The two men looked at me and then the constable whispered something to his companion and the two nodded their heads in unison.
“You’re an American,” the constable said, raising an eyebrow and chewing at the stem of his pipe.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m an American.”
“Well, Dr. Logan, you may be certain that we’ll get straight to the bottom of this,” he assured me.
“Thank you,” I said, and it was at that moment that I noticed something odd, about the diameter of a silver dollar, clutched in the drowned man’s hand.
“Murders here in Whitby do not go unsolved.”
“What makes you think he was murdered?” I asked the constable, prying the curious, iridescent object from Elijah Purdy’s grasp.
“Well, for one, the man’s pockets were filled with stones to weight the body down. See there for yourself.”
Indeed, the pockets of his wool overcoat were bulging with shale, but on quick inspection I saw that they all contained fossils and explained to the man that in all likelihood, Elijah Purdy himself had placed the stones there. One of his vest pockets was likewise filled.
“Ah,” the constable said thoughtfully, and rubbed at his mustache. “Well, no matter. We’ll find the chap what did this, I promise you.”
In no mood to argue the point, I answered a few more questions, told the constable that I would be available at the inquest, and made my way back up the rickety stairway to Pier Road. I stood there for a short time, surveying the scene below, the men arranged in a ring around the drowned man’s corpse, the dark sea lapping tirelessly at the shore, the wide North Sea sky above. After a bit I remembered the object I’d taken from Purdy’s hand and held it up for a closer inspection. But there was no doubt of what it was, a small ammonite of the genus Dactylioceras, a form quite common in sections of the English Liassic. Nothing extraordinary, except that this specimen, though deceased, was not fossilized, and the squidlike head of the cephalopod stared back at me with silvery eyes, its ten tentacles drooping limply across my fingers.
I fear that there is little else to tell, Dr. Watson, and glancing back over these few pages, I can see that there is not nearly so much sense in what I’ve written as I’d hoped for. I returned to the hotel, where I would spend the next three days, making one more visit to the Reverend Swales’s museum, only to discover my enthusiasm for work had dissolved. After the inquest, during which it was determined that Sir Elijah Purdy’s drowning was accidental, having occurred while he collected fossils along the beach and that no foul play was involved, I packed up my things and returned home to Manhattan. I delivered the very recently dead Dactylioceras, preserved in alcohol, to the curator of fossil invertebrates, who greeted the find with much fanfare and promised to name the surprising new species for the man from whose grip I had pried it. One final detail, which will be of interest to you, and which forms the primary reason of this writing, is a letter which I received some weeks after coming back to the States.
Posted from Whitby on the twelfth of September, one month to the day after my arrival there, it carried no return address and had been composed upon a typewriter. I will duplicate the text below:
Dear Dr. Logan,
I trust that your trip home will have passed without incident. I have written to offer my sincerest apologies for not having attended to the matter of your friend’s untimely death, and for not having found the time to continue our earlier conversation. But I must implore you to forget the odd matter of which I spoke, the three tablets from Whitby, Staithes, and Frylingdales. All are now lost, I fear, and I have come to see how that outcome is surely for the best. Dark and ancient powers, the whim of inhuman beings of inconceivable antiquity and malignancy, may be at work here and, I suspect, may have played a direct role in the death of Sir Elijah. Take my words to heart and forget these things. To worry at them further will profit you not. Perhaps we will meet again someday, under more congenial circumstances.
S. H.
Whether or not the letter’s author was, in fact, your own associate, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and if that was the man I spoke with at West Cliff, I cannot say. Any more than I can explain the presence in the waters off Whitby of a mollusk believed vanished from the face of the earth for so many millions of years or the death of Elijah Purdy, an excellent swimmer, I have been told. Having never seen the tablets firsthand, I can profess no reliable opinion regarding them, and feel I am better off not trying to do so. I have never been a nervous man, but I have taken to hearing strange sounds and voices in the night, and my sleep and, I am very much afraid, peace of mind are beginning to suffer. I dream of—no, I will not speak here of the dreams.
Before I close, I should say that on Friday last there was a burglary at the museum here, which the police have yet to solve. The Whitby ammonite and all written records of it were the only things stolen, though some considerable vandalism was done to a number of the paleontology and geology offices and to the locked cabinet where the specimen was being kept.
I thank you for your time, Dr. Watson, and, if you are ever in New York, hope to have the pleasure of meeting you.
Dr. Tobias H. Logan
Department of Vertebrate Paleontology
American Museum of Natural History
New York City, New York
(Unposted letter discovered among the effects of Dr. Tobias Logan, subsequent to his suicide by hanging, 11 May 1898.)
A Case of Insomnia
JOHN P. VOURLIS
Holmes couldn’t sleep. Not that this was unusual—he required no more than three to four hours on any given night. While London slumbered, he would prowl the gaslit neighborhoods of the city, past the breadmakers at the foot of Baker Street already at work, observing the late-night revelers staggering home from Soho in their drunken stupor as he continued down Regent Street, through Mayfair, past the ladies of the evening in Shepherd’s Market still hoping to squeeze the last few pounds out of the night before lying down in their own beds as the sun rose. Through Piccadilly, Edgware, Marylebone, and finally home again to the flat we shared. This was the route Holmes’s sleeplessness followed—which he often detailed for me over a morning pipe.
As a man of medicine, I pondered the root of his affliction. Holmes’s mind was an engine of perpetual thought, constantly at work on some problem that required wakefulness. Sleep seemed a nuisance to him, a luxury he had little use for. So it was no real surprise to me that Thursday in March when he came striding into my chambers at half-past seven in the morning, the Daily Press in hand, and said, “Watson, I simply cannot sleep!”
“What about the Valeriana officinalis I prescribed for you?” I said.
“Useless. It’s been three days now, and I haven’t so much as closed my eyes. And I am not alone in my suffering,” he continued, shoving the newspaper into my hands. “Read there, page three, column seven, near the bottom.”
I scanned the paper, searching for the item.
“There.” He pointed, jabbing his finger like a dagger at the headline.
“ ‘Plague of Insomnia,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘Citizens of northern town of Inswich suffer third month of sleeplessness. Town rife with wild rumors of cause. What began as a few isolated cases has become a full-blown epidemic . . .’ Holmes, you’re not suggesting a connection between your restlessness and theirs?”
“Of course not,” Holmes replied. “But when I couldn’t sleep this third night, I went to an apothecary on Hadry Street.”