper was still crying and drinking tea, “—keeps this place gleaming, wouldn’t you? No other marks, and certainly not one so large. And look—” Brabbins put his hand onto the mark, letting Swann see how it matched the pattern of fingers slipping across the wood and into the damaged books.

  “No, whatever happened to him, it happened quickly. There are no signs of disorder in the kitchen, no signs of a struggle of any kind. He fled his death along this hallway, but couldn’t move fast enough.” Brabbins went slowly down the hallway and onto the stairs.

  “He went up the stairs, and he was careless, knocking over the piles of books and paper, but why? What was up here that he thought might help? Where was he going?”

  “The study?”

  “Yes, but why? Why there and not the bathroom or the bedroom? Why the study?” Their discussion had taken them to the room in question, and Brabbins stepped in, gesturing for Swann to follow. “Tell me what you see.” Swann followed, clearly reluctant.

  Although the body had been removed the man, Holmes, was still a presence in the room. These were his papers and books, his curios on the shelves in front of the books, his tobacco and his pipe on the desk. This was his space, and Brabbins knew that he and Swann were intruders here.

  “It’s a study,” said Swann.

  “Good,” said Brabbins. “Tell me more. Tell me what you see.”

  “It’s messy, like the hall. Lots of things. How a person could work here, I don’t know. How could you tell where things were? There’s piles of newspapers, the desk is covered in manuscript sheets with writing on, there are books open on the desk and magazines all over.”

  “Very good. Go on.”

  “There’s a picture on the desk, the only one I’ve seen in the house, of a man with a moustache. He’s got a doctor’s bag at his feet and a revolver in his hand. There’s a pipe on the desk and more papers on the floor. They’re crumpled, as though he pulled them to the floor when he fell. Some of them are bound together. There are matches loose on the desk and tobacco on the floor.”

  “Did he decide to light a pipe for himself, one last smoke in his death throes, do you think?”

  “No,” said Swann, his voice defensive, and for a moment Brabbins wondered if he had gone too far. No matter. “The tobacco’s fallen out of his pouch, or spilled when he went for the matches. There’s none in the pipe or near it.”

  “Well done, Constable. Please, continue.”

  “I don’t know what else to say,” said Swann. “I can’t see anything else, I don’t know what you’re looking for. There’s pine needles on the floor with the papers and tobacco, and some old wood and burlap. It looks like he tried to fill his smoker but dropped it before he could.”

  “Smoker?” asked Brabbins, startled. “What’s that?”

  “The tin,” said Swann in a tone that was somewhere between wary and disbelieving; it was either so obvious to him that he was worried he was wrong, or it was genuinely obvious and he couldn’t understand why Brabbins couldn’t see it. “It’s smoker fuel. Look, the smoker’s under the desk.”

  “Smoker?” said Brabbins again. “You mean his pipe?”

  “No, that,” said Swann, pointing to a thing that looked like a lantern with a kettle funnel welded to it, lying on its side under the desk. “It’s a smoker. You put needles and wood and burlap in and burn it, and it makes smoke.”

  “Why?” asked Brabbins, mystified.

  “You need the smoke,” said Swann, “to calm bees.”

  The parlour was filled with piles of concertina files, three or four deep from the walls and to the height of perhaps five feet, tied with cord or ribbon, as though to stop them bursting. Some were old and some newer, the corners of the files less worn and the ribbons less dull. Experimentally, Brabbins opened one of them and withdrew sheets at random. The first one was a handwritten letter.

  Dear Mr. Holmes

  My brother has been vanished these past six months and I suspect he may have come to a terrible end at the hands of his wife, a selfish and unpleasant woman. I know you don’t do your investigations any more, but surely you can make an exception to help bring a vicious harridan to justice and give my family some peace?

  I pray that I will hear from you soon.

  Yours in God

  Bernadette Murray (Mrs.)

