Sherlock Holmes 01: The Breath of God

by Guy Adams

  “Indeed we did,” I said. “Holmes was good enough to help him with the investigation into Lord Ruthvney’s death.”

  Carnacki nodded. “As was I. Though I’ll warrant that the inspector has precious little his superiors will tolerate his putting in a report.”

  “Then perhaps you were not as much help as he might have hoped?” I replied, realising even as I said it that I sounded childishly defensive.

  Carnacki shrugged. “I cannot change the facts, that Ruthvney was killed by forces outside the normal purview of the police force should have been self-evident to anyone with a modicum of intelligence.”

  “That would rather depend on your point of view,” said Holmes. “If you were of a decidedly rational bent then you would of course discount the application of supernatural forces as impossible and therefore still strive to find another solution.”

  “You can’t still be sceptical?” Silence asked. “After everything we’ve experienced!”

  “Thus far I have experienced nothing,” Holmes replied, “but I’ve heard a great deal. Gentlemen, if you will excuse me I really must see about dinner, this realist mind of mine will insist on sustenance. Perhaps you would be happy to keep me company?” he asked me. Of course I agreed and we left, a somewhat uncomfortable silence following us out into the train corridor.

  “I think I feel a Baskerville manoeuvre coming, Watson,” said Holmes once we had sat down in the dining carriage. “Which is why I forced you to accompany me, we must have a words in private.”

  I felt deeply uncomfortable sat there, staring in a daze towards the ceiling where that terrifying web had hung. The unfortunate gentleman who had not survived the experience had of course been moved now, no doubt laid down in an empty carriage to await the police at the next station. They would not be happy to see the body moved but with an official assurance from Silence that the man had died of natural causes – something I had no doubt he would give, the alternative being impossible to prove – no doubt the law would be content. I only wished it was so easy for me. Looking back now I realise I was in a state of shock, my mind slipping from minutiae to daydream, fixating on anything it could lay its hands on rather than face what it was unable to process. At the time I just felt dreadfully tired, confused and barely able to keep up with Holmes’ conversation.

  “A Baskerville manoeuvre?” I asked.

  “I cannot stay here, my friend,” he said, selecting an escalope of veal from the menu and a bottle of claret which he no doubt assumed we would share.

  I began to protest but he held up his hand.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “but I cannot. The position is untenable. I cannot work with them any more than they could work with me. We are too opposed in our beliefs.”

  “If you had only seen what we saw...”

  “But I did not, and therefore I cannot believe it.”

  “You could take me at my word.”

  “My dear fellow,” he insisted, “there’s nobody’s word I value more. But even taking that into account, all I can say for sure is that you believe it happened. That is not the same thing as my believing it happened.”

  “Short of a demon leaping out of your soup and grabbing you by the necktie, I doubt anything could convince you.”

  “Precisely my point. But until that happens, can we agree that I respect you enormously but that I am a cold fish that insists on empirical evidence before he’ll so much as listen to another ghost story?”

  I smiled. However much I may have wished for my friend to be the one who could share and explain these things to me, he would hardly have been Sherlock Holmes had he done so. “Agreed,” I said. “In truth I don’t know what to think myself, but what I saw...”

  “Is what you saw,” he said, “and was either real or not. My only advice – and it is meant kindly – is that you question everything but, for the sake of your sanity, be willing to believe. I know you may think that I am utterly rigid in my outlook but in truth I could be convinced. The science of today is the magic of yesterday, who’s to say what impossibilities may become commonplace in the future? But big claims require big evidence and thus far I have yet to see enough to change my view of the world.”

  “Very well,” I agreed. “I shall continue to observe objectively and, so far as I can, rationally. What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, you know me,” he said with a smile, “I shall follow my own lines of enquiry. Ah! The veal...”

  Sometimes I could almost swear that Holmes had the entire serving community in his employ, the amount of times an explanation has been diverted by a dinner plate beggars belief. He sniffed the dish and smiled a smile of pure, innocent pleasure.

  Many considered Holmes a cold and humourless man, for which I suppose I must take the blame. If my writing has made him seem so then I have done him a disservice. He could be obsessive, insensitive and unfeeling but I would never say these were his default emotions. He simply wasn’t very good with people – over the years I like to think I became an exception – and he often tended to repel them with harsh words rather than go through the troublesome business of having to interact with them. Yet even that is misleading, however, now I read it back, for Holmes could also be exceptionally charming, particularly with women – which would surprise a number of his commentators I’m sure. Perhaps the key to Holmes’ character lies in his contradictions rather than his consistencies. When in a cheerful mood he could be electric, his humour and charm second to none. When at a lower ebb he could be quite intolerable, even cruel. Holmes was, quite simply, a fractured man. But then what genius can claim to be stable?

  “I take it you wish me to keep in touch?” I said, helping myself to a glass of the wine as he began to eat.

  “Most definitely,” he agreed. “As usual, simply send all correspondence to Baker Street and I shall have it rerouted from there.”

  “To little more than a stone’s throw away, I imagine.”

  “I will certainly keep a close eye, but this case has its feelers spread wide, I will need to travel here and there in the hope of bringing it to some semblance of order.”

