The Sherlockian (6 page)

“Who are you?” asked Jeffrey of Sarah.

“Hi,” she replied. “I’m Sarah Lindsay. We e-mailed back and forth, about this weekend.”

Jeffrey made a sour face. “We did,” he said. “And I remember telling you, in no uncertain terms, that you were not permitted to attend today’s lecture. What are you doing here?”

In response Sarah simply smiled.

“Reporters,” said Jeffrey. “Can’t take no for an answer, can you?”

She turned to Jeffrey’s companion. “There’s no answer at the door, Jim.” The man didn’t reply but merely stepped forward next to Sarah and gave the door his own series of firm knocks.

“Mr. Cale?” he said. Another long, uncomfortable pause. “Mr. Cale, this is Jim Harriman, I’m the Quality of Stay Director at the hotel.”

Harold supposed that this was another way of saying “manager.”

“Your friend Mr. Engels tells me you’re late for an appointment, so I’m going to come in there to make sure nothing’s the matter. Mr. Cale?” Still nothing. Jim removed a bar-coded electronic key card from his wallet and slid it in and out of the lock.

“If you’ll all excuse me,” said Harriman, his hand waiting on the knob.

“Come on now,” said Sarah. “These are his friends. If something’s the matter, maybe they can help.”

Harold couldn’t help but notice that there was no mention of her own role in this.

Harriman examined Sarah’s earnest face and looked to Jeffrey for a reaction. He didn’t find one. The manager thought for a moment, then pressed the hook-shaped doorknob down.

Harold felt a coldness begin in his shoulder muscles and shiver down his back, tingling all the way to his toe tips and newly frigid fingers. Even before the hall light jumped into the dim gray air of the room, he knew. Something was wrong.

When his eyes adjusted, Harold saw the disheveled dresser, its drawers yanked out and overturned. He saw the tipped-over lampshade and the dark splotches of what must be dress shirts on the taupe carpet. He saw the half-open closet door, the pile of clothes hangers on the floor, the fanned-out papers sprinkled like snowflakes.

Harold stepped inside, behind Sarah, Jeffrey, and Harriman the manager. The stiff-legged four moved almost in unison.

“Alex?”

“Alex.”

“Al . . . ex . . .”

“. . . Alex.” They each took turns calling the name, as if the word itself would make him appear. It became a chant, a round, and an incantation.

The mess accentuated the smallness of the room. The heavy blinds were shut tight, locking in the darkness. Harriman stepped through a narrow entryway past the bathroom door and the closet, toward the dresser against the wall on the right, and the wooden desk in the far corner. Ahead to the left, the room appeared to blossom out in open space—the bed must be in that direction.

Harold watched Jim slow down midstep as he turned the corner, then watched as Jeffrey did the same. Jeffrey’s brow furrowed and shook with his head, as a slight tremor reverberated through the older man’s body. Sarah stepped beside Jeffrey, turned, and inhaled sharply. Her face was blank, smoothed into soft focus by the darkness.

Harold looked down for a moment and steadied his nerves before taking his next step. Coming to a stop behind Sarah as he turned, he subconsciously crouched down an inch. He peeked over Sarah’s shoulder—she suddenly seemed so tall.

His gaze started at the unmade bed and the pillows unsheathed from their cases. It moved to the nightstand and the khaki-colored hotel phone, the receiver off the hook, the red message light blinking in a long rhythm, roughly at the pace of Harold’s breath. Then to the lounge chair and matching ottoman, soiled with more scattered paper, a pair of work pants, and a few books. And finally, then, to the floor, and the dead body of Alex Cale.

C
HAPTER 7

The Bloodsucker

“[He is] a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman,”

said Holmes, holding up a restraining hand.

“Let that now and forever be enough for us.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”

December 18,1893, cont.

London had become an alien land for Arthur, full of strange people going about their strange ways. He felt like Captain Nemo, adrift from civilization and surrounded by monsters. As he tumbled through the rest of this perverse day, eyes seemed to trail him all the way down the Strand, even into Simpson’s, where he stopped for his dinner. Inside, they flicked at him from every dim corner as he ate his kidney pie and read the papers. He flipped through the
Times’
back pages to find that even London’s cartoonists had drawn their share of blood. A crudely rendered image showed a young boy reading the final Holmes tale, his face contorted in grief and disillusion. Arthur was now accused of shattering a generation’s childhood.

