Game Is Afoot, page 12
I looked at the door. “I am in the woods, Holmes. How can you possibly make such an assertion?” I strode over, opened the door, and looked into the bathroom.
Holmes observed me with manifest patience. “Let us say that you make yourself comfortable on the floor behind the door as it opens. I myself will find a place behind the bed.” As he spoke, he began to arrange Mrs. Thornton’s bed with a roll of blanket and a pillow to simulate someone sleeping there. Having finished this, he turned out the light, crossed to the windows, and threw up the shades, together with the central window, which was the largest; this, despite the fog, he opened half way. In the adjoining room, meanwhile, the ladies were preparing for bed.
“Now, then, Watson—not a sound. Whatever you hear, say nothing; whatever happens, do nothing until I give you the word.”
“If you would give me a hint, Holmes…”
“We shall see devil’s work tonight, Watson, unless I am much mistaken.”
He said no more; so I composed myself to snatch as much sleep as possible.
Some two hours passed in absolute silence, when there came to my ears the faint sound of a whispered voice. It seemed to rise from somewhere in my immediate vicinity, and, as I listened, it increased in volume.
“Lydia! Lydia!” it cried. “Come to me. Come over. All is pain where you are. Only here will it end in joy again. Lydia! Lydia!”
A man’s voice—or was it a man’s voice? It had a hollow, funereal sound, and I felt my skin prickle, as if something of the fog flowing into the room through the open window had penetrated my flesh. It was horrible, it was grotesque, it was damnable.
Then I heard Holmes stir, and in a moment he raised his own voice in a remarkable quavering cry that might have been Mrs. Thornton herself replying. “Frank? Frank? Where are you, Frank?”
“Come over to me, Lydia. Come. It does not matter how you do it, only come. We can be happy again over here.” Then the voice faded as it had come, diminishing altogether in a last whispered, “Lydia!” urgent and compelling.
Holmes waited a few moments before coming quietly to my side and whispering into my ear. “I fancy that is somewhat more than an auditory illusion, is it not, Watson?”
“Good God! I begin to understand!” I answered. “It is damnable. But why—why?”
“Wait yet a little. It is far from over.”
In two hours time, everything happened as before, I had dozed off and was awakened by the voice calling once again. This time Holmes did not i come to my side, though a low clucking sound he made after the voice had [ceased assured me he had heard.
Then all was silence again, and so it remained until dawn.
It was then that I became conscious of a tremor in the floor of the room i where I sat. I was about to call out to Holmes when his cluck of warning j stopped me. And then the entire floor began to move, slowly, almost imperceptibly. I had hardly time to assimilate this before Holmes’s urgent whisper reached me. “Keep behind the bathroom door.” I crept backward along that weirdly moving floor, revolving slowly, soundlessly, until the dressing-table was indeed before the windows lining the east wall of that room, and the book-case over before one door. There was now light enough in the room to see it as Mrs. Thornton must have seen it, and it took no imagination to understand how horrified and terrified the poor, stricken lady must have been at this sight, and how much more to come back into the room and find it as it should be.
As soon as the movement stopped, Holmes twitched the folded blanket and pillow from the bed, gave vent to a low sobbing moan, and, hastening across the floor to the door leading into Miss Manahan’s room, he opened it and slammed it shut. This accomplished, he raced silently around the room to where I crouched, one hand wamingly grasping my shoulder.
On the instant, the door to the bath-room was cautiously opened, someone looked into the room, and then immediately the door was drawn noiselessly shut once more.
“So!” whispered Holmes. “That is dastardly work indeed, Watson. And one alone could not do it, no!” He peered around one edge of the window nearest us. “Ha! there is the signal. Come along.”
He darted to the open window, crawled out, dropped to the ground, and ran off into the now rising fog. I followed close upon his heels. Without hesitation, he ran to the summer-house and entered it.
The rustic table had been moved aside, and in the center of the floor gaped an opening through which light flowed upward. Holmes walked catlike to the edge of the opening and looked down. I peered over his shoulder.
