We rode in silence in a comfortable black brougham drawn by four 14-hand Halflingers, our destination the North Downs of County Hampshire. Holmes had brought a burglar’s lamp of smoked glass and a black canvas bag. He wore a black cape and cap and bade me wear a black overcoat and bring my revolver.

It was some time before the brougham careened out of the ambling side streets of London and onto the main highway. Only then did Holmes lean back and fold his arms, and only then did I dare inquire into the purpose of our frantic journey. Worried that my companion had somehow contracted the madness of our assailant like some contagion that could only pass between a genius greater than I possessed, and to which I was thankfully immune, I blurted, "Who then are we after, Holmes, if our assailant was so alone, as you yourself insist?"

"A haunted house, Watson. Or perhaps nothing at all. Or something quite real and dangerous. I hope you will indulge me a little tonight, my friend."

I frowned. "Surely our man is in irons and safely on his way to Scotland Yard!"

"Of course, Watson. It is there that you are most squarely in the right. Yet I am chasing several men. And the police arrested only one."

"But I thought you said—"

"I said I believed our assailant worked alone. However, I have reason to believe that a gang of others may be a clue to his crime, or himself a clue to theirs. We must make haste to Sutton’s house at Exmoor. We must get there like lightning! I cannot tell you all, though I fully expect a meeting of the gravest consequence to commence in Blackdown House before the dawn of the new day. Feast or famine, Watson. I cannot tell you more."

My companion sank his chin upon his chest and looked out upon the passing gloom outside our speeding carriage, and I could see he was in one of those impenetrable moods of reflection that would not bear inquiry.

We reached Epsom and disengaged our brougham.

Holmes interrogated the night stable manager about earlier arrivals. Even I could see that there had been such an arrival shortly before us from the steam rolling off the horse Holmes rested an appreciative hand upon as he questioned the stationmaster. "Any private cabs hired from London?"

"London? Oh, a plain chap stepped off," said the tall, broad stationmaster. "An odd one stepped back on, though, right after, and made for Guildsford. Odd enough to remember, all right!"

"What was the first wearing?"

"Why, let me see... a brown suit, I think."

"And the second?"

"An old grouch, indeed! Terrible old man, if ever there was. Wore all black, and his face was white as a skull! I was glad to see him off, I was. So what’s it about, Mister Holmes? Murder then?" The middle-aged, round-featured man smiled discreetly.

"No other scars or memorable marks?"

"Why, no, not that I noticed. Didn’t see the first too well. Had his hat low over his brow—like that!"

"The time?"

"Oh, in the last two hours somewhere."

"Thank you!" Holmes’s smile vanished as he turned away from the stationmaster. "What time, Watson?"

"A quarter till eight," I said, consulting my watch.

"And the apothecaries probably close at seven, or earlier—six-thirty? Ah, but we are close. If only I could be sure... Come, Watson! I see it! The apothecary shop across the way!"

Holmes ran toward the building and I, close behind, saw the proprietor and his wife at the doorway of the closed shop.

"Halloa!" Holmes cried, relaxing his pace. Nevertheless, the elderly couple was startled by the fantastic image of my friend in black cape and cap rushing upon them across the street.

He did less than soothe them with a few direct words.

"My dear people, my name is Sherlock Holmes and in the name of catching a dangerous criminal I must ask if you have had a late customer this evening, with a brown suit, who purchased, perhaps, some talcum?"

Holmes certainly could not imagine how absurd his inquiry seemed.

"Why, sir, I have heard your name, but I am not at all certain you are entitled to the authority of the police! How should I be sure of your intentions? Or that you are Sherlock Holmes?" cried the old shopkeeper, his round face flushing red.

"I am Doctor John Watson. I can vouch for both my colleague’s identity and the absolute integrity of his request," said I, adopting the most professional bearing possible after jaunting across the street in profound confusion.

"Why, tell him, Dear! We did see a man in a brown suit, Mister Holmes. But he didn’t purchase anything." The apothecary’s sporting, fine-featured and decidedly unmatronly wife nodded. Her twinkling eyes made her neatly wrapped gray hair seem girlish. She had taken her husband’s bulldog arm, and he shrugged, gruffly.

"Why, thank you, Madam," smiled Holmes. "Pray, what time did this customer visit your shop?"

"Just before closing."

"After closing," her stout husband grunted.

"At what time, though?"

"Half past six."

"More like a quarter till seven! Rattled the windows until I thought it was the taxman. You and your quarry, Mister Holmes, are a raucous lot for a stodgy old man." The old shopkeeper laughed.