He sputtered at the drawing and spilled a droplet of kidney juice onto the paper. The hot beefy broth blotted out the face of the young boy, smudging the ink and distorting his features. The child’s skin turned brown. Curiously, Arthur took his spoon, scooped up another helping, and after pushing two peas and a mushy carrot sliver back onto the plate, he dribbled a few more drops of hearty brown juice onto the newspaper. And then a few more. And then a whole spoonful, until the cheap, soggy paper wrinkled and tore from the liquid.

Arthur glanced around Simpson’s to see if anyone had witnessed his petulant antics. No one had. Or everyone had, and they were presently gossiping in angry whispers about him. It was impossible to tell.

On the streets, Arthur wobbled through his errands. His solicitor. The pharmacy. There was some vital shop he knew he’d intended just hours before to visit but whose identity he could no longer seem to recall.

A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place—
that
was loneliness. Of course there had been in his years long bouts of solitary hours. In the first—very well, the only—years of Arthur’s medical practice, he logged interminable afternoon after interminable afternoon in his bright, empty office. He would sit at his cheap desk, waiting in vain for patients to arrive on his doorstep. So he made use of the time by writing stories: a long novel called
The White Company
and a handful of short tales that marked the first appearance of a certain consulting detective. They were such pleasant trifles then—his brooding, cantankerous detective and the oblivious, dim-witted assistant. Holmes was too cold-blooded, too remote for Arthur to become attached to him. But Watson! Well, Watson one could come to love.
He
was Arthur’s stand-in, not Holmes; it was Watson who shared the author’s biography, the author’s voice, the author’s hotheaded romantic afflictions. Watson was the one he would miss now. But hunched over that desk with his stories, Arthur had never, in all that time he spent patiently hoping to hear the sound of the visitor’s bell, been this alone.

He made his way to the Lyceum Theatre and stepped across the long shadows etched onto the cobblestones by the Lyceum’s six tall stone columns. It was dark under the broad portico, as the roof shielded Arthur from the late afternoon. It felt warmer in the shadows.

“My, my,” crowed a ghostly voice from behind. “You look a fright. Has someone died?”

Arthur turned. A thick, wide-shouldered man emerged from the third pillar back, materializing into the sunlight like a spirit made flesh. His beard was cropped tightly to his cheeks, his unfashionably short hair pasted across his scalp from a deep part far to the left. He wore coat and tails, and shoes of such deep black that they sparkled directly into Arthur’s eye. He was dressed for a state funeral—or, more likely in his case, for opening night. After a few seconds had passed and Arthur had recovered from the shock, he recognized his old friend.

“Bram,” said Arthur with a deep, steadying inhale. “You gave me some start.”

“My deepest apologies,” said Bram Stoker as he came forward to shake Arthur’s hand. “It’s only that you look so pale—I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Do I?” Arthur leaned against the freezing Lyceum wall. “It has been . . . It has been a curious day.” The great center door to the theater opened suddenly, and a radiant woman bounced onto the portico.

“At six, then?” she called to Bram, her frizzy brown hair shaking free at the sides of her cap as she trotted down the steps. She gave Arthur a smile and a knowing raise of her dark eyebrows.

“Six,” responded Bram firmly. The woman—Arthur could not help but admit that she was indeed quite handsome—continued on to the Strand. Just before she merged into its pace and disappeared in the crowd, Arthur caught a glimpse of a black mourning band round her arm. He ground his teeth together.

“You must remember Ellen Terry,” asked Bram after she was out of earshot. “I’m sure you’ve seen her on the stage a dozen times.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course. Certainly, yes.”

“The woman’s going mad with this Juliet.” He grinned. “Henry’s getting all the press with his Romeo, and the poor girl’s a bit starved for attention. Mind you, not that Henry’s press is good enough for him either.”

This was typical conversation for Bram. His life consisted of placating the raging egos of the actors in his care as manager of the Lyceum—especially Henry Irving, whom Bram managed personally. As Irving got older, he became more dictatorial in his manner, and ever more vain in his person. At fifty-five, he was perhaps long in the tooth to take the stage as Romeo, but he would hear none of Bram’s objections. When the reviews came in—Arthur had read them, of course— and Bram’s position was vindicated . . . well, that only served to further enrage the aging actor. Bram was a dutiful servant, who’d been in thrall to his master since the day they’d met, though Arthur suspected that his friend had not known a happy moment in the fifteen years since he’d accepted this position.