There below was an extraordinary sight. A man was bent at some kind of great instrument, whose shafts passed into a tunnel leading in the direction of the house we had just left, and before him, attached in some fashion to the machine at which he worked with such quiet persistence, was a perfect miniature, walls and floor, of the room we had just quitted, and, as he worked, the miniature floor slowly shifted its position, righting itself.
“Good morning, Mr. Wellman Davies,” said Holmes in a scornful voice. “I fancy you will have no further occasion to carry on your devil’s work.”
At the sound of Holmes’s voice, Davies whipped around. His hand reached out for a spanner which lay nearby, but Holmes’s hand was quicker; he showed his revolver, and Davies, a short, benevolent-looking man with pale grey eyes and a clipped moustache, whose nose showed signs of eyeglasses having been worn, hesitated, and glared at us in baffled rage.
“Come up, come up, Mr. Davies. We have yet to take your wife. How did you find your friends in Scotland?”
“In reality,” said Holmes in the brougham on our way back to Baker Street through the first morning sun to penetrate the night’s dense yellow fog, “the problem offered of no other solution. Indeed, Mrs. Thornton, poor unsuspecting soul, told us all herself. What had Miss Lavinia, her sister-inlaw, to say that would upset her? Why, could it be other than criticism of, and warnings about Mr. and Mrs. Davies? Surely not, for Mrs. Thornton said, you remember, ‘If she could only know Wellman and Pauline as I know them.’ Alas! poor woman!
“The fundamental problem was, of course, that of the circular room. Either it was changed, as Mrs. Thornton said, or it was not. Miss Manahan and Mrs. Thornton herself were convinced that it could be nothing but an hallucination. On the contrary, I proceeded from the assumption that something was wrong with that room, and I sought for evidence that it was so. Obviously, the walls were fixed, but the floor did not seem to be. When the space between the molding along the wall at the floor and the floor itself was manifest, it was clear that in some fashion the floor was constructed on a large turntable. I thought there might be a clue in the basement; but there was no basement beyond that concrete-walled cellar. Hence I sought the summerhouse, and it was immediately apparent to my eye that the large stone blocks concealed a trapdoor. The assumption was obvious that that diabolic business was carried on from there. An accomplice was clearly indicated, and who else but Mrs. Davies? It was she who made sure that Mrs. Thornton had fled her room, and signalled her husband in the summer-house so that he could return the room to its normal appearance, which he was enabled to do by means of that small-scale model geared to the original.
“It was Davies, of course, who imitated her dead husband’s voice from the bathroom. Obviously, they did not go to Scotland, but crept back to the house to carry on their fell game, and the reason for that blind seemed inherent in Miss Manahan’s story; she told us, you will remember, that Mr. Davies had begun to look at her with apprehension, as if he feared she might leave them; it was just the opposite; he realized that Miss Manahan was not obtuse, and might begin to suspect their involvement in the matter; so he and his wife absented themselves, for the purpose of establishing to Miss Manahan’s knowledge that things occurred in their absence, never dreaming that Miss Manahan had already consulted us.
“And the motive for this horrible plot to drive that poor lady into hopeless insanity was surely obvious, too; Davies had control of his aunt’s money, and he did not want to relinquish that control. She was wealthy; he was not. He had already squandered some of her money on this house, and if he could succeed in so breaking down the poor lady’s mental health that she could be confined once more, or in driving her to suicide by that bogus haunting of her with her husband’s voice, his squandering might never be uncovered, and he would remain permanently in control of her late husband’s estate, for it had been placed in her hands, and she had given it over to Davies to manage. A callous, diabolic business, long premeditated. I shall see to it that Mr. and Mrs. Wellman Davies get their just deserts.’’
