I turned around, and Holmes was gone.
I was in the blackness of a dungeon, cold rock under my feet. By the taste of the air, the smell of horror and damp, I knew I was in the Nightmare Realm somewhere, and I knew there was evil close-by. Peter darted up beside me, his face grim in the tiny glow shed by Ten Stars – goodness knows where she’d come from – and his knife in his hand. “Did they get him?” he whispered. “The Black Knights. They’re everywhere...”
I shook my head, grieving and very frightened, at least in part because I suspected that Peter did not hold the power here in these realms that he had in the kindlier skerries of dreams. “He can’t come through,” I whispered. “He doesn’t remember the way. Mr. Holmes!” I called, as loudly as I dared. “Mr. Holmes, just close your eyes! Walk forward!”
We stood for what felt like an eternity – what could have been eternity, I was well aware, for this realm was neither in the real world nor the Neverlands themselves, like a pocket of darkness in the curtain that separates them. An old pocket, filled with the smell of things that belong in no child’s dreams.
“Holmes!” Peter cried, a little louder, and somewhere in the dark behind us, I heard the soft, deadly whisper of metal on metal, the distant clicking of machinery, like a dozen vile clocks.
I kept my voice steady with an effort. “Mr. Holmes,” I said. “Mr. Holmes, if you can hear me... What was the first song you learned to play?”
I listened hard in the darkness, in my mind and my heart, but heard nothing from him.
Peter whispered, “It was this one.” He took from his pocket (the only pocket he had, hanging from the belt where he carried his knife) his pipes, and played: it was an Irish tune, that I’d heard Mr. Holmes weave into fantasias of melody on his violin. Yet it was very simple, the kind of thing a boy might whistle, when he’s been locked in his room for seeing too clearly, and for making deductions about his elders from what he sees.
Behind us the clicking grew louder, and by the glow of Ten Stars’ fairy-light I could see them, at the far end of the corridor. Four Black Knights, towering and identical. Faceless, as Holmes had said, only through their helmets’ visors I could see the cold glitter of something moving steadily, mechanically. Peter’s eyes widened, but he kept playing, playing as he and I slowly backed from them, until we reached the wall at the end of the corridor, trapped by that pocket of blackness. The lead knight raised its hand, and I could see that instead of a hand it had glittering steel blades coming straight out of its wrist, blades that whacked back and forth like saw-toothed scissors.
In panic, in despair, my adult self somewhere in dreaming cried, John–!
Then Holmes was beside us, stepping out of what looked like a pocket of still-deeper blackness by the wall. Ten Stars flickered, dove about him as he dropped the heavy carpet-bag, dug from it a second electromagnetic rod. “We’ll only have current for a moment,” he warned as he handed it to Peter. “Mary, when I yell Now—”
“–throw the switch,” I finished, because there was a switch among the neat maze of wires and batteries visible in the bag. “Is it a magnet?” I called after them, as they went striding, gray-clothed man and green-clothed boy, trailing wires down the corridor toward those faceless dark shapes, those whirling blades. The corridor was narrow, the Black Knights crowded one another, jostling, two behind two as they lifted their deadly slashing hands.
Holmes said, “Absolutely,” and lunged like d’Artagnan, thrusting the rod into the center of the metal attacker’s breastplate at the same instant that Peter thrust his. “Now!”
There was a blazing shower of white sparks, a flash of lightning when whatever was still trying to power the clockwork mechanism of the attacking knights imploded as metal fused to metal. The second pair of knights, running into the first pair, magnetized from them and also froze in a shower of blue sparks.
Peter’s eyes shone blue and wild, brighter than the lightning with delight. “Super!” he breathed.
The Black Knights completely blocked the corridor, so Peter put his shoulder to the nearest one, sending all four crashing. “That tears it,” said Holmes, kneeling to wrap up his electrical rods and batteries. “We must find Bobbie and flee, for Nightcrow will come, and he won’t make the mistake again, of using the technology of the real world in this realm.”
Peter whispered confidently, “This way.”
We found the boy Bobbie Lewensham in a stone cell, its barred door standing open to the dank blackness of the corridor. His head was pillowed on his rolled-up blue coat and his little blue cap; he was profoundly asleep. Holmes tried to wake him, and then Peter, to no avail. I stood looking down at that thin, peaky-looking little face – he was very young, no older than John Darling. What is it that you were fleeing, Bobbie, that opened your heart so fully to the realm of dreams? ‘Bobbie never visits anywhere,’ Peter had said. ‘When he’s at home, he’s alone...’
