Read The Case of the Haunted Horrors Online
Authors: Anthony Read
The Case of the Haunted Horrors
For Elliot and Oliver, Jack and Miranda
ONTENTS
A
jagged flash of lightning tore open the night sky over Baker Street. For a moment it was as though someone had switched on a giant floodlight, lighting up the buildings below – then, just as suddenly, it was gone and everything was even darker than before. The lightning was followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder that sounded like a thousand cannons being fired at once
.
“Blimey, that was a close ’un!” exclaimed Sarge. The old soldier usually counted the seconds between flash and thunder, to tell how far away the lightning was – five seconds for every mile, he reckoned. This time there had been no gap, which meant it must be right overhead. He looked anxiously around, to see if anything had been struck. Then, hanging on tightly with his one good hand to the pitcher of beer he was carrying home from the pub, he hurried back to the Baker Street Bazaar
.
As he pushed through the wrought-iron gates and hurried into his lodge, the deep rumble of the thunder echoed overhead like a roll of drums. Strangely, though, there was no sign of rain. Another lightning flash and a bang as loud as a volley from all the guns of the Royal Artillery made him jump so hard that some of the beer slopped over the edge of the jug and splashed onto the floor
.
“My oath!” he cried. “It’s enough to waken the dead.”
Sarge put the pitcher carefully down on the table and reached for a cloth to wipe up the spilt beer. As he straightened, he glanced out of the door and along the Bazaar to Madame Dupont’s waxworks exhibition – and froze. There was a dim light moving behind one of the windows
.
“Hello,” he said to himself. “What’s goin’ on? Looks like somebody’s in there!”
Tucking a truncheon under the stump of his amputated left arm, he lifted a bunch of keys from their hook on the wall, picked up his bull’s-eye lantern and set off to investigate
.
The waxworks gallery was always a bit spooky at night. Standing in their shadowy alcoves around the wall, the wax figures often looked as though they might be coming to life. But Sarge was used to this, and it did not worry him. He shone his lantern around the room in case an intruder was hiding among the models. There was no one. Then he heard a sound – the quiet, stealthy sound of someone moving. It came not from the main exhibition, but from the side room that Madame Dupont had recently turned into the Dungeon of Horrors
.
Sarge was not a nervous man, nor was he very imaginative. But he didn’t like going into the Dungeon, particularly at night and on his own. True to its name, this gallery was full of horrors: lifelike – or perhaps death-like – wax figures of murderers and their victims splashed with gore; unspeakable monsters and deformed creatures so revolting they made your stomach turn. It was so scary that Madame Dupont had offered a prize of the princely sum of five pounds to anyone who would spend a whole night alone in there. So far, no one had dared to take up the challenge. Could it be, Sarge wondered, that somebody was doing so now? Or was there a more sinister explanation?
Seeing light seeping through the crack under the heavy oak door to the Dungeon, Sarge summoned up his courage, took a deep breath and gave the door a cautious push. It creaked loudly as it opened – a sound effect that Madame Dupont had installed especially to make people nervous. Inside the room, someone or something moved. The beam from Sarge’s bull’s-eye lantern swept over the wax models, picking out a headless corpse, a grinning skull and finally the agonized face of the murder victim in Madame Dupont’s latest tableau. Next to it stood the figure of another man, his face lit eerily from below. And it was the same face
.
Sarge let out a yell and screwed his eyes tight shut. When he opened them again, there was no one there. Only a thin wisp of smoke hung in the air. The figure had disappeared
.
EEING A
G
HOST
The morning dawned bright and sunny, with no sign of the previous night’s electric storm. The Baker Street Boys were cheerful as they left HQ, their secret cellar home, for another day on the streets of London. Rosie, the little flower girl, filled her tray with posies for the ladies and buttonholes for the gentlemen, and set off to sell them on bustling Baker Street. Shiner headed for Paddington railway station carrying a green wooden box holding his boot polishes, brushes and cloths. Queenie started on her round of shops – grocers, greengrocers, butchers, bakers – looking for yesterday’s leftovers to beg or buy cheaply from friendly shopkeepers to turn into one of her tasty stews. Everything seemed like a very normal, ordinary morning – until Wiggins, Beaver, Gertie and Sparrow strolled up to the Baker Street Bazaar.
As they approached the entrance gates, they were surprised to see a small crowd of people on the pavement outside. Most of them were the owners of the little shops that lined the inside of the Bazaar, plus a couple of coachmen whose carriages were parked inside. At the front was the unmistakable figure of Madame Dupont, wearing a vivid purple cloak over an equally bright red satin dress. The tall green ostrich feathers in her hat swayed backwards and forwards as she pushed and tugged at the heavy iron gates and shouted for Sarge to open them.
Being an old soldier, Sarge was usually up and about long before anybody else. It was unheard of for him not to be “on parade”, as he always put it, bright and early. But on this morning there was no sign of him, and the big gates were still firmly locked.
As the four Boys arrived from one direction, PC Higgins appeared from the other.
“’Ello, ’ello!” the burly policeman called out. “What’s goin’ on here, then?”
“Ah, officer,” Madame Dupont greeted him. “We are locked out. Locked out of our own businesses. It’s a disgrace!”
“That’s not like Sergeant Scroggs,” said PC Higgins, pushing back his helmet.
“D’you think something’s happened to him?” Wiggins asked.
“Could have.”
“But there’s no way we can find out without getting in,” said Madame Dupont impatiently. “And the keys are in his lodge.”
“That’s soon fixed,” said Wiggins. “Gertie here could be over that gate in two shakes of a dog’s tail. Climb anything, she can.”
“Is that right?” PC Higgins looked suspiciously at the tousle-haired girl in boys’ clothes.
“Sure and haven’t I been cloimbin’ trees since I was knee-high to a grasshopper?” Gertie told him with a cheeky Irish grin. “Shall I show you?”
“Go on, then,” grunted the policeman.
“And just get a move on,” Madame Dupont snapped. “We’re sick of having to wait here like ninnies.”
Wiggins and Beaver gave Gertie a leg-up, and in no time at all she had hopped over the gate and down the other side, run to the lodge and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, she lifted the latch and opened it.
“The keys should be hanging up just inside,” Wiggins called to her. “The one for the gates is the biggest.”
Gertie stepped in and reached for the key, then let out a shriek.
“What is it?” Wiggins asked as she came tumbling out of the door, clutching the key and looking pale. “What’s up?”
“It’s … it’s Sarge…” she cried. “I think … I think he’s dead!”
There was a gasp from the little crowd. Gertie’s hands were shaking so much that she couldn’t get the big key into the keyhole, so Wiggins reached through the bars and took it from her.
“What’s he look like?” he asked as he unlocked the gate from the outside.
“He’s stretched out on the floor, all stiff and still.”
“Everybody stay where you are,” PC Higgins ordered. “This is a job for the police.” He pushed through the gates and went into the lodge, placing his large boots very carefully so as not to disturb any possible evidence. The others watched breathlessly and waited for him to emerge, which he did very shortly.
“Well?” demanded Madame Dupont. “Is he dead?”
“Dead
drunk
,” PC Higgins replied, holding up an empty bottle. “What you might describe, ma’am, as paralytic.”
“Drunk on duty!” Madame Dupont declared, trembling with indignation. “It’s a disgrace! The man’s clearly not to be trusted. I shall see to it that he is dismissed from his post and never works again.”
“That’s for you to decide, ma’am. It’s not a police matter.”
“Poor old Sarge,” said Beaver. “Ain’t there nothin’ we can do for him?”