“Oh! You may be right, Watson. Perhaps Steve learns best by example.”
Steve seemed pleased to see his creator. “MOE-NOE-BOE!” he said, as he turned both his joyous, blood-spattered face and the barrel of my Webley directly at Holmes. Click, click, click, went the firing hammer.
“Oh well, at least nobody taught him to reload,” Holmes reflected. “See if you can’t get that gun away from him, eh?”
The waxen murder-man was reluctant to give up his favorite new toy, but after a few minutes of prying and cajoling, I got it back from him. I turned to find Holmes looking down at the two corpses with a dejected look on his face. “Do you know the worst thing?” he asked with a sad shake of his head. “This is exactly what Grogsson and Lestrade were talking about. Ah well… can’t be helped… Care to help me hide a couple of bodies, Watson?”
“Absolutely not! This is your mess, Holmes! Your affair from start to finish, and I am deeply mortified that my pistol and I got mixed up in it!”
“Well I can’t be to blame for all of it, can I?” said Holmes, huffily.
“In my experience, Holmes, yes; you usually can.”
“Very well. Please yourself,” he snapped. “It won’t be the first set of accidental murder victims I’ve cleaned out of this apartment. Nor will they be much missed, I should think. The real tragedy—the gravest loss to mankind—is that with them died the secret of the final hiding place of the M—”
“It’s in his left jacket pocket.”
“What? Are you certain?” Holmes cried. He then rifled Sylvius’s pockets for the barest moment before raising aloft a gleaming yellow diamond, dripping with oily goo.
“Oh, happy day!” Holmes exclaimed.
“Really?”
“Find some bread, Watson! We must try the stone!”
“No, Holmes, enjoy it with my regards,” I told him, looking about for something to wrap my pistol in so I wouldn’t get blood all over my doctor’s bag. “As for my part, I’m going to do my best to be well clear of this rather singular murder scene before any of Scotland Yard’s newer inspectors happens by and gets the mystery of his life.”
I don’t think Warlock Holmes heard me. Or at least, he did not mark me. He was already in the corner, fussing over his toast racks with wide, eager eyes. I took a few moments to make sure I was presentable, then gave him a nod and walked out onto the stairs. As I stepped back into the familiar light of a Baker Street afternoon, I happened to overhear the final denouement of ‘The Adventure of the Margarine Stone’.
“Eugh!” came Holmes’s horrified voice. “You call that butter?”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE TRUE GARRIDEB
I HAVE SAID BEFORE THAT I OFTEN FELT TOWARDS VICTIMS of magical mischief the same way I felt towards my medical patients: that they had suffered an unfairness. That they must be aided and comforted. That—even if it was a battle that could not be won—I must do my utmost to put things right for them. Never, I think, has that feeling been more in evidence than in the curious case of Garrideb Grub.
He came to my attention through my wife. As I have reported, Mary had made us host to a number of diverse gatherings. These were necessary to sustain her social standing, but it was rare for her to show personal interest in them. It therefore struck me as odd that she glowed with anticipation when she announced she would be needing the drawing room one Thursday night, for she had at last convinced Old Garrideb to come and lecture on his antiquities. The malicious smile she wore when she said it had nothing—I was certain—to do with antiquities. There was motive behind that smile.
“Oh?” I asked her. “What kind of antiquities?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, ancient paintings? Ancient sculpture? Ancient politics?”
But she cut me off. “Just antiquities, John!”
“Very well.”
My regular habit was to make myself scarce before Mary’s festivities began, spiriting away to my private chambers to read or plan my patients’ care. Yet, on this occasion I made sure to tarry long enough to catch a glimpse of my wife’s mysterious guest. By God, the man was practically a ghoul. Garrideb Grub must once have been very tall, but age and the practice of bending over his curios had stooped him grotesquely forward. He had the pallid, anemic complexion of a man to whom exercise was utterly foreign and yet the gaunt, bony-jointed frame of one to whom food was a stranger, too. His hair and beard were long and feral—gray streaked with brown. The only effort he had made to govern them was to pull his hair back and tie it with a ribbon—in abeyance to what style, I could not say. The man’s eyes burned with fanatical zeal, as a disturbing preacher’s might. As he entered, he decreed in a high, wavering voice that he would begin by teaching Mary’s assembled cretins the finer points of Japanese vases of the Edo period. This, despite the fact that the object he waved about at them was actually a teapot of recent manufacture. Said cretins thrilled with pleasure at the announcement, though I could not fathom why. It seemed to me the lecture they were about to endure could be either boorish or maniacal, but nothing else.
I’d seen enough. I retreated to my chambers to read Herodotus. If I must spend my evening in contemplation of antique studies, let my teacher at least be the father of history, rather than one of London’s more loquacious madmen. And yet… I could not concentrate. For all of Herodotus’s flash—and he certainly knew how to bait an audience—I could not help but notice that something was very wrong downstairs.
They were laughing. Everybody. Just laughing and laughing and clearly having a grand old
