“‘Henry!’ I declared. ‘This is no way to welcome an old friend after so long an absence.’ It may seem remarkable to you, gentlemen, but I felt no great fear. I know Henry to be an excellent shot, and if he had wished to hit me, he could have. His goal was to deter me, no more than that, and thus I felt safe standing my ground. My main emotion, aside from a sense of shock, was affront.
“At last my friend spoke. ‘Go away, Brother Benjamin. You are not needed here. Go and save yourself. Leave me be.’
“‘I shall not budge from this spot,’ I said, ‘until you tell me why you are acting so out of character. I know about your wife, and you have my deepest condolences. But if this is how you are mourning Audrey, it is inappropriate, to say the least.’
“‘I am under no obligation to explain myself,’ said Henry. ‘All I need tell you is that while you are in my company, you are in peril. I appreciate that you have travelled far to be here, but please just do as I ask, Benjamin, and go.’
“‘I have braved many dangers in the past,’ I said. ‘If there is further danger here, I am quite prepared to face it. Let us confront it together, indeed, side by side, as friends and brothers of the square should.’
“‘You do me a great honour, and yourself great credit, with that offer,’ came the reply. ‘But I am adamant. Every minute you remain on my property, you expose yourself to hazard. The sooner you leave, the sooner all will be well for you.’
“‘And the boy? Young Harry? What about him? Surely all is not well for him while he is on the premises.’
“‘I shall protect him,’ said Henry. ‘I shall defend him to my dying breath. I trust no one but myself to keep him safe.’
“‘I beg you, one last time,’ said I, ‘let me in. Whatever has gotten you so in fear of your own and your son’s lives, surely it is better if there are two of us to guard against it.’
“I heard, then, the distinctive click of a breech being snapped shut. Quite clearly Henry had just loaded his shotgun with fresh cartridges.
“‘I have no desire to injure you, Benjamin,’ my friend said. ‘Yet if the threat of bodily harm is not enough, I may yet have to resort to the reality. Go. There is a smallholding half a mile due south of here, where the farmer, Mr Wonnacott, will be willing to put you up for the night for a small consideration. You may reach it before full dark if you start now. Farewell. I am sorry that you did not come at a more propitious time.’
“He closed the window, and I was left standing there on the drive with a dilemma. Should I persist? Or should I do as bidden and depart? The former option seemed futile. Could I break into the house? Force Henry to accept my assistance against his will? On present showing it was unimaginable. More than likely I would end up with a peppering of buckshot for my trouble. The latter option meant abandoning him – him and of course innocent, vulnerable Harry, who I could only assume was living in terror of his desperate, gun-wielding papa – and such an act would weigh sorely upon my conscience. Yet if Henry did not want me there, whatever his reasons, I had no choice but to respect his wishes.
“I lugged my suitcase all the way to the smallholding Henry had described. The owner, the aforementioned Wonnacott, grudgingly offered me a bed, at the cost of three pence. I hardly slept a wink, and the next morning I returned on foot to Bartonhighstock, my thoughts all awhirl. I fervently wished to help my friend but could not think how. It was as I was approaching the village that a certain name suddenly sprang to mind. Yours, Mr Holmes. Not only are you renowned worldwide as an unraveller of knotty conundrums, but you have had prior dealings with Henry and Baskerville Hall. All at once it was obvious to me that you were the man to see.
“The next London train was not due until midmorning. I was famished, so I went to the village inn and ordered breakfast. The landlord there seemed to find me as fascinatingly exotic as a hothouse orchid. Hence, while I ate, he sat with me and engaged me in conversation. He asked me about my homeland. Was it really so huge? Were all us former colonials as brash as our reputation would have it? And so on.
“When the cause of my visit to Devon came up and I told the landlord about my abortive expedition to Baskerville Hall, a similar look stole over him as had over the booking clerk the previous afternoon.
“‘Oh my word,’ said he, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘You know, of course, what has happened at the Hall lately. An awful business. And the condition of Lady Audrey’s body – ghastly.’