  “And what shall I tell the others?”

  Holmes thought about that for a moment. “That is certainly important,” he said, “I would not want them to think I have abandoned matters. Tell them...” He continued to think, a piece of veal hovering on his fork, then he gave a contented smile. “Tell them that the De Montfort family have been applying pressure and that my brother has demanded an audience. Tell them that I shall placate him as swiftly as possible, reassure him that all is in hand, and then return.”

  I agreed that I would say just that.

  Finishing his meal, Holmes checked his watch. “I dare say our ghostly sleuths will be getting impatient. You should return to the fold and make my excuses.”

  “And where will you go? They can’t help but notice that we’re on a moving train, you can hardly have vanished.”

  “Can’t I? I would have thought that would have been well within their widened realms of possibility.” He stood up, reached for the emergency stop chain and yanked it.

  “Oh Holmes...” I said as the carriage filled with the sound of brakes and passengers erupted in a panic.

  “See you soon,” said Holmes, running from the carriage with a childlike chuckle.

  I made my way back to the carriage we had been sharing with Dr Silence and Carnacki.

  As I came in sight of it along the train corridor, Carnacki stuck his head out of the door. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Holmes,” I replied, not for the first time using my friend’s name as an explanation for chaos. “He’s received an urgent wire from his brother, Mycroft.”

  I entered the carriage and sat back down, glancing at my friend’s overnight case in the rack and realising that I would now be forced to carry it along with my own. “It seems the De Montfort family are dissatisfied with the progress of the investigation thus far,” I said, “and have put pressure on him
through their connections in government. Holmes’ brother has been tasked with consoling them.”

  “A thankless undertaking one imagines,” said Silence. “Given the facts of the case.”

  “Nonetheless, Mycroft has insisted that Holmes returns to London immediately in order to show that everything possible is being done. He is adamant that he will rejoin us as soon as he can.”

  “Perhaps it’s for the best,” said Carnacki. “I appreciate from your stories that he is a talented detective, Dr Watson, but, given my involvement, that is not a skill that we are currently lacking. His scepticism was an unnecessary hurdle that we now have no need to jump.”

  “I can assure you that his presence could only have been an asset,” I said, defensively, “and I have no doubt he will return shortly.”

  “Well,” said Silence, “I certainly hope so, given that the spirits asked for him directly, I can’t say I relish he fact that he’s no longer with us.”

  “Relax,” said Carnacki, “the spirits will just have to be content with me!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ASSASSIN IN THE NIGHT

  As the train continued north, Carnacki filled the time with more stories of his exploits. For all his arrogance he told a good tale and I confess I enjoyed listening to him. The thrill of his adventures only slightly marred once it occurred to me that, if all he was saying was true – something I could no no longer entirely dismiss – then our current experiences were far from isolated incidents. Carnacki had, as previously admitted, been involved in several cases where the supernatural had not been involved, rather the evil hands of man wishing to convince otherwise. Accepting that, there was still the matter of the disembodied tongue that wagged within the dining room of Brackridge Hall or the squealing of the Pig Lords that had so terrified those in residence at Mocata Grange.

  The world in which both Silence and Carnacki operated was not the world in which I had hitherto lived. The safe, solid world I was used to seemed little more than a stepping stone to other existences and experiences. I tried to bear Holmes’ advice in mind, to listen, and be willing to believe, but to also accept that their tales may have grown in the telling, that perhaps the gelatinous spectre of Andover Crescent was the result of misunderstood evidence, events that could have had an explanation through science as well as the supernatural.

  I was still deeply unsettled, however, and even when I began to feel tiredness sweeping over me I found I couldn’t close my eyes against the furniture of the carriage. In my mind’s eye I found it all too easy to imagine faces appearing in the darkness of the window, the light of the lamps dimming, hands moving beneath the upholstery of the seats. I had lost all faith in the comfort of my surroundings.

  Accordingly, when we finally approached Inverness, I was exhausted and agitated. Desperate for sleep but unable to give in to it.

  The train pulled up and we descended with our luggage. I placed both mine and Holmes’ bags on the platform and checked my watch. It was just shy of midnight. Our plan had been to find a hotel close to the station so that we might sleep and recommence our journey towards Foyers, where Boleskine House lay, in the morning. At this time of night we certainly didn’t fancy doing much more than securing a bed.

  “I dare say there’s a railway hotel nearby,” said Silence. “What say I check with one of the porters?”

  He walked over to a short, red-faced man who was wrestling with the hatboxes of the elderly lady I had been saddled with earlier. They talked for a few moments, and then Silence returned.

  “There’s a place not five minutes walk away,” he announced, “and apparently what they lack in refined decoration they more than make up for with breakfast.”

  “I’m sure I’ll have stayed in worse,” said Carnacki, picking up his bag and following Silence towards the exit. I went to pick up my own bags and suddenly realised that Holmes’ case had vanished. It had been no more than a foot from mine but now it was gone. I looked around, about to raise a cry of alarm when it occurred to me that the only person who could have stolen it with such skill and subtlety was probably its owner, and that maybe Holmes hadn’t left the train earlier at all.

