The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by edited by John Joseph Adams

  "I don't have to tell you that the trip was a disaster. Supplies went bad or disappeared. We all had fevers. What native guides we could hire or seize at gunpoint misled us, then got away. I alone could read the damned map, but it was cryptic, even if you could make out the script. Much of the time I merely guessed and tried to find our way by the stars.

  "Many times I was certain that none of us would get back alive. The first to die was the crazy American, something-or-other Jones, a lunatic who carried a bullwhip and fancied himself an archaeologist. We found Jones in his tent, bloated to half again normal size, his face eaten away by foot-long jungle leeches.

  "One by one the others perished, from accidents, from disease that might have been poisoning. Gutzman, the South African, caught a dart in the neck one night. Van Eysen, the Dutchman, tried to make off with most of our remaining food and clean water. Hawkins shot him in the back, then killed the Malay when he protested, and the Lascar on general principles. Another Englishman, Gunn, got his throat cut merely so that there would be one mouth less to feed.

  "Since I alone could read the map—or pretended to—I was certain Hawkins needed me alive. In the end, there were only the two of us, ragged and emaciated wretches staggering on in a timeless delirium of pain and dread. It was nothing less than a living death.

  "At last we emerged from the jungle and climbed onto the windswept tableland of central Asia. Still the journey seemed endless. I had no idea of where we were going anymore, for all I made a show of consulting the map over and over so that Hawkins would not kill me. Each night I dreamed of the black and forbidding Plateau of Leng, which was revealed to me in a series of visions, its ruins and artificial caverns of shocking antiquity, perhaps older even than mankind itself, as were the immemorial blasphemies of the Chan-Tzo.

  "What Hawkins dreamed, I cannot say. His speech had ceased to be coherent, except on the point of threatening me should I waver from our purpose. I knew he was insane then, and that I would die with him, likewise insane, unless I could somehow escape his company.

  "I was past thinking clearly. How fortunate, then, that my plan was simplicity itself—almost the bare truth rather than some contrived stratagem.

  "I fell to the ground and refused to rise, no matter how much Hawkins screamed that he would blow my brains out with his pistol. I said I was dying, that his pistol would be a mercy. He would offer me no mercy. I was counting on that. Instead, he forced me to translate the map for him and make notes as best I could. There was nothing to write with by a thorn and my own blood, but I wrote, and when he was satisfied, he laughed, folded the map into his pocket, took all our remaining supplies, and left me to my fate on the trackless, endless plain.

  "And so we parted. I hoped I had sent him to Hell, deliberately mixing up the directions so he'd end up only the Devil knew where. He, of course, assumed I would be vulture's meat before another day or two.

  "But I did not die. Mad with fever and privation, my mind filled with fantastic and horrible hallucinations, I wandered for what might have been days or even weeks, until, by the kindness of providence alone, I stumbled into the camp of some nomads, who, seeing that I was a white man, bore me on camel-back into the Chinese province of Sinkiang and there turned me over to a trader, who brought me to a missionary.

  "This proved to be my salvation, both physical and otherwise. I married the missionary's daughter, Abigail's mother, and largely through the influence of her family I later found a place on a much more respectable Anglo-French expedition to Angkor. That was the true beginning of my scientific career. Still the mysteries of the East haunted me, but my cravings were directed into proper channels until I achieved the renown I have today."

  At this point Sir Humphrey paused. The only sound was the slow ticking of a great clock in some other room. Abigail Thurston's face was white from the shock of what she had heard. She scarcely seemed to breathe. Holmes sat very still, his chin held in his hand, staring into space.

  I was the one who broke the silence.

  "Surely, Sir Humphrey, there is more to the story than that. I don't see how your luckless expedition or whatever fate the rascal Hawkins must have met has anything to do with the here and now."

  Thurston's reaction was explosive.

  "Damn it, man! It has everything to do with my predicament and what may well be my inevitable fate. But . . . you are right. There is more to tell. After many years of roving the world, giving lectures, publishing books, after I was knighted by the Queen—after my past life seemed a bad dream from which I had finally awakened—I thought I was safe. But it was not to be. This past fortnight I began to receive communications from the fiend Hawkins!"

  "Communications?" said Holmes. "How so?"

  "There. On the desk."

  Holmes reached over and opened an ornately carven, lacquered box, removing a sheaf of papers. He glanced at them briefly and gave them to me.

  "What do you make of them, Watson?"

  "I cannot read the writing. The paper is an Oriental rice-paper. The penmanship shows the author to be under considerable mental strain, perhaps intoxicated. Notice the frequent scratchings and blottings. Beyond that, I can make out nothing."

  Sir Humphrey spoke. "The language is an archaic—some would say degenerate—form of Burmese, the script a kind of code used by criminals in the Far East. Between these two elements, I am perhaps the only living man who can read what is written here, for Wendall Hawkins is not alive, if his words are to be believed."

