Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

“Smoker?” said Brabbins again. “You mean his pipe?”

“No, that,” said Swann, pointing to a thing that looked like a lantern with a kettle funnel welded to it, lying on its side under the desk. “It’s a smoker. You put needles and wood and burlap in and burn it, and it makes smoke.”

“Why?” asked Brabbins, mystified.

“You need the smoke,” said Swann, “to calm bees.”

The parlour was filled with piles of concertina files, three or four deep from the walls and to the height of perhaps five feet, tied with cord or ribbon, as though to stop them bursting. Some were old and some newer, the corners of the files less worn and the ribbons less dull. Experimentally, Brabbins opened one of them and withdrew sheets at random. The first one was a handwritten letter.

Dear Mr. Holmes

My brother has been vanished these past six months and I suspect he may have come to a terrible end at the hands of his wife, a selfish and unpleasant woman. I know you don’t do your investigations any more, but surely you can make an exception to help bring a vicious harridan to justice and give my family some peace?

I pray that I will hear from you soon.

Yours in God

Bernadette Murray (Mrs.)

There was a Cheam return address on the letter, and at the bottom in a different hand was written No. The other sheets Brabbins withdrew were similar: requests to help find missing family members, to solve robberies, to discover the whereabouts of missing wills. One even asked Holmes help in finding a missing pet, much loved and missed and Oh Mr. Holmes if you could see my child’s face you would surely be unable to resist our request for your assistance. The last one Brabbins looked at was typed, on paper headed with the insignia of the Manchester Constabulary. Dear Mr. Holmes, it read, We have a most difficult series of violent attacks and would request your assistance in solving them. Brabbins stared around the hundreds of files, thinking that if each contained the same as this file, then that was thousands upon thousands of requests, more and more arriving daily. What had Swann said? That he received a lot of post? And he read all of them; the repeated handwritten No told Brabbins that. My God, he thought, if this is what each day brought him, no wonder he tried to seal himself away.

Naked, Holmes’ corpse lay on its back on the metal table in the morgue whilst Rivers, the coroner, talked and pointed. “It’s not technically poison because he didn’t ingest it,” he said, “so it’s venom, although I don’t suppose it makes much difference to him now, does it? It was administered mostly to the flesh of the face and hands, which explains the amount of swelling and tissue damage in those areas.”

Rivers was a GP, he had told Brabbins, called in to help in those rare incidents when there was a need for a medical opinion on a corpse. The morgue was tiny, little more than a cupboard, tiled a pale, sickly green that reflected the two men as they moved around the body, their images hovering like vapor at the corner of Brabbins’ eye. It smelled of harsh soap and embalming fluid and the loose, wavering scent of flesh that was rotting despite the chill. There was another odor emanating from the body, the one that Brabbins had first come across in Holmes’ study, bitter and cloying, yet oddly sweet.

Holmes must have been tall and imposing in life, thought Brabbins. Prostrate on the table, though, he was shrivelled and splayed, his belly a sliced and yawning cavity, his flesh sagging back from his bones like an ill-fitting suit. The swelling of his face and hands made him look clownish, a caricature of the aquiline man that he had been in life. The puffy flesh had deflated slightly, and in relaxing and dropping away, the skin had pulled back from both of the man’s eyes, leaving their bloodshot gaze focussed on a point somewhere beyond the ceiling of the mortuary in rapt, cold attention.

“I haven’t identified the poison yet,” said Rivers. “I may not be able to. If you want a theory, it was smeared on something, or it was in something, and then his assailant attacked him, stabbing at him. At his face and hands, mainly, although there are some punctures on his neck and some on his lower arms.” Rivers held up his hands, nodding at his cuffs as they pulled back from his wrists, and said, “Defensive wounds, I’d imagine. The weapon was thin and sharp, probably a needle. It may even have been a hypodermic, given the depth of some of the punctures in the flesh.”

“Thank you,” said Brabbins. He leaned in close to the corpse, looking at its stretched, sloughing skin. There were even wounds in the swept back, thinning hair, he saw, areas of scalp where the poison had caused the man’s head to bulge and swell. His tongue had collapsed back into his mouth, lay curled and dry in the shadowed depths. Brabbins thought of the room full of pleading letters, of the person that this man must have been, and felt a wave of sadness wash over him. This had been a human being, a good one by all accounts, and someone had hated him enough to murder him, to slaughter him. Brabbins sniffed deeply, trying to lock the smell of the dead man and the sight of his bruised, distorted face deep in his mind; then he rose to go.

Swann was gone when Brabbins arrived back at Holmes’ house. Evening was closing in, so Brabbins couldn’t blame the man. He had gone to … what? A Mrs. Swann? Some doughty housewife warming slippers and a meal in a tiny kitchen? Brabbins smiled at the image and wondered how the man would tell his wife of his day, of bodies and detectives and rooms full of papers and a study that was cluttered and claustrophobic and smelled like spoiled humanity. Perhaps the man was a widower, and would sit in a dark and lonely home, talking to no one but himself. Brabbins supposed he should have asked, had a conversation with the man, but had long ago realized that he wasn’t inclined to that sort of thing. Those things were distractions, getting in the way and watering down his attention. The case was all; the dead man and the cause of his death.

Before leaving, though, Swann had made a start on the papers from the parlour. Piles of them were out of the folders and on the floor, and more were on the table in the kitchen. The man hadn’t left a note, which Brabbins took to mean that he had found nothing of interest. Most of the piles in the parlour itself were more requests for help, from all over the world. Each had the word ‘No’ written at the bottom, solid and emphatic.

The pile in the kitchen looked to be more recent, invoices and household bills. Swann had weighted this pile down with an empty cup, Brabbins saw with distaste. It had left a tea ring on the uppermost paper, a pale circle blotted across the top of an invoice for comb replacement pieces from a company in Liverpool.

Actually, Brabbins saw, the paper on the kitchen table was in two piles, one face down and one face up. They gave the impression of a job half-done, something partway complete. The cup was almost like a bookmark, he thought, a place marker to ensure that the task could be taken up from the point at which it had been left. He leafed through the face up pile presumably the unchecked ones, finding them all handwritten sheets, covered in notes and drawings.

Was this the last thing that Swann had read? Had it sparked something in the man’s brain, or had he simply reached that point and thought, That’s it, time to go home. Somehow, Brabbins didn’t think so. It was the half-finished look of the piled papers that did it, the sense of something partly complete, not abandoned but simply interrupted. Swann was old, yes, had struck him as inexperienced, yes, but lazy and inefficient? No.

So, if something had flared in the man’s mind, what had he done next? And where was he now?

Brabbins stood and went walking, slowly pacing the length of the hallway, going into the parlour and the lounge and finally coming to the bottom of the stairs. Nothing had changed; at least, nothing that gave Brabbins pause. Upstairs? The papers on the steps had been placed back into their piles, he saw, but one had a sense of ruffledness, as though it had been sifted through and then placed down. Swann? Brabbins looked through the pile and found that it was mostly more correspondence. Why this pile above the others, he wondered. There was nothing in it of interest as far as he could see, nothing that would seem to tie into Holmes’ death. It seemed to be a set of letters between Holmes and a London publishing house, mostly about royalties. The last letter mentioned a ‘new project’, Brabbins saw, and his policeman’s instinct told him that this was the one that Swann had been interested in. It was more crumpled, placed more roughly back into the pile than the others, but why was it important? What had Swann been thinking?

The study door was open, and it had been shut when Brabbins left. He stepped inside and saw immediately that things had changed; some of the papers from the floor had gone and the others were in new piles, scattered