Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

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We argued over Hegel’s Logik, observed by the beady eye of a parrot named Griswold. We pored over Giovanni Battista Morgagni, and Taylor’s seminal work on pathology and toxicology, the first in the English language.

We read by lamp light. We slept on the floor or in our chairs but more often talked through the night.

When we were busy, and the doors bolted so we would not be disturbed, food and drink was lowered on a rope through a trap door from upstairs by the loyal servant Le Bon.

I was made to memorize a hundred imprints of soles of shoes. And a hundred types of house brick. Coins. Coral. Types of dentition. Birds’ eggs. Navigational equipment. Moths.

Blindfolded, I learned how to identify cigarette brands by smell alone.

The nature of breeds of dog — not to mention their owners.

He would show me a hundred Daguerrotypes and direct me to deduce the maladies from the patients’ photographs alone. And more. More, more, he taunted me. What more do you see?

Hour after hour, day after day, the room became clearer, as if a veil were lifted. As if my eyes had been put through a pencil sharpener. As if the world, muddy and intangible, were slowly being made clean and whole.

Habitually we would visit the aforementioned Menagerie, and always pay a special pilgrimage to the old Orangutan named — I remember it clearly — Bobo.

Sometimes, after supper, as we walked beside the Seine, Poe took my arm. He liked a stroll, but sometimes his vanity meant he left his walking cane at home. He would tell me not to nag him when I reminded him of the fact. Often we sat on a certain bench and gazed at the Moon reflected on the water.

Watson spoke in derogatory fashion of my lack of knowledge in the field of astronomy. The truth is, I know not too little, but too much.

Poe taught me to listen to the music of the spheres.

Giordano Bruno said there is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the centre of things.

The observer. The detective.

I spent three years with Poe before he died and he taught me — not “all I know” (such a claim would be absurd) — but how to know. He was no less than a father to me, and the only thing he ever asked in return is that I keep his secret from the world.

We were sometimes seen around Paris: C. Auguste Dupin, with his white hair, black cape and yellow sunglasses, and his young English assistant.

Some mysteries were solved.

The affair of the so-called “phantom” of the Paris Opera. The case of the horla and its tragically afflicted seer. The “crying spider” of Odilon Redon.

We applied arithmetic to decadence and catacombs.

I never resumed my studies at Cambridge. My university was that of Poe: of detection, and of life.

As he became frail I cared for him in that and another apartment, smaller, but with a view of the Bois du Boulogne.

He observed life from the window. We tested each other in deducing the characteristics of walkers on a Sunday afternoon. He’d bemoan my pipe tobacco. I’d in return call him a pious ex-drunk.

When his eyesight went, I read to him aloud. I remember all too well his reaction to Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. The tragic fate of Quasimodo made him grimace with emotion. I thought he had been moved by the fates of the hunchback and Esmeralda, but he quickly retorted it would have been better in verse … and shorter. Though he muttered that it was obviously influenced by his own Hop Frog — and most inferior to it.

He was cantankerous and conceited, vain as a poodle and unmelodious to the ear. But I have never known a more intelligent or electric individual, which almost always excused his inveterate rudeness and dire fluctuations of mood.

Most of all, I owe him my vocation. Sherlock Holmes — detective. What would I have become, else?

It will be a surprise to no one that my friend had a fear of being buried alive, and therefore stipulated in his will that the examining doctor open a vein in his neck to ensure no such ghastly mistake could be made. In the event the medic was all thumbs I had to perform his final wish myself.

Thinking of the grave in far-off Baltimore and its false incumbent, I watched the smoke rise from the Paris crematorium in a black plume.

The bird of death was silent at last, the black fading to white, the book of grotesquerie and wonder closed, the coffin breath exhaled, the great, unfathomable mind becalmed and untormented at last. He exists now only on every bookshelf in England, and in my final thoughts.

As I now lie close to death myself, I know more clearly than ever what my master — the master — knew: that Nature is chaos. Chaos is truth. Death is the final mystery. And our only defence is knowledge.

Infinite knowledge. Infinite, and futile, knowledge.

* * * * *

STEPHEN VOLK was recently nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Award for his novella Vardoger. His writing has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best British Mysteries, Best New Horror and Gaslight Grotesque. Stephen is the creator/writer of the series Afterlife and Ghostwatch as well as many other film and television projects. The Society of Fantastic Films awarded him their International Award for contributions to the genre.

“The Adventure of Lucifer’s Footprints” by Christopher Fowler

Illustration by Luke Eidenschink

The Adventure of Lucifer’s Footprints

by Christopher Fowler

I must say from the outset that the shocking business of Lucifer’s footprints is something I cannot fully explain. And although there was a solution of sorts, it caused a rift between myself and my old friend that may never be fully healed. To this day, it chills me to the marrow to think of our foray into the dark netherworld that lies beyond the reach of rational science.

I have written elsewhere that although I recall the events laid out herein, I cannot place an exact date upon them, for I was not long married when I came to call upon Holmes once more.

I do remember the gutters of Baker Street running with melted ice and snow, the sky a sickly winter yellow above the chimney pots, which tempts me to place my visit on a Saturday in the late February of 1888. Should I venture to the vaults of the bank of Cox & Co., Charing Cross, and unearth my battered tin dispatch box, I would find among the many papers some notes which might be constructed into an account of what happened during our time in Devon. But I can still barely bring myself to believe what happened. And indeed, there is no logical explanation — I can only set down the facts as they occurred.

It began, as these things so often did, with a visitor to Holmes’ rooms.