Encounters of Sherlock Holmes

by George Mann

  It had been a far more enjoyable evening that I had expected and really, Doctor, I am only telling you about it now in order to prove that I am taking seriously your exhortations that I should relax during my northern sojourn and do my level best to let down my hair.

  This morning we are in disarray. My head and that of my sister are both pounding with the echoes of queer music. Nellie has made several large pots of tea to help us stir ourselves. Uppermost in my mind is the needling impression left upon me by that grotesque hostess, Mrs Claus. During our unexpectedly energetic dancing, I caught her watching us once or twice, through the crowd. She even had the nerve to waggle her fat fingers at me.

  Also—and I haven’t breathed a word of this to Nellie, of course —I happened to glimpse a poster advertising the very thing that you and Himself have asked me to watch out for.

  In the ladies’ lavatory there was a garish notice for An Extravaganza of Exorcism to be held at the Christmas Hotel. It’s on every Tuesday night, apparently.

  Yours,

  Mrs Hudson

  * * *

  Dear Dr Watson,

  It was evening before Nellie and I ventured out again and, in nostalgic vein, Nellie wanted to reminisce about our distant shared childhood in the Borders. I have no interest in looking back at a time when I was small, helpless and at the mercy of neglectful parents, and I can’t see why she would care to dwell on such times when folk would call out names and throw rocks at her in the street. But my sister seems depressed and sunk into herself. Her flesh appears to hang off her distorted skeleton and her spirit is out of sorts, and so I indulged her for a portion of the evening, roving stiffly over old times. I also made half a dozen discreet enquiries about her health and state of mind, but about both my sister has not been forthcoming, poor mite.

  Gabbling about a childhood expunged of all distressing details, she led me through the harbour and there we found a crowd gathered around a certain whaling vessel at the jetty. There was a flurry of excitement and kerfuffle going on as the ship docked and naturally we paused to see what was occurring. Nellie pointed to the cause of all the over-stimulation and it turned out to be a dark, dripping, unidentifiable carcass that was being roped into a harness on the deck of the ship. The sailors had brought something horrid out of the freezing sea. Some multi-limbed monstrosity that sent shivers through each of the observers, none of whom had seen anything like it.

  We wandered to the swing bridge over the harbour and, standing downwind of its evil, brackish stench, we watched as the nasty thing was hauled aloft. I stared straight into its monstrous and sightless eyes.

  And how do I explain this without sounding like a raging loon? Ach, Dr Watson. You will think that no more than two days away from Baker Street has turned me into a silly woman. For: I looked into the eyes of that beast. Eyes as large as side plates they were, and I felt I could see whole galaxies expand in their swirling depths. I saw stars blooming and worlds colliding and time telescoping into nothingness. I felt the whole of the future and past were laid out before me as I stood there on the bridge in the middle of that town, with the turbid North Sea all chilly around me. I experienced a small thrill of excitement, I have to say

  All of that I saw in the queer cephalopod’s eyes.

  Anyhow, then we had a very pleasant fish supper. Much, much better than the rubbish we get in London. I hope you and Himself are having a pleasant week, Doctor, and that there have been no untoward investigations thrust upon the two of you. You know how I fret. Tomorrow is Tuesday, as you know, and I shall be attending the Extravaganza of Exorcisms, just to see what it is like. I will report forthwith.

  Yours,

  Mrs Hudson

  Dear Dr Watson,

  Oh by jingo.

  Why on earth did you ask me to go there? Why not leave a poor woman alone to potter about at the seaside and enjoy old ladyish things? Why make me undertake a mission of this nature?

  I wish I had never gone.

  Nellie is upstairs in her bed. It’s past one in the morning. She’s whimpering in her sleep, I can hear it through the floorboards. I’m just praying that she won’t be permanently damaged by what she has been through tonight.

  I’ll tell you what it was. It was cruel, is what it was. It was shameful cruelty on the part of that woman and I blame myself. More than you and Himself, I blame myself, for letting my poor sister come along to the Christmas Hotel with me this evening.

  But how was I to know?

