Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

differently. Swann read something downstairs, in the papers on the table, and it … what? Made him think? Caused some kind of realization? He came upstairs, stopped on the way and read more, read something else that confirmed his suspicions, or at least strengthened them into something more solid, and from there he came into the study and sorted through the papers on the floor. And on the desk, Brabbins saw more had gone from there, as had the smoker from the floor and some of the smoker fuel. The matches were still on the desk, though. He wanted some of the papers, others not, and then he left the study, left the house. But to where?

The garden was a frayed mess of shadows and night. The light escaping from the doorway around Brabbins lost its strength as it stretched away, soaking the lawn from a rich green to a torpid, heavy grey. The plants and bushes that lined the lawns were little more than blacker streaks in a night that was lightless and warm. There was a smell in the garden, a mingled scent of exhaling plants and clean earth.

And something burning, or burned.

Brabbins walked cautiously down to the edge of the lawn and started across it. As he moved deeper into the shadows, the smell of burned things became stronger and he heard a noise, a somnolent hum. He raised his lantern, letting the pale light dance across the ground ahead of him. More lawn. He had the sense of it widening around him, opening out to become a field; the grass felt longer under his feet, the ground rougher, less cultured. The smell had changed as well, shifting from the sweet breath of flowers to the denser, richer aroma of roots and soil and wood.

Brabbins felt exposed here, as though he had swum further out from shore than he realized, to where the water suddenly went cold and the waves were made of stone rather than cotton. He turned, looking back towards the building and the pale squares of light falling from the kitchen windows and doorway as he walked. The distance between him and Holmes’ house stretched, dark and sly, and then he realized that the sound had changed and that shapes were emerging from the gloom about him.

They were low and hard-edged, paler smears in the darkness revealed by his approach. The low sound had changed as well, had shifted and become less rested, more anticipatory, although anticipatory of what Brabbins could not tell. Whatever it was that was making the sound, he had the impression that it knew he was there, was watching him carefully, judging and gauging and waiting. It was a grating buzz, oddly metallic and sharp, and it scraped across his exposed skin like a toothache. He turned slowly back around, completing a full circle with the torchlight leaping ahead of him and about him like an inquisitive tongue. There were six of the shapes, solid white boxes on little legs, set at irregular intervals across a pasture of some kind. The noise came from all the shapes at once. He took a cautious step back, feeling his way with his heel because he suddenly, definitely, did not want to turn his back on the boxes.

They were hives. He was a city boy, true, but even he recognized the slatted shapes of beehives. There were no bees, at least none that he could see, but he assumed that it was the creatures making the sound inside the hives. He took another backwards step and the sound rose in pitch, cold and glitteringly alert. He had heard bees before, enjoyed their warm hum in the air around him in summer gardens, but this noise was something different. It was ferocious, a noise of warning and threat. Another step, and he was at the edge of the pasture, almost out from the hives. Their pallid shapes seemed to face him as he went, horridly observant and aware. Another step, another. Another and his questing heel bumped into something that rolled and gave under him, and his balance yawned wildly for a moment and then he fell. The torch bounced to the ground by his head, dancing and jittering before it settled and the beam came to rest on what he had fallen over, and Brabbins saw it and screamed.

It was Swann; or at least, it had been Swann.

The man’s face, caught in the beam of light, leered in black and swollen misery at Brabbins, the flesh darkened and gross. His head was massive, like a scarecrow’s made out of some misshapen, rotten vegetable; his eyes were bulged shut, the lids erupting and pressing together, and his mouth was open, but compressed to a dark, tiny O by lips that had blistered towards each other. The skin looked taught, ready to split, and it was covered in beads of blood, some of which had trickled and collected and slathered down the man’s cheeks like aged, dank tears. The swelling made his chin a shapeless ridge above a neck that bulged and strained against his uniform collar, where his police number glittered, silver and pitiless. It was Swann made into a caricature of himself, drawn by a hand that was both mocking and humourless. The smoker was lying by him in the centre of a scorched circle of grass.