“‘How so?’ I said, reckoning I was going to get more out of this garrulous fellow than I had out of the tight-lipped booking clerk.
“‘Bereft of blood, she was. Scarcely a drop left in her veins. And there was a hole in her neck, through which the stuff must have been drained. Drained or…’
“He hesitated. I made an encouraging gesture, and the landlord, with some circumspection, resumed.
“‘Sucked out of her,’ he said. ‘Sucked out of her by some kind of vampiric animal!’”
Chapter Five
SKINWALKER
Sherlock Holmes was unable to suppress his disdain.
“Pooh!” he said. “Vampiric animal indeed.”
“You do not know of any beast that drinks the blood of others to sustain itself?” said Grier. “Why, I could list you a dozen, from the humble mosquito to the freshwater leech and onwards.”
“And I could list you a dozen more. However, I would be hard pressed to name one which is so large it could consume practically the entire blood supply of a human at a single sitting in order to sate its appetite, as this creature reputedly has done with Lady Audrey. How many pints is that, Watson?”
“In an adult, somewhere between nine and twelve.”
“You see? Impossible! The thing would have to be as big as an elephant, if not bigger, with a stomach capacity to match. No haemophagic entity of such gargantuan proportions exists or has ever existed.”
“Your scepticism jibes with my own, Mr Holmes,” said Grier, “if somewhat amplified. But listen. The landlord had more to say. When I queried his remark, he responded with a wry, knowing nod. The manner of Audrey’s demise, you see, was not wholly unprecedented. He told me that over the past few weeks there had been reports of sheep in the region being molested in much the same way as she had been, the blood extracted from them by means of a hole in the neck. A fair few had died more or less straight away from blood loss, while the rest had been left so deathly ill that they had to be slaughtered just to put them out of their misery. Farmers were understandably very worried about their flocks and had taken to bringing them indoors at night or standing guard over them in the field, armed.
“‘Nobody has caught the being responsible for the bloodsucking,’ the landlord said. ‘Its attacks have all taken place under cover of darkness and well away from human habitation. But there have been definite sightings of… something.’
“‘Something…?’ I prompted.
“The landlord lowered his voice and leaned a little closer. ‘More than once it has been spotted flying across the moon,’ he said. ‘A fearsome thing, even in silhouette.’
“‘Flying?’ I said. ‘So we are talking about some kind of bird?’
“‘No. Not bird. Insect, sir. To be precise, a moth.’
“‘Moth!’ I exclaimed.”
“Moth!” Holmes said, echoing Grier’s ejaculation, but in this case with a mixture of derision and glee. “Really, now I have heard everything! And yet…” A contemplative gleam entered my friend’s eyes, and he stroked his chin with a forefinger. An idea had occurred to him, that much I could tell. In the deeps of his vast brain, something had snagged, like a bite on a fishing line.
Grier continued. “‘A big one, too,’ the landlord said, ‘in as much as anyone can judge. Wings wider than a man is tall, and a body as thick around as a tree trunk. Just three nights ago, when the moon was at its fullest, the moth was seen, and its outline covered the moon’s disc almost completely.’”
“A matter of perspective, surely,” said Holmes. �
�I may hold up a thumb before my eye and blot out the moon with it.”
“I believe I lodged a similar objection,” said Grier, “but the landlord claimed that the witnesses concerned were, in every case, reliable sources. Each saw the moth at a distance and was able to estimate its size accurately from context. Each swore, too, that the moth’s wings were fluttering and that the looping, swirling pattern of its flight was consistent with that of a member of the species. What distinguished it from every other moth was its sheer excessive scale. That,” he added, “and the fact that its eyes glowed bright red in the darkness.”
“And this same exceptionally large moth with the glowing red eyes, having first feasted upon unsuspecting sheep, graduated thence to human prey in the shape of Lady Audrey Baskerville,” said Holmes. “Was that the presumption among the good people of Dartmoor?”
