Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(34)
Brittle rapping startled him. Turning sharply, he saw a constable frowning through a window.
Conan Doyle opened the door.
“Unusual to see you at this late an hour, Sir Arthur.” The constable peered into the shop, straining to see its back corners. “Is everything all right?”
“Perfectly. I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to come here and catch up on some work.” It had been more than four decades since Conan Doyle left Edinburgh, and yet his Scottish burr remained thick.
“You’re certain nothing’s wrong?” the constable persisted.
“Absolutely. Thank you for your concern.”
The constable gave him a troubled nod, seeming baffled about why one of the most revered authors in Great Britain was wasting his time in this strange shop and why he now lived in a small flat just down the street rather than at one of his large country houses.
Only when Conan Doyle closed and locked the door did the constable continue along the misty street, his footsteps receding.
Stillness again enveloped the shop.
Of course, everything was definitely not all right, but what troubled Conan Doyle wasn’t anything that a constable could correct.
He faced the first display that patrons saw when they entered—not that the shop enjoyed many patrons. Conan Doyle’s name was featured prominently above titles that he’d spent much of the past ten years writing but that hardly anyone wanted to read: The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, The Coming of the Faeries, The Case for Spirit Photography, The New Revelation, The Vital Message, and The History of Spiritualism.
No preposterous fictions here. No supercilious Sherlock Holmes, who solved improbable mysteries about homicidal hounds and trained serpents. No fawning Watson, who was so befuddled that he should never have been allowed to acquire a medical degree. To the contrary, these particular books contained the truth, and yet the world didn’t care. Visitors didn’t even need to buy these books. They could borrow them. It didn’t help. Nor did Conan Doyle’s exhausting lecture tours throughout the United Kingdom and around the world—to the United States, Canada, France, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. People came to hear him only because they wanted to know why a man whose name was associated with Sherlock Holmes couldn’t stop talking about ghosts and faeries.
The floor creaked as Conan Doyle walked toward the rear of the shop. His shoulders were so broad that he needed to shift sideways between rows of bookshelves. He came to murky stairs, their wood protesting as he descended toward the dark basement.
At the bottom, a damp chill greeted him. Emerging from an archway, he turned an electrical switch on a wall. Overhead lights chased the long room’s shadows, their glow reflecting off glass cases and framed photographs, creating an otherworldly effect. Some visitors, no matter how skeptical, might have felt uneasy and even fearful about coming down here in the middle of the night, but Conan Doyle felt comforted by the truth before him.
After all, here were photographs of actual ghosts and faeries. Here were the wax gloves of a spirit’s hands. Here were a Syrian vase, a Babylonian clay tablet, and a pile of Turkish pennies that had materialized on a séance table. Here were intricate drawings of flowers that someone under the influence of a spirit had impossibly created within seventeen seconds. Here was a brilliant seascape that a woman without any artistic training had painted while under a spirit’s influence. Here were pages of automatic writing that mediums had scribbled, responding to questions that loved ones asked and that only the departed could answer correctly.
How can anyone see these proofs, and not be convinced that the dead are capable of communicating with us? Conan Doyle wondered in despair. I need to try harder, to write more books about the afterlife, to travel to more cities and countries and give more lectures.
Seeking reassurance, he turned toward a photograph of three faeries next to a waterfall. He was reminded of a painting that his father had—
A creak of footsteps on the stairs surprised him. Had the constable returned to make certain that nothing was amiss? But how would that be possible? The front door was locked. Had someone broken into the shop? To what purpose? If hardly anyone bought or even borrowed the shop’s books, why would somebody go to the effort of stealing them as opposed to burglarizing the valuable contents of the garment shop next door?
“Who’s there?” he called.
The creak on the wooden stairs became louder as the footsteps neared the bottom.
“Mary, is that you?”
Conan Doyle’s daughter—from his first marriage—managed the shop. Perhaps she’d come here in the middle of the night to attend to a pressing detail she’d suddenly remembered.
But in that case, wouldn’t she have called out as he himself had, demanding to know who was in the shop?
Conan Doyle stepped backward when a shadow appeared at the bottom of the stairs. The shadow didn’t belong to Mary but instead to a tall, thin man emerging from the murky archway.
The man wore an Inverness cape, the grey color of which matched the figure’s intense eyes. He was perhaps thirty-five, with an ascetic face, a narrow chin, a slender nose, high cheekbones, and an intelligent forehead that was partially covered by a deerstalker hat.
The basement became damper and colder.
“My dear fellow, you’re as pale as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Sherlock Holmes said.
Conan Doyle felt a tight pain in his chest. “If you were indeed a ghost, I’d rejoice.”