In 1944, the pseudonymous Ellery Queen commissioned two superb Sherlock Holmes pastiches from Stuart Palmer (1905-1968), creator of the delightful Hildegarde Withers mysteries and past president of the Mystery Writers of America. Palmer, who also penned articles and poems about the immortal sleuth, wrote “The Adventure of the Remarkable Worm” for the now-scarce anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. “The Adventure of the Marked Man” was first published in the July 1944 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
The Adventure of the Marked Man
Stuart Palmer
It was on a blustery afternoon late in April of the year ’95, and I had just returned to our Baker Street lodgings to find Sherlock Holmes as I had left him at noon, stretched out on the sofa with his eyes half-closed, the fumes of black shag tobacco rising to the ceiling.
Busy with my own thoughts, I removed the Utter of chemical apparatus which had overflowed into the easy chair, and settled back with a perturbed sigh. Without realizing it, I must have fallen into a brown study. Suddenly Holmes’s voice brought me back to myself with a start.
“So you have decided, Watson,” said he, “that not even this difference should be a real barrier to your future happiness?”
“Exactly,” I retorted. “After all, we cannot—” I stopped short. “My dear fellow!” I cried, “this is not at all Uke you!”
“Come, come, Watson. You know my methods.”
“I had not known,” said I stiffly, “that they embraced having your spies and eavesdroppers dog the footsteps of an old friend, simply because he chose a brisk spring afternoon for a walk with a certain lady.”
“A thousand apologies! I had not realized that my little demonstration of a mental exercise might cause you pain,” murmured Holmes in a deprecating voice. He sat up, smiling. “Of course, my dear fellow, I should have allowed for the temporary mental aberration known as falling in love.”
“Really, Holmes!” I retorted sharply. “You should be the last person to speak of psycho-pathology—a man who is practically a walking case history of manic-depressive tendencies—”
He bowed. “A touch, a distinct touch! But Watson, in one respect you do me an injustice. I was aware of your plans to meet a lady only because of the excessive pains you took with your toilet before going out. The lovely Emilia, was it not? I shall always remember her courage in the affair of the Gorgiano murder in Mrs. Warren’s otherwise respectable rooming house. And indeed, why not romance? There has been a very decent interval since the passing of your late wife, and the widow Lucca is a most captivating person.”
“That is still beside the point. I do not see—”
“None so blind, Watson, none so blind,” retorted Holmes, stuffing navy-cut into his cherrywood pipe, a sure sign that he was in one of his most argumentative moods. “It is really most simple, my dear fellow. It was not difficult for me to deduce that your appointment, on an afternoon as pleas-andy gusty as this, was in the park. The remnants of peanut shell upon your best waistcoat speak all too plainly of the fact that you have been amusing yourself by feeding the monkeys. And your return at such an early hour, obviously having failed to ask the lady to dine with you, indicates most clearly that you have had some sort of disagreement while observing the antics of the hairy primates.”
“Granted, Holmes, for the moment. But pray continue.”
“With pleasure. As a good medical man, you cannot fail to have certain deep convictions as to the truth contained in the recent controversial publications of Mr. Charles Darwin. What is more likely than that in the warmth of Indian Summer romance you were unwise enough to start a discussion of Darwin’s theories with the Signora Lucca, who like most of her countrywomen is no doubt deeply religious? Of course she prefers the Garden of Eden account of humanity’s beginning. Hence your first quarrel and your hasty return home, where you threw yourself into a chair and permitted your pipe to go out while you threshed through the entire situation in your mind.”
“That is simple enough, now that you explain it,” I admitted grudgingly. “But how could you possibly know the conclusion which I had just reached?”
“Elementary, Watson, most elementary. You returned with your normally placid face contorted into a pout, the lower lip protruding most angrily. Your glance turned to the mantelpiece, where lies a copy of ‘The Origin of Species’ and you looked even more belligerent than before. But then after a moment the flickering flames of the fireplace caught your eye, and I could not fail to see how that domestic symbol reminded you of the connubial felicity which you once enjoyed. You pictured yourself and the lovely Italian seated before such a fire, and your expression softened. A distinctly fatuous smile crossed your face, and I knew that you had decided that no theory should be permitted to come between you and the lady you plan to make the second Mrs. Watson.” He tapped out the cherrywood pipe into the grate. “Can you deny that my deductions are substantially correct?”
