The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(53)
This past week, he’d done little on that front at all, instead maintaining an active correspondence with officials in France and Belgium regarding a series of international art thefts that buried our poor flat in diagrams, floor plans and maps so that paper covered every available surface. Holmes also had a habit of flinging records and notes in all directions when he was on a mad search for any one particular document, so that our problem elevated from inconvenience to organizational disaster. Mrs Hudson had absolutely refused to enter our rooms for days, and would only hand our meals across the threshold, for fear of further damaging some infinitely valuable yet woefully mistreated document.
As such, it was my beleaguered task when I rose in the evening to try and push enough papers around on the table to make room for the tea service left out for me.
“Take care, Watson,” Holmes murmured without lifting his face from an article on the nature of pearls. Right next to him, precariously balanced and in danger of tipping over a nearby coffee cup, sat a microscope with a large pearl on the examination plate. “Those articles you cavalierly thrust aside may hold the key to over a score of burglaries.” Holmes peered into the microscope and frowned. He’d presumably gotten the pearl from one of the victimized museums but he’d refused all evening to answer any question regarding it.
“Just as you have pushed aside the manuscript pages I tried to bring to your attention?” I said tartly.
“The write-up for the Kittredge abduction?” Holmes reached out a long arm and unerringly put his hand on the manuscript in question. He tilted it just enough to scan the title page before unceremoniously dropping it with an expression of distaste back onto the table. “Another of your overly romantic titles, I see. ‘The Adventure of the Bloodthirsty Baron’. Really, Watson. Terrible. It is just as well that you cannot publish this one for fear of exposing vampires to the rest of the world. Another of your classified dossiers, hidden from the world.”
“It was the case itself that was terrible,” I said. “Horrid business.” It had been both thrilling and horrific to write, including as it did the murder of our associate, Shinwell Johnson, as well as the return and subsequent staking of the Baron Adelbert Gruner.
“On that, at least,” Holmes said, “we agree. Poorly handled from start to finish. Bungled from the very moment I first met Baron Gruner over the De Merville case last year. A true reasoner would have recognized the supernatural nature of the threat the baron represented the first time around! His unusual influence over others, especially women, flying in the face of his sordid reputation. The appearance of Kitty Winter alone should have given me my first clue. That profound pallor, even for a woman of the streets. And those blazing eyes! Or the fact that our good baron made all his appointments after dark, had no fear of burglars, and possessed hearing keen enough to hear my intrusion into his rooms even when you were distracting him. Any one of these should have told me that something beyond the norm was afoot. I might as well have left it in the fumbling hands of Scotland Yard!”
“We did not yet know of the existence of vampires, Holmes,” I said. “How could any man, even you, deduce such a thing on such flimsy evidence?” We’d encountered the Baron Adelbert Gruner during the series of incidents I later penned as ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’ and come away from the affair without any knowledge of vampires and thinking the adventure quite concluded. This new story I’d written featuring the baron’s return would never see the light of day, of course.
“If I’d listened to my own lectures, Watson,” Holmes went on, “I’d have seen the truth of it at once, including the baron’s recovery and return.” He lit his pipe and drew morosely on the tip. “I begin to doubt myself and my powers, Watson. Had I seen the obvious signs, Shinwell Johnson might not have suffered the ultimate penalty for my gross incompetence.”
“Unfair, Holmes!” I objected. “The baron has committed his last crime, thanks to your deductions. No man could have done more.”
“Perhaps,” he said. His expression was as phlegmatic as ever, but I, who knew him so well, could see he was still deeply affected by his doubts. “Though we may perhaps have a chance to do better over at Highgate, if you are not too busy to come? It is a short cab ride.”
“Highgate Cemetery?” I said.
“Yes. We had a note from Miss Winter this afternoon.” He strode over to the sideboard, pushed aside a stack of foolscap pinned down with an upside-down teacup and pulled the note out from the bottom.
“Here,” he said, handing it over. The paper was stationery from Highgate itself, marked with a childish scrawl.
FUNNY MURDUR AT HIGHGATE. MAN BIT AND STABBED. BIT MANY TIMES.
“Terrible command of the English language,” I said, frowning. “Funny murder, indeed. But there seems little doubt it must be serious.”
“Indeed,” Holmes said. “Written hastily, too, if I am any judge. She is quite right that it is urgent, too. Surely you see the significance of someone being bitten multiple times?”
“Multiple vampires?”
“That is one possibility,” Holmes agreed. “Which is disturbing enough, considering how competently the two of them, overseeing the teams that you have rather fancifully named the ‘Midnight Watch’, have kept watch over the graveyards and dealt with such newly created vampires that arise. But what is far more likely – and more dangerous – is that one vampire has been feeding on this man for some time, meaning…”