Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Kim Newman

  May 20th: Following the attack on the dog, I have found myself carefully considering the facts of this most curious of cases, and the fears that it has raised in me. The dog posed no threat to the bees, yet they attacked anyway. The assault was swift, unforgiving, unprovoked, and merciless, and whilst it may have only been a stray farm dog that took the brunt of the savagery on this occasion, I cannot guarantee that this will always be the case. I am beset by images of a child from the village, or a farmhand, or Mrs. Roundhay one day straying too close to the hive and raising the bees’ ire. Without the benefit of protective clothing, they would be killed as surely as the dog was, and I am tormented by visions of a person, the bees clustered about them as he lies in the field by the hives, his flesh swollen and blackened, and the smell of venom hanging in the air around them.

  The vision does not end there. Past the dead on the ground, in the distant fields and in the woods and eaves where bees make their homes, I saw new hives being constructed, some by man and some by the bees themselves, their ordered waxen combs containing worker after worker, each equipped with a savage and pitiless sting and with venom that burned. I saw, somewhere deep in these hives, the gestation and birth of new kings, each as violent and aggressive as the other, and I heard an inhuman buzz fill the air. It is not just the regrettable incident with the dog that has caused these visions, however, but another thing. In my tending to the other hives over the past weeks, I have noticed an increased aggressiveness in the bees and, this morning, I found in two of them the larval stage of the king bee.

  I have little choice now. I shall study the hives carefully for the next day to ascertain when activity in them is at a minimum and the risk at its least, and then I shall burn them and all of their inhabitants. My experiment has been, in the strangest way, too successful, and is at an end.

  Brabbins put the papers down. The last of them was dated the day before Holmes’ death, and he wondered how it had happened; had the man approached the hive without his protective clothing? No, he was clearly not stupid. Had he underestimated the bees? Brabbins thought that perhaps he had, and had paid for that underestimation with his life. He had treated them as something limited, mere insignificances to remove but not to regard warily, neither intelligent nor able to plan. They had known what was coming, somehow, and had attacked Holmes pre-emptively. Had they swooped down out of the sky as he took a last turn around his garden before bed? The night had been warm, Brabbins remembered; maybe he was in the house with the back door open and the bees had come in, a last, awful visitor for the man who had helped so many others in his life. He would never know, of course, but it nagged at him, leaving a hole in the picture he had painted for himself of what had happened.

  “Solved,” he said quietly to himself, not liking the way his voice trembled. “The dead man was killed by bees of his own breeding because he trusted to the logic of the situation rather than the reality of it. It is impossible for bees to plan, and so they cannot have plans to act upon. They cannot predict or assume or pre-empt, for they are bees. Only, these bees can, and they did, and the impossible became possible.” He stopped; his voice sounded like it came from someone else’s throat, distant and scared. And Swann? Had he understood? No, he thought not. He had known the bees were a part of it, but not how. How could he? Wandering out there, blithely approaching his own death. Brabbins swore, his fear giving way to anger. They were bees.

  Bees.

  Brabbins hand throbbed, the fingers aching as he flexed them into a tight fist. Standing, he drew back the curtain from the window. Even if it had been daylight outside, he would not have been able to see; the glass was covered, filling the small space with ever-moving brown shapes. They crawled over one another, lifting away and then battering back into the pane in waves, as though seeking some synchronisation in their attacks. The glass was smeared with pale fluid, he saw, dribbles of it coming from the stings that banged against the window with sharp little clicks. It gathered in little puddles against the bottom of the wooden frame. The window shook as the creatures banged into it. How long before they manage to break through? he thought. How long before they find another way in, something that I’ve missed?

  Brabbins went down the stairs. He wondered briefly about trying to distract the bees somehow, getting them to gather against one part of the house whilst he ran from some other exit but dismissed the idea immediately. Holmes’ house was miles from anywhere, and the bees would catch him before he got far. Fire? No. He would never stop the bees getting to him, and he could hardly burn them off the windows without burning the house down. He was trapped.

  No, he suddenly realized, he was not. A search of the downstairs of the house turned up Holmes’ beekeeping clothing in a cloakroom. Hurriedly, he shrugged it on; trousers and a white smock. Holmes had been taller and the legs and sleeves gathered in bunches around his ankles and wrists, but he tied the cuffs as tight as he could round his wrists and ankles. Before pulling on the gauntlets and net helmet, he put Holmes’ papers on the kitchen table, weighting them with the mug that Swann had used for the same purpose earlier in the day, and next to them he scrawled a note that said simply: These are genuine and their contents should be treated with the utmost seriousness. Look for my body and tell my wife I love her. Insp. W. M. Brabbins. At least that way, if something did happen to him, there was some record of what had happened. His body, and Swann’s in the garden, would add weight to the evidence. They’d have to believe it.