  “Infuriating man,” I muttered to myself, chasing to catch up with Silence and Carnacki.

  At the entrance to the station we were directed up the street a short distance to the doors of Unsworth Lodge, bed and breakfast. Despite concerns of the late hour, the door was answered almost immediately by a small lady who had that mothball air of a woman caught in the hinterland of middle-age. Her hair was striped in black and white like that of a badger and her mouth was perpetually puckered as if she were in the process of devouring an everlasting pickled onion.

  “Mr Holmes and company?” she asked, before we had even had a chance to speak.

  “Actually,” I said, “Mr Holmes is not with us but I am Dr Watson and these are my colleagues, Dr Silence and Mr Thomas Carnacki. Were you expecting us then?” I was unaware that Holmes had called ahead and booked us rooms, but supposed it was far from impossible.

  “I most certainly was,” the woman said, beckoning us in. “I can assure you I don’t wait up at this hour on the off chance of custom.” She looked at Carnacki. “Though you weren’t on the booking, young man,” she said to him before turning back to me. “Will Mr Holmes be arriving later?”

  “Sadly not,” I replied, “our plans had to change at the last minute.”

  She nodded as if this were all too common here at Unsworth Lodge. “Then I suppose he can have the spare room,” she said, nodding towards Carnacki, “after all, I’ve cleaned and aired it now, it would be a great irritation were it not to be used.”

  “That would be excellent,” I said and we followed her up a narrow flight of steps towards a landing that contained several numbered rooms.

  She opened the doors marked three, five and seven and ushered us to take our pick. “There’s no real difference,” she said, “except for the noise of the rats in five. It’s right beneath the loft you see and they’ve made themselves right at home up there.”

  Silence, who had been entering the door of the said room as she spoke, gave a slight sigh before carrying on. “Good night gentlemen,” he said. “I trust I shall survive the night and see you in time for breakfast.”

  He pulled the door closed behind him and I said my goodbyes to Carnacki before entering my own room, number three. It occurred to me just before shutting the door, that I should ask the landlady something. “Excuse me,” I said, calling her back from the stairs, “I know this might sound ridiculous but who was it that booked the rooms?”

  She gave me a sharp look that said, yes, it certainly was a ridiculous thing to ask. “I would have thought you’d have known that yourselves,” she said. “It was Mr Crowley, of course.”

  I was no more relaxed in my bedroom than I had been in the train carriage. How could Crowley have known? Had Holmes telegrammed ahead, or Silence even? Then Holmes’ advice returned to me and, rather than get carried away with the possibility of unnerving conclusions, I accepted that the only way that Crowley could have known is that one or the other had told him. It scarcely mattered which, though it would have been nice to have been told, naturally...

  I dressed for bed. It can’t have been Silence, I thought, I had seen him ask the porter whether there was a hotel close by, he would hardly have done that if he had already known the answer... So it was Holmes then, I told myself, losing patience with my own inclination to question, and, as usual, he had chosen to keep it to himself as he never met a theatrical flourish he didn’t love.

  I turned down the gas and shuffled towards the bed, distracted for a moment by the sight of the moonlit street beyond the window. I stood between the curtains and looked out at the row of terraced houses. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust, the moon was large and the clouds parted enough to let its light fall down on the quiet street. Looking on those rows of ordinary houses, I wondered what their, no doubt sleeping, residents might make of
the night’s events. Were they like me, rigid enough in their beliefs that any upset left them reeling? Or were they more superstitious, more willing to believe anything of the world they lived in?

  I was about to turn away when I noticed the silhouette of a figure at the top of the street. I couldn’t help but smile at that paper-thin shape in its top hat, swinging a cane as he walked away from me. I was certain I knew its owner and went to my bed feeling somewhat more secure for knowing that Holmes was still near by.

  The good feeling didn’t last and I awoke several times in the night. The first occasion was upon being shaken free of a terrible dream, a nightmare where viscous liquid had covered my face and body, forcing its tendrils up my nostrils and into my mouth. I had been hanging, I remembered, as the cool air chilled the night sweats on my back, swinging in that ectoplasmic cat’s cradle in the dining carriage, utterly at the mercy of whatever force it was that had hovered above us.

  Lying there in the dark I tried to shake the feeling that I was not alone in my room, dismissing the unfamiliar silhouettes of the furniture around me as source for panic. The sound of breathing I thought I could hear was no doubt my own, echoed back at me from against the high ceiling, the delay making it sound like the breathing of another. I held my breath, finally sighing into the silence that resulted. The house creaked around me, of course, all houses do. I reminded myself also of the rats that our landlady insisted were thriving in the loft space above us. No doubt they made that tapping noise that, for one terrified second, I imagined was the sound of a nail on my door.

  Finally, such childish thoughts ceased and I returned to sleep, only to be woken again some time later. Something had disturbed me, though I could not tell what. What I could hear, extremely faintly, was the sound of a man crying. I lit a match and checked my watch, it was a quarter to three in the morning. What is it that so saddened a man that it brought tears at this hour? Lying back in the darkness, the sharp smell of the match settling around me, I thought about my poor Mary and had my answer.