The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VII Read online

  The creature who tumbled into the room was a startling sight. His face was covered in open sores and his skin a strange purplish hue. His saliva-sodden lips were stretched tight, revealing discoloured and uneven teeth. The hands held to his brows were as scabrous as his face, and one forearm was tightly bound in white gauze with a brownish stain on the inner side; the certain signs of recent blood letting. He gazed at me, blinking and wincing at the late evening light streaming through the window.

  Mrs. Stevens curled a protective arm around his shoulders. “It’s all right, William,” she crooned. “You need not be afraid. We shall deal with all of this.”

  “Porphyria?” I leaned forward and examined the man intently. “Good heavens, yes. The signs are quite clear. I have never seen such an advanced case.”

  “Poor soul suffers with the sunlight, so we let him sleep away most of the daylight hours,” said Mrs. Stevens.

  “And an inherited condition, or so I understand,” said Holmes and glanced toward Heath. “Though not in your direct line.”

  “I did not know,” said Heath. “And I am sorry for him. But why would he pick on my thoroughbreds?”

  “Father kept horses,” Clarence said. “Didn’t he, Violet?”

  “Yes, William, he did.” Mrs. Stevens patted the man’s arm and smiled. “Mr. Josiah Stevens was a great horseman.”

  “According to my sources,” said Holmes. “Josiah was head groom at the Pavillions, and was offered a stipend if he married Constance. He was also given the lease on Ridge House as payment for taking the royal infant on as his own by none other than a cousin to the Prince - your grandfather, Mr. Heath.”

  “Then this poor wretch is my cousin of a kind?” Heath stared at Clarence in wonder, tinged with a little horror. “And this is why my father was so angry at my taking Ridge House?”

  “So it would seem. Though it would have been more to his credit had he given reasons for his displeasure.” Holmes glanced at Stevens. “You are to be admired for shouldering the burden in your turn.” He examined his finger tips for a moment, allowing the compliment to be accepted before continuing. “As your wife has told us, a part of William Clarence’s condition is a sensitivity to sunlight, and in consequence, his life has become largely nocturnal. During his manic fits, which often coincided with the full moon, he escaped back to his childhood home.”

  He viewed Mrs. Stevens with arched brow. “The stable lad that left, thus beginning all rumours of fairies and Good Neighbours, was a nephew of yours. Just as the tweeny who also left Mr. Heath’s employ was your niece. It makes for a pleasing irony when you are those very neighbours. It was a simple task for Clarence to enter the stable block via the hayloft door on the outer side of the buildings. It was a trick he had performed often as a child. But in doing so, he trampled down the wild plants beneath the hatch and left the imprint of boots that were worn down in the fashion of a man who does not walk well.” Holmes sat back, smiling that superior smile at his staggering revelations, dying sunlight highlighted by the smoke he exhaled, giving him the appearance of some less-than-holy angel.

  “So when I took back the lease, I inadvertently unpicked the entire conspiracy?” Heath said. “It was an honest mistake. I knew that you were no longer farming the estate, so I did not see how I could be upending any particularly productive lifestyle. I apologise for my ignorance... but the maiming of my animals was unforgivable!”

  “One misdeed for another,” Stevens replied. “My brother did not intend harm. My crime was in not preventing his nightly wanderings.”

  “Rest assured, you will not have any further visits.” Mrs. Stevens glared around at us all, but at Heath the hardest. “I shall see that Clarence is fully calmed at times of the full moon in future.” She swallowed hard. “It will be a sadness. William has so few pleasures in life.”

  “You have your own beasts,” Heath said. “Surely he can ride those?”

  “We do,” Stevens replied. “But when the madness is on him, William becomes a child once again and he is drawn to his old home. The home that my mother was assured William would have for his lifetime!” Stevens glowered at Heath. “Until you came.”

  “Enough! The past is done,” Holmes said. “It will benefit none of you to continue harbouring ill will. Least of all Mr. Clarence-Stevens. Come to some agreement as gentlemen for all your sakes.”

