The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by edited by John Joseph Adams

  Then the darkness swallowed the altar, and where a moment before I could see the old man writhing there I could see only churning darkness, while a hideous fetor of blood and death rolled up from the pit, nearly making me faint. "Before the Five Hundred," cried Colby . . . then he staggered suddenly, nearly dropping the skull he held. "Before the Five Hundred . . . ."

  He gasped, as if struggling to speak. The thing upon the altar lifted its hooded head, and in the sudden silence the dreadful lapping sound of the deeper darkness seemed to fill the unholy place, and the far-off answering echo of the now-silenced pipes.

  Then with a cry Colby fell to his knees, the skull slipping from his hands. He choked, grasping for it, and from the darkness of the stair behind him another form darted forward, small and slim, and stooped to snatch up the talisman skull of the terrible ancestor who had ruled this place.

  "Ygnaiih, ygnaiih Yog-Sothoth!" cried a woman's voice, high and powerful, filling the hideous chamber, and the darkness that had surged forward toward her seemed for a moment to close in as it had closed around the old man on the altar, then to fall back. By the queer, actinic luminosity of the skull I could see the woman's face, and recognized her as Judith Delapore, niece and granddaughter of the madmen who ruled Depewatch. Yet how different from the sweet countenance painted on Colby's miniature! Like the ivory mask of a goddess, cold and lined with concentration, she bent her eyes on the heaving swirl of nightmare that surrounded her, not even glancing at her lover, who lay gasping, twisting in convulsions at her feet. In a high, hard voice she repeated the dreadful words of the incantations, and neither flinched nor wavered as the dreadful things flittered and crawled and bounced in the darkness.

  Only when the hideous rite was ended, and the unspeakable congregation had trickled away through the blasphemous angle of the inner walls, did the young woman lower the skull she held. She stood in her black gown, outlined in the gleam of the niter on the walls, staring into the abyss from which those dreadful unhuman things had come, barely seeming to notice me as I stumbled and staggered down the last of the stairs.

  Of the old man's body that had lain upon the altar nothing whatsoever remained. A thick layer of slime covered the stone and ran down onto the floor, which was perhaps half an inch deep in a brownish liquid that glistened in the feeble blue gleam of the niter. Having seen Burnwell Colby engulfed by that wriggling darkness I staggered to where he had lain with some confused idea of helping him, but as I dropped to my knees I saw that only a lumpy mass of half-dissolved flesh and bones remained. The bones themselves had the appearance of being charred, almost melted. I looked up in horror at the woman with the skull and her eyes met mine, clear golden hazel, like other eyes I could not quite recall. Her eyes widened and filled with anger and hate:

  "You," she whispered. "So you did not take him after all?"

  I only shook my head, her words making no sense to me in my shaken state, and she went on, "As you have seen, Uncle, it is I, now, and not Grandfather—Grandfather who has not existed for over fifty years—who rules now here." And to my horror she held out her hand toward that hideously anomalous angle of the walls where the darkness lay waiting. "Y'bfnk—ng'haiie . . . ."

  I cried out. At the same instant light blazed up on the stairway that led to the upper and innocent realms of the ignorant world: blue-white incandescence, like lightning, and the crackle of ozone filled the reeking air.

  "My dear Miss Delapore," said Holmes, "if you will pardon my interruption, I fear you are laboring under a misapprehension." He came down the last of the stair, bearing in one hand a metal rod, from which a flickering corona of electricity seemed to sparkle, flowing back to a similar rod held up by Carnaki, who followed him down the stair. Carnaki wore a sort of pack or rucksack upon his back, of the kind one sees porters in Constantinople carrying; a dozen wires joined it to the rod in his hand, and lightnings leaped from that rod to Holmes', seeming to surround the two men in a deadly nimbus of light. The cold glare blanched all color from his face, so that his eyebrows stood out nearly black, like a man who has received a mortal blow and bleeds within.

