Sherlock Holmes, the noblest human being I have ever encountered, Holmes alone dared to confront this monstrosity. He glowed in a hideous, hellish green flame, as if even great Holmes were possessed of the stains of sin, and they were being seared from within him in the face of this being.
As the monster reached for Holmes with its hideous mockery of limbs, Holmes turned and signaled to me.
I reached within my garment, removed the object that lay against my skin, pulsating with horrid life, drew back my arm, and with a murmured prayer made the strongest and most accurate throw I had made since my days on the cricket pitch of Jammu.
More quickly than it takes to describe, the object flew through the angle. It struck the monster squarely and clung to its body, extending a hideous network of webbing ’round and ’round and ’round.
The monster gave a single convulsive heave, striking Holmes and sending him flying through the air. With presence of mind such as only he, of all men I know, could claim, Holmes reached and grasped Lady Fairclough by one arm and her brother by the other. The force of the monstrous impact sent them back through the angle into the sealed room, where they crashed into me, sending us sprawling across the floor.
With a dreadful sound louder and more unexpected than the most powerful thunderclap, the angle between the walls slammed shut. The sealed room was plunged once again into darkness.
I drew a packet of lucifers from my pocket and lit one. To my surprise, Holmes reached into an inner pocket of his own and drew from it a stick of gelignite with a long fuse. He signaled to me and I handed him another lucifer. He used it to ignite the fuse of the gelignite bomb.
Striking another lucifer, I relit the kerosene lamp that Mrs. Llewellyn had left on the altar. Holmes nodded his approval, and with the great detective in the lead, the four of us—Lady Fairclough, Mr. Philip Llewellyn, Holmes himself, and I—made haste to find our way from the Anthracite Palace.
Even as we stumbled across the great hall toward the chief exit of the palace, there was a terrible rumbling that seemed to come simultaneously from the deepest basement of the building if not from the very center of the earth, and from the dark heavens above. We staggered from the palace—Holmes, Lady Fairclough, Philip Llewellyn, and I—through the howling wind and pelting snow of a renewed storm, through frigid drifts that rose higher than our boot tops, and turned about to see the great black edifice of the Anthracite Palace in flames.
The Adventure of Exham Priory
F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE
My friend Sherlock Holmes was never quite the same after his return from the dead. I refer, of course, to that long interruption in his detective career, after he vanished from the brink of the Reichenbach Falls and was presumed dead: an illusion which he maintained for a period of three years until the moment when he removed his disguise in my study in Kensington.
Yet the man who returned was transformed. Before his seeming death, Holmes had been disposed to occasional bouts of melancholy. After his return, I found him to be increasingly saturnine and grim: his periods of good humor became fewer and briefer. Of late, whenever Sherlock Holmes played his violin, he no longer performed barcaroles and waltzes, showing a newfound preference for the darker motifs of Beethoven and Wagner.
One evening in April of 1901, I was detained in my Harley Street consulting surgery with an urgent case. In consequence, I did not return to our rooms in Baker Street until well past sunset. I found Holmes clad in his old smoking jacket, seated near the sideboard with an expression of doom on his countenance whilst he peered at a strange ill-shapen object clutched between his long fingertips.
“Hallo, Watson,” said my friend, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “I see that you have been draining a patient’s mastoid infection.”
“Two infections,” I said, astonished. “But how did—”
“Never mind that, Watson. Come, what do you make of this?” As I seated myself, Holmes pressed the strange object into my hands.
It was a carved piece of stone, roughly nine inches long, of some black mineral resembling basalt. The object was highly polished and deeply curved—concave on one side, convex on the other—yet so thoroughly weathered as to suggest that this artifact was of an immense age. At one edge, the stone was broken and jagged. “It appears to be a fragment off the rim of a large bowl or dish,” I ventured.
“Exactly so, Watson. Observe that the rim’s curvature is uniform: this was part of a circular object, not an elliptical one. By measuring the fragment’s arc, I have established that this was once part of a dish some thirteen feet in diameter. And the object is exceedingly weathered, yet the broken edge is still sharp, and the jagged surface at the edge is still dark and glossy . . . so the original object is ancient, but this piece was broken off quite recently. What else do you see?”
I brought the fragment closer to the electrical lamp. The convex surface of the black stone was incised with weird hieroglyphs and runes. Then I turned over the broken stone so as to view the dish’s inner surface. And now I felt a sudden revulsion as I saw that the concave side of the bowl was crusted with a dark russet-colored stain resembling coagulated blood.
“Holmes,” I said. “Wherever did you get this?”
“Sent to me in the morning post,” said he calmly. “The parcel bore a postmark from Anchester, which my gazetteer identifies as a village of the Welsh Marches. It was enclosed with a most intriguing letter, concerning—wait, there is the door.”
Our housekeeper had brought us a visitor: a man above the middle height, sallow-faced and exceedingly distraught. His hair was dead white, his countenance haggard. His clothes were well tailored and immaculate, yet they hung from his frame as if there were a scarecrow within them.
The visitor’s face was an astonishment. He appeared to suffer from some congenital deformity, to a degree I had never encountered in my medical studies. His cranium was exceedingly narrow, with a receding forehead and chin, watery green eyes, and a flattened nose. Above his celluloid collar, there were several rows of oddly deep creases in the sides of his neck. The skin of his face and hands was peeling, as if from some cutaneous disease, and his fingers were strikingly short in proportion to his hands. “Came up to London as soon as I could, in spite of the engine change,” he gasped, in a breathless whisper which put me in mind of a fish out of water. The visitor spoke in a cultured voice which betrayed no regional accent. “And then the cab horse lost a shoe in Great Portland Street, so I got out and ran the rest of the way. Which one of you is Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”
“I have that honor, sir,” said my friend. “And it is clear to me that you are Jephson Norrys. Your family are from Cornwall, yet you reside in the Welsh Marches. You are a man of some prosperity, but in recent months you have been keenly agitated.”
The newcomer had been pale, yet now he turned ashen. “Black magic!” he exclaimed. “You must have read my letter, but how could you have known my—”
“Simply a matter of deduction,” said Sherlock Holmes, pointing to our visitor’s waistcoat. “Your watch chain bears an ivory pin, in the shape of a black cross upon a white field: that is the flag of Cornwall. But the ivory is yellowed with age, indicating that the pin came to you as an heirloom . . . from your father perhaps, but at any rate from a Cornish forebear. If you had traveled here to London from Cornwall, your railway journey would have ended at the Great Western terminus in Paddington Station . . . but you mentioned Great Portland Street, which is in the opposite direction. The nearest railway station in that neighborhood is Euston . . . and the shortest route from Euston to Baker Street, along the Marylebone Road, passes through Great Portland Street. I need hardly consult my Bradshaw’s Railway Guide to know that most of the rail lines arriving at Euston Street station originate in Birmingham. Yet you mentioned an engine change, so your journey must have commenced before Birmingham: perhaps as far west as Shrewsbury, on the Welsh border. If you had traveled from as far away as Wales to get here, your journey would have required two engine changes . . . but you mentioned only one. So! East of Shrewsbury, yet west of Birmingham, eliminates all territory excepting the Welsh Marches. I have just received an urgent letter from Jephson Norrys of Anchester, and you are evidently he.”