  There was a Cheam return address on the letter, and at the bottom in a different hand was written No. The other sheets Brabbins withdrew were similar: requests to help find missing family members, to solve robberies, to discover the whereabouts of missing wills. One even asked Holmes help in finding a missing pet, much loved and missed and Oh Mr. Holmes if you could see my child’s face you would surely be unable to resist our request for your assistance. The last one Brabbins looked at was typed, on paper headed with the insignia of the Manchester Constabulary. Dear Mr. Holmes, it read, We have a most difficult series of violent attacks and would request your assistance in solving them. Brabbins stared around the hundreds of files, thinking that if each contained the same as this file, then that was thousands upon thousands of requests, more and more arriving daily. What had Swann said? That he received a lot of post? And he read all of them; the repeated handwritten No told Brabbins that. My God, he thought, if this is what each day brought him, no wonder he tried to seal himself away.

  Naked, Holmes’ corpse lay on its back on the metal table in the morgue whilst Rivers, the coroner, talked and pointed. “It’s not technically poison because he didn’t ingest it,” he said, “so it’s venom, although I don’t suppose it makes much difference to him now, does it? It was administered mostly to the flesh of the face and hands, which explains the amount of swelling and tissue damage in those areas.”

  Rivers was a GP, he had told Brabbins, called in to help in those rare incidents when there was a need for a medical opinion on a corpse. The morgue was tiny, little more than a cupboard, tiled a pale, sickly green that reflected the two men as they moved around the body, their images hovering like vapor at the corner of Brabbins’ eye. It smelled of harsh soap and embalming fluid and the loose, wavering scent of flesh that was rotting despite the chill. There was another odor emanating from the body, the one that Brabbins had first come across in Holmes’ study, bitter and cloying, yet oddly sweet.

  Holmes must have been tall and imposing in life, thought Brabbins. Prostrate on the table, though, he was shrivelled and splayed, his belly a sliced and yawning cavity, his flesh sagging back from his bones like an ill-fitting suit. The swelling of his face and hands made him look clownish, a caricature of the aquiline man that he had been in life. The puffy flesh had deflated slightly, and in relaxing and dropping away, the skin had pulled back from both of the man’s eyes, leaving their bloodshot gaze focussed on a point somewhere beyond the ceiling of the mortuary in rapt, cold attention.

  “I haven’t identified the poison yet,” said Rivers. “I may not be able to. If you want a theory, it was smeared on something, or it was in something, and then his assailant attacked him, stabbing at him. At his face and hands, mainly, although there are some punctures on his neck and some on his lower arms.” Rivers held up his hands, nodding at his cuffs as they pulled back from his wrists, and said, “Defensive wounds, I’d imagine. The weapon was thin and sharp, probably a needle. It may even have been a hypodermic, given the depth of some of the punctures in the flesh.”

  “Thank you,” said Brabbins. He leaned in close to the corpse, looking at its stretched, sloughing skin. There were even wounds in the swept back, thinning hair, he saw, areas of scalp where the poison had cau
sed the man’s head to bulge and swell. His tongue had collapsed back into his mouth, lay curled and dry in the shadowed depths. Brabbins thought of the room full of pleading letters, of the person that this man must have been, and felt a wave of sadness wash over him. This had been a human being, a good one by all accounts, and someone had hated him enough to murder him, to slaughter him. Brabbins sniffed deeply, trying to lock the smell of the dead man and the sight of his bruised, distorted face deep in his mind; then he rose to go.

  Swann was gone when Brabbins arrived back at Holmes’ house. Evening was closing in, so Brabbins couldn’t blame the man. He had gone to … what? A Mrs. Swann? Some doughty housewife warming slippers and a meal in a tiny kitchen? Brabbins smiled at the image and wondered how the man would tell his wife of his day, of bodies and detectives and rooms full of papers and a study that was cluttered and claustrophobic and smelled like spoiled humanity. Perhaps the man was a widower, and would sit in a dark and lonely home, talking to no one but himself. Brabbins supposed he should have asked, had a conversation with the man, but had long ago realized that he wasn’t inclined to that sort of thing. Those things were distractions, getting in the way and watering down his attention. The case was all; the dead man and the cause of his death.