Alone with at least one person who knew or guessed about the Neverlands, and knew where to hire a kidnapper who would hide him in the other world forever.
“He’s been drugged.” Holmes scooped the boy up in his arms as if he were a kitten. “Drugged or a spell. Peter, listen. Can you keep him in the Neverlands with you for another two days? It will take me that long to find the man who hired Krähnacht – Nightcrow – and make sure he’s not in a position to make a second attempt on the boy.”
“He’ll be safe with me.” Peter inclined his head like a young king. He always liked to turn orders or suggestions around so that they were actually his idea.
And behind us, the barred door clanged.
We all whirled. And there he stood in the corridor, the nightmare wizard Nightcrow: a chubby gray-bearded man in the sort of tweeds you see hikers wear in the countryside – he had, of course, been in Yorkshire. And behind his spectacles, the coldest blue eyes I had ever seen.
“A mortal man,” he said thoughtfully, regarding Holmes with those awful eyes. “A dream-child—” He looked at me, as if I were a butterfly in a net who’d make an interesting addition to some tray in a library. “And...” He looked at Peter. “And what have we here?”
“We have here your doom, Nightcrow!” trumpeted Peter, striding to the bars. “I am Peter Pan, and I have come here armed with spells for your destruction! Holmes, play your magic flute!”
“Holmes?” Nightcrow’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows ascended; he wasn’t in the least disconcerted. “So old Wylcourt’s hired occultists have given up trying to find the Gate I opened, and he’s hired Mr. Sherlock Holmes, eh? Now, that is a piece of news.”
Holmes laid Bobbie back on the stone bench where we’d found him, said coldly, “I have nothing to say to you, Herr Krähnacht , except that I advise you to flee as fast as you can. For you are indeed doomed.” Then, when Nightcrow only folded his arms with the air of a man expecting to see an interesting show in complete safety, Holmes sat down on the edge of the bench, turned his back on Nightcrow, took his flute from his pocket, and began to play the air from Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major. Peter flung up his arms, uttered a long wailing “Oooo-oo-ooo-ah-ah-ah-ooo-ooo-ooo,” and began to chant a string of nonsense syllables, coils of fairy-light (courtesy of Ten Stars, hiding prudently behind his back) ribboning from his outstretched fingers.
I realized what was going on, and began to hop around Peter in the best imitation I could contrive of my friend Delphine Tremlow’s Ancient Grecian Dances that she teaches shop-girls.
“Fascinating,” Nightcrow murmured, not disconcerted in the least. “You can’t do a thing to me, you know. We are neither in reality nor the dream world, and this enclave has its own laws. I look forward, Holmes, to observing you here over the next several years. As for Peter Pan – the Peter Pan – Well! I have a number of experiments I am eager to try—”
“Silence, fiend.” Peter paused in his chanting. “I am weaving your Doom.”
“I await it,” smiled Nightcrow sarcastically, “with bated breath. I’ve heard about you
, of course – Did you come because young Viscount Mure was calling for you? He did, you know. For years now I’ve sought the secrets that lie within the realm of Dreaming, and now they’re within my grasp. My dear young lady, I hope your parents...”
At that point, summoned by Holmes’s piping, the terrible Gallipoot emerged from the darkness behind Nightcrow in a rush of sulfur stench and the wailing of a thousand chewed-up fragments of souls, and devoured him down to the last morsel. When the Thing Cold and Empty rolled, surged, oozed away down the corridor and vanished once again, all that was left of Nightcrow was his spectacles, his watch, and the key to the cell, lying on the stone floor a few inches outside the bars, in a puddle of Gallipoot slime.
“You did tell him to run away,” said Peter, in a satisfied voice. He knelt to retrieve the key. “Grownups never listen, do they?”
“Never,” lamented Holmes.
*
There is a crossroads on the borders of the ocean of sleep, a tiny islet of rock and sand in the vast archipelagoes of the Neverland that stretch into eternity, and from there I could see, far away across the darkness, my bedside lamp burning low, and John asleep in a chair beside my bed.
If I turned my head I could see the other way, toward the Neverlands, world after world of forests and rainbows, of mermaid lagoons and pirate ships, of castellated islands and magic horses and caves full of enchanted books. Peter and Bobbie stood hand in hand where the gray arm of the crossroad led in that direction: “I’ll have him back at the stone circle in two days,” said Peter. I guessed that if Peter forgot, the King of Dreams would remind him.
