The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(109)
“Thank you,” I said sombrely. “That is very kind.”
The two of them departed as I watched out the window, waiting carefully until the four-wheeler with the Draculas in it had left our kerb, clattered down the street, and then turned the corner.
“Carfax indeed!” I said, turning to Holmes.
“I will admit to some reservations about the Count Dracula,” Holmes said. He had seated himself again, lit his pipe while I had been at the window, and now blew blue smoke rings into the air.
“Reservations?” I said. “While he was certainly instrumental in stopping Moriarty, there is no doubt that the man has a deeply homicidal past!”
“The man has been at war,” Holmes said. “He was a king and soldier, first against aggressors in his land of Romania, and then, after his transformation, against all of humanity.”
“You believe that part of the story?” I asked, incredulous. “We have only his word for that.”
“We have a little more than that,” Holmes said. “He has the stride of a soldier, even after these many years. There are other signs that incline me to take his claim of nobility at face value, not the least of which is his scrupulous adherence to honour and the truth. Also, there is Mina to consider. With Mina in play, I see our Count Dracula as becoming, perhaps, a potent and powerful force for light.”
“Surely you must be joking.”
“Not a bit,” Holmes said. “Consider carefully his deportment in London during this last case. I saw every evidence that he was fastidious about his methods and harmed no living person during his stay here. He has committed no crime against the decent London citizenry and really it is beyond my purview, I think, to enforce crimes in another country and from another century.”
He reached out his long arm and grabbed a sheaf of letters off the table, then thrust them at me. “I see you remain unconvinced, but let me see if I can perhaps put this into perspective. These are some of the letters that I have received and been, as yet, unable to answer due to the focus on the Moriarty affair. Do me a favour and give me your opinion on which one best deserves our attention next.”
I frowned at this transparent attempt to change the subject, but rifled through the papers anyway, then found myself suddenly paying more serious attention to what they said.
“This first one seems to be about the Whitechapel murders,” I said. “They think that they are starting up again.”
“Yes,” Holmes said. “Not without interest. And the next?”
“This one claims… Holmes, this is preposterous! They claim to have been burglarized by a lion that walks like a man.” I rifled through the rest. “The next appears to be from a woman whose employer can disappear in plain sight? Where has this ridiculous collection of fairy tales come from?”
“In the case of the last one you mention, Sussex,” Holmes said lazily. “I have been sifting through my correspondence to locate the most outré for you, but this last bundle rather outdoes itself. We have tales of disappearing men and talking animals, cadaverous monsters and magical portraits. You have, as usual, dredged up the most appropriate term imaginable when you say ‘fairy tales’, haven’t you?”
“You can’t take any of this seriously?” I said.
Holmes waved a hand. “A year ago, I did not take stories of vampires seriously and now we both know very much better, do we not? In the past year we have encountered not only vampires, but mysterious cults that call on inhuman sea gods and get answers. Monstrosities of the sea both large and small. Mark my words, Watson, humanity is expanding its level of knowledge in all the scientific fields and finding that a multitude of impossible things are out there waiting for us, now that we have become advanced enough to see them. You read that bundle of letters and call them fairy tales, but we already organize and fund a clandestine organization to police the morgues and cemeteries for creatures of the dead. What other dangers might require an organized response? I would be very much surprised if we do not encounter all of your fairy tales, and more, in the coming year. In such a light, would it not be better to keep Dracula as an ally?”
“I suppose you are right,” I said.
*
The next day found us in the dappled sunshine of Highgate Cemetery. As many funerals as I have attended over the years, circumstances invariably unfold during these occasions to provide weather fitting to the occasion so that the proceedings are filled with a dreary and cold rain, while the mourners are always a tangled mass of slick ulsters and black umbrellas. If, by chance, the sun ever shone during such a solemn occasion, there was always a sense of bleak irony about the scene. Today, however, there was nothing ironic about the blazing sun overhead as they lowered Nigel Somersby’s closed casket into the earth. The sun was an oppression to me, entirely fitting for the saddest of occasions, with nothing of the bright cheer that I had once looked upon the sun with. The night and the darkness was home now to those of us with the vampire affliction.
Somersby’s mother had become a vampire and Somersby had had to stake her himself in order to save the rest of the family. The circumstances left Somersby’s father and sister with the impression that he’d been quite mad. As such, they did not attend the funeral. Somersby’s work on the Midnight Watch had further estranged him from daytime friendships so there were no mourners except for Holmes, Miss Winter and myself, and half a dozen others from the Midnight Watch, because Miss Winter would not hear of engaging a funeral director or professional mourners. Holmes demurred completely, admitting to me in private that it was probably just as well to invite fewer participants and fewer questions.