  "Surely if he is dead," said Holmes, "your troubles are at an end."

  "No, Mr. Holmes, they are not, for all of these letters were written after Hawkins's death—long after it. It seems that he reached the Plateau of Leng, which I saw only in visions. There the almost sub-human priests of the Chan-Tzo murdered him after what might have been years of indescribable tortures, then brought him back into a kind of half-life as an animate corpse at their command, hideously disfigured, the skin flayed from his face, his heart ripped out, the cavity in his chest filled with inextinguishable fire. He is implacable now, driven both by the will of his masters and his own rage for revenge against me, whom he blames for his unending agony. He knows all the secrets of the Chan-Tzo priests, and the conjuring of death-fetches is easily within his power."

  "He says all that in these letters?" I asked.

  "That and more, Dr. Watson, and if it is true, I am defenseless. My only hope is that Mr. Holmes and yourself can prove me to be deluded, the victim of a hoax perpetrated by the vile Hawkins who has no doubt returned, but returned, I still dare to hope, as no more than a mortal villain. If you can do this, I certainly have the means to reward you handsomely for your services."

  "My services are charged on a fixed scale," said Holmes, "but let us not concern ourselves with the monetary details now. I shall indeed collar this Hawkins for you and unmask his devices—which I am sure would make the tricks of our English spirit mediums child's play in comparison—but they are devices none the less. For what else can they be?"

  "Mr. Holmes, I will be forever in your debt."

  "We shall watch and wait until Hawkins is forced to show his hand. But first, I think Dr. Watson should escort Miss Abigail to a safer place, my own rooms, which I shall not be needing until this affair is concluded." When Thurston's daughter made to protest, Holmes turned to her and said, "You have been a heroine, but now that the battle is actually joined, I think it best that you remove yourself from the field. Will you go with Dr. Watson?"

  "Whatever you say, Mr. Holmes."

  "Splendid. Now I must busy myself examining the house inside and out, to discover any way our enemy might use to gain entrance."

  Thurston picked up the elephant gun and lay it across his lap, then began idly polishing the barrel with a cloth.

  "I've survived five days like this. I think I shall be safe here behind the locked door for a little while longer yet. Your plan makes excellent sense, Mr. Holmes."

  We left Sir Humphrey alone in the r
oom. As Holmes and I escorted Miss Thurston down the stairs, the detective asked me, "Well, Watson, what do you think?"

  "A unique case, Holmes. One worthy of your talents."

  "About Sir Humphrey. What about him?"

  "I judge him to be of fundamentally sound mind, but what superstitious fears he may harbor are being played upon by the murderous Hawkins, who sounds himself to be completely mad."

  "Mad or not, he shall have to manifest himself in a decidedly material form before long, at which point he will be susceptible to capture by mundane means."

  "One thing doesn't fit, Holmes. Who, or what, did we see upon our arrival here? Sir Humphrey hadn't been out of the room."

  "An impostor, possibly a trained actor in league with Hawkins. I agree that all the pieces of the puzzle are not yet in place. But have patience. You know my methods."

  "I am so glad that you and Dr. Watson will help Father," Miss Thurston said softly as we reached the base of the stairs. "You are sent from Heaven, both of you."

  Holmes smiled indulgently. "Not from nearly so far, but we shall do what we can."

  Alas, we could do but little. As we stood there at the base of the stairs and I helped Miss Thurston on with her coat, she turned and chanced to look back up the stairs. Suddenly she screamed.

  "Good God!" I exclaimed.

  Near the top of the stairs was a figure who appeared to be Sir Humphrey, but dressed for the outside, in coat and top hat, as we had seen him before. He could not have gotten past us.

  "You! Stop!" Holmes was already in pursuit, bounding up the steps three at a time.

  The figure moved so swiftly the eye could hardly follow, and soft-footedly. I heard only Holmes's boots pounding on the wooden stairs. Then there came a cry from within the study. Sir Humphrey shouted something in a foreign language, his tone that of abject terror, his words broken off in a gurgling scream. The elephant gun went off with a thunderous roar.

  I left Miss Thurston and hurried up after Holmes. By the time I reached the study door, which was blown apart from the inside as if a cannonball had gone through it, Holmes was inside.

  He rushed out again, his eyes wild, his face bloodless, and he saw Miss Abigail Thurston coming up behind me.

  "For the love of God, Watson! Don't let her in!"

  "Father!" she screamed. "Oh, you must let me pass!"

  For all she struggled, I held her fast.

  "Watson! Do not let her through no matter what happens! It is just . . . too horrible!"

  I think that was the only time I ever saw Sherlock Holmes truly shocked, at a loss for words.