  Brabbins pulled on the helmet and gloves, tying them as tightly as he could, trying to ensure that he left no gaps between them and the other garments. Had he put them on correctly? He had no idea. Only time would tell. Finally, he went to the front door. The bees against the other side of the small porthole window in the centre of the door, as if they sensed his intention, began to beat themselves against the glass even more furiously. Perhaps they do know what I’m planning. I don’t suppose it would surprise me if they did; nothing would at this point, he thought. He readied himself but, before he could open the door, there was a crack from behind him.

  Undecided, Brabbins paused, and there was another crack. It came from the kitchen, he realized, was audible even through the closed door. In spite of himself, he went down the hallway and opened the door slightly, peering cautiously inside the room. At first, he thought that what he saw was a shadow, or the way the netting draped across his face moved in front of his eyes, but then he realized that it was bees. One of the panes of glass had cracked and a piece of glass fallen away, and bees were crawling in through the tiny hole, tumbling over themselves in their desperation to get in. Once in, they rose into the air like burned paper drifting above a fire, circling in odd, elliptical patterns. Instead of coming towards the door, however, towards him, they flew to the centre of the room and clustered around the manuscript on the table, burying it in an undulating, shifting blanket. The mug weighing the paper down toppled over and rolled until it stopped, prevented by its handle from turning further. Its inside contained bees, he saw, so many of them that they filled it like viscid liquid. Under their hum, the bees were making another sound, a moist, mulching noise that made him think of tiny jaws chewing and tearing. Pieces of paper began to flutter out of the mass and then he realized what they were doing to the manuscript and he turned and ran.

  As though his movement had caught their attention, the bees coming in through the window shifted, arrowing out of the kitchen and gathered around him as he ran, the first of them landing on him, crawling across his visor and interrupting his vision with dark shapes the color of fury. He crashed into the front door, his gloved fingers pulling clumsily at the latch as more bees swarmed in the air around his head and shoulders and their companions on the other side of the glass became even more agitated. He had no choice now. Yanking open the door, he started to run.

  With a hum that was more like a shriek, the bees were about him in seconds.

  * * * * *

  SIMON KURT UNSWORTH’s story ‘The Church on th
e Island’ was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His short story collection Lost Places was recently released by Ash Tree Press. Simon’s work has also appeared in the anthologies Shades of Darkness, Lovecraft Unbound, Exotic Gothic 3, At Ease with the Dead and Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes.

  “Sherlock Holmes and the Great Game” by Kevin Cockle

  Illustration by Luke Eidenschink

  Sherlock Holmes and the Great Game

  by Kevin Cockle

  Where dogs had got at them, blood was caked into snow — frozen like stained glass in grisly ruby pools.

  “Ice picks,” Holmes muttered, indicating trace evidence in the shattered dome of the nearest igloo. “Here. And here, you see.” Watson did not see, though he had no doubt.

  “People-killing arrows,” Holmes continued, stooping to examine one of the shafts used against the slain. “Not hunting arrows. Deliberate and pre-meditated Watson, all of this. Very much so.”

  Watson shuddered, repressing memories of similar atrocities seen years ago and a world away. Afghan mountains meshed with Canadian ice in his imagination: slaughter was slaughter whenever, wherever; the vividness could not be unseen. He shifted the weight of the Lee Enfield .303 on his shoulder and cast his gaze out into the bleak blue-white horizon. Here and there, a body dotted the landscape. Dark piles of fur stark against the white.

  Holmes stood, his tall frame given impressive bulk by the Caribou-skin parka and breeches supplied by the North West Mounted Police. His aquiline nose protruded just past the edges of the hood, betraying his lean lines. If not for that angular, fine-boned face, Sherlock Holmes would have seemed a bear of a man with the weight of kit upon him.

  “Not for food, nor materials,” Holmes said, boots grinding on snow as he made his way through the hunting settlement. Stopping at a smaller imploded igloo, he regarded the huddled occupants. “Raiding is a poor strategy in the north, Watson, one rarely sees it. Not slavers…” he paused in mid thought. “Hold on.” He circled the igloo, eyeing the tracks all round.

  “Here, Watson! Signs of a struggle … one of these unfortunates being led away. Yes! This was it — this was the prize they sought. Confident beggars — they’ve made no effort to conceal their tracks!”

  “We follow, then?” Watson said, shivering at the thought.

  “Definitely,” Holmes smiled. “The game, dear Watson, is most assuredly afoot!”

  Watson caught the look in Holmes’ eye — that look so often described as a cocaine-induced glaze in the written accounts, but which in truth was of a far different nature altogether.

  “Holmes,” Watson said, lowering his voice, “do you really see these clues in the snow, or have you divined them? Are you certain a captive was taken?”

  Holmes grinned. “One way or the other, I have seen it, and it is true. Come!”

  With urgent energy, Holmes marched back to the dog sled. Two junior constables stood waiting, faces white as the snow they stood upon, anxious eyes peering out from fur-lined hoods like the eyes of wolf-spooked sheep.

  “We’re going on,” Holmes informed the men. The man on the left — Ryan — hugged himself in an unconscious gesture of self-preservation. “We’re close now,” Holmes continued, “maybe a few hours behind, and these savages are in no hurry.”

  “But our orders sir…” the man on the right — Culloden — began.

