Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon

by James Lovegrove

  “Oh no, none of the family goes into the east wing, Mr Holmes. Especially not after dear Mrs Allerthorpe…” She faltered. “Well, you know. These days they avoid it like the plague, and who can blame them? Terrible associations it has for them. Staff, on the other hand, are required to polish and dust there, once a month on average. If we didn’t keep on top of things and only cleaned the wing the one time a year it is actually used – at Christmas – the job would be far harder.”

  “So you yourself did not hear any of these noises,” said Holmes, “and rejected the idea that they might have some unnatural origin?”

  “Absolutely. I hate to say it, but some of the employees at Fellscar are not what you’d call sophisticated. The East Riding is an area steeped in superstition, and folk around here from a certain background seem to thrive on stories of witches and strange beasts and meteorites and the like.”

  “But not you.”

  “Not me, sir. I’ve always thought of myself as a sensible lass. Still do, which makes it all the more difficult for me to reconcile myself with what went on that July night.”

  “You went to the east wing to investigate something a scullery maid claimed happened to her.”

  “Becky Goforth,” Mrs Trebend confirmed. “The girl you saw me addressing a moment ago. And by the by, if you thought I was being hard on her, really she is the stupidest creature. A pretty face but precious little going on behind it. You have to explain even the simplest task twice or even three times in order for her to grasp it. And she is truculent, as though she thinks her position beneath her. It is a poor combination in a scullery maid and fair tries the patience.

  “Yes, Goforth came back from the east wing all of a dither and trembling like a leaf, and spun a yarn about this unseen being who blew out a candle. She said she’d heard muttering, too, as though somebody was speaking right by her ear, and yet when she looked round, there was nobody there. ‘I could not make out the words,’ she said, ‘but it were a horrid-sounding voice, Mrs Trebend, it were. Low and hoarse and full of hatred and wickedness, like. Whoever it was that were talking, they did not want me there, and that decided me that I did not want to be there either; and so I ran. I ran like the wind.’

  “Now, I thought this just so much blether, and I made no bones about it. ‘You are quite the giddy simpleton, Goforth,’ said I. ‘You have let your imagination run away with you.’

  “‘No, Cook,’ replied she, ‘I swear to you, on my mother’s life, it’s true!’ And she was so adamant, and so het up, I was halfway to believing her.”

  “Might I ask what Goforth was doing in the east wing so late in the day?” said Holmes. “That she was carrying a candle indicates she was there after nightfall.”

  “Cleaning, I should imagine. Although her duties are largely restricted to the kitchen, she is expected to carry out more general household tasks as well, and her hours are long. The time, as I recall, was around ten o’clock, and my own working day was coming to an end, but I felt I ought at least to follow up on her claims, if only to show her how foolish she was being. I invited her to come with me and point me to the spot where her candle had been extinguished and where she’d heard the voice, but she refused point-blank.

  “‘I shan’t ever go back to the east wing after dark, Mrs Trebend,’ she said, ‘not for all the money in the world.’ I saw no alternative, then, but to go on my own.”

  “Very intrepid of you.”

  Mrs Trebend shrugged her shoulders. “I like to think I am not without mettle.”

  “You did not ask someone else – your husband, perhaps – to accompany you?”

  “Robert was just then going over the wine cellar inventory with Mr Allerthorpe, and besides, why should I trouble anyone to join me on what I fully expected to be a fruitless exercise? I fetched a lamp and performed the very journey we three are now undertaking. Goforth had identified the location of her strange occurrence as being midway along the main ground-floor corridor. This corridor, indeed, that we are just coming to.”

  After a trek through the castle that included a fair few twists and turns and ups and downs, we had arrived at a long, broad passage with windows positioned at ten-yard intervals along one side and a row of doors, similarly distributed, along the other. The windows faced north, so the daylight was muted. Perhaps for that reason, the air felt chillier and damper than elsewhere on the premises. Added to that was the impression that this was obviously an unfrequented place. Even if I had not known it already, I would have been able to tell. Unfrequented places have their own unique atmosphere, and also their own faint yet distinct odour, one that is hard to describe but still readily identifiable. If melancholy can be said to have a smell, that is what it smells of.

