Sherlock Holmes: The London Terrors by William Meikle Read online

  SHERLOCK HOLMES:

  THE LONDON TERRORS

  by John Hamish Watson, MD

  William Meikle

  DARK REGIONS PRESS

  2016

  FIRST EBOOK EDITION

  TEXT © 2015 BY WILLIAM MEIKLE

  COVER ART AND INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS

  © 2014 BY M. WAYNE MILLER

  EDITOR & PUBLISHER, JOE MOREY

  COPY EDITOR, F.J. BERGMANN

  ISBN: 978-1-62641-198-2

  DARK REGIONS PRESS, LLC

  P.O. BOX 31022

  PORTLAND, OR 97203

  WWW.DARKREGIONS.COM

  Grateful acknowledgement to Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. for permission to use the Sherlock Holmes characters created by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Dedication

  EF

  To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Table of Contents

  EF

  The Hackney Horror

  Chapters

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

  13 14 15 16

  The Long Sleep

  Chapters

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

  13 14 15 16 17 18

  The Lost Husband

  Chapters

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

  About the Author

  About the Artist

  List of Illustrations

  EF

  … he did indeed have a prodigious number of facts at his fingertips.

  “Someone has taken his brain—they were dashed careful about it, too.…”

  Green—or his disembodied head, at least—spoke to the rapt congregation …

  Both were mere silhouettes against the darkness of the night …

  It took me a second to realize it was not even remotely human.

  “… we really will have to choose which future we want to live in.”

  “… it did not save me, and it will not save you.”

  “A deep moan came from the darkness in the far end of the hold …”

  … a hefty sarcophagus, hewn out of some kind of marble by the look of it …

  I stepped forward and put two bullets in the attacker’s torso …

  “… had him raised above its head as if he weighed no more than a babe …”

  “… it is never wise to try to second-guess a master tactician.”

  “Say you will help me? Please? I have nowhere else to turn.”

  “… a great many of those in places of power are also businessmen …”

  … they turned and stared in our direction, every eye clouded white …

  The crawling men kept coming. We closed the carriage door …

  … the stitches at their lips had all been snipped—leaving them free to bite.

  There were hundreds of them, and the stench was terrible.

  Mrs. Pemberton would be making no more breakfasts for her George.

  SHERLOCK HOLMES:

  THE HACKNEY HORROR

  by John Hamish Watson, MD

  William Meikle

  Chapter One

  EF

  The card that started the case arrived at some time on a Tuesday afternoon in the hottest August on record. It was several hours before I was apprised of its existence, for I was with a patient who had taken quite a turn for the worse in my rooms, and I had to see him settled before I could tend to the day’s administrative tasks. Even after reading the card, it was several hours before I caught up with my required paperwork.

  In the end, I did not even have the time to return home and change for the outing. I had a wash and shave at the hospital and then had to hurry across town to arrive in time for the occasion to which I had been invited—an evening performance in the Lyceum.

  Given that the card had come from my good friend Sherlock Holmes, and knowing his tastes in matters of the stage, I expected to be attending a rather highbrow affair—a light opera, perhaps, or a string quartet. I was rather taken aback to see the placard in the foyer for an evening of music-hall entertainment, it not being something that would normally attract Holmes’ attention. I was also surprised to find that, despite my tardiness, our customary box was empty.

  The ashtrays were still clear, which told me that Holmes had not yet arrived.

  I assumed he had been diverted to another matter. Given that I was rather tired from a day at the hospital, and that I felt underdressed for the occasion, I considered taking my own leave. But I had nothing else planned for the evening, and as no further correspondence from my friend seemed to be forthcoming, I ordered myself a glass of brandy and settled down for the entertainment.

  I soon began to regret my decision to stay, even after the most welcome arrival of the brandy, for the fare on show was shoddy stuff indeed.

  The first singer, a pleasing-to-the-eye soprano, got everything off to a steady but far from spectacular start, but the next act up, a portly Scottish comedian, badly misread the mood of the crowd with a string of jokes at the expense of the inhabitants of London. His material might have gone down well in Sauchiehall Street in his hometown, but down in the Strand he was dead and buried before he realized it. They were baying for his blood by the time he beat an ignominious retreat a mere five minutes later.

  Things went downhill sharply from there, in a succession of dull magicians, feats of strength and agility that showed precious few signs of either quality, and a quartet of singers so badly out of tune that at first I thought they were another comedy act.

  After that assault on our ears, the crowd was restless, and I sensed trouble brewing, so I was feeling nervous on behalf of the next performer before he even reached center stage. The stooped gait and shuffling walk of the man who came on did little for my confidence.

  Several boos rang out, and a cry of ‘Show us your knickers, mate,’ got a big laugh. I thought the performer might immediately wilt under the pressure, but his voice carried clear through the whole auditorium when he spoke, and it rang with an air of confidence that caused the audience to at least start to pay attention to what he had to say.