  “You will follow them. Make camp close by. We’ve two good hours of sunlight left. Let us make use of them. Keep a close watch. These bodies will attract company sooner rather than later.”

  “You should’na go just the two of you sir,” Culloden said.

  Holmes smiled almost parentally. “You’re good lads, and fine policemen, but you are not up to this. Make camp; get some food together. We’ll be wanting dinner when we return.”

  Watson turned from the men, did his own calculations. Going back to Dawson and mustering a force was out of the question. The seal hunting season was drawing to a close and ice would be breaking up soon. Holmes was right: the chance was now, or never.

  Two thoughts occurred to Dr. Watson: There is nothing here to indicate that anyone has survived this massacre, or been taken from the scene and Holmes doesn’t want witnesses where we are going.

  Anernerk stared at the chains which bound her to the sled, her manacled hands heavy in her lap, and thought: These are too big for me. The iron was old, rusted, foreign. She sat with her legs tucked up underneath her, staying quiet, staying still, as dogs pulled, and a man pushed at the handles just behind her. They need not have bound her. Their precautions were ridiculous. Where would she run? To whom would she go, now that her family had been extinguished?

  She tried not to see the details. The moonlight punching through the roof of the igloo as the men bludgeoned their way in. The screams; the dull squish and thud of the killing strokes. She had screamed too, but had been stopped short by a gonging voice in her head — a voice not her own — and images that crowded out her own shrill thoughts of terror.

  Stars. The voice had shown her stars, made her see a particular pattern, made her focus upon it. At first, the voice had spoken gibberish to her, but had changed in tone and articulation, almost as though sifting through sounds to find her language, and when it did, it said: “It is time. It is near equinox. You will come to me. You will come to me now.”

  She had closed her eyes then, listening to the distant screams, knowing there was nothing she could do. She had kicked out in reflex, fighting in futility as she was bundled out through the shattered ceiling of the igloo by strong, silent attackers. They had made no sound throughout the massacre — no war cries, no exultant shouts of triumph. They had killed with cold ferocity, like an Arctic blizzard unleashed. She was theirs now; she belonged to them even as they belonged to the voice. She did not weep, or wail, or bargain, for that was not the Nunamiut way.

  Now, in an effort to repress the memories of slaughter, she recalled her father’s voice singing a traditional lament in his husky, warbling tone:

  Hard times, dearth times

  Plague us every one

  Stomachs are shrunken

  Dishes are empty

  Over and over she recited the words to herself and stared without expression at her lap. No tears fell, for a hard life had shaped her early for the acceptance of things. Sometimes, the caribou did not come in the spring. Sometimes, the seal holes could not be found. Her only hope was that it would be quick and painless, whatever they had in mind for her.

  The sun had crept up on its low trajectory, and the sled had come to a stop at the crest of a shallow rise. Anernerk looked up then, and her mouth gaped open in astonishment for two reasons. The first was for the structure in the distance, immense and dark and utterly beyond her ability to comprehend.

  The second was because one of the men had put back his hood to reveal his face. She knew him, had once shed the tears for him that she had yet to shed for her slain kinfolk. It was her grandfather, who had been left to die three winters ago on pack ice, unable at the last to walk on used up legs. He stood strong and straight now, though his hair blew whale-bone white in the slight northerly breeze.

  He turned his face to look upon her without recognition, without pity.

  His eyes were the washed out blue of a pack dog’s, strange and horrifying and cold.

  The jagged majesty of the ice filled Watson with primordial awe. He’d seen a fair piece of the world — been to every corner of the empire either with or without Holmes — but he had never quite seen anything to rival the vast bleak Canadian north. Walls of ivory jutting into the clear blue sky, and drifting, susurrant serpents of windblown snow. Cool pools of blue shadow in the lees of icy rises. Water so clear and clean it looked like glass. And treachery amidst the breathtaking beauty, lying in wait to pounce upon the slightest mistake.

  “I quite honestly don’t know what to make of it,” Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Reed had said back at camp in Dawson. He was a priggish man, but resolute
enough, with a back straight as a mainmast, and a neck thick as a kilderkin. Before him, on his desk, lay the papers from Whitehall, complete with parliamentary seal, outlining the terms of Holmes’ special service. “They are … well, that is to say … attacks, of some kind, as it were.”

  “Attacks.” Holmes repeated. “Implying the imposition of main force? Warfare, I am given to believe, does not exist here, in the sense that we employ it.”

  “Whole settlements destroyed, Holmes. Systematically. Casualties exacted to the last man. Pursuit. That is not the tribal, vendetta way, no. It is rather more … European in nature. As it were.”

  “And you suspect…”

  Reed swallowed, mustering his confidence. “The Russians.”

  “The Russians,” Holmes repeated, this time failing to disguise his skepticism. “Hoping to secure control of the strategic seal-skin and blubber markets?”

  “Well, damn it all, Holmes … that’s what you are here to determine! All along the seal hunting grounds — entire settlements wiped out, and bloodthirsty work it is too. Not our business by and large, but if it is some Russian gambit…”