“According to the landlord, yes.” “Well now,” my friend said, musing. “There is, to my knowledge, at least one genus of moth that feeds off the blood of vertebrates. Watson, would you do me a favour? You see that slipcased edition of Kirby and Spence’s Introduction to Entomology on the shelf behind you? Take down volume three and pass it over. Thank you.”
He leafed through the book until he came to the page he sought.
“Yes, here we are. Calyptra. Common name: the vampire moth. A lepidopteran gifted with an unusually strong, hollow proboscis with which it is able to pierce any fleshy integument, even cattle hide, and thus suck blood, much as its non-carnivorous equivalents suck nectar from the flower.” He closed the book and laid it aside. “However, there is no known member of the species possessing a wingspan greater than an inch or so, let alone a six-foot-wide behemoth such as you are describing. Nor is it anywhere stated that Calyptra’s eyes glow red.”
“If you ask me,” said Grier, “you are looking at this the wrong way by treating the beast as though it is part of the natural order.”
“You are asserting that it is unnatural? Or, for that matter, supernatural?”
“I am asserting just that. Earlier, Mr Holmes, you correctly intuited that I have seen action in the Indian Wars with the 25th. I served on the Great Plains, in the Dakota Territory, although I was not part of the regimental detachment that took part in the Battle of Wounded Knee, and I thank the Lord for that. I was also posted on the Mexican border. There I came into contact with members of the Apache and Navajo nations. We skirmished with war parties and carried out police actions against bands of raiders, but I may say the circumstances were not always hostile. Some Navajo, indeed, were army recruits, serving as scouts and trackers. It was from just such an individual, attached to our regiment, that I learned about skinwalkers.”
“Skinwalkers?” I said.
“According to the scout, whose name was High-Backed Wolf, skinwalkers are evil witches who can transform themselves, through ritual magic, into animals. In the Navajo tongue the word for them is yee naagloshii, meaning ‘he who goes on all fours’. Skinwalkers can adopt almost any animal form and are known to suck the blood of their prey. Their distinguishing characteristic, aside from inhuman speed and the uncanny ability to disappear from view in an instant, is their lambent red eyes.
“Now, Indians lay claim to all manner of miraculous powers. Their shamans are able to commune with the spirits of their tribal ancestors and use mystical totems either to heal or to cause death. It isn’t for me to say whether any of that is genuine or not. High-Backed Wolf, however, was utterly sincere when he described skinwalkers to me. His voice was hushed and his eyes darted nervously around, exactly the behaviour of one who, against his better judgement, was speaking the unspeakable. He told me he had even met a skinwalker himself. It swooped down upon him one day while he was on a hunting expedition near the Colorado River. It had taken the shape of a large white eagle, and High-Backed Wolf knew that he must not look the creature in the eye, else it would absorb his soul and he would become its hapless thrall. He realised he had strayed unwittingly into the skinwalker’s hunting grounds, and with various signs of apology and obeisance he departed the area in some haste. I could see the terror he had felt at the time reflected in his face as he confided in me about the incident. I did not have the slightest doubt that what he said was true.”
“True to him, perhaps,” said Holmes, “but objectively true? I wonder. You seem to be implying, Corporal Grier, that this monstrous Devonshire moth may itself be one of these so-called skinwalkers. You mean to say that a Navajo witch has taken up residence on Dartmoor and is using black magic to bring terror and death to the region?”
“I advance it as a possibility.”
“I am sure that you can see, as well as I do, the arrant preposterousness of the notion. For a start, assuming an American Indian has exchanged the western provinces of his country for the western provinces of ours, would the natives not remark upon this alien’s presence in their midst? Would it not be a matter of such surpassing interest that it merited an article in the national papers? Yet no such report has appeared in recent months, to my knowledge, and I make a point of perusing the press thoroughly every day. But if we accept nonetheless that this migrant has managed to keep a low profile thus far, his attacks upon livestock and now Lady Audrey Baskerville risk bringing unwanted attention. He is even showing himself at night, in moth form. Can hunger have made him reckless? Is it a kind of arrogance? Is he taunting Dartmoor’s denizens, boldly inviting them to form search parties and hunt him down? If so, what does he hope to gain from it all?”