  The two men eyed each other up and down like feral cats in a back street, and then Heath nodded gravely. “If Clarence wishes to ride from Ridge House at such times, then I am sure I can accommodate him.” He smiled wryly and nodded to Clarence. “Though perhaps not at full gallop in the dead of night?”

  “He, and all of us, will be very grateful, Mr. Heath,” Stevens replied.

  Heath looked to Holmes and smiled suddenly. “Mr. Holmes, I am in your debt for solving our mystery. I have to say that, whilst I am grateful for knowing my animals will no longer be at risk, I am a little sad that I no longer have fairies in my garden.”

  The Adventure of the Second William Wilson

  by Daniel D. Victor

  The mask and mantle of the unknown drop off, and Alfonso discovers his own image, - the spectre of himself.

  – Washington Irving, An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron

  Straightway the door opened, and a shrivelled, shabby dwarf entered... This vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote and ill-defined resemblance to me.

  – Mark Twain, The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut

  One cannot play a role in the detecting business - let alone write of the profession - without possessing an opinion on the subject of Edgar Allan Poe. The American author so often referred to as “The Father of the Detective Story” evokes strong reactions. Sherlock Holmes himself was not immune to Poe’s sway. And yet for so clear a thinker as Holmes, his views on Poe’s crime-solving skills were known to waver.

  As much as he might deny it, my logical-thinking friend had always been of two minds regarding the writer. At the start of his career, Holmes appeared to look down upon the man. In our first investigation together, the account of which I titled A Study in Scarlet, he labelled Poe’s fictional detective “a very inferior fellow”.

  “You should note, Watson,” Holmes said, “C. Auguste Dupin is by no means the phenomenon Poe imagined him to be.”

  But Holmes also harboured another opinion. In a later case, an investigation I called “The Cardboard Box”, he praised Dupin as a “close reasoner” - not unlike himself. Never comfortable with reversals of opinion, however, Holmes duly suggested that it was I, not he, who had initially doubted Dupin’s credibility.

  It is an easy matter for me to plead not guilty to such charges, but my faithful readers need not accept my pledge of innocence on its own. Events themselves offer corroborating evidence. In late 1882, the details of a strange new case forced Holmes to confront both sides of his conflicted attitude towards Poe. It required no less than a gruesome crime to cause Sherlock Holmes to question the dichotomy between Poe’s celebrated psychological insight and the writer’s equally renowned literary flights of fancy.

  Poe himself would have appreciated the beginnings of the matter. It was a dark Monday evening in a suitably bleak and dreary December, when Billy the Page came suddenly rapping at our chamber door.

  “Enter!” Holmes called, and Billy stepped inside.

  Holmes and I rose as the lad adjusted his livery and announced, “Mr. William Wilson.”

  Directly behind Billy came a distinguished-looking gentleman. Dressed in a bespoke dark suit that contrasted nicely with his grey side-whiskers, he maintained a fine head of black hair combed straight back. Yet in spite of his august appearance, he had the unusual habit of constantly looking round the room. His blue eyes darted everywhere - peering over our chairs and tables, examining the windows, glancing backward at the doo
rway through which he had just come.

  I judged him an obvious paranoiac, demonstrably worried that he had been followed. Indeed, he went so far as to check that our door latched after Billy had closed it upon exiting.

  “Mr. Holmes?” he asked, his gaze bouncing back and forth between my friend and me.

  “I am Sherlock Holmes,” said my companion. Gesturing in my direction, he added, “This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson. Whatever you have to say to me, you may say to him as well.”

  “I am called William Wilson,” came the reply. “It is a name with which you might be familiar.”

  Holmes cocked an eyebrow.

  “From the story with that title by Edgar Allan Poe,” he added.