  Down the gloomy corridor we traipsed, and with every step, the tingle of apprehension that had started up in my belly deepened. I did not anticipate us running into a ghost, not in the middle of the day. Ghosts were nocturnal creatures, were they not? Yet the mere possibility that this part of Fellscar was haunted had me entertaining uneasy thoughts, the kind I might normally have given short shrift. My senses were alert for any anomaly – a shift in the light, an incongruous sound. Within me warred two paradoxical desires: a burning curiosity to witness something truly inexplicable, and a pusillanimous reluctance to. Increasingly the latter was gaining the upper hand.

  Mrs Trebend halted. “It was just here,” she said. I discerned the slightest of quavers in her voice, and my admiration for her grew. She was grappling with her fears and mastering them, perhaps better than I was – and she had more justification for being afraid than I did, since she was the one who had run into a ghost here before, not I.

  “Now, be precise please, Mrs Trebend,” said Holmes. “Relate the sequence of events exactly as they unfurled.”

  “Well, to begin with there was nowt untoward, as best I could tell. I shone the lamp around, and its light revealed only that which you yourselves can see right now. The moon was the merest sliver that night, so there was scant other illumination. I waited a minute or two, not clear what I was waiting for but almost completely certain that no weird manifestation would occur. I was all prepared to give it up as a waste of time, but then I… I felt it.”

  “It?”

  Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “It is hard to put into words, Mr Holmes. You know that uncanny sensation one has, that tickle at the back of the neck, when one thinks one is being watched? Not just thinks but knows. I had that. It was as though another person had joined me in the corridor and was creeping up on me from behind. I looked back and saw nobody, but the feeling – no, the certainty – would not go away.”

  Almost on a reflex, I glanced over my shoulder. There was no one in that corridor save the three of us. Of course there wasn’t.

  “Then came the touch,” Mrs Trebend continued. “This ice-cold sensation on the bare skin of my forearm, as though someone were drawing their fingers across it, not in any comforting way, but meanly, insinuatingly. At the same time, the lamp flame guttered, and if not for the chimney surrounding it, I daresay it might have gone out.

  “I summoned up the courage to speak. Frankly, I’m not sure how I managed it, and I can tell you now, the sound that came out of my throat was a reedy croak, hardly my usual voice at all.

  “‘Who’s that?’ I said. ‘Is someone there? Who are you? State your name.’

  “Well, answer came there none, and in a sense I was glad, for I had precious little desire to hear the ‘horrid-sounding voice’ Goforth had described. Frankly, if it had accosted me, I might have fainted on the spot.

  “‘Is that you, Mrs Allerthorpe?’ said I. ‘If it is, please know that we miss you and grieve for you. You were a kind mistress, and Fellscar Keep is not the same without you.’ I meant it. As you must be aware, Mrs Allerthorpe had her troubles, but between bouts of madness she was as good-hearted and gentle a soul as one could hope to meet. ‘I’m sorry if you are unsettled in your eternal rest,’ I went on. ‘But for your
own sake and the sake of those you have left behind, you must move on. You shouldn’t remain here when a much better life awaits you in the great beyond.’ I believe that quite sincerely, sirs. If anyone deserves the solace of heaven, it is Mrs Allerthorpe.

  “More time passed, and I was beginning to think that my mind had been playing tricks on me. Then… It was just over there.”

  She raised a forefinger to point. At the same time her eyes grew wide, as though she was seeing right now the same macabre sight she had beheld two months previously.

  “I shan’t go any closer,” she said, her voice even more hushed, “but you see where I mean. Where the corridor turns the corner. To this day I cannot say quite what I saw, but it was a figure – a figure in motion. A pale, fleeting shape, clad in a long flowing garment. And it was – what is the word? Diaphanous. Like tulle or cheesecloth. I could see through it to the wall behind. All I had was the merest glimpse, there then gone in an instant, but that was all I needed to see. I could not quit that spot quickly enough, gentlemen. I ran so fast, in such a mad panic, that I stumbled and fell several times. You should have seen the bruises on my shins. In my mad dash I collided headlong with Mr Allerthorpe – Shadrach, that is – who was good enough to escort me to the drawing room and ply me with whisky in order to calm my nerves.”