  “My name is John Green,” he began, his accent clearly local, which immediately gave him a better start than the Scotsman had. His speech was overlaid with the signs of an educated, if not exactly cultured, upbringing, and was free from the harsh nasal quality often associated with the area.

  “I was lucky enough to be born with a remarkable brain,” he continued. “One that I have trained and honed to a perfect instrument through years of dedication.”

  “Go and hone yourself,” a wag in the audience shouted, amid much hilarity. It did not break the man’s composure.

  “I have filled my mind with a veritable encyclopedia of facts and figures, alongside much of the great literature of history, including the whole of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.”

  “Pride cometh before a fall,” a voice shouted out from the audience, and that got a laugh all round.

  “Actually, the quotation is more accurately rendered as ‘Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.’ Proverbs, chapter sixteen, verse eighteen. Ask me another.”

  A smattering of applause ran through the crowd—they were starting to warm to the man. And he too seemed to be warming to the task. He walked to the front of the stage and raised his voice.

  “I am willing to put my money where my mouth is. If you ask me a question of a factual nature and I do not know the answer, I will give you a sixpence for your trouble.”

  “Let’s see your money, pal.”

  Mr. Green jingled his trouser pocket. Coins rattled, and the man smiled. “I’ve got something in here
for the ladies, too, and it ain’t small change.”

  That earned the best laugh of the night thus far, and Mr. Green’s act was off and running. Over the course of the next ten minutes, the crowd threw a series of questions at him: some mundane, some outlandish. He displayed that he had not been boasting—he did indeed have a prodigious number of facts at his fingertips. He was also, as he relaxed, looking strangely familiar to me, and I realized why Holmes was not in the box beside me. As yet, he had not had to take a single sixpence from his pocket, but I believed I might have a question that would test him.

  I was to be thwarted in my plans. A theater attendant came into the box and handed me a note. It was a hand I recognized immediately, and it was brief and to the point.

  Meet me in Green’s dressing room after the act. And be careful—there could be trouble. H.

  I decided to act immediately, and therefore I missed the climax of the act, but as I went backstage, I heard the roar of approval and a deafening chorus of applause. Mr. Green was the star of the show.

  He arrived at the dressing-room door at the same time as I did, and smiled. Up close, there was no mistaking him.

  “Well, Watson,” Holmes said, slipping into his normal cultured voice. “How did I do?”

  “Remarkably well,” I replied. “But I would have had you with my question, given the chance.”

  If I expected him to rise to the bait, I was to be disappointed. He pushed open the dressing room door and bundled me inside before stripping off the wig and rubbing away the face paint. By now I myself had quite forgotten about any question I might have asked him on stage, for there was a bigger question lying on the floor of the dressing room.

  A man—the real Mr. Green, I supposed—lay in a fetal curl on a threadbare rug. I bent to check on him, but it was immediately obvious that he was quite dead.

  3

  “No time to explain, Watson,” Holmes said. “Watch the door. If it is anyone but Lestrade, do not let them enter.”

  As I moved to the door, he went to bend over the body, where he started his customary minute observance of every tiny detail. From outside the door I heard a piano player lead the crowd in a chorus of a popular song of the day, but there was no sound of anyone approaching along the corridor. I chanced a look, opening the door by an inch or so to peer out. The corridor was empty.

  “Close the door,” Holmes said. “I may have bought us some time with my little deception, but equally, I may have forced their hand. They may make another attempt on Mr. Green’s life at any moment.”

  “But Holmes, the man is already quite dead.”

  Holmes stood from the body and looked me in the eye. “Yes, Watson. But they do not know that. With any luck, my play-acting will convince them that they have failed in their first attempt and will flush them out into the light.”

  “Who?” I asked. I had not yet caught up with what was happening and felt quite lost.

  Holmes smiled grimly. “That is what I am hoping to discover.”

  Seconds later I heard heavy footsteps in the corridor and I sensed a certain tension in Holmes’ stance, as if he expected trouble, but the voice that called out was more than familiar enough to both of us.

  “Holmes? If this is another of your blasted tricks, I’ll …”

  I opened the door to Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. He stopped shouting as soon as he saw the body on the floor.

  “Get in here,” Holmes said. “And close the door behind you.”

  A younger officer I did not know came in behind Lestrade. With all of us inside, the small dressing room seemed even smaller and more cramped.

  “No games, Holmes,” Lestrade said as he knelt to check the body. “I want a full account of what has happened here.”

  “And you will get one, Inspector,” Holmes replied. “But first things first—would you like to catch the killer or not?”

  Lestrade seemed on the verge of a snappy response when Holmes put a finger to his lips, asking for silence. We heard the audience laugh loudly out in the theater, and then once again there was the unmistakable sound of heavy footsteps in the corridor.

  “Leave this to us, Holmes,” Lestrade whispered.