  It took me a moment to recall the piece. Once I did, I wondered how the man dared to identify himself so definitively. It is always dangerous to trust one of Poe’s narrators, but if I remembered correctly, the storyteller states that so abhorrent is the tale he is about to relate that he fears sullying the “fair page” with his “real appellation”. In light of our visitor’s claim, one had to question whether the storyteller’s denial was a ruse, or whether our guest was guilty of a ridiculous charade.

  “I know the story,” said I coldly. “I’m sure Mr. Holmes does as well.”

  “Indeed I do,” said my friend with a nod. “It is a difficult story to forget. As I recall, the aforementioned William Wilson encounters someone he believes looks and sounds just like himself - an intriguing mirror-image the Germans term a Doppelgänger. This alter ego, who even bears the same name, follows Wilson to the Carnival in Rome. Driven mad by the constant pursuit, Wilson employs the rapier that is part of his costume to stab his double to death. Or so it appears.”

  Holmes hit exactly the right mark with his ambiguous conclusion. For it is in leaving the ending open to interpretation that Poe becomes most perplexing. Through literary sleight of hand, he forces the reader to question whether Wilson, rather than killing his tormentor, has in reality viewed himself in a mirror - a mirror that might or might not exist - and inflicted the bloody wounds upon his own person.

  “What relationship does the story have to you?” asked Holmes.

  The man stood tall. “The original William Wilson was my father,” he announced.

  “Preposterous!” I ejaculated, sharing with Holmes a disbelieving glance. “The story is mere fiction.”

  The visitor shook his head. “Gentlemen,” said he with a dry chuckle, “I can assure you that you are mistaken. Neither is the story untrue, nor am I mad.’”

  “You present a singular situation, sir,” said Holmes, reaching for his favourite briar. “I’m certain I speak for Dr. Watson when I say we wish to hear you out.”

  Containing my scepticism, I muttered some words of agreement. At the same time, Holmes indicated that our visitor should take a seat. The man calling himself William Wilson did just that, and the two of us occupied armchairs opposite his. “Now,” said my friend as he filled his pipe, “pray, explain yourself.”

  Wilson took a deep breath. “As you may be aware,” he began, “Edgar Allan Poe was born in America. John and Frances Allan, the people who took him in following his father’s abandonment and his mother’s early death, brought him to England at a young age.”

  “To Stoke Newington, was it not?” Holmes asked as he lit his pipe.

  “Quite right. They settled in the picturesque village just north of London. Poe’s biographers will tell you that the hamlet described in his narrative was based on that very locale, right down to the thick, cloying mist and the massive, twisted trees. For that matter, Bransby, the headmaster of young William’s prison-like school in the story, bears the same name as the headmaster of the school attended by Poe himself.”

  Tenuous proof, I remember thinking at the time.

  “I provide this information, gentlemen, to enable you to make the leap of faith that literary critics seem so unwilling to perform - that is, to accept as fact a supposedly fictional story. Poe was describing the actual location where, as a youth, he had befriended a real lad he called William Wilson. As a consequence, I implore you to recognise the narrative in question not as a simple fabrication, but rather as a true chronicle of past events.”

  Holmes’s response to this bizarre request was to exhale a cloud of blue smoke towards the ceiling. For my part, I must confess to experiencing a degree of sympathy. After all, to this very day, my accounts of the true exploits of Sherlock Holmes continue to be misidentified as fiction. (Unlike Poe, of course, I never had the intention of presenting my sketches as anything but the truth.)

  Undaunted by Holmes’s blasé reaction, Wilson continued. “To their delight, the boys discovered they shared the same birthday; and soon thereafter they became fast friends. Once Poe returned to America a few years later, the youths began a correspondence that continued into manhood.

  “Poe’s letters are gone now; but being the wordsmith he was, he recognised not only the attraction of the details Wilson recounted in his letters, but also the reckless abandon with which he described them. There seems little doubt that Wilson appreciated their content as well. We’ll never know the precise reason, but the promise of anonymity afforded by the use of a false name prompted William to grant his friend permission to convert the many letters into a single, factual narrative.”