  Looking down at me he asked, as if we shared a cup of tea at Baker Street, "What was your wife's favorite flower?"

  Miss Delapore, startled, opened her mouth to speak, but I cried in a convulsion of grief: "How can you ask that, Holmes? How can you speak of my Mary in this place, after what we have seen? Her life was all goodness, all joy, and it was for nothing, do you understand? If this—this blasphemy—this monstrous abyss underlies all of our world, how can any good, any joy exist in safety? It is a mockery—love, care, tenderness . . . it means nothing, and we are all fools for believing in any of it . . . ."

  "Watson!" thundered Holmes, and again Miss Delapore turned her eyes to him in astonishment.

  "Watson?" she whispered.

  His gaze held mine, and he asked again: "What was Mrs. Watson's favorite flower?"

  "Lily of the valley," I said, and buried my face in my hands. Even as I did so I saw—such was the horror and strangeness of my dream—that they were the hands of an elderly man, thin and twisted with arthritis, and the wedding-band that I had never ceased to wear with my Mary's death was gone. "But none of it matters now, nor ever will again, knowing what I now know of the true nature of this world."

  Through my weeping I heard Carnaki say softly, "We'll have to switch off the electrical field. I don't think we can get him up the stairs."

  "You will be safe," said Miss Delapore's voice. "I command Them now—as did my grandfather, or the thing that for so many years passed itself off as my grandfather. I knew his goal—its goal—was to take over Burnwell's body, as it had taken over my grandfather's fifty years ago. He despised my uncle, as he despised my father, and as he despised me as a woman, thinking us all too weak to withstand the power raised by the Rite of the Book of Eibon. Why else did he bring me home from school, save to lure that poor American to his fate?"

  "With a letter blotted with tears," said Holmes drily. "Even in the margins, and the blank upper portion by the address. Hardly the places where a girl's tears would fall while writing, but it's difficult to keep drops from spattering there when they're dipped from a bedroom pitcher with the fingers."

  "Had I not written that letter," she replied, "it would be I, not Grandfather, who was given to the Hooded One tonight. At least by luring Burnwell to me I was able to give him poison—brown spider-mushroom, that does not take effect for many days. Grandfather would have had him, one way or another—he does not give up easily."

  "And was it you who sent for him, to meet your grandfather in Brighton?"

  "No. But I knew it would come. When Grandfather—when Lord Rupert's vampire spirit—entered poor Burnwell's body, that body was already dying, though none knew it but I. I knew Uncle Carstairs had mastered the technique too, of crossing from body to body—I assume it is you who were his target, and not your friend."

  "Even so," said Holmes, and his voice was quiet and bitterly cold. "He underestimated me—and both underestimated you, it seems."

  And there was the smallest touch of defiance in her voice as she replied, "Men do. Yourself included, it seems."

  The snapping hiss of the electricity ceased. I opened my eyes to see them kneeling around me, in the horror of that nighted cavern: Holmes and Carnaki, holding their electrical rods to either of my hands, and Miss Delapore looking into my eyes. Somehow despite the darkness I could see her clearly, could see into her golden eyes, as one can in dreams. What she said to me I do not remember, lost as it was in the shock and cold when Carnaki touched the switch . . . .

  I opened my eyes to summer morning. My head ached; when I brought my hand up to touch it, I saw that my wrists were bruised and chafed, as if I had been bound. "You were off your head for much of the night," said Holmes, sitting beside the bed. "We feared you would do yourself an injury—indeed, you gave us great cause for concern."

  I looked around me at the simple wall-paper and white curtai
ns of my bedroom at the Cross of Gold in High Clum. I stammered, "I don't remember what happened . . . ."

  "Fever," said Carnaki, coming into the room with a slender young lady whom I instantly recognized from the miniature Burnwell Colby had showed us as Miss Judith Delapore. "I have never seen so rapid a rise of temperature in so short a time; you must have taken quite a severe chill."

