The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes II

by Sebastian Wolfe (ed)

  The cadenzas of coloratura are strange things in reverse. As I heard it, the record naturally began with the startling final note which so disheartened Miss Borigian, then went on to those dazzling fioriture which so strengthen the dresser’s charge of time-magic. But in reverse, these seemed like the music of some undiscovered planet, coherent to themselves, following a logic unknown to us and shaping a beauty which only our ignorance prevents us from worshipping.

  And there were words to these flourishes; for almost unique among sopranos, Carina possessed a diction of diabolical clarity. And the words were at first simply Nema . . . nema . . . nema . . .

  It was while the voice was brilliantly repeating this reversed Amen that I became literally beside myself.

  I was standing, naked and chill in the London evening, beside a meticulously composed agglomeration of clothing which parodied the body of Dr. Horace Verner.

  This fragment of clarity lasted only an instant. Then the voice reached the significant words: olan a son arebil des men . . .

  This was the Lord’s Prayer which she was singing. It is common knowledge that there is in all necromancy no charm more potent than that prayer (and most especially in Latin) said backwards. As the last act of her magical malefactions, Carina had left behind her this record, knowing that one of its purchasers would occasionally, by inadvertence, play it backwards, and that then the spell would take effect. It had taken effect now.

  I was in space . . . a space of infinite darkness and moist warmth. The music had departed elsewhere. I was alone in this space and the space itself was alive and by its very moist warm dark life this space was draining from me all that which was my own life. And then there was with me a voice in that space, a voice that cried ever Eem vull! Eem vull! and for all the moaning gasping urgency in that voice I knew it for the voice of Carina.

  I was a young man then. The Bishop’s end must have been swift and merciful. But even I, young and strong, knew that this space desired the final sapping of my life, that my life should be drawn from my body even as my body had been drawn from its shell. So I prayed.

  I was not a man given to prayer in those days. But I knew words which the Church has taught us are pleasing to God, and I prayed with all the fervour of my being for deliverance from this Nightmare Life-in-Death.

  And I stood again naked beside my clothes. I looked at the turntable of the gramophone. The disc was not there.

  Still naked, I walked to the dispensary and mixed myself a sedative before I dared trust my fingers to button my garments. Then I dressed and went out again to the shop of the gramophone merchant. There I bought every copy in his stock of that devil’s Pater Noster and smashed them all before his eyes.

  Ill though I could afford it, even in my relative affluence, I spent the next few weeks in combing London for copies of that recording. One copy, and one only, I preserved, you heard it just now. I had hoped that no more existed . . .

  ‘. . . but obviously,’ Dr. Verner concluded, ‘your Mr. Stambaugh managed to acquire one, God rest his soul . . . and body.’

  I drained my second Drambuie and said, ‘I’m a great admirer of your cousin.’ Dr. Verner looked at me with polite blue inquiry. ‘You find what satisfied you as the truth.’

  ‘Occam’s Razor, dear boy,’ Dr. Verner murmured, associatively stroking his smooth cheeks. ‘The solution accounts economically for every integral fact in the problem.’

  ‘But look,’ I said suddenly. ‘It doesn’t! For once I’ve got you cold. There’s one “integral fact” completely omitted.’

  ‘Which is . . .?’ Dr. Verner cooed.

  ‘You can’t have been the first man that thought of praying in that . . . that space. Certainly the Bishop must have.’

  For a moment Dr. Horace Verner was silent. Then he fixed me with the Dear-boy-how-idiotic! twinkle. ‘But only I,’ he announced tranquilly, ‘had realized that in that . . . space all sound, like the Our Father itself, was reversed. The voice cried ever Eem vulll and what is that phonetically but Love me! backwards? Only my prayer was effective, because only I had the foresight to pray in reverse phonetics.’

  I phoned Abrahams to say I had an idea and could I do some checking in the Stambaugh apartment?

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I have an idea too. Meet you there in a half-hour.’

  There was no Abrahams in the corridor when I got there; but the police seal was broken and the door was ajar. I went on in and stopped dead.

  For the first moment I thought it was still Stambaugh’s clothes spread out there. But there was no mistaking Inspector Abrahams’ neat gray plainclothes—with no Abrahams in them.

  I think I said something about the horror. I draw pretty much of a blank between seeing that empty suit and looking up to the far doorway and seeing Inspector Abrahams.