  Holmes allowed another cloud of smoke to escape his lips.

  “You have read,” our visitor continued, “of Wilson’s attendance at Oxford and his intemperate behaviour there.”

  “In particular,” I felt compelled to add, “his involvement with licentious women.”

  “‘Profligacy’,” stated Holmes, the pipe clenched in his teeth. “‘Miserable profligacy’ is the term employed by Poe.”

  “Quite right,” said the man. ‘“Profligacy’ is exactly the term. So is ‘debaucheries’. He used others as well - ‘soulless dissipation’ and ‘dangerous seductions’ to name two more. I can assure you that his demeaning language describes the foul actions most accurately.”

  “You seem to speak from experience,” I observed drily.

  Our visitor smiled. “No, Dr. Watson, I wish the answer was that simple. You see, gentlemen, much as it grieves me to say so, my own mother was one of that unholy company, one of those young whores who serviced Wilson and his chums.”

  “Good heavens!” I cried. “One doesn’t usually hear a gentleman speak so rudely of his own mother.”

  “I note,” said Holmes, “that you refer to the woman in the past tense. May we assume that she has died?”

  “Yes, Mr. Holmes. She died a few weeks ago at age seventy-two.”

  “A ripe old age,” I observed.

  “To be sure, Doctor, and yet, the longer she lived, the more she feared going to her grave without providing me with the truth about my birth. I am no student of literature, you see, and have had no cause to be familiar with the writings of Mr. Poe. I can assure you that his works occupied no place on the shelves in our home. In point of fact, it was my aging mother who left me a book containing Poe’s account of William Wilson - along with a letter to be read after her death that explained the story’s significance.’

  “A letter, you say? Do you have it with you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Holmes. I thought that you would want to see it.”

  Sherlock Holmes extended his long fingers in anticipation whilst Wilson removed a set of folded pages from an inner pocket and placed them in Holmes’s open palm. My friend proceeded to read the missive and then passed the papers to me. Here is the letter that we read:

  10 October 1882

  My Dearest William,

  By the time you read this, I shall be gone, happy to face a better world, but happier still to know I have left you comfortable in this one. I cannot move on, however, without finally providing you with specific
knowledge of your own peculiar background. For all your lifetime I have been fearful of telling you your history, but during every one of those years my silence has gnawed at me. I cannot deprive you any longer of the knowledge of your past. No parent likes to advertise the misdeeds of their youth or to describe for their children the crumbling foundation upon which a false family history has been constructed. Yet that is the case - and as I confront my own fate, I cannot turn away from showing you yours.

  You know of my early youth. Although my mother died in childbirth, I was brought up in a proper home in Gloucestershire. My father - your grandfather - was a vicar and provided me with an education. But I found such a simple life unappealing, and thanks in great part to my comely appearance, I came to believe at a youthful age that I might travel to Oxford and find some rising young man who could provide me not only with a family, but also with a material improvement in my fortune.

  Sadly, I was taken advantage of. As a result, my dreams faded. I lost hope in securing a suitable man to be my husband - and yet I could never ignore the appeal of lucre. On the contrary, my lust for riches only grew. In short, though I hesitate to write the words, I spent most of my evenings in the arms of young men who sought nothing more than paying for all manner of delights of the flesh. Needless to say, amidst words of righteous indignation, your grandfather abandoned me.

  My reputation as a bewitching temptress brought me gold and infamy, and it was not long before I met one William Wilson, a debauched young man with lots of money. Inflicting pain and humiliation were his desires, and he seemed intent on fulfilling his wants. In a word, he appeared a ruthless master. It was only later that I discovered the inner torment he suffered. He claimed to fear the vengeance of some sort of evil twin, a double that he said had haunted him from their first encounter years before. On occasion, he would whisper that I should run away. But no sooner did he dismiss me than he would cry out for protection from the devilish creature that was driving him mad. The longer I knew your father, the more I heard him rant and rave, and yet I assure you that no such phantom ever showed itself to me.