"He bought nothing? Did you see him? What did he look like?"

"I didn’t see his face too well, Mister Holmes. No, he didn’t purchase anything, as my wife would tell you. He tried to steal something, though, as she would not, so good a soul is she," he sighed, smiling dearly at her.

"Your man is with the police, already in irons, Mister Holmes."

"What?"

"Yes, he was arrested half an hour ago! We’re only just locking up the store as the police just finished questioning us," the woman said enthusiastically, hoping this would be welcome news to my friend, no doubt.

"Did they recover what he stole?"

"No, and he was too drunk to say," the apothecary grunted.

"Talcum powder," said the woman.

"Eh," asked Holmes. "Talcum, you say!"

"Yes, sir. That is what he took," she said, and shrugged.

"Where are the police now?"

"Oh, they must be about yet." The apothecary looked around.

"Thank you both. And may your evenings be more peaceful for this taxing one well-spent!"

Holmes turned and ran, and I, feeling rather awkward before the endearing couple, tipped my hat and turned, running after Holmes toward the stables.

It seemed I ran behind Holmes all the while he arranged for the next brougham and stopped only when we were behind a fresh team and hurtling full cry toward Guildsford.

"Ah!" Sherlock Holmes grasped his hand through the air of the dark coach. His long body was laid out straight in the seat, his beaky nose and sparkling eyes reflecting the starlight in the window, a sinister portrait. "It was a pitiless waste of time, Watson!" he said.

"I’m afraid I must agree, Holmes," said I.

"I should have followed my instincts. My plodding habit of verifying all the facts is a crushing weakness, sometimes!"

His statement seemed so outrageous I thought my friend must be masking an embarrassing defeat, and I felt a dreadful shame for him.

"Of course he went to the apothecary," he continued to my anguish. I felt he should know that he need not explain a mistake to me, or indeed attempt to conceal one. My respect for Holmes would not bear it. But he stubbornly held to his initial conviction as he rambled on, and I listened painfully. "He probably visited the apothecary at forty minutes after six, the mien of truth between our pessimistic proprietor and his optimistic wife. We wasted thirteen minutes, Watson, to find out we were an hour and thirteen minutes behind!"

"All we have, Holmes, is that a man in a brown suit, whom I must presume you know, arrived here, and after browsing liberally at the apothecary’s found himself in the local jail, and that an elderly disheveled character debarked from here, with whom you seem to be satisfied to take up chase. Perhaps you believe that the lunatic could have transcribed the players and the scheme of an actual gang into his own personality. But Holmes, I assure you that such a massive mental disorder would take years to gestate and his madness could not be related to any simultaneous event! You cannot base anything real or contemporary on Pitney’s account! His troubles are rooted in his childhood, I suspect. This ‘Sutton’ he mentioned could be any Sutton, quite unassociated with the Edelston Gang. And his mother Phoebe could be any Phoebe. Yes, it’s an unlikely coincidence. But Holmes!"

I will never forget the gloom of doubt that came over my friend’s face and my heart simultaneously. "Do you think so, Watson? I accept the possibility of your suggestion. Could it be that coincidence after coincidence is meeting my thrust every inch, teasing me slightly away and dragging me all the deeper at the same time? That the man arriving at the station from London visited an apothecary with some urgency and took some talcum was coincidental, for instance... would be fantastic!"

"That is precisely why I suggest that it was not the same man, Holmes. The stable manager was quite vague and only guessed the suit was brown. The couple said brown definitively, by coincidence I suggest, since brown suits are common enough. Why should a man who can hire a brougham shoplift? I suggest that we cannot assume the passenger and the shoplifter to be the same man. The drunkard who stole was a derelict, obviously."

"Hullo, Watson! The years have paid off most richly! It is a bit of brilliance, which by now I should be accustomed to from you, my friend. They could not be the same man, but I was not sure how until just now. And the arrest followed... Aha!" He laughed. "I am sold, Watson." He gazed out the window. "I am sold!"

"But are you going to tell the driver to turn back then, Holmes?"

"Turn back? Why? We are hot on the trail!"

"By Jove, what are we chasing, then? The friends of Sutton, still, the escaped murderers of a year ago? Are you to press it, Holmes?"