Holmes enumerated these objections in an arch manner. Not for a moment was he giving Grier’s skinwalker idea credence.
“What if there is some local equivalent of the skinwalker, though?” Grier said. “Your country has a long history of witchcraft and the dark arts. Might there not still be those who embrace those old customs to this day, in the less civilised corners of the land?”
“Modern witches?” said Holmes. “Ones capable of turning themselves into animals? Well, if such folk exist, I would very much like to meet them and see these magical metamorphoses with my own eyes. Until then, however, I am content to believe that an empirical explanation may be found for all the phenomena you have reported, and that whatever took the life of Lady Audrey, no supernatural agency was involved.”
“I prefer to keep an open mind, myself,” said Grier.
“Mine is far from closed,” Holmes rejoined. “I merely make it my habit to exclude the paranormal from consideration when investigating a case. It removes a layer of unnecessary complication. All said and done, this remains a fascinating state of affairs. Sir Henry is quite certain that his life and his son’s are in jeopardy, and in light of his harrowing experiences of five years ago and the more recent trauma of his wife’s death, he could well be forgiven for thinking that the stars are indeed aligned against him and his kin. It may be, moreover, that there lies in the Baskerville bloodline a streak of insanity, one which runs all the way back to Hugo Baskerville, that wretched rake and libertine, and perhaps further still. It has been latent in Sir Henry until now, when, under the strain imposed on him by grief, it has risen to the fore. Regardless of the cause, the man is clearly in crisis and requires help.”
“Help which you are prepared to give?” said Grier hopefully.
“More than willing to.”
“Oh, thank goodness!” the American sighed. “How soon can you make the journey down to Dartmoor?”
“A glance at Bradshaw’s will confirm my supposition that there is a Totnes-bound train departing from Paddington shortly after three.”
“You mean you can leave immediately?”
“I can and shall. You, I take it, will accompany me?”
“Gladly,” said Grier.
“Excellent. And you, Watson? How about it? Are you ready to return to Dartmoor to confront another murderous marauding beast of seemingly unearthly origin?”
“No,” said I.
Holmes blinked, aghast. “Did I hear you right? ‘No’?”
&
nbsp; “I’m afraid, Holmes, I shall not be going with you. I wish you well, but sorry, I am staying in London.”
Chapter Six
A NOT UNCOURAGEOUS MAN
As I walked glumly away from Baker Street, I asked myself again and again why I had given the answer I did. When pressed by Holmes for a reason, I had cited pressure of work. I was swamped with patients, I told him. My two usual locums were both out of town, and I knew of no one else whom I trusted to handle the practice in my absence.
All of which was true enough, but if I had really wanted to, I could have freed myself up for at least a couple of days, with some effort and a good deal of judicious rearranging.
Holmes had said that it pained him to imagine tackling this case without his trusty Watson by his side. He had complained in strenuous terms that I was professionally overstretched and could do with shedding some or all of the burden of my vocation. He had even ventured that he knew a young doctor called Verner who was looking to buy a general practice and that I should consider selling mine to the fellow.
“But that is a long-term solution,” he had said. “Is there really nothing that can be done, in the short term, which might enable you to join me and Corporal Grier on our undertaking? Nothing at all? You shake your head. Oh, my dear fellow. How very sad. If it is any consolation, you may be assured that when I return, I shall furnish you with a full account of my deeds so that you may, as is your custom, take copious notes. I shall not skimp on a single detail.”
It wasn’t until I was near home that I could bring myself to admit the real reason for my refusal to go.
It was fear, plain and simple.
I am a not uncourageous man, even if I say so myself. My service in Afghanistan should attest to that, as does my participation in various adventures with Holmes, during the course of which he and I have opposed many a malefactor with deadly designs and frequently found ourselves in predicaments that constitute a threat to life and limb. I have seldom been deemed deficient when it comes to valour.
Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons Page 3