  The footsteps came closer, and then stopped—someone stood just on the other side of the door. The sound from the theater died to little more than a distant whisper and then rose again to a loud roar of applause. Whoever was outside had been waiting for the sound to cover what came next; the door banged open as if someone had put a shoulder into it. At the same instant the lamps in the room extinguished in a sudden gust of wind, leaving us in darkness that quickly became a chaotic mêlée of thrown punches, kicks and some rather exotic cursing from Lestrade. I lashed out at a large shadow, and immediately recoiled as my fist met something as hard as iron and just as unyielding. Someone grunted in pain, and I heard a loud crack that I knew immediately signaled a broken bone.

  Then all fell silent.

  “No one move,” Holmes said.

  A match sparked, and I saw Holmes’ face, lit in flickering red and as solemn as I have ever seen him. He lit a lamp and illuminated the room. Lestrade sat on the floor, sporting a bump on his forehead that would be a most impressive bruise later, and the young officer stood, ghost-faced, nursing an arm that hung at an unnatural angle from the elbow.

  There was no body on the floor and no sign of our assailant. Wherever he had gone, he had taken Mr. Green with him.

  Holmes dashed out into the corridor—I merely had time to see that the gas lamps out there had also been extinguished before I turned my ministrations to the young policeman. Lestrade got to his feet, somewhat groggily, but refusing any aid.

  “What in blazes just happened, Watson?”

  I had no answer for him.

  Holmes reappeared in the doorway. “He is gone, and there is no trail to follow, I’m afraid,” he said. “Although how he managed it, I am at quite a loss to say.”

  “This lad needs a hospital,” I said, having to hold the young officer upright to keep him from falling into a dead faint.

  Holmes nodded. “Let us see to that immediately.” He turned to the Inspector. “You look like you could do with a drink, Lestrade. Let us return to Baker Street and sample some of Mrs. Hudson’s fine brandy. I believe I owe you an explanation.”

  Chapter Two

  EF

  We arrived back in the Baker Street apartment sometime after ten, having taken time to get the young officer the medical attention he required. On another night I might have stayed by him to ensure he was comfortable, but I had left him in good hands, and my curiosity had been piqued—I wanted to hear how Holmes and the rest of us had become involved in this most perplexing matter.

  By ten after the hour we were sitting in armchairs around the fireplace in the parlor. It was still too warm an evening to have a fire going in the grate, and even with the windows closed against the stifling fumes of the city outside, it was still a muggy, slightly unpleasant atmosphere. We proceeded to add tobacco smoke to the fug, and Holmes himself charged three large snifters of brandy before we settled to hear his tale.

  “As you have probably surmised, it was no coincidence that I was at the theater tonight. I first met John Green in this very room, just after Christmas last year,” he started. “He came to me with … shall we call it a filing problem? He wanted a new way to order some of the information he had stored, as it was becoming rather unwieldy for him to process.

  “I quickly discovered that he had a truly remarkable mind—one capable of retaining every scrap of information he either read, saw or heard. The storage of it all was not the problem—as you have often heard me say, the normal human mind is a vast expanse of empty space waiting to be filled. But as I said, Mr. Green was having problems with retrieval, having failed to adequately categorize the facts he was gathering—facts that were rapidly piling up in a jumble too tangled for him to unravel.

  “I helped where I thought I could do him the most good. I had also quickly
determined that despite the unique nature of his gift, Mr. Green was not a deep thinker and seemed unable or unwilling to make any connections between the disparate items he was so assiduously gathering.

  “We had three sessions in all over the next week. I even went so far as to partake of one of his performances, so as to obtain a better idea of the uses to which he put his storeroom, but I did not see him again until this very evening.

  “A card came this morning.”

  Holmes took a small rectangular card from his waistcoat pocket and passed it to me. On one side it had Green’s name, and an address in Hackney. On the other was a scrawled script, written either by someone unaccustomed to the pen, or in some degree of haste.

  Please meet me at the Lyceum tonight. I fear for my life.

  I showed the card to Lestrade, who merely grunted and sipped more brandy.

  “Of course,” Holmes continued. “I could not in all honesty refuse such a plea. I booked our usual box, sent Watson a message, and made my way to the theater to arrive before the start of the show, hoping to talk to the man before he went onstage.

  “But even by arriving early, I was too late for Mr. Green. He lay as you both saw him, on the floor of his dressing room, quite dead. A cursory glance at the body told me little I did not already know, and when there was a knock on the door, and a shout announced ‘Five minutes, Mr. Green,’ I decided on my plan to try to draw the killer out.

  “As Watson knows, I am rather handy with stage makeup and am capable of disguises that can fool the casual observer. I took Green’s place on stage—and even if I do say so myself, gave a performance that managed to persuade everyone present that John Green was still very much alive. When I returned from the auditorium, Watson met me at the door—and the rest you know.”