"Doctor Watson, I am reminded how fortunate I am to have you as my comrade-in-arms," Holmes said, leaning forward like a pointing setter. "It is the very same Edelston Gang connected to this, as you suggest! It is now Old Man Edelston, himself, the evil engine of this assassination syndicate, that we are chasing. The Old Man’s early murders were in the alleys, brothels, and opium dens of London—cheap jobs or even larks! He’s the kind of man who kills for sport, Watson. However, for large sums of money, he is a cold and cunning killer. His gang employs a brilliant system of signals coded into very ordinary actions and gestures—a walk to the grocers could mean all is well, a turn into a butcher shop could mean a man has been murdered, etcetera. What is ingenious is that their association could hardly be proven by common standards. I deduced their system over a hardboiled egg and seven months of the Times spread out over the floor ten mornings before the gang struck again, as you will remember, in the tragic Fleet Street Massacre. Alas, Scotland Yard had been too proud to trust my translation of their coded pantomime, though if they had simply applied it to the observations of their men the previous evening, the tragedy could have been entirely avoided. It all seemed a very parlour room game, at the time, and lacked the spectacle that you require to fill out one of your romances. To say nothing of a happy ending."

"At the time, it seemed too neat and grim," I agreed.

"But the rope of justice frayed, Watson, and six damnable necks escaped the hangman to haunt the survivors of their victims."

"And to haunt you, my friend," I said. "It must be a tax to live in such close proximity to the enemies you have condemned, if they escape the noose. Perhaps it is your wish to end that nagging mystery by linking it to this one, so you can shed that burden and finally exorcise old ghosts?"

"You are in quite as close a proximity as I, and don’t seem to mind much, Doctor!"

I grunted at his dubious compliment, suspecting that he was deflecting the thrust of my question.

"But our present target, Watson: Old Man Edelston. That has a fatherly ring, don't you think?"

"It does," I said.

"Impossible in character, and never seen with a child!" he said sharply, glancing out the window.

"I’m afraid you’ve lost me again, Holmes," said I. "The Edelston Gang escaped from prison over a year ago and none of the six has been caught. Surely they did not tarry long in England. Come, Holmes, it is too outlandish. If you’re still considering —"

"Our relatively young prisoner has scars on his wrists which suggest a prolonged use of manacles of the police variety." Holmes spoke as if to a third person, to his imagination, which supplied explanations for the facts his logic observed. "Combined with the fact that he is mad, perhaps driven mad or born with some impairment, I rather think the former," said Holmes, "it means it would be possible for ‘Old Man’ Edelston to have a son. It would, in fact, only be possible if he had a son who was hidden away and mistreated in such a fashion, if I read that monster’s character. This would explain both the lad’s physical and mental scars and the fact that there is no official record of him. So where did he stay at the time of the trial? With Sutton? The assassin, we’ll call him Young Edelston, said Sutton had made him do it, as though Sutton had some will over the boy perhaps even more compelling than his own father’s. No doubt, in fact, as the scars on his wrists had healed, he was treated, not well I imagine, but much better by Sutton than he had ever known under Old Man Edelston’s cruel hand. Sutton might have felt a moral urge to help our young Edelston, as even a rogue like him would abhor the needless abuse of an afflicted child."

"It is utterly fantastic!" I exclaimed, aghast at Holmes’ extravagant specultions.

But Holmes sunk back into himself, his eyes closed, his face lean with meditation as he chased inward trails a year or years long, and I knew I was once again alone. I therefore pondered the weird pieces of this dark puzzle in silence and smoked a cigarette as we drew near Guildsford, in fear for my friend's sanity for the first time as I pondered the fragile barrier that exists between the minds that are mighty and fallen.

We did not leave the carriage at Guildsford, but Holmes opened the window and received a note from the night stable manager. "‘There was an old man who came, and a gimp that went.’ Humph! It will have to do," said Holmes, handing me the note. "The gimp would be Erasmus, the explosives expert who cut a fuse too short in his youth."

"They seem to be relaying a message to all the members of the gang," I suggested, drily.

"It is rather reminiscent of the gang’s communication system," nodded Holmes, and he pressed his lips, intrigued by my obvious suggestion. Then he seemed stricken, at last, with a serious doubt.

He looked out the window. "I must take that possibility seriously, Watson. If a message were being sent to Sutton... it would be to meet at Sutton’s house tonight. Perhaps this time a personal gratification has impaired my focus." Holmes sighed and looked at me with grim resolve. "But you have your pistol, Watson, and I am confident that we have a powerful reputation for not being as rash as we may have been tonight, and that will stand us in good stead. But I must be frank. I mean to take a bold gamble tonight. Unless you trust my judgment implicitly, bow out now, and let me risk it alone!"

"I’ll go down if you do, Holmes! There is more than enough credit in your account to cover one wild goose chase. But don’t lose yourself, old friend," I implored.