  Before leaving, though, Swann had made a start on the papers from the parlour. Piles of them were out of the folders and on the floor, and more were on the table in the kitchen. The man hadn’t left a note, which Brabbins took to mean that he had found nothing of interest. Most of the piles in the parlour itself were more requests for help, from all over the world. Each had the word ‘No’ written at the bottom, solid and emphatic.

  The pile in the kitchen looked to be more recent, invoices and household bills. Swann had weighted this pile down with an empty cup, Brabbins saw with distaste. It had left a tea ring on the uppermost paper, a pale circle blotted across the top of an invoice for comb replacement pieces from a company in Liverpool.

  Actually, Brabbins saw, the paper on the kitchen table was in two piles, one face down and one face up. They gave the impression of a job half-done, something partway complete. The cup was almost like a bookmark, he thought, a place marker to ensure that the task could be taken up from the point at which it had been left. He leafed through the face up pile presumably the unchecked ones, finding them all handwritten sheets, covered in notes and drawings.

  Was this the last thing that Swann had read? Had it sparked something in the man’s brain, or had he simply reached that point and thought, That’s it, time to go home. Somehow, Brabbins didn’t think so. It was the half-finished look of the piled papers that did it, the sense of something partly complete, not abandoned but simply interrupted. Swann was old, yes, had struck him as inexperienced, yes, but lazy and inefficient? No.

  So, if something had flared in the man’s mind, what had he done next? And where was he now?

  Brabbins stood and went walking, slowly pacing the length of the hallway, going into the parlour and the lounge and finally coming to the bottom of the stairs. Nothing had changed; at least, nothing that gave Brabbins pause. Upstairs? The papers on the steps had been placed back into their piles, he saw, but one had a sense of ruffledness, as though it had been sifted through and then placed down. Swann? Brabbins looked through the pile and found that it was mostly more correspondence. Why this pile above the others, he wondered. There was nothing in it of interest as far as he could see, nothing that would seem to tie into Holmes’ death. It seemed to be a set of letters between Holmes and a London publishing house, mostly about royalties. The last letter mentioned a ‘new project’, Brabbins saw, and his policeman’s instinct told him that this was the one that Swann had been interested in. It was more crumpled, placed more roughly back into the pile than the others, but why was it important? What had Swann been thinking?

  The study door was open, and it had been shut when Brabbins left. He stepped inside and saw immediately that things had changed; some of the papers from the floor had gone and the others were in new piles, scattered differently. Swann read something downstairs, in the papers on the table, and it … what? Made him think? Caused some kind of realization? He came upstairs, stopped on the way and read more, read something else that confirmed his suspicions, or at least strengthened them into something more solid, and from there he came into the study and sorted through the papers on the floor. And on the desk, Brabbins saw more had gone from there, as had the smoker from the floor and some of the smoker fuel. The matches were still on the desk, though. He wanted some of the papers, others not, and then he left the study, left the house. But to where?

  The garden was a frayed mess of shadows and night. The light escaping from the doorway around Brabbins lost its strength as it stretched away, soaking the lawn from a rich green to a torpid, heavy grey. The plants and bushes that lined the lawns were little more than blacker streaks in a night that was lightless and warm. There was a smell in the garden, a mingled scent of exhaling plants and clean earth.

  And something burning, or burned.

  Brabbins walked cautiously down to the edge of the lawn and started across it. As he moved deeper into the shadows, the smell of burned things became stronger and he heard a noise, a somnolent hum. He raised his lantern, letting the pale light dance across the ground ahead of him. More lawn. He had the sense of it widening around him, opening out to become a field; the grass felt longer under his feet, the ground rougher, less cultured. The smell had changed as well, shifting from the sweet breath of flowers to the denser, richer aroma of roots and soil and wood.

  Brabbins felt exposed here, as though he had swum further out from shore than he realized, to where the water suddenly went cold and the waves were made of stone rather than cotton. He turned, looking back towards the building and the pale squares of light falling from the kitchen windows and doorway as he walked. The distance between him and Holmes’ house stretched, dark and sly, and then he realized that the sound had changed and that shapes were emerging from the gloom about him.