  “Spirits to banish a spirit,” Holmes remarked.

  I shot him a look. This was no time for glibness. Mrs Trebend was panting, her body reacting to the memory of the traumatic stimulus much as it must have reacted to the traumatic stimulus itself.

  “Take slow, deep breaths,” I advised her, in my most soothing tones. “You are safe. It is in the past. Sherlock Holmes and I are here, and we can protect you.” Could we? From a discarnate entity? Possibly not, but it seemed the right thing to say.

  Before too long, Mrs Trebend’s fit abated. Her stare became less wild and her breathing returned to normal.

  “I can’t stay a moment longer,” she declared. “I shan’t.” And, suiting the action to the word, she spun on her heel and hastened away.

  Holmes watched her go with a detached, faintly ironical look on his face.

  “Poor woman,” I said. “She is scared half to death even just remembering the incident.”

  “It certainly would seem that way. Yet what did she feel? Frigid fingers? Or was it a gust of cold air, much like a draught? Say what you like about Fellscar Keep but it is definitely draughty, and even in July the air outside at night would not have been warm. And what did she see? A ‘pale, fleeting shape’. It could have been anything. The shadow of a cloud passing across the moon. An afterimage in her vision, perhaps, left there by the lamp’s flame. She styles herself sensible, but what if, in fact, she is no less suggestible than the scullery maid? I contend that Goforth’s account of extinguished candles and strange voices primed Mrs Trebend for some sort of unearthly shenanigans, and lo and behold, unearthly shenanigans was the interpretation the good woman put on otherwise perfectly explicable phenomena. So often do we bend reality to conform to our expectations, rather than the other way round. Say I told you that the front door at Baker Street is dark blue.”

  “It is not. It is black.”

  “But say I was quite strident about it, even to the point of becoming angered at your obtuseness. A blue so dark, it could be mistaken for black.”

  “I would think you quite deluded. I might also suggest you lay off the cocaine for a while.” This was a constant refrain of mine at the time. The drug’s deleterious effect upon my friend’s constitution were marked, and I was keen for him to wean himself off it.

  “But,” said Holmes, “the next time you entered the house, might you not look askance at the door’s paintwork? Might you even think that, viewed in a certain light, possibly it was dark blue?”

  Grudgingly, I allowed that I might.

  “Mankind is inherently inclined towards co-operation,” Holmes said. “It is how we create societies and moral consensus. We want to agree with one another, on the whole. Thus, if one of us insists a certain thing is true, and maintains his standpoint in the face of all opposition, others will eventually come around to his way of thinking.”

  “If it is somebody who commands respect,” I said, “then I grant you it may happen. I hold you in high esteem, for instance, and therefore I would be more likely to see your dark blue front door than if it were, say, Lestrade making the allegation – or Wiggins. And that is where your premise falls down.”

  “How so?”

  “Because Mrs Trebend does not respect Goforth. You have seen the contempt in which she holds the girl. She bullies her. If the roles were reversed and Mrs Trebend were Goforth’s subordinate, then it is conceivable that Goforth could have an influence on her thinking. As things stand, Mrs Trebend would have been more likely not to see a ghost, simply because Goforth is of so little consequence to her and she would rather spite her than support her. She said herself that she went to the east wing with the express purpose of proving Goforth wrong. The fact that she did see a ghost therefore surely lends weight to her testimony. Instead of refuting Goforth’s claims, she ended up reinforcing them. You stand contradicted.”

  I was quite pleased with this counterargument of mine. I thought it a model of deductive reasoning, one that would have done Holmes himself proud.

  He, for his part, simply said, “Or else I stand vindicated, if what I am beginning to suspect is borne out later on.”

  “And what are you beginning to suspect?”

