The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (31 page)

I stared at him, speechless, then blurted out the first question that came into my mind. “B-but what about the two little girls?”

Holmes drew a thin hand over his face. “How can I have forgotten? Of course, they were already dead. I saw their gravestones among the trees as we drove away.”

This was too much for me. “And they, I suppose, are the ‘ghost or two' which you promised me before we entered this foul place, not to mention a Wallachian madwoman, an evil scientist, and a vampire in the linen chest. Oh, well done, Holmes. Bravo! And you call
me
romantic!”

His attention sharpened and he threw up a hand for silence. I, well trained, instantly obeyed.

We listened. Water dripped, the wind soughed, the old house creaked . . . and then it came again, from above us somewhere on the second floor: a faint rasp, a muffled thump.

“Oh, really!” I exclaimed.

Snatching the candle from his hand, I limped hastily down the hall to the far door. There was the stair, with water cascading down the steps. The decayed remains of a carpet made them as slippery as moss in a river-bed as I climbed, clinging to the bannister.

I did not want to believe my friend's story. It frightened me the way he had groped after details, not as if making them up but as if drawing their memory out of a half-forgotten childhood nightmare like splinters from a long neglected wound. And such details! Was I really to believe that . . . ? No, I would not.

But I had to be sure.

Here was the upper hall as Holmes had described it, eerily long, lined with doors. I hesitated on the upper landing, suddenly unsure. After all, here I was, with a guttering candle, in the upper storey of an abandoned house miles from anywhere, on a dark and stormy night, hunting ghosts. For all I knew, we might instead be sharing Morthill with an escaped axe-murderer—which, at that moment, I would almost have preferred.

The first door to the left stood half open. From the darkness within came a furtive rustle, as if of shifting paper.

A hand closed like a vise on my arm. “Don't go in there,” snapped Holmes.

I was startled, so quickly and quietly had he come up the stair on my heels, and I was annoyed to find myself whispering. “Why not?”

“Because the way in may not be the way out. And besides,” he added, somewhat lamely, “the floor may be unsound.”

“A fine time to think of that. Very well, then; if not this door, which?”

He would not answer me, but his eyes betrayed him, sliding involuntarily to the first door on the right. When he made no move to open it, I pushed past him and gripped the knob. It came off in my hand.

I glanced back at Holmes, suddenly as reluctant as he. Candlelight flickered across his face, shadows pooling in the hollows beneath cheekbones and eyes. He stood as if rooted before the door from which his father had fled.

There was no way forward but one.

I set my shoulder to the warped panels and pushed. The lock broke in a shower of rust and the door squealed open on clutching hinges. Mindful of the house's tricks, I reached blindly inside, fished out a high-backed chair, and wedged the door open with it. Holmes stared into the darkness, then entered as if drawn. I followed.

Candlelight flickered on mouldering clutter: a disordered bed whose canopy long since had fallen down across its foot, rags of once elegant clothing strewn about the floor, a pair of long, dingy gloves draped like flayed skin over the back of a chair. More confusion littered the dressing table—age-dull bottles, lotions, notions and trinkets tumbled together.

One of Carle Vernet's lithographs hung on the nearby wall, depicting an extravagantly dressed eighteenth-century belle seated at her dressing table, admiring herself in its large mirror.

“The picture is called
Vanity,”
said Holmes, behind me, “not that Blanche probably understood why. She had a certain imitative cleverness—like a monkey—but no real imagination.”

I looked again, and recoiled. The mirror's rounded shape was
that of a naked skull, the twin images of the woman's head and her reflection its hollow eyes, the cosmetic bottles her teeth bared in a cryptic smile. This print, not the
Mona Lisa
, was the original of Blanche's portrait in the hall below.

“Sangsue,”
her dying father had scrawled in horror over his meticulous notations. Bloodsucker.
Non, non, non
. . .