“It was Mr. Gower, you know,” said Bobbie to Holmes. “Mr. Gower’s our business manager – Father’s, I mean. I never liked him – he was always asking questions about the fairies, and the Neverlands. When I came back through at the stone circle last time, he was there, he and Nightcrow...”
“He shall be dealt with,” promised Holmes, with grim quiet. “He will be gone, by the time you return.”
“If we see the King of Dreams,” said Bobbie, “I’ll tell him you’ve taken care of the problem.”
“You’re sure you won’t come with us?” asked Peter, looking up at Holmes. “Your tree’s still there, and Old Chief Walking Wolf would love to see you again.”
Holmes smiled, and shook his head. “I have to go deal with Mr. Gower,” he said. “To make sure that the Neverlands will still be open, the next time Bobbie – or your friends Wendy and John and Michael – wish to come through. But do indeed give my regards to the Chief, and to Melegriance the White Wizard, and to the Evil Queen of the Night Island, and all the others. And thank you.” He held out his hand, and Peter shook it, very man-to-man.
Peter said, “Any time,” though Holmes and I both knew how quickly he would forget.
After Peter and Bobbie had gone, I asked softly, “Were you one of Peter’s Lost Boys?”
Holmes gave me a sidelong look. “Certainly not. How would I have come to be Lost in the Neverlands?”
“How does anyone?” I asked. “Will you be able to get rid of this Mr. Gower when you get back? He’s obviously studied occult matters, the same as you have, to guess about Bobbie and the stone-circle and the fairies and the Neverlands, and to know to hire Mr. Krähnacht . If he’s their business manager, must he not have been speculating with the Earl’s money, while the old Earl’s been sick? That’s why he wanted to hide Bobbie in another world – so no one would find a body. It would be years before he’d have to be accountable for money he’d lost.”
Holmes smiled down at me. “I see you’ve grasped my methods, Mary. Since the matter is one of financial peculation, it should be easy enough to bring home to him, and to put him out of the way. Even had I not spoken to Bobbie, the culprit would have been simple to find. Quite elementary, my dear...”
The word stopped on his lips, and his face changed, in the starry twilight of that crossroads, as he recognized me at last. First enlightened, then filled with a rush of comprehension, as he understood at last why I had come to be so free within the Neverlands, followed by pity and grief. And it seemed to me that I no longer looked up so far at him, though as I’ve said he was always far taller than I. But it seemed to me that I was as he saw me, not my child self, nor even the woman I’d been when first we’d met, but a gaunt and shorn-haired invalid in the final stages of consumption.
“My dear.” He put out his hand, and where once it had felt cold against the healthy heat of my child-hand in dreaming, now his was the warm one.
“Don’t worry,” I said gently. “I’ll be returning to John, at least for a short while.”
In his face I saw his knowledge, of how short that time would be.
“Take care of him,” I said, simple and matter-of-fact.
“Of course.”
“It’s been good to have an adventure with you,” I said. “I always wanted to. They never let girls.”
Holmes opened his mouth to reply – almost certainly with some sentence beginning, The female of the species... then thought about the words, and closed it again. At length he said, “That has been my loss.”
We were silent, on that crossroads island, the dark bridge that led back toward my own room – and to Baker Street, for him – disappearing into the star-sprinkled gloom before our feet. In the other direction I could still see the Neverlands, sparkling in sunlight and joy.
Holmes asked, “Will you be all right?”
“Oh, yes. Peter will look after me, and go with me the first part of the way. It is the one thing he always does.”
He nodded, knowing this to be true. “Until we meet again, then, Mary.”
And we went our separate ways.
About the Author
Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.
A lifelong fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, over the years Hambly has been asked to contribute to a number of Holmes anthologies. When the character went into public domain, she added these stories to her collection.
Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.
Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.
She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.
***
Other Sherlock Holmes stories by Barbara Hambly, available on Smashwords:
The Dollmaker of Marigold Walk (narrated by Mrs. Watson)
The Adventure of the Sinister Chinaman (narrated by Dr. Watson)
The Adventure of the Antiquarian’s Niece (narrated by Dr. Watson - this story was written for an anthology of Sherlock Holmes in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos)
Sherlock Holmes - Adventure of the Lost Boy Page 3