He smiled, a gleam in his eyes. "Then I have more credit than I desire, Doctor. By the way, we gained at least twenty minutes on him by wiring ahead to the station for our information." Holmes clapped his long hands in satisfaction.

"I did not even see you arrange the wire. Sometimes, Holmes, you are too fast for the human eye."

Holmes laughed and peered out the window. "The gang’s method of communicating a meeting at Blackdown, if I remember correctly, passed Farnham and Lambshead, to transmit the message to Angus Murray, the Scottish boxer, and Jim Tierney, the so-called ‘Dispatcher.’ But we can gain time by switching to a team I have ready and in wait for us at Alton to take the straightest country route over Exmoor to Blackdown House, where the meeting should take place, if that line of our reasoning holds."

"So we will arrive before or after all of them reach Blackdown?" I asked, trying to catch up with this incomprehensible chase.

"I admit that it is impossible to say for certain, Watson. But they will surely make a very resourceful haste to Sutton’s house, some of them on horseback, if you are correct. However, the first carriage will reach Blackdown House before us, of that we can be sure. The rest, we shall give a fair race!"

I could see my friend felt the hunt as keenly as a hound.

It was enough for me. With a clear plan of action at last laid before me and some tenuous connection with reality, I sat back, satisfied where it would seem any rational man would have opted out. I waited in silence as we tunneled through the black night, trusting that Holmes would inform me at exactly the right time what I needed to know, and knowing that he needed all the time between to piece together the racing mystery on which we had embarked. Though I feared the worst, I decided to put myself into the great detective’s hands, and even if he was rolling dice, I had certainly gambled on his wits before.

* * *

Like clockwork, we met Holmes’s man at Alton and were off on the last short leg to Exmoor Hill, which rises over the desolate downs of Hampshire. The heather was in full bloom, and its sweet musk scented the night air.

We broke away from the main road and made off across a bleak wilderness of rolling hills and sparse trees. Blackdown House appeared against the dark slope of Exmoor Hill like an ugly black steamer trunk emitting yellow light through its keyhole.

Holmes had the driver stop a few hundred yards from the house. We got out and the detective crouched in the grass, examining the ground in the moonless night with his burglar’s lamp.

"Yes, one going and one coming," he said softly. "One carriage, that is."

He shot a glance at me and I imagined the others arriving on horseback across country.

"Are you armed, Eastwood?" Holmes asked the driver.

"Oh yes, Mister Holmes."

Holmes nodded. "Watson!"

I rushed behind Holmes as he ran across the black turf toward the hulking, buckled house of Sutton.

An icy wind pierced our cloaks as we crossed the open field. Blackdown House proved to be a plank house of the cheapest kind, showing badly the penny-wisdom of its builders. It seemed abandoned as Holmes entered over the front door, which had fallen inward.

However, as we crossed the debris-covered ground floor of the house, to my astonishment, I heard voices coming from upstairs, causing the stubble on the nape of my neck to stand on end. What I had considered to be a fantasy had materialized, surpassing even my own faith in Holmes’s judgment. I admit that I suddenly felt a disorienting terror, as though I had entered a dream of madness or a nightmare in which I suddenly doubted my own senses, and my own sanity.

Holmes drew his burglar’s lamp from under his cape in one sinewy hand and narrowed its beam to our path, sweeping it behind him as he walked.

I caught glimpses of the refuse surrounding us as we went. Bones of rabbits and goats, skins of rats, mouldering food, dirty rags and a sloth of such barbaric magnitude as I have ever witnessed was scattered over the floor. It was as though some Neandertalic savage had resided here. To my amazement, I saw that a fortune in ermine, sable, fox, and mink pelts was tacked to the walls in strange contrast to the remains strewn on the floor. At one point, in the beam of Holmes’s lamp, I glimpsed a rusty saw with an ugly impression of hair and flesh hardened on the blade.

Holmes moved lightly over the rubble, and I climbed behind him up a dilapidated wooden staircase, following his tested footprints as we reached the top floor in complete stealth.

The meeting Holmes had predicted had commenced. Yet it seemed that Holmes himself was surprised by what I had by now begrudgingly come to expect.

The voices of the men were loud and contentious. They came from a single central chamber on the otherwise open first floor. It was a room hastily constructed of badly milled and warped boards and from between the cracks the light of a lantern layered the dark outer room with glowing motes of dust.

Holmes sank back down the stairwell before the lowest layer of light touched his cap. We peered together over the landing at the central meeting room and listened to the argument transpiring inside.

"So the idiot botched it again! And this time, who knows," rolled a thunderous brogue.

"It’s all up, it’s all up!"