  They were low and hard-edged, paler smears in the darkness revealed by his approach. The low sound had changed as well, had shifted and become less rested, more anticipatory, although anticipatory of what Brabbins could not tell. Whatever it was that was making the sound, he had the impression that it knew he was there, was watching him carefully, judging and gauging and waiting. It was a grating buzz, oddly metallic and sharp, and it scraped across his exposed skin like a toothache. He turned slowly back around, completing a full circle with the torchlight leaping ahead of him and about him like an inquisitive tongue. There were six of the shapes, solid white boxes on little legs, set at irregular intervals across a pasture of some kind. The noise came from all the shapes at once. He took a cautious step back, feeling his way with his heel because he suddenly, definitely, did not want to turn his back on the boxes.

  They were hives. He was a city boy, true, but even he recognized the slatted shapes of beehives. There were no bees, at least none that he could see, but he assumed that it was the creatures making the sound inside the hives. He took another backwards step and the sound rose in pitch, cold and glitteringly alert. He had heard bees before, enjoyed their warm hum in the air around him in summer gardens, but this noise was something different. It was ferocious, a noise of warning and threat. Another step, and he was at the edge of the pasture, almost out from the hives. Their pallid shapes seemed to face him as he went, horridly observant and aware. Another step, another. Another and his questing heel bumped into something that rolled and gave under him, and his balance yawned wildly for a moment and then he fell. The torch bounced to the ground by his head, dancing and jittering before it settled and the beam came to rest on what he had fallen over, and Brabbins saw it and screamed.

  It was Swann; or at least, it had been Swann.

  The man’s face, caught in the beam of light, leered in black and swollen misery at Brabbins, the flesh darkened and gross. His head was massive, like a scarecrow’s made out of so
me misshapen, rotten vegetable; his eyes were bulged shut, the lids erupting and pressing together, and his mouth was open, but compressed to a dark, tiny O by lips that had blistered towards each other. The skin looked taught, ready to split, and it was covered in beads of blood, some of which had trickled and collected and slathered down the man’s cheeks like aged, dank tears. The swelling made his chin a shapeless ridge above a neck that bulged and strained against his uniform collar, where his police number glittered, silver and pitiless. It was Swann made into a caricature of himself, drawn by a hand that was both mocking and humourless. The smoker was lying by him in the centre of a scorched circle of grass.

  All of this Brabbins saw even as his scream was newborn, still rising into the air in a great, whooping arc. Under it, the sound of the bees leapt in pitch, climbing with the scream to a sharp, inhuman shiver. Brabbins clambered to his feet, rolling against Swann as he did so and feeling the man’s flesh shift like water in a balloon. He grabbed, almost by instinct, the sheaf of partly charred papers that were still clutched in the dead man’s hand (also bloated and black, he saw) and then he was running. As he did so, he had the impression of the hives boiling, of a ragged cloud gathering in the air above them and starting towards him and then he was concentrating on the house, on Holmes’ house, on the faint yellow square of the doorway.

  The bees were closer; he could hear them even over the pant of his own breathing. Their noise was constant, furious, mounting, itching in his ears and prickling his skin. He ran, moving swiftly from the meadow and onto the lawn, with its neat grass and sentinel plants, and as he went the bees were a cloud about him, almost invisible in the darkness, it was as though the night itself had come alive and had stretched out writhing arms to take hold of him. He ran, and the bees closed in.

  Brabbins dashed through the doorway as the first bees started to land on him; one banged into his shoulder and span away, another flashed into his face and then was gone, more landed on his arms and dashed against his legs. Their buzz was a pitiless shriek that reminded him of drills and saws and factories full of sweat and dirt and poverty, and then he was into the house, slamming the door behind him. The swarm, for he could think of no other word for it, banged hard against the door behind him, a thousand or more tiny impacts making a noise like cloth being torn asunder, louder and louder as the tiny creatures battered themselves against the door. More struck the glass of the windows in a staccato beat, and then Brabbins’ hand flamed with pain.