  I shook my head, wondering what it was about Miss Delapore's haggard calm, about her golden-hazel eyes, that filled me with such uneasy horror. "I remember nothing," I said. "Dreams . . . . Your uncle came here, I believe," I added, after Holmes had introduced the young lady. "At least . . . I believe it was your uncle . . . ." Why was I so certain that the wizened, twisted little man who had come to my room—whom I believed had come to my room—yesterday had been Carstairs Delapore? I could recall nothing of what he had said. Only his eyes . . . .

  "It was my uncle," said Miss Delapore, and as I looked at her again I realized that she wore mourning. "You remember nothing of why he came here yesterday? For before he could mention the visit to anyone at the Priory . . . ." And here she glanced across at Holmes; "He fell down the stairs there, and died at the bottom."

  I expressed my horrified condolences, while trying to suppress an inexplicable sense of deepest relief that I somehow associated with dreams I had had while delirious. After inclining her head in thanks, Miss Delapore turned to Holmes, and held out to him a box of stout red cardboard, tied up with string. "As I promised," she said.

  I lay back, overcome again by a terrible exhaustion—as much of the spirit, it seemed, as of the body. While Carnaki prepared a sedative draught for me Holmes walked Miss Delapore out to our mutual parlor, and I heard the outer door open.

  "I have heard much of your deductive abilities, Mr. Holmes," said the young woman's voice, barely heard through the half-open bedroom door. "How did you know that my uncle, who must have come here to take you as my grandfather took Burnwell, had seized upon your friend instead?"

  "There was no deduction necessary, Miss Delapore," said Holmes. "I know Watson—and I know what I have heard of your uncle. Would Carstairs Delapore have come down into danger, to see what he could do for an injured man?"

  "Do not think ill of my family, Mr. Holmes," said Miss Delapore, after a time of silence. "The way which leads down the six thousand stairs cannot be sealed. It must always have a guardian. That is the nature of such things. And it is always easier to find a venal successor who is willing to trade to Them the things They want—the blood They crave—in exchange for gifts and services, than to find one willing to serve a lonely guardianship solely that the world above may remain safe. They feared Lord Rupert—if the thing that all knew as Lord Rupert was in fact not some older spirit still. His bones, buried in the sub-crypt, shall, I hope, prove a barrier that They are unwilling to cross. Now that the skull, which was the talisman that commanded Their favors, is gone, perhaps there will be less temptation among those who study in the house."

  "There is always temptation, Miss Delapore," said Holmes.

  "Get thee behind me, Mr. Holmes," replied the woman's voice, with a touch of silvery amusement far beyond her years. "I saw what that temptation did to my uncle, in his desperate craving to snatch the rule of the things from my grandfather. I saw what my grandfather became. These are things I shall remember, when the time comes to seek a disciple of my own."

  I was drowsing already from Carnaki's draught when Holmes returned to the bedroom. "Did you speak to Colby?" I asked, struggling to keep my eyes open as he went to the table and picked up the red cardboard box. "Is he all right?" For my dreams as to his fate had been foul, terrible, and equivocal. "Warn him . . . prevent the old Viscount from doing harm?"

  Holmes hesitated for a long time, looking down at me with a concern that I did not quite understand in his eyes. "I did," he replied at length. "To such effect that Viscount Gaius has disappeared from the district—for good, one hopes. But as for Burnwell, he too has . . . departed. I fear that Miss Delapore is destined to lead a rather difficult and lonely life."

  He glanced across at Carnaki, who was packing up what appeared to be an electrical battery and an array of steel rods and wires into a rucksack, the purpose of which I could not imagine. Their eyes met. Then Carnaki nodded, very slightly, as if approving what Holmes had said.

  "Because of what was revealed," I asked, stifling a terrible yawn, "about this . . . this blackmail that was being practiced? The young hound, to desert a young lady like that." My eyelids slipped closed. I fought them open again, seized by sudden panic, by the terror that I might slide into sleep and find myself again in that dreadful abyss, watching the horrible things that fluttered and crept from those angles of darkness that should not have been there. "Did you learn . . . anything of these studies they practiced?"