  I mean, with things of this sort, you expect them to be a den of charlatans, don’t you? There’s nothing in it, is there? All that table-rapping. Spirit-world mumbo jumbo. Why, I recall several occasions when you yourself and Himself have been called out on cases complicated by the carryings-on of fakers of psychic phenomena. I had assumed that much the same would be going on at the jamboree held at the Christmas Hotel and, indeed, when we first went in, it did seem like a fairly innocuous affair: a kind of bazaar for the feebleminded. There were gypsies everywhere, reading palms in tents and at tables; there were Arabs and Jews and Chinese flogging their exotic wares; there were foreign folk consulting crystals and scrying mirrors and all types of occult artefacts. The very air was singing with the mystical mumblings of the fey folk crowded into the hotel’s public rooms.

  It was for the demonstrations of exorcisms that we were there, however, as you well know, Dr Watson. I guided my lumpen and somewhat sullen sister in the direction of the ballroom and there we were witness to a most peculiar performance. He was rather like a magician on that stage, with his assistant in a glamorous, beruffled frock. Denise and Wheatley, they were billed as, and, when they got going with a volunteer from the audience, I saw that it was the female Denise who took the lead. She was the one shouting and exhorting the devil to hie himself out of the volunteer elf. Mr Wheatley simply stood to one side, mumbling verses from a black-bound Old Testament and casting worried sideways glances at the supposedly possessed young man who then started vomiting on the stage.

  It was a revolting spectacle, but my sister was enthralled. When I turned to tell her that I thought we had seen enough, I was startled to see that Nellie had an avid expression on her face. Her whole, twisted body was rigid and on the very point of surging forward through that crowd. “N- Nellie...?” I asked.

  She looked at me and I saw a light in her eyes that I had never seen before. A wicked light, I thought.

  We were interrupted then by the next act. Denise and Wheatley had apparently been successful in de-demonising the vomiting elf, and were replaced by a formidably ancient Romany woman with jet-black hair and dressed in hooped satin skirts. She was hard-faced and sinister and she appeared to be slipping into a trance.

  “There are devils amongst us,” she intoned, in a curious accent. “Beelzebub walks amongst us.”

  I turned to my sister to make a dry and jocular remark and was startled to find that Nellie had gone. She had slipped neatly through the press of bodies and was hauling herself onto the stage area. There was a roar of approval from the crowd.

  “He is in me!” Nellie declared. She held out her arms and faced us, with a beatific smile upon her usually rather miserable-looking and crumpled face. “The devil is inside me! He has always been inside me! I have always been his plaything!”

  The applause grew wilder, as if my unfortunate sister had won the approval of her fellow townsfolk; as if she were confirming the truth of something they had always suspected about her.

  There was a string of words stuck in my throat. I tried repeatedly to shout them out at the stage, but they wouldn’t come. I was suspended in horror, jostled in the crowd and helpless.

  Now the Romany woman was laying her coarse, dirty hands on my sister and chanting some very strange verses indeed. I watched as Nellie went stiff as a board and started to froth at the mouth. That made me sick to the pit of my stomach. I could feel the Seafood Surprise from our early dinner start to rise in my gorge.

  The gypsy woman’s chanting was reaching
a crescendo. I could have sworn I saw Nellie’s eyes roll back and turn red.

  Then there was a round of applause and it was over. Nellie was helped down from the stage and she was smiling shyly and nodding, acknowledging the applause. She wandered back through the crowd towards me.

  On the stage the Romany exorcist flung up her arms and said, “The demon is powerfully strong! He will not leave this woman so easily. Nor will he leave any of you. All of you must buy...” And here she produced a pink jar of some kind of snake oil that she insisted we must all queue up and buy for four guineas a pop. Well, I was having none of it, and practically dragged my still-shaking and frothy-mouthed sister home.

  So—thank you, indeed, Dr Watson. As if you even needed Nellie and I to investigate those charlatans at the Christmas Hotel. Naturally they are fakers. We knew that even before attending this macabre charade. But Nellie needn’t have been frightened out of her wits in aid of your pursuit of knowledge. I wish you had never read those accounts in the first place, of the miraculous and mysterious events reported here in Whitby. I don’t know why a sensible man such as yourself would have been at all bothered in the first place.