“Of course not,” I retorted, somewhat abashed. “But Holmes, in a less enlightened reign than this our Victoria’s, you would be in grave danger of being burned as a witch.”
“A wizard, pray,” he corrected. “But enough of mental exercises. Unless I am mistaken, the persistent ringing of the doorbell presages a client. If so, it is a serious case and one which may absorb all my faculties. Nothing trivial would bring out an Englishman during the hour sacred to afternoon tea.”
There was barely time for Holmes to turn the reading lamp so that it fell upon the empty chair, and then there were quick steps on the stair and an impatient knocking at the door. “Come in!” cried Holmes.
The man who entered was still young, some eight and thirty at the outside, well-groomed and ready if not fashionably attired, with something of professorial dignity in his bearing. He put his bowler and his sturdy malacca stick on the table, and then turned toward us, looking questioningly from one to the other. I could see that his normally ruddy complexion was of an unhealthy pallor. Obviously our caller was close to the breaking point.
“My name is Allen Pendarvis,” he blurted forth, accepting the chair to which Holmes was pointing. “I must apologize for bursting in upon you like this.”
“Not in the least,” said Holmes. “Pray help yourself to tobacco, which is there in the Persian slipper. You have just come up from Cornwall, I see.” “Yes, from Mousehole, near Penzance. But how—?”
“Apart from your name—‘By the prefix Tre-, Pol-, Pen- ye shall know the Comishmen’—you are wearing a raincoat, and angry storm clouds have filled the southwest sky most of the day. I see also that you are in great haste, as the Royal Cornishman pulled into Paddington but a few moments ago, and you have lost no time in coming here.”
“You, then, are Mr. Holmes!” decided Pendarvis. “I appeal to you, sir. No other man can give me the help I require.”
“Help is not easy to refuse, and not always easy to give,” Holmes replied. “But pray continue. This is Dr. Watson. You may speak freely in his presence, as he has been my collaborator on some of my most difficult cases.” “No one of your cases,” cried Pendarvis, “can be more difficult than mine! I am about to be murdered, Mr. Holmes. And yet—and yet I have not an enemy in the world! Not one person, living or dead, could have a reason to wish me in my coffin. All the same, my life has been thrice threatened, and once attempted, in the last fortnight!”
“Most interesting,’’ said Holmes calmly. “And have you any idea of the identity of your enemy?’’
“None whatever. I shall begin at the beginning, and hold nothing back. You see, gentlemen, my home is in a little fishing village which has not changed materially in hundreds of years. As a matter of fact, the harbor quay of Mousehole, which lies just beyond my windows, was laid down by the Phoenicians in the time of Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur, when they came trading for Cornish tin …”
“I think in this matter we must look closer home than the Phoenicians,” said Holmes dryly.
“Of course. You see, Mr. Holmes, I live a very quiet life. A small income left to me by a deceased aunt makes it possible for me to devote my time to the avocation of bird photography.” Pendarvis smiled with modest pride. “A few of my photographs of terns on the nest have been printed in ornithology magazines. Only the other day—”
“Nor do I suspect the terns,” Holmes interrupted. “And yet someone seeks your life, or your death. By the way, Mr. Pendarvis, does your wife inherit your estate in the unhappy event of your demise?”
Pendarvis looked blank. “Sir? But I have never married. I live alone with my brother Donal. Bit of a gay dog, Donal. Romantic enough for us both. All of the scented missives in the morning mail are addressed to him.” “Ah,” said Holmes. “We need not apply the old rule of cherchez la femme, then? That eliminates a great deal. You say that your brother is your heir?”
“I suppose so. There is not much to inherit, really. The income stops at my death, and who would want my ornithological specimens?”
“That puts a different light on it, most certainly. But let us set aside the problem of cui bono, at least for the moment. What was the first intimation that someone had designs upon your life?”