  "Indeed we did," said Carnaki. And then, a little airily, "There was nothing in them, though."

  "What did Miss Delapore bring you, then?"

  "Merely a memento of the case," said Holmes. "As for young Mr. Colby, do not be too hard on him, Watson. He did the best he could, as do we all. I am not sure that he would have been entirely happy with Miss Delapore in any event. She was . . . much the stronger of the two."

  Holmes never did elucidate for me the means by which he bridged the gap between his supposition that Viscount Delapore was engaged in kidnapping children for the purposes of some vile cult centered in Depewatch Priory, and evidence sufficient to make that evil man flee the country. If he and Carnaki found such evidence at the Priory—which I assume was the reason he had asked the young antiquarian to accompany us to Shropshire—he did not speak to me of it. Indeed, he showed a great reluctance to refer to the case at all.

  For this I was grateful. The effects of the fever I had caught were slow to leave me, and even as much as three years later I found myself prey to the sense that I had learned—and mercifully forgotten—something that would utterly destroy all my sense of what the world is and should be; that would make either life or sanity impossible, if it should turn out to be true.

  Only once did Holmes mention the affair, some years later, during a conversation on Freud's theories of insanity, when he spoke in passing of the old Viscount Delapore's conviction—evidently held by others in what is now termed a folie à deux—that the old man had in fact been the reincarnated or astrally transposed spirit of Lord Rupert Grimsley, once Lord of Depewatch Priory. And then he spoke circumspectly, watching me, as if he feared to wake my old dreams again and cause me many sleepless nights.

  I can only be sorry that the case ended without firm conclusion, for it did, as Holmes promised me that night on the Embankment, show me unsuspected colors in the spectrum of human mentality and human existence. Yet this was not an unmixed blessing. For though I know that my fever-dream was no more than that—a fantastic hallucination brought on by illness and by Carnaki's own curious monomania about otherworld cults and ancient writings—sometimes in the shadowland between sleep and waking I think of that terrible blue-lit abyss that lies beneath an old Priory on the borders of Wales, and imagine that I hear the eerie piping of chaos rising up out of blasphemous angles of night. And in my dreams I see again the enigmatic Miss Delapore, standing before the chittering congregation of nightmares, holding aloft in her hands the skull of Lord Rupert Grimsley: the skull that now reposes in a corner of Holmes' room, wrapped in its red cardboard box.

  Dynamics of a Hanging

  by Tony Pi

  Tony Pi has a Ph.D. in Linguistics and currently works as an administrator at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. At the time of this writing, he is a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. His work has appeared in (or is forthcoming from) Abyss & Apex, On Spec, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the anthologies Ages of Wonder, Cinema Spec, and Writers of the Future XXIII. He is currently working on a novel manuscript about the shapeshifters who first appeared in his story "Metamorphoses in Amber," which was a finalist for
the Prix Aurora Award.

  Most people know Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Dodgson became good friends with the family of one of his academic colleagues, the Liddells, and would often take their children along with him when he went rowing on the nearby rivers. During these expeditions he would make up fanciful tales to entertain the children, and one of the girls, Alice, was so enchanted that she begged Dodgson to write it all down. The enthusiastic reception for the manuscript by fantasy author George MacDonald and his children convinced Dodgson to pursue publication. Dodgson's private life has been the subject of intense speculation, especially regarding his relationship with the Liddells. (Dodgson's family apparently destroyed several pages of his diary, presumably to protect his reputation.) We know that he was tormented by feelings of guilt and shame, which apparently restrained him from following his father into the priesthood. It's all very mysterious. One thing that's beyond any doubt though is that Dodgson demonstrated brilliance in many different fields. Notably, he held a lectureship in mathematics, and wrote books on logic. It's those abilities that he puts to good use in our next adventure.