"Well, why doesn’t Sutton here explain it, eh," slithered a sickeningly sweet voice.

"He’s probably on us already, the devil!"

"Shut your gob! Out with it, Sutton!"

"What do I know about the idiot the Old Man doesn’t already know?"

"You’re his wet nurse," growled the Scotsman, who I took to be the brutal gangster, Angus Murray.

"I thought the idiot could do it. He minded me, I tell you. You saw for yourself. It would have been perfect! Foolproof! As it is, we’ve got to fly, gentlemen. The boy’s too stupid to talk, so you said, Old Man, but I’ve only today heard it. He’s got the Devil in him, all right! He’s got a piece of each of us in him! We’ve got to get rid of him or us, and now or never, or Holmes will know it all. The boy's a bloody mynah bird! Everything he ever heard us say will come tumbling out as soon as he’s caught!"

"Enough!" The stentorian voice of the "Old Man" himself roared over the hideous convention. "You and your sweet Jesus love, Sutton, will be the death of us all!"

"I’d have gladly seen Holmes paid as you!"

"As gladly? Did you wait for the rope like the rest of us? If you knew the Idiot had a dangerous tongue, why did you let us trust your ‘fool-proof’ trick? You wanted the fool to take the fall, instead of getting the devil yourself while we were on the docks!"

"You’re the one who said he couldn’t talk!"

"Not since I tanned his hide for lying, he couldn’t. ’Twas your mothering that brought it out!"

There was the sound of a chair being knocked backward and a muffled cry.

Holmes motioned me to follow, leaving the lamp on the third step. Crouching below the first layer of light, he crawled forward. He stopped about six feet from the wall and looked intently at one of the planks of wood above as he snaked into a gymnastic position.

I sprawled behind him on all fours, craning my head up to see the clue he was examining, clutching my revolver. All I could see of note were several black nail-points that had been driven through one of the planks about two-thirds up the wall. Dark rust stains ran from each nail-point through the rough cross-grain of wood.

"Now, see here," said Angus. "We need Sutton, Old Man!"

"Yes, we do," said a silken voice with a nasal ring at which Holmes nodded sardonically as he inspected the wall. "Just what devils are in the lad? Me, for instance? I think we should know which ones he parrots, I do indeed!" It was a sickeningly mellifluous voice, which I took to be the lame safecracker, Erasmus.

"He mimics every one of us."

"You’re the cause of all this, Sutton!"

"No! 'Tis murder then?"

"Kill him now, I say, and then we fly! The game’s up and Holmes is probably on us already!"

Another chair was knocked over and glass shattered as Old Man Edelston’s voice rose in a roar: "I’ll see to it you’ll not see a gallows, Jim Sutton! Consider that a favor from a friend!"

"This is Sherlock Holmes!"

"Holmes!" I hissed.

"You are surrounded and utterly at the mercy of the authorities!" Holmes shouted beside me.

"What! What! Lord no," cried Erasmus inside the room as chairs grated against the floor.

"He’ll not have us, he won’t," shouted Angus.

"We’ll not hang for you, Mister Holmes," roared Old Man Edelston bitterly, and with that a lantern was thrown against the wall and the wood seemed to explode like gunpowder.

One of the room's walls was kindled and in a few moments, the roof was ablaze. Various screams and a hideous laugh shrieked from the conflagration in the room.

"Go, Watson!" cried Holmes, pushing me as he pulled out his black canvas bag and ran around the corner of the room.

I ran behind him, however, my revolver in hand, as Holmes burst through the door to the room on the other side.

I could not enter behind him, as he had crouched, and I took the blow of the heat, which momentarily overcame me. All I recall is that Holmes vanished into the flames, and, just as I feared the worst, he emerged with his cape blazing. He flung it off as flames shot over the ceiling and he dragged me down the stairs as they ignited behind us.

Even as we leaped out over the threshold of the derelict house, the first floor buckled and a plume of flame like a vengeful spirit blasted over the field over our heads.

Holmes carried his mysterious black bag guardedly and I carried the burglar’s lamp as we crossed the distance to our waiting cab.

We turned and watched Blackdown House burn like a crimson eye under the heavy brow of Exmoor Hill. At the end, only a black chimney stood out in the coals, a fittingly infernal headstone for the notorious Edelston Gang, who had chosen suicide rather than face Sherlock Holmes in court a second time.

* * *

continue to section 4 >>

The Haunting of Sherlock Holmes Copyright ©2011 Warren Fahy.  All Rights Reserved.
Illustrations by the great Sidney Paget for the original Strand Conan Doyle publications.