Bram had always wished to be a writer. That was the issue, Arthur felt. That accounted for the very slight bitterness he’d occasionally find in his friend. Underneath the burdens of his thankless, spirit-wearying job, Bram held firm to a passion for the literary life that he rarely shared publicly. He would wake early in the mornings. Before heading to the Lyceum to solve the day’s budgetary crisis and flatter Irving until he grew sore in the throat, Bram would scribble such macabre and fantastical stories—truly bloody stuff—and then squirrel them away in a drawer. He showed some to Arthur only once, and Arthur was shocked by the violence Bram could commit only in fiction, and only in secret. On an occasional evening of drink, Bram would describe for Arthur his work on a longer piece, a perpetually half-written novel of undead ghouls and some bloodsucking count from the Continent. For a man so meek and—dare he say it?—sinfully effeminate, Bram had quite a heart for the grotesque.

They’d met two years earlier, when Bram had bought a play of Arthur’s, a one-man show for Henry Irving to perform. Over the long nights of rehearsals, and the still-longer nights of burgundy after the play had gone up, they’d become fast friends. Irving was a pompous buffoon, but in this gentle manager with a hidden drawerful of ghost stories, Arthur had found someone who understood him. And just because the man’s yarns hadn’t netted him more than a halfpenny over the years, while at the same time Arthur had become financially quite comfortable, that was no reason for any tension between the two.

“Do you have a moment?” asked Arthur.

“For you?” replied Bram. “Always. Now, what is afflicting you?”

“I hate him!” Arthur barked suddenly.

Bram laughed. “This is your Holmes we’re talking about?”

“I hate him more than anyone! If I had not killed him, he certainly would have killed me. And now these . . . these people act as if the man were
real,
as if I’d murdered
their
father,
their
wife.” Arthur spoke faster, the anger welling up inside him. He began ranting to Bram about the unfairness of it all, about how Holmes had distracted the public from better things, about the myriad ways in which, once loosed, the creation begins to dwarf its creator. Arthur’s breath puffed into the frigid air like smoke from a pipe.

Finally Bram began to laugh, the sound somewhere between a cackle and a feline meow. Arthur stopped, derailed from his anger.

“I hate him,” Arthur repeated.

“You’re the one who tossed the poor sod off a cliff,” said Bram. “Imagine how he feels about you!”

C
HAPTER 8

The Darkened Room

“You know my methods. Apply them!”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

The Hound of the Baskervilles

January 6, 2010, cont.

In the darkest corner of a darkened room, all Sherlock Holmes stories begin. In the pregnant dim of gaslight and smoke, Holmes would sit, digesting the day’s papers, puffing on his long pipe, injecting himself with cocaine. He would pop smoke rings into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to pierce into the belly of his study and release the promise of adventure; of clues to interpret; of, at last he would plead, a puzzle he could not solve. And after each story he would return here, into the dark room, and die day by day of boredom. The darkness of his study was his cage, but also the womb of his genius. And when into that room—

Harold shuddered, and his thoughts snapped back from such fancies to Room 1117, to his sneakers on the plush carpet, to Sarah’s shoulder a hairsbreadth from his face, and to the dead body not ten feet in front of him.

Alex Cale’s corpse—and to merely glance at it was to tell it could not be anything other than a corpse—was pressed, like dough, into the carpet. He wore a black two-button suit, his wide black tie only slightly undone. He looked, to Harold, perversely like an undertaker. Except that his shoes were off and resting neatly by his side, revealing thin dress socks that almost matched the black of his suit. Was he dressing when he was killed, getting ready to lace his shoes?

Harold stepped forward, past Sarah, toward Alex. Despite the hundreds of blood-soaked stories he had read, Harold had never been in the presence of an actual dead body before. It was both more and less shocking than he might have imagined. The lifelessness of a man Harold had known—not well but at least in the flesh, so to speak—watered his eyes, and forced him to bite the inside of his lower lip. And yet the sensation of standing straight-backed and alert above the scene of the crime felt shamefully natural.