Entering a low-ceilinged anteroom meagerly lit by several sputtering oil lamps, we found no one at hand to attend us. I clapped the bell, and a haggard figure stirred from the shadows. Rising from a rocking chair, an elderly woman of perhaps seventy appeared: hair gray as slate, one eye brown, the other clouded milky white with cataract.
“Two rooms?” she asked in a tired, creaky voice.
“Yes, madam, thank you,” I replied.
“And how many nights?” she asked.
“I will be quite surprised if we are unable to conclude our business this very evening,” said Holmes.
“You’ll find no reason to stay here longer, sir,” agreed the woman. “We have little to boast of.”
“We understand that the entire town has suffered from sleeplessness these last three months,” said Holmes.
“It’s in all the London papers,” I hastened to add, fearing that my friend’s peremptory manner might distress our hostess.
“Yes, well, there is that,” she said softly.
“Are you so afflicted yourself?” inquired Holmes.
“I am indeed,” she replied, but before she could continue, one of the lamps flickered out, and she hurriedly moved to it, her hands shaking as she struck a match and rekindled the wick.
“Are you all right, madam?” I asked, concerned that we might have inadvertently frightened the poor woman.
“You’ll pardon me, sir,” she replied nervously, “but the night has become a thing to dread ’round here.”
“Indeed?” I said. “And why might that be?”
“ ‘The devil is driven from light into darkness and is banished from the world,’ ” she replied, as if that somehow answered my question.
“Job, chapter eighteen, verse eighteen,” said Holmes.
She nodded, offering nothing further, but handed over two keys. “Seven and eight, up the stairs to the right,” she continued. “And would you be wanting tea this evening?”
“No, madam, we are expected at Carthon,” I said.
“Best get there before dark,” she replied.
“Thank you, we shall do our best,” I replied.
She nodded, then turned back to her chair, bidding us good evening.
I found her brief biblical quotation to be quite nonsensical, wondering how a roomful of lamps would suffice to keep away the devil, should he actually decide to come to Inswich, and said as much to Holmes as we made our way up the stairs.
“No doubt we’ve just witnessed the result of sleeplessness mixed with religious fervor,” he said sardonically.
I thought no more of it for the moment. After all, we were merely here to track down Holmes’s sleeping medicine, and in the morning we would be on our way back to London. We deposited our belongings in our quarters, both of which, like the lobby, were lit with sputtering lamps, as were several other open rooms we passed.
We found no doctor to speak with, Inswich being no doubt too small to attract a resident physician, but we did locate the local dentist, who offered certain information regarding Holmes’s much-sought-after apothecary’s tincture.
The dentist, it seems, had been approached by an ever-increasing number of townspeople over the last three months in a high state of anxiety over their inability to get any meaningful rest, “On account of a night creature.” Some sort of wild animal that he said was terrorizing the local populace.
Not putting much stock in the stories he heard—“A load of superstitious rubbish,” he said—yet with no other clear course of action available, he had ordered a large quantity of sleep medicine from his brother-in-law, an apothecary in London, and prescribed it to nearly every man, woman, and child in the town.
“Once I determined that neither rotting teeth nor indigestion was the cause of their sleeplessness,” he told us, “I decided that putting them all to sleep was the only way to keep them from overrunning my premises.”
But though the tincture had provided some relief for the first night or two, the symptoms had quickly returned. This of course led to even greater anxiety, and the demand for larger doses, which quickly resulted in the depletion of his brother-in-law’s entire supply.
“Treating the symptom, not the cause,” said Holmes in my ear.
When Holmes inquired of the man whether he had any of the medicine left, even a single dram, that he might purchase, he was told the last of it had gone to Carthon House some weeks ago.
“Perhaps we should investigate this night creature,” I said half in jest as we left the dentist, noting that we had several hours before we were expected for dinner.
Despite his disappointment regarding the tincture, Holmes required no more prodding than this, though his fatigue was now punctuated regularly by enormous yawns and a frequent rubbing of his tired eyes, for his natural curiosity was now aroused. So he and I took a stroll through the little town, making stops at the smoke shop, the general store, a small pub, and the town hall—in which was located the magistrate’s office, but no magistrate. The tired woman on duty informed us that “his lordship” was away on holiday.
We interviewed a dozen or so citizens about their experiences of sleeplessness, and as we talked with them, it became clear that it wasn’t only the old innkeeper who feared the night. A rather homely woman of fifty reported that something had been trying to enter her bedroom window, scraping at the glass, rattling the latch, awakening her consistently whenever she neared slumber. Upon rising from her bed and opening the shutters, however, she would invariably find nothing there, only a “bad odor” floating about.
A young mail clerk reported seeing “a giant shadow, like a bat, only enormous,” swoop down on him as he made his way home late one evening. He avoided the fell creature, he said, by rushing into a well-lit pub.
Another swarthy fellow, a butcher, looking haggard and worn down, said that he was awakened several times each night for the last month by the feeling that someone or something was sitting on his chest, intent on strangling him. Upon awakening and turning up his lantern, he could find nothing about. I dismissed his story as mania brought on by a continual lack of sleep, such deprivation no doubt resulting in hallucinations.
“I recently read an article by a Dr. Breuer,” I remarked to Holmes as we moved on in our search, “in a journal of the medical college in Vienna, regarding a type of hysterical condition of the mind which can, under some circumstances, manifest itself throughout an entire community.”
“I have read the very same article, Watson,” said Holmes. “But that is the symptom, and we search for a cause. Once we have that, a cure should be forthcoming.”
None of those we interviewed had stated that they had actually seen the creature—that is, until we happened upon one young mother, dark circles around her eyes, who attested that her child had seen the thing enter his bedroom, and had ever since insisted that he sleep in his mother’s bed. I must say that I was forced to suppress a smile at this last accounting, though Holmes appeared to find it not the least bit amusing.
He asked to speak with the boy.
“Can you tell me what you saw, sir?” said Holmes, conversing with him as if he were quite the grown man, and not the eight-year-old child he was.
The young boy looked at his mother, uncertain whether to speak, until she nodded her approval. “I went to bed like I always do,” he said, “and Mummy left a candle burnin’.”
“To keep the night creatures away,” said the young woman, rather embarrassed, and by way of explaining herself, “Me mother is a superstitious woman, and she’s lately insisted I not leave the boy to sleep in the dark on account of this animal that’s been prowlin’ about.”
“But I wanted to see it,” the boy said. “To see if it were real, so I put out the light. I waited up a long time, and I think I fell asleep maybe, but then I heard the door open, and saw it. It sniffed ’round a sec, but our dog Jeffery took to barkin’ like mad, and scared it right off.”