  He was wearing a dressing gown of Stambaugh’s, which was far too short for him. I stared at his grotesque figure and at the android parody which dangled from his hand.

  ‘Sorry, Lamb,’ he grinned. ‘Couldn’t resist the theatrical effect. Go on. Take a good look at the empty man on the floor.’

  I looked. The clothes were put together with the exactly real, body-fitting, sucked-out effect which we had already decided was impossible.

  ‘You see,’ Abrahams said, ‘I remembered the vacuum cleaner. And the Downtown Merchants’ parade.’

  I was back at the studio early the next morning. There was nobody from Verner’s Varieties there but Slavko, and it was so relatively quiet that Dr. Verner was just staring at the manuscript of The Anatomy without adding a word.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘In the first place, Stambaugh’s record player isn’t equipped for hill-and-dale records.’

  ‘They can be played even on an ordinary machine,’ Dr. Verner observed tranquilly. ‘The effect is curious—faint and with an odd echoing overlap, which might even enhance the power of the cantrip.’

  ‘And I looked in his card catalog,’ I went on, ‘and he didn’t have a recording of the Pergolesi Pater Noster by anybody.’

  Dr. Verner widened his overblue eyes. ‘But of course the card would vanish with the record,’ he protested. ‘Magic makes allowances for modern developments.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ I exclaimed suddenly. ‘Hey, I’m brilliant! This is one Abrahams didn’t think of. It’s me, for once, that solves a case.’

  ‘Yes, dear boy?’ said Dr. Verner gently.

  ‘Look. You can’t play an inside-start record backwards. It wouldn’t work. Visualize the spiraling grooves. If you put the needle in the outside last groove, it’d just stay there ticking—same like it would if you put it in the inside last groove of a normal record. To play it backwards, you’d have to have some kind of gearshift that’d make the turntable spin backwards.’

  ‘But I have,’ said Dr. Verner blandly. ‘It enables one to make extraordinary interesting experiments in sound. Doubtless Mr. Stambaugh had too. It would be simple enough to switch over by mistake; he was drinking . . . Tell me: the spinning turntable that you saw . . . was it revolving clockwise or counterclockwise?’

  I thought back, and I was damned if I knew. Clockwise, I took for granted; but if I had to swear . . . Instead I asked, ‘And I suppose Captain Clutsam and the Bishop of Cloisterham had alternate counterclockwise gearshifts?’

  ‘Why, of course. Another reason why such a serious collector as Mr. Stambaugh would. You see, the discs of the Fonogrammia company, a small and obscure firm but one boasting a few superb artists under exclusive contract, were designed to be so played.’

  I stared at those pellucid azure eyes. I had no notion whether counterclockwise Fonogrammia records were the coveted objective of every collector or a legend that had this moment come into being.

  ‘And besides,’ I insisted. ‘Abrahams has demonstrated how it was really done. The vacuum cleaner tipped him off. Stambaugh had bought a man-sized, man-shaped balloon, a little brother of those monster figures they use in parades. He inflated it and dressed it in his cloth
es. Then he deflated it, leaving the clothes in perfect arrangement with nothing in them but a shrunken chunk of rubber, which he could withdraw by unbuttoning the shirt. Abrahams found the only firm in San Francisco that manufactures such balloons. A clerk identified Stambaugh as a purchaser. So Abrahams bought a duplicate and pulled the same gag on me.’

  Dr. Verner frowned. ‘And the vacuum cleaner?’

  ‘You use a vacuum cleaner in reverse for pumping up large balloons. And you use it normally for deflating them; if you just let the air out whoosh! they’re apt to break.’

  ‘The clerk’ (it came out clark, of course) ‘identified Stambaugh positively?’

  I shifted under the piercing blueness. ‘Well, you know identifications from photographs . . .’

  ‘Indeed I do.’ He took a deliberately timed pause. ‘And the record player? Why was its turntable still revolving?’

  ‘Accident, I guess. Stambaugh must’ve bumped against the switch.’

  ‘Which projected from the cabinet so that one might well engage it by accident?’

  I pictured the machine. I visualized the switch and the depth to which one would have to reach in. ‘Well, no,’ I granted. ‘Not exactly . . .’