  Yours,

  Mrs Hudson

  * * *

  Dear Dr Watson,

  This morning my poor sister was no better. She has gone a very odd colour indeed. Her usual hue isn’t all that healthy looking, but this is downright alarming. I asked her if there was anything I could do for her.

  “Maude will know,” she said, tremulously. “Fetch Maude.”

  Well, it turns out her friend Maude Sturgeon lives down by the docks and she is what used to be called a local wise woman. Actually, there is a whole family of wise women, as it turns out, and these sisters occupy a tall house not far from the harbour. Downstairs it is a kind of herbalist shop—reeking of spices and curious unguents. I cast my eye around with some interest at the things they had on display. But I was there on a mission. “Maude will be able to help me,” Nellie had insisted.

  Now I was confronting the formidable Maude Sturgeon herself, in her witchy emporium. She listened disapprovingly as I described the previous evening’s events. She seemed to take a very dim view of anything that went on at the Christmas Hotel.

  “There’s always someone dabbling with dark forces and things they should know better about,” said Maude gruffly. She was more like a schoolmarm than a witch, I thought, in her plain grey suit and her steel-grey hair pinned up like so. It was reassuring to be in the presence of her stolid good sense. She asked me to come and sit in their parlour, where I found three of her rather more fey sisters engaged in a very odd task indeed.

  Maude was fetching her shawl off the hat stand. “Oh, don’t mind them,” she told me. “They’re stuffing it for the Whitby museum.”

  I looked harder and realised that the slippery dark thing they were all sewing wasn’t some svelte garment after all. It was the gutted remains of the monstrous sea beast that had been landed yesterday. Those witchy sisters appraised me as they went on stitching, and I was very careful not to look into the behemoth’s eyes again.

  Then Maude was ready and I was glad to get out of the fishy smell of that back parlour. The wise woman led the way through the narrow streets towards Nellie’s house, pausing on the way to buy her a fancy cake from a favoured bakery.

  “How long have you been friends with my sister?” I asked conversationally.

  “Ever since she’s been here,” said Maude, beaming brightly and brandishing her walking stick as we passed familiar faces. “Your sister has proved quite a reliable helper on a number of my more terrifying investigations and adventures here in Whitby.”

  Well, of course, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Our Nellie? Having adventures? Involved in investigations? Helping out a personage such as this Maude? For a second I experienced a slight dizziness. Did everyone I know get themselves involved in curious adventures behind my very back?

  “Do you mean... crimes?” I asked, lowering my voice as we came within sight of Nellie’s cottage.

  “Crimes, indeed—” Maude nodded “—also supernatural and unexplained phenomena of all kinds. Whitby seems to be a kind of magnet for occult and devilish practices, schemes and unholy beings, y’know.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes—” Maude sniffed, giving me a very dark look indeed as I fumbled for my keys to Nellie’s house “—it’s to do with the presence of an interstitial dimensional gateway known as the Bitch’s Maw in the grounds of the old Abbey, you see. A kind of gateway into hell. Very nasty indeed.”

  I’m afraid my mouth dropped open at her words and I busied myself with letting us into the cottage, which smelled reassuringly of newly brewed coffee and fresh wood smoke. Convinced I was bringing a raging lunatic to the rescue, I was delighted to see that my sister had risen from her bed. She was shuffling about in the kitchen in her nightie and pouring coffee for us all.

  “I’m so sorry to call you out, Maude,” she said, as her visitor produced the Victoria sponge from her shopping bag. “Ooh, lovely. I’ll fetch plates. No, I thought I’d better call you over, because of this funny do that we had last night at the Exorcism Extravaganza.”

  “You were fools to go to such a thing,” Maude growled, slicing the cake and dolloping wodges of it messily onto dainty china.

  “I know, I couldn’t help myself,” said Nellie. “And we all know these things are about charlatans fleecing the public. But the thing is... I went there because Raphael was worried. He had felt a vibration. There was a genuinely powerful psychic up there at the hotel last night. He could feel them at work. They were malevolent. Harmful. Hiding their wicked selves away amongst the usual fakers. That’s why we were there last night. So I could flush this person out.”