I turned to Holmes in triumph, just as he threw back the collapsed canopy. At the foot of the bed was a chest, no bigger than a child's coffin. A crude spray of mistletoe was carved into the age-blackened oak of its lid. At its farther end, caught in the crack, were several long strands of pale hair.

Holmes hesitated a moment. Then he gripped the lid and, with a sudden effort, attempted to lift it. It rose a quarter inch and stopped with a jar that dislodged his fingers. Belatedly, he looked at the key, still turned in the lock. For a long moment we stood there, he staring at the key, I at him. It had grown very quiet outside. Inside, all I heard was the distant, forlorn drip of water. A long, scraping sound made me start. It came from the window. Outside, the fingers of a dead oak again drew restlessly across the glass and tapped against the pane. Then Holmes sighed.

“No ghosts need apply,” he murmured, turned, and walked past me out of the room.

I suppose I stood with my mouth open a good ten seconds, and then I swallowed. There was the chest; there, the key. Stealthy moonlight pooled about it on the floor, and a breath of air sighed through the broken window. The strands of pale hair stirred . . .

I ran down the treacherous stair after my friend, in danger of adding one more ghost to the house by slipping.

Below, the dining hall had filled with shifting moonlight and shadow. I paused in the hall doorway, searching the walls not for the painted smile of a “da Vinci” or an icon's baleful glare, but for those two white blurs in the corner, forever side by side. They were not there. Something outside the window caught my attention. There the two dead children stood, white frocks glimmering among the
moon-silvered birch, watching, waiting . . . for what, or whom? Their pale, unblinking eyes gazed upwards, as though toward the window of a second-storey bedroom.

Cold water dripped on my head. I started and looked up. Above me hung the mistletoe, that filthy parasite, each bare twig glistening with a drop of condensation like so many sparkling poison berries.

When I looked out the window again, I cursed my gullibility. Not children but two small, white tombstones leaned toward each other in the family plot, almost touching.

We reached Bagshot in time to catch the last train. Holmes slept all the way to London.

W
e have never spoken of that evening again.

Was the whole adventure a practical joke—Holmes's attempt to cure me by surfeit of my foolish romanticism? I want to think so, but I can not shrug off the story. It haunts me. In my dreams, I wander through endless, dusty rooms, sometimes hearing distant song, sometimes distant laughter. Last night, all too close, there was a muffled voice crying and the sound of nails breaking against wood as hard as iron . . .

Let me out, let me out, let me out
. . .

Thus, I have felt compelled on this Christmas Eve to make what sense I can of that strange night four months ago. Perhaps I have read more into my friend's words and especially into his silences than he ever intended. Perhaps he is waiting for me to publish this fantastic tale to have the last laugh. Perhaps, in the beginning, that was his only goal.

I believe, however, that he found himself telling a deeper story than he intended, digging up the buried horror that poisoned his sleep. What he can not endure is the inexplicable, the irrational. Mere ghosts will never bother him, for he does not believe in them. For him, the mystery is solved. That is enough.

In that, he is more the detective than I have proved the story-teller. Before that sullen, silent chest, my courage faltered, and the story's end remains untold.

[1902]

A
DDENDUM

Story-tellers die, but do stories ever really end? If you are reading this, then perhaps I, too, am dead, and the guardianship of these hitherto unpublished accounts passes to you.

Whatever my other failings, I have found myself too much both the story-teller and the detective to destroy evidence. At the bottom of this old tin dispatch-box is the last stanza of “The Mistletoe Bough,” wrapped around a key—two keys, as it were, to a single mystery. The dispatch-box itself sits upon an oblong chest made of age-blackened oak, bound with iron, with a crude mistletoe carved into its cracked lid. Without telling Holmes, I had carters convey it unopened from Morthill Manor to the vaults of Cox & Company.

Here, then, are the ballad and the key; there is the chest. As my dear friend once said of another case, “It can't hurt now.” Do what you will.