  Dr. Verner smiled down at me tolerantly. ‘And the motive for these elaborate maneuvers by Mr. Stambaugh?’

  ‘Too many threatening male relatives on his tail. He deliberately staged this to look oh-so-mysterious so nobody’d spot the simple fact that he was just getting the hell out from under. Abrahams has an all-points alarm out; he’ll be picked up any time within the next few days.’ Dr. Verner sighed. His hands flickered through the air in a gesture of infinitely resigned patience. He moved to his record cabinet, took out a disc, placed it on the turntable, and adjusted certain switches.

  ‘Come, Slavko!’ he announced loudly. ‘Since Mr. Lamb prefers rubber balloons to truth, we are conferring a signal privilege upon him. We are retiring to the other room, leaving him here alone with the Carina record. His cocksure materialism will surely wish to verify the effect of playing it in reverse.’

  Slavko stopped pounding and said, ‘Huh?’

  ‘Come, Slavko. But first say a polite good-bye to Mr. Lamb. You may not be seeing him again.’ Dr. Verner paused in the doorway and surveyed me with what seemed like genuine concern. ‘Dear boy,’ he murmured, ‘you won’t forget that point about the reverse phonetics . . .?’ He was gone and so (without more polite good-bye than a grunt) was Slavko. I was alone with Carina, with the opportunity to disprove Dr. Verner’s fabulous narrative once and for all.

  His story had made no pretense of explaining the presence of the vacuum cleaner.

  And Inspector Abrahams’ theory had not even attempted to account for the still-revolving turntable.

  I switched on the turntable of the Verner machine. Carefully I lowered the tone-arm, let the oddly rounded needle settle into the first groove from the outer rim.

  I heard that stunning final note in alt. So flawless was the Carina diction that I could hear, even in that range, the syllable to which it was sung: item, the beginning of the reverse-Latin Amen.

  Then I heard a distorted groan as the turntable abruptly slowed down from 78 to zero revolutions per minute. I looked at the switch; it was still on. I turned and saw Dr. Verner towering behind me, with a disconnected plug dangling from his hand.

  ‘No,’ he said softly—and there was a dignity and power in that softness that I had never heard in his most impressive bellows. ‘No, Mr. Lamb. You have a wife and two sons. I have no right to trifle with their lives merely to gratify an old man’s resentment of scepticism.’

  Quietly he lifted the tone-arm, removed the record, restored it to its envelope, and refiled it. His deft, un-English hands were not at their steadiest.

  ‘When Inspector Abrahams succeeds in tracing down Mr. Stambaugh,’ he said firmly, ‘you shall hear this record in reverse. And not before then.’

  And it just so happens they haven’t turned up Stambaugh yet.

  The Adventure of the

  Paradol Chamber

  John Dickson Carr

  Narrator (reading): ‘I find recorded in my notebook that it was after dark on a hot evening in August 1887. All day Sherlock Holmes had been moody and distraught. That evening he took up his violin. Leaning back in his armchair, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle, which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. (In pitch blackness, a few unearthly chords from violin.) Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. (Chords hop.) I might have rebelled had it not been that he usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favorite airs.’

  (Violin plays a few bars of Mendelssohn’s ‘Spring Songthen fades. Lights slowly come up. Holmes and Watson are sitting on opposite sides of stage, facing audience; table at Holmes’s side. Holmes has violin across knee, bow in right hand; lighted pipe in mouth; eyes fixed glassily ahead. Watson wears expression of ecstasy, hand in air as though it has been keeping time to music; copy of Daily Telegraph in his lap.)

  Watson: My dear Holmes, your virtuosity is unrivaled. Pray continue!

  Holmes (grim; on edge): I am in no mood for it, Watson. (He puts down violin and bow on table; gets up.) My mind is tortured, obsessed!

  Watson (amused): Surely not—again!—by Professor Moriarty?

  Holmes: He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson! You will find his spider trace, I dare wager, in that very newspaper. What is the first item on which your eye falls?

  Watson (scanning paper): By Jove, Holmes, this is curious!

  Holmes: Quick, Watson, the item!

  Watson (reading): ‘Lord Matchlock, the Foreign Minister, collapsed in a faint as he was walking up Constitution Hill after leaving Buckingham Palace.’

  Holmes: Ah!