  I sat there with my wedge of cake halfway up to my mouth, staring at my sister. My malformed and shy younger sister, Nellie. Nellie with one eye, a crooked back and a clubfoot. Nellie who would never say boo to a goose. My poor Nellie was sitting there in her nightgown, eating cake for breakfast, and coming out with all of this gobbledegook, easy as you like. And that bullish Maude woman was simply nodding at her. Nodding as if they had little chats like this all the time. Nodding as if they were discussing something entirely reasonable.

  Before they could carry on saying more to uproot my sense of the stability of all things, I broke in, “Erm, who is Raphael?”

  My dear sister Nellie looked at me and I was astonished to see a hint of pity in her single eye. She was pitying me! “Oh dear,” she said. “Well. I suppose needs must. After all these years, I must come clean. I must tell you the truth. After a lifetime of concealment.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Maude. “It’s about time your sister knew the truth.”

  Nellie took a deep breath and looked at me dead in the eye. Both my eyes. With her single one. Which was wincing with pity. She said— in a very calm voice indeed—“You see, Raphael is my inner demon. And my spirit guide. He’s been inside me all my life and he’s been my little secret. And when that dreadful woman tried to exorcise him last night, it gave Raphael quite a turn, I can tell you.”

  I stared at her. I really didn’t know what to say. What does one say, Dr Waston, in circumstances like these?

  Yours,

  Mrs Hudson

  * * *

  Dear Dr Watson,

  I hope both your good self and our mutual friend, Himself, are faring rather better than I am this week. I have been in a whirl of perturbation for several days. Never have I been so steeped in strangeness and such eerie goings-on. Well, it turns out that my malformed sister and her bluff and hearty best friend are very well accustomed to all manner of supernatural things. Things I assumed simply should not be. Being, like our good friend Himself, a creature of rationality and good, plain commonsense, I am having problems. Here in the north I am finding more things in my philosophy—as the Danish prince would say—than I could shake a stick at.

  Today is Thurs
day—honestly, I don’t know where the time is going; I’m passively being led around by my sister, who seems to have a renewed vigour about her, now that she is embroiled in an investigation. I was compelled to attend an unveiling ceremony at the museum in the rather elegant park across the other side of town. This was for the stuffed squid that Maude’s sisters had spent day and night stitching back into some semblance of life. When we arrived for the sherry cocktail reception this evening in that rather musty, dusty municipal establishment, the squid was suspended in a delicate cat’s cradle of silver threads, which gave it the appearance of swimming through the cavernous room. All of the guests—Whitby’s great and good in their finery—stood milling underneath, gazing up at the frozen tentacles and the shiny carapace of its purple skin.

  I nodded politely and smiled as my sister gabbled away at Maude’s sisters, who were attired in suitably witchy—and rather scandalous—gowns for the evening. They smiled demurely and seemed to be the toast of the town. I wandered about the other display cabinets, finding a bewildering selection of mouldering dolls’ houses and ragged bears. There were Valentine’s cards from the previous century; tiny gloves and shoes; stuffed woodland beasts and seabirds. It was a shabby miscellany, I thought, with hardly any rhyme or reason.

  Anyhow, there was a proper ballyhoo when the Mayor of Whitby got up in all his robes and chains and made his speech. He stood on a podium—this oleaginous Mr Danby, as they called him—and chuntered on about their town and its glorious heritage. I was staring into the eyes of the monstrous beast, but its celestial orbs had been replaced, naturally enough, with something less potent. They looked rather like green glass plates and, indeed, Maude leaned in to me and hissed that they were two expensive serving platters she had brought back from a holiday on the island of Murano, near Venice. Oh, my heart leapt up at the mention of Venice, dear Dr Watson. And then I shivered as I recalled some of the deadlier details of our adventure there, last autumn.

  It was just as the Mayor was coming to the end of his windy speech that I noticed something rather odd happening to the suspended squid. One of its attenuated limbs seemed to flex and lash, of its own accord. There was a sharp cry as someone else noticed the same thing. Then, all of a sudden, its other limbs were moving and screams rang out inside the stuffy museum. It was at this point that I noticed it was all due to the wires which suspended the beast: they were snapping, one by one, and the thick, heavy body of the squid was swaying and then galloping about in mid-air. There was such a pandemonium at this, and I felt Nellie grab me by both arms and drag me backwards into the alcove where the ships-in-bottles were tidily arrayed.