At length an oak chest that had long laid hid
Was found in the castle, they raised the lid
When a skeleton form lay mouldering there
In the bridal wreath of that lady fair.
Oh sad was her fate, when in sportive jest
She hid from her lord in the old oak chest,
It closed with a spring and a dreadful doom
And the bride lay clasped in a living tomb,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!

[1929]

BY
R
OBERTA
R
OGOW

T
here are very few times I have ever seen my friend Sherlock Holmes refuse to help a prospective client. I was present at our lodgings in Baker Street when such an occasion arose. It led to a revelation so shocking in its implications that I have never set it down before. I only do so now in the interests of completing the record of the cases undertaken by my famous friend.

It was November of the year 1896. Holmes and I were preparing to leave London, in pursuit of one of the most elusive criminals we ever encountered, when the bell rang, and Mrs. Hudson announced that a “Mrs. Churchill” and a “Mrs. Jerome” wished to speak with the famous detective.

Before we could stop them, two women strode past our faithful landlady; a tall, slender lady, in a fashionable morning-suit of blue velvet entered, followed by a shorter, stouter woman in an equally striking dress of dull rust color. Both wore the huge hats common to that year, with veils that were supposed to conceal their features. The piercing eye of Sherlock Holmes penetrated the veils, and he bowed to the taller veiled woman.

“Good morning, Your Grace,” he said.

The woman lifted her veils to reveal the delicate features made famous by the illustrated newspapers the year before, upon her marriage to His Grace, the Duke of Marlborough. The other woman shrugged and lifted her veil also.

“I told you, Consuelo, he can tell everything at a glance,” she said, in an unmistakably American accent. I recognized Lady Randolph Churchill, known to London Society as Jenny. Like Her Grace the Duchess, Lady Randolph's face had been photographed and popularized in the Press.

Her Grace turned to Holmes. “Was I so obvious?” she asked, in clear but timid tones.

Holmes restrained a smirk, but his lips twitched as he said, “If you wish to be anonymous, Your Grace, you should not go about carrying a handkerchief with the Marlborough crest on it, like the one I see in your reticule.”

“Of course.” The duchess looked about her. “May I sit down?”

“We were about to leave . . .” Holmes said. I bustled forward with a small chair. The young duchess looked quite faint, whether with fatigue or fear I could not say.

“It is quite important,” Lady Randolph said, with the air of one who is usually obeyed instantly. “Consuelo . . . that is, Her Grace's jewels have been stolen.”

Holmes strolled to the fireplace where he took his familiar stance, leaning against the mantelpiece. “Indeed. A burglary . . . ?”

“No, not at all. It was when Marlborough and I were invited for the shooting at Sandringham last month. A man came out of the crowd at the railroad station, grabbed my jewel case as it was being
loaded, and ran off. The police have not been able to find him and I thought . . .” Her voice trailed off, as she looked at Holmes. Even seated, she retained the noble posture of one trained from birth to a Position in Society.

Holmes frowned. “Not a burglary,” he muttered to himself. “A vulgar snatch-and-grab. In this case, Your Grace, I must defer to the efforts of Scotland Yard. They are the experts in petty thievery, not I.”

“Petty thievery!” Lady Randolph exclaimed. “Those jewels were worth several thousand pounds!”

Holmes's eyes never left the young duchess. “For you, Your Grace, that would be a mere bagatelle. The Vanderbilt fortune will surely make up the difference.”

I suddenly remembered that the Duchess of Marlborough had been Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt, the daughter of the American multi-millionaire. The marriage had been the subject of lewd gossip and surmise in the clubs for months, both before and after the event.

Her Grace rose in one graceful motion. “Come, Jenny. I am sorry I troubled you, Mr. Holmes. Good day.” She took a hesitant step towards the door. “Mr. Holmes,” she said, a slight frown marring the porcelain perfection of her features, “you seem familiar to me. Have we ever met before?”