Sherlock Holmes (5 page)

I lay back, overcome again by a terrible
exhaustion – as much of the spirit, it seemed, as of the body.
While Carnaki prepared a sedative draught for me Holmes walked Miss
Delapore out to our mutual parlor, and I heard the outer door
open.

“I have heard much of your deductive
abilities, Mr. Holmes,” said the young woman's voice, barely heard
through the half-open bedroom door. “How did you know that my
uncle, who must have come here to take you as my grandfather took
Burnwell, had seized upon your friend instead?”

“There was no deduction necessary, Miss
Delapore,” said Holmes. “I know Watson – and I know what I have
heard of your uncle. Would Carstairs Delapore have come down into
danger, to see what he could do for an injured man?”

“Do not think ill of my family, Mr. Holmes,”
said Miss Delapore, after a time of silence. “The way which leads
down the six thousand stairs cannot be sealed. It must always have
a guardian. That is the nature of such things. And it is always
easier to find a venal successor who is willing to trade to Them
the things They want – the blood They crave – in exchange for gifts
and services, than to find one willing to serve a lonely
guardianship solely that the world above may remain safe. They
feared Lord Rupert – if the thing that all knew as Lord Rupert was
in fact not some older spirit still. His bones, buried in the
sub-crypt, shall, I hope, prove a barrier that They are unwilling
to cross. Now that the skull, which was the talisman that commanded
Their favors, is gone, perhaps there will be less temptation among
those who study in the house.”

“There is always temptation, Miss Delapore,”
said Holmes.

“Get thee behind me, Mr. Holmes,” replied the
woman's voice, with a touch of silvery amusement far beyond her
years. “I saw what that temptation did to my uncle, in his
desperate craving to snatch the rule of the things from my
grandfather. I saw what my grandfather became. These are things I
shall remember, when the time comes to seek a disciple of my
own.”

I was drowsing already from Carnaki's draught
when Holmes returned to the bedroom. “Did you speak to Colby?” I
asked, struggling to keep my eyes open as he went to the table and
picked up the red cardboard box. “Is he all right?” For my dreams
as to his fate had been foul, terrible, and equivocal. “Warn him …
prevent the old Viscount from doing harm?”

Holmes hesitated for a long time, looking
down at me with a concern that I did not quite understand in his
eyes. “I did,” he replied at length. “To such effect that Viscount
Gaius has disappeared from the district – for good, one hopes. But
as for Branwell, he too has … departed. I fear that Miss Delapore
is destined to lead a rather difficult and lonely life.”

He glanced across at Carnaki, who was packing
up what appeared to be an electrical battery and an array of steel
rods and wires into a rucksack, the purpose of which I could not
imagine. Their eyes met. Then Carnaki nodded, very slightly, as if
approving what Holmes had said.

“Because of what was revealed,” I asked,
stifling a terrible yawn, “about this … this blackmail that was
being practiced? The young hound, to desert a young lady like
that.” My eyelids slipped closed. I fought them open again, seized
by sudden panic, by the terror that I might slide into sleep and
find myself again in that dreadful abyss, watching the horrible
things that fluttered and crept from those angles of darkness that
should not have been there. “Did you learn … anything of these
studies they practiced?”

“Indeed we did,” said Carnaki. And then, a
little airily, “There was nothing in them, though.”

“What did Miss Delapore bring you, then?”

“Merely a memento of the case,” said Holmes.
“As for young Mr. Colby, do not be too hard on him, Watson. He did
the best he could, as do we all. I am not sure that he would have
been entirely happy with Miss Delapore in any event. She was … much
the stronger of the two.”

*

Holmes never did elucidate for me the means
by which he bridged the gap between his supposition that Viscount
Delapore was engaged in kidnapping children for the purposes of
some vile cult centered in Depewatch Priory, and evidence
sufficient to make that evil man flee the country. If he and
Carnaki found such evidence at the Priory – which I assume was the
reason he had asked the young antiquarian to accompany us to
Shropshire – he did not speak to me of it. Indeed, he showed a
great reluctance to refer to the case at all.

For this I was grateful. The effects of the
fever I had caught were slow to leave me, and even as much as three
years later I found myself prey to the sense that I had learned –
and mercifully forgotten – something that would utterly destroy all
my sense of what the world is and should be; that would make either
life or sanity impossible, if it should turn out to be true.

Only once did Holmes mention the affair, some
years later, during a conversation on Freud's theories of insanity,
when he spoke in passing of the old Viscount Delapore's conviction
– evidently held by others in what is now termed a
folie a
deux
– that the old man had in fact been the reincarnated or
astrally transposed spirit of Lord Rupert Grimsley, once Lord of
Depewatch Priory. And then he spoke circumspectly, watching me, as
if he feared to wake my old dreams again and cause me many
sleepless nights.

I can only be sorry that the case ended
without firm conclusion, for it did, as Holmes promised me that
night on the Embankment, show me unsuspected colors in the spectrum
of human mentality and human existence. Yet this was not an unmixed
blessing. For though I know that my fever-dream was no more than
that – a fantastic hallucination brought on by illness and by
Carnaki's own curious monomania about otherworld cults and ancient
writings – sometimes in the shadowland between sleep and waking I
think of that terrible blue-litten abyss that lies beneath an old
Priory on the borders of Wales, and imagine that I hear the eerie
piping of chaos rising up out of blasphemous angles of night. And
in my dreams I see again the enigmatic Miss Delapore, standing
before the chittering congregation of nightmares, holding aloft in
her hands the skull of Lord Rupert Grimsley: The skull that now
reposes in a corner of Holmes' room, wrapped in its red cardboard
box.

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 Lost Boy (Sherlock
Holmes meets Peter Pan - narrated by Mrs. Watson)