  Watson: ‘We are happy to report, however, that Lord Matchlock’s condition is not serious.’

  Holmes: I wonder!

  Watson: ‘Messrs. Lestrade, Gregson and Athelney Jones, all of Scotland Yard, pronounce it a heat stroke. Lord Matchlock, on a hot day, was wearing a heavy frock coat, bombazine waistcoat, wing collar and Ascot tie, long flannel underwear, woolen socks, and Hessian boots. He therefore

  (Violent reaction from Holmes: Watson starts.) My dear Holmes! What can be wrong with you?

  Holmes: There’s villainy here!

  Watson (taken aback): You jest, my dear fellow!

  Holmes: He was wearing no trousers, Watson! Lord Matchlock was wearing no trousers!

  Watson (pause, stunned): Holmes, this is marvelous! Holmes (waving it away): Elementary! But not uninstructive. Scotland Yard, of course, observed nothing.

  Watson: But why should Lord Matchlock, the Foreign Minister, have been walking up Constitution Hill without his britches?

  Holmes (somber): There lies our problem. If only . . . (Sharp knocking is heard off.)

  Watson: A client, Holmes!

  Holmes: Perhaps even the answer to our problem. Come in!

  (Enter Lady Imogene Ferrers, in a state of restrained terror. She carries a paper parcel. In violent agitation, she looks from Holmes to Watson: finally chooses Holmes.) Imogene: You are Mr. Sherlock Holmes! Every fiber of my woman’s instinct tells me so! (She rushes to seize Holmes by the shoulders.) Help me, Mr Holmes!

  Holmes (austerely): Pray compose yourself, madam. I shall do my best. A chair, Watson! (He leads her to Watson’s chair, and goes to his own.) A cup of hot coffee, too, might be not unwelcome. I perceive that you are shivering.

  Imogene: Alas, sir, it is not the cold which makes me shiver!

  Holmes: Not the cold? What then?

  Imogene: It is fear, Mr. Holmes. It is terror! I am Lady Imogene Ferrers. My father is Lord Matchlock, the Foreign Minister.

  Watson (bursting out): They have stolen your papa’s britches!

  Imogene: I think you must be wizards, both of you! For I came here, Mr. Holmes, to show you . . . there! (Rising dramatically, she opens the paper
parcel and holds up in majesty a pair of trousers.)

  Watson (amazed): Merciful heaven! Britches!

  Holmes (exalted): It is for these dramatic moments that my soul lives! Tell me, Lady Imogene: are they your father’s trousers?

  Imogene: No, Mr. Holmes! No! I had not thought, until this moment, that dear Papa was trouserless.

  Holmes: Ha! Then how came the trousers into your possession?

  Imogene: This morning, Mr. Holmes, they were thrown from an upper window at Buckingham Palace. I saw them fall.

  Watson: Holmes, some fiend is snatching the britches from half London!

  Holmes: Good, Watson! But not, I think, quite good enough. May I see the evidence? (She hands over the trousers. Holmes scrutinizes them through a magnifying glass. Then to Lady Imogene) Buckingham Palace, I think you said?

  Imogene: Yes, Mr. Holmes. My father had gone there for a conference with the new French Ambassador, M. de Paradol, and Her Majesty the Queen. (Faltering) It—it concerned, I think, a secret treaty between France and Great Britain. Can you picture my dread—nay, my terror! —when I saw the trousers take wing from Her Majesty’s window?

  Holmes: These are deep waters, my lady. Were you followed here?

  Imogene: I hope not, Mr. Holmes! All day I have been riding in four-wheelers! And yet. . . (Off, heavy and elaborate knocking)

  Holmes: Quick, Watson! Make haste and hide the evidence! (Holmes hands the trousers to Watson, who thrusts them inside his frock coat. Watson turns and moves towards door.)

  Watson: Holmes, this is no ordinary client! This is . . . Holmes: Speak out, man!

  Watson: (stepping back to one side like a court chamberlain): His Excellency the French Ambassador!

  (Enter M. de Marquis de Paradol: top hat, frock coat, imperial beard. He swoops forward, center, removing hat, and adopts posture of immense dignity.)

  Paradol (drawn up): Messieurs! (To Imogene, different tone) Mademoiselle!

  Imogene (crying out): You have come here, sir, about the hideous enigma at Buckingham Palace?