  “At present, I am but dimly grasping the outline of something. But then it may be that I am guilty of the very crime I just deplored – bending reality to conform to expectations – and that I perceive a coherent image where there is none. We shall see.”

  He would not be drawn to clarify this rather enigmatic statement, but instead embarked upon one of those energetic flurries of activity that so often attend his investigations. For a while he stalked back and forth along the corridor, pausing every now and again to study some piece of minutiae that caught his notice. More than once he went down on all fours, crouching with his nose so close to the floor that he looked like a Mussulman at prayer. He opened each of the doors in turn, revealing a succession of bedrooms and in one instance a bathroom. By way of conversation, nothing escaped his lips apart from an occasional wordless grunt, to which I did not feel duty-bound to respond.

  Leaning back against the wall with my arms folded, I waited. I have to confess that my eyelids drooped, my chin sank to my chest, and I may even have dozed off. My night of poor sleep was taking its toll.

  Holmes startled me out of my drowse by clapping his hands.

  “Done, Watson!” he declared.

  “And?”

  “My examination has been instructive, up to a point.”

  “What have you found?”

  “Very little, but then even the absence of evidence can be useful, in that it eliminates certain possibilities, leaving the field clear for others. I will, however, draw your attention to this window, and in particular to the frame here adjacent to the stone mullion that divides the two casements.”

  The frame in question was made of iron. A small section at the base was warped out of true. It bent outwards, leaving a narrow gap between frame and casement that was roughly the size of a throat lozenge.

  “In this, I propose, lies a reasonable explanation for Goforth’s blown-out candle and the eerie touch Mrs Trebend felt. On a windy night, a gust of air forcing itself through this tiny aperture would have some considerable impetus, sufficient to snuff a candle flame and to mimic the sensation of cold fingers on flesh. This same gust might, moreover, generate a sound resembling a guttural, inarticulate voice, by making the casement vibrate within its frame somewhat like a clarinet reed. Do you not agree?”

  “It is plausible.”

  “And yet… When was the section of frame bent? And how?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Possibly not. Nor does it matter that the bent
section is at the bottom of the frame and that the mullion is a sturdy stone pillar. Or does it?”

  “You are talking in riddles.”

  “It must sound that way to you. It does even to me. But sometimes it helps to air my thoughts aloud, disjointed though they may seem. I can weigh their value with my own ears, and also judge them according to your reaction. Now then, this way.” He marched to the corner where Mrs Trebend had glimpsed her darting ghost. “What lies along here, I wonder?”

  A short second corridor, running perpendicular to the one we were on, terminated at a small, arched door. Holmes twisted the ring-shaped handle and the door swung outward.

  Before us lay a black emptiness. We leaned in through the doorway, and as my eyes adjusted I gathered that we were looking at a cellar. The dim light filtering in from the corridor behind us picked out rough stone walls that were hung with ragged strands of cobweb. A dank, clammy smell rose to greet my nostrils.

  Just visible was the cellar’s earthen floor, which lay some ten feet below and could be reached by a flight of steep wooden steps.

  Or so I thought, for no sooner had I set foot on the top step than Holmes arrested my progress with an arm across my chest.

  “Steady, old friend,” he said. “Look down. You will see it is not as straightforward as you think.”

  I looked down, as instructed. Beyond the first step there was a second, but beyond the second there was nothing. I had thought that the rest of the wooden staircase was lost in darkness, but actually it had rotted away. Only the topmost portion still clung in place, anchored just beneath the door’s threshold by rusty iron bolts.

  “Bless me!” I said. “If not for you, I would have fallen and broken my leg, maybe even my neck. That staircase is a liability. You would have thought someone would put a warning sign on the door; better yet, ensure it was locked.”

  “I wonder if anybody realises that the staircase is gone,” Holmes said. “By the looks of it, it collapsed some time ago. One can just make out the remnants down there in a heap on the floor. The cellar itself, perhaps a cold store once, is clearly long disused. Who is to say the family even know it exists? Especially since it is in the east wing, where few go.”