  I forced Miss Thurston back down the stairs despite her vehement protests, holding onto her until the police arrived, which they did shortly, summoned by the neighbors who had heard the screams and the shot. Only after she had been conveyed away in a police wagon, accompanied by a patrolman, was I able to examine the body of Sir Humphrey Thurston, who was indeed murdered, as I had feared.

  Though still seated in his chair, he had been mutilated hideously, almost beyond recognition.

  His throat was cut from ear to ear. That was enough to have killed him. But the flesh had been almost entirely torn away from his face, and a strange series of symbols, like the ones I had seen in the letters, had been carved in the bare bone of his forehead. The crown of his skull had been smashed in by some blunt instrument, and—it revolted me to discover—most of his brain was gone.

  The final detail was the worst, for it had been deliberately designed to mock us. The still smoking elephant gun lay across his lap, and, carefully placed so that it would be reflected in the mirrored surface of the polished gun barrel, was a small jade idol with emerald eyes, a stylized figure of a bat-winged dog.

  "Yes, Holmes," I said, "it is entirely too horrible."

  Dr Watson stopped telling the story, and I, the nineteen-year-old American college student, could only gape at him open-mouthed, like some imbecile, trying not to reach the attractively obvious conclusion that the good doctor's mind had gone soft after so many years. It was a terrible thing, just to entertain such a notion. I almost wept.

  I would have remained there forever, frozen where I sat, wordless, had not Dr. Watson gone on.

  "It was a case which I could not record, which Holmes ordered me to suppress on pain of the dissolution of our friendship. It just didn't work out."

  "Wh-what do you mean, didn't work out?"

  "I mean exactly that. The affair concluded too quickly and ended in abject failure. We accomplished nothing. He would have no more of the matter, the specifics, as he acidly phrased it, being left to the 'official imagination,' which, sure enough, concluded the murder to be the work of a madman or madmen, perhaps directed by a sinister Oriental cult, a new Thuggee. But even the police could not account for the powerful stench of decay which lingered in the explorer's study even long after the body had been removed, as if something long dead had invaded, done its worst, and departed as inexplicably as it had come.

  "Enormous pressure was brought to bear to prevent any accurate reportage in the newspapers, to prevent panic. I think those instructions came from the very highest level. Sir Humphrey's obituary, ironically, listed the cause of his demise as an Asiatic fever. I signed the death certificate to that effect.

  "My own conclusions were profoundly disturbing. The mystery could not be resolved. What we—even Miss Thurston—had witnessed were not merely unlikely, but impossible.

  "'I reject the impossible,' said Holmes vehemently, 'as a matter of policy. Such things cannot be—'

  "'You and I and the girl saw, Holmes. They are.'

  "'No, Watson! No! The irrational has no place in detective work. We must confine ourselves to the tangible and physical, carefully building upon meticulous reason, or else the whole edifice of my life's work crumbles into dust. Against the supernatural, I am helpless, my methods of no use. My methods have been useful in the past, don't you think? And so they shall be in the future, but we must remain within certain bounds, and so preserve them.'"

  Again I, the college boy, was left speechless.

  "Holmes made me swear an oath—and I swore it—never to write up this case—and I never wrote it—"

  Had he, in a sense at least, broken his oath by telling me? I dared not ask. Was there some urgency now, of which had lately become aware?

  "I wanted to tell someone," was all he said. "I thought I should."

  King Midas. Ass's ears. Who will believe the wind in the reeds?

  I merely know that a week after I returned to school in America I received a telegram saying that Dr. Watson had died peacefully of heart failure, sitting in that very chair by the fire. A week later a parcel arrived with a note from one of my aunts, expressing some bewilderment that he had wanted me to have the contents.

  It was the idol of the bat-winged dog.

  The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland

  by Mary Robinette Kowal

  Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of several short stories, including "Evil Robot Monkey," which is a current finalist for the Hugo Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Cosmos, and Escape Pod, and in the anthologies Twenty Epics, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Vol. 2, and Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction. Her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, is forthcoming from Tor Books. Kowal was also the 2008 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and when not writing she works as a professional puppeteer.

  Men are notoriously reluctant to get married, and when you look at the history of weddings, who can blame them? After all, weddings are pretty dangerous places. The marriage of Claudius and Gertrude in Hamlet ends in what can only be termed tragedy. Good night, sweet prince. In fact, good night just about everybody. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a misinformed Sir Lancelot rampages through a wedding party, slaying many, including the best man. And these are small potatoes compared to truly disastrous affairs such as the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre
of 1572, in which a controversial Catholic-Protestant marriage touched off a wave of violence that eventually claimed as many as thirty-thousand lives. Is it any wonder that men stay away? It's simple prudence, really. In Conan Doyle's story "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder," Watson mentions in passing the "shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, which so nearly cost us both our lives." Our next story imagines what this evocatively titled case might have entailed—it involves a naive young woman, a royal couple, a glassblower, and the darker side of Italian politics. And oh yes, also a wedding.