All of this Brabbins saw even as his scream was newborn, still rising into the air in a great, whooping arc. Under it, the sound of the bees leapt in pitch, climbing with the scream to a sharp, inhuman shiver. Brabbins clambered to his feet, rolling against Swann as he did so and feeling the man’s flesh shift like water in a balloon. He grabbed, almost by instinct, the sheaf of partly charred papers that were still clutched in the dead man’s hand (also bloated and black, he saw) and then he was running. As he did so, he had the impression of the hives boiling, of a ragged cloud gathering in the air above them and starting towards him and then he was concentrating on the house, on Holmes’ house, on the faint yellow square of the doorway.

The bees were closer; he could hear them even over the pant of his own breathing. Their noise was constant, furious, mounting, itching in his ears and prickling his skin. He ran, moving swiftly from the meadow and onto the lawn, with its neat grass and sentinel plants, and as he went the bees were a cloud about him, almost invisible in the darkness, it was as though the night itself had come alive and had stretched out writhing arms to take hold of him. He ran, and the bees closed in.

Brabbins dashed through the doorway as the first bees started to land on him; one banged into his shoulder and span away, another flashed into his face and then was gone, more landed on his arms and dashed against his legs. Their buzz was a pitiless shriek that reminded him of drills and saws and factories full of sweat and dirt and poverty, and then he was into the house, slamming the door behind him. The swarm, for he could think of no other word for it, banged hard against the door behind him, a thousand or more tiny impacts making a noise like cloth being torn asunder, louder and louder as the tiny creatures battered themselves against the door. More struck the glass of the windows in a staccato beat, and then Brabbins’ hand flamed with pain.

It was like nothing he had ever felt, a burning, roaring sensation that swept rapidly across the back of his hand and clutched at his knuckles and wrist. Looking down, Brabbins saw a fat bee crawling across his hand. He shook his hand, trying to dislodge it, but it clung on and stung him again, causing another wave of pain to coruscate in his palm and fingers. He used his other hand to knock the creature off, sending it to the floor, and then stepped on it before it could right itself and lift into the air. More crawled over his arms and legs, and he knocked them off with the papers, swatting at them and stepping on them until they were all dead. The bees outside seemed to redouble their efforts to gain entry, as though they knew of their fallen comrades.

Brabbins thrust his hand under the tap, letting the cold water play across his flaming skin. It was already swelling, he saw, rising around twin punctures. He scratched at them, half-remembering advice about getting out beestings, but all that emerged was his own blood, somehow paler and with a yellow tinge. Is that poison? Is that what killed Swann? And Holmes? he thought, and suspected that it was.

When his hand felt marginally better, although it remained reddened and swollen and painful to move, Brabbins picked up the papers from where he had dropped them, and then went through the house. The lounge and parlour had open fireplaces, piled with logs and kindling, so he shut the doors to both rooms, thankful that they fitted snug in their frames. He also shut the kitchen door, closing off the noise of the bees to a lesser degree. Already, tiny dark shapes were gathering on the outside of the small glass pane in the front door, their indistinct forms filling the available space. From behind both of the doors he had closed came the faint sound of something striking the wood, not hard but repeatedly. Brabbins went upstairs, checking all the windows as he went. None were open; the house was sealed.

Finally, Brabbins took the papers into the study, righting the chair and sitting down, noticing as he did so that he was shaking, nauseous. The poison? he wondered. The fear?

The Bees.

For a moment, he tried to put the bees out of his mind; they had him penned in the house, and he had no idea why they were acting so aggressively, but his policeman’s instincts, honed by years of sifting through humanity’s mud and detritus, of making sense from the senseless, told him the answers lay in the sheets of paper that Swann had been holding.

They were bound, he saw, neatly written and tied at the top and bottom left corners with loops of thick twine. He recognized the writing as Holmes’ from the repeated ‘No’ on the letters, the words firm and decisive. The