The Classified Dossier - Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray E-Book

Christian Klaver

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 474

Beschreibung

Mysterious socialite Dorian Gray is at the centre of Sherlock Holmes' latest investigation in this astonishing, uncanny mash-up of Victorian mystery and horror 1903 Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson have tickets to the newly arrived Egyptian Circus. Holmes is puzzled by his brother Mycroft's cryptic gift but is intrigued enough to attend the next production. The performers, dressed as wondrous half-animal, half-human gods from Egyptian mythology, display superhuman agility and stunts. But they speak no Arabic, sequester themselves in the stables after each show and take orders from a mysterious ring master who is yet to be seen. And then one of the performers is murdered. Holmes's enquires lead him to Montebank Manor, the home of the beautiful and secretive socialite Dorian Gray. As Holmes digs deeper, he learns Gray is hiding much more than his involvement in a murder. It's a darkly fantastical tale of lies, experimentation, hypnosis and wicked ambition.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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Copyright

Dedication

Part One The Adventure of the Sinister Circus

Chapter 1 A Letter from the Enemy

Chapter 2 The Circus of Amun-Ra

Chapter 3 Dorian Gray

Chapter 4 Mortal Enemies

Chapter 5 Sayer of the Law

Part Two The Mystery of Dorian Gray

Chapter 6 The Picture of Dorian Gray

Chapter 7 Funeral Rites and Hypnotists

Chapter 8 The Island

Chapter 9 Mycroft’s Return

Chapter 10 Mrs Wattles

Part Three Doctor Moreau

Chapter 11 Tracking Moreau

Chapter 12 Dracula

Chapter 13 The Mortuary

Chapter 14 Doctor Moreau

Chapter 15 Hunting Rhinophants

Chapter 16 Hunting Moreau

Chapter 17 Rhinophant Redux

Chapter 18 Observation Tower

Chapter 19 The Fate of the Rhinophant

Chapter 20 The Collisions and Conundrums

Chapter 21 Visitations and Final Plans

Chapter 22 Final Destinations

Acknowledgements

Also by Christian Klaver and available from Titan Books:

Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula

Sherlock Holmes and Mr Hyde

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Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray

Print edition ISBN: 9781789098716

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789098723

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Christian Klaver 2024

All Rights Reserved

Christian Klaver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Dad, for instilling a love of all things Sherlock,and to Mom, who liked to think outside the box.Also thanks to Kimberly, my wife, and Kathryn,my daughter, who have always encouraged me.

Chapter 1

A LETTER FROM THE ENEMY

I came down to our sitting room one evening to find my good friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, whom I have often touted as the greatest detective who has walked this Earth, seated at our dining table and glaring at an envelope.

“The clever fiend,” Holmes muttered without looking up. “He’s had someone else address it so that I can’t see his handwriting.”

“We have a new case?” I asked as I lifted a teacup from the sideboard and helped myself to some of the contents of the teapot with the red ribbon. Holmes was clearly nursing a foul temper over some aspect of this new case, but I couldn’t help but appreciate the timing, since the only time Holmes was in worse spirits than when he had a vexing case was when he had no case at all, and things had been abysmally slow this week. Rain pattered at the window, indicating another cold and dismal night.

I sipped at my cup while I peered over his shoulder at the letter. “Which clever fiend is it, Holmes? I had thought most of the men you honour with that title to be quite out of commission.”

Sherlock Holmes glared back at me, then sighed. “Not quite.” He handed the envelope back over his head to me in an imperious gesture, without looking in my direction.

“Is this a woman’s handwriting?” I asked in surprise. I laid the envelope on the table.

“Yes,” Holmes said with asperity. “You can see that she has used one of the atrocious bank pens. Also, the fiend has not used any of his regular minions, for the woman in question doesn’t know our address. So not one of your faithful readers, either. Both the pens are dull and atrocious, as I said, but the one she used for our address is slightly less so than the first. So there was a space of time between the writing of the first line and the second. Probably when she consulted a notebook or the like to remind herself where I lived. I am familiar with the handwriting of most of his lackeys, so he had to range far and wide to find this one.”

“Who is this mastermind you keep alluding to?” I asked. “We have seen the likes of Colonel Moran and Baron Gruner turn their hands to our destruction, to say nothing of Moriarty, Van Helsing, Ezra Griffin and the Fleetes. How much worse could this person be?”

“Far worse,” Holmes said with dark and dramatic overtones. “He may not have our destruction as his aim, he is far more cunning. He has familial ties that he will ruthlessly twist to further his machinations.”

“Familial?” I said. “This is Mycroft we’re discussing?”

“None other,” Holmes said.

I frowned, shook my head and finished my repast, then dabbed with a napkin. “Really, Holmes, your sense of humour is in poor form this evening, with all your talk of fiends and minions. Mycroft hardly deserves such treatment.”

“Does he not?” Holmes said. “Well, I suppose not. He is no danger to anyone that is not an enemy of England, but still, there is no man possessed of greater cunning. He is a master manipulator of men and today he has turned his hand to manipulating us.”

“I can’t imagine him being very successful if all he sends are empty envelopes,” I said. “Surely there was a letter inside?”

“A letter, no,” Holmes said. “Only these.” He took from his lap a few scraps of paper I had not noticed and let them drop disdainfully onto the table so that I could retrieve them.

“Tickets for tomorrow?” I said. “To the Circus of Amun-Ra? Was there no note of explanation?”

“You see the deviousness of the man?” Holmes said. “He is hoping to manipulate me this way and pique my curiosity.”

“Could he not see the likelihood that you would deduce his identity as the sender?”

“Oh, certainly,” Holmes said. “But if he had addressed it himself, it is possible that I would have put it aside until a convenient time. To Mycroft, my own cases are trivial and his own problems are the priority. Needless to say, I do not agree. This way, he was guaranteed to attract my attention and so I opened it immediately.”

“Then why bother to hide it?”

“To deprive me of data,” Holmes said. “If he had come himself, I would very likely have deduced something about his mood and motives based on his dress or demeanour.”

“But that would be unlikely,” I added. Only twice have I ever known Mycroft to visit us here in Baker Street and both times he had been driven by great need.

Holmes continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Even addressing it himself would have given me his handwriting to analyse. This way I have nothing other than the tickets themselves and the habits and methods of some woman kept at a great distance from Mycroft himself. He is being coy.”

“It is not as if we have a great deal of other business this evening,” I said. “I had thought to take in the new zoo, but it is still under construction. This could be a welcome diversion.” I had brought a partner into my medical practice, giving over the lion’s share of the daytime work and income, and taking only the undesirable late evening house calls. I had no such appointments today. Holmes, for his part, had no ongoing case that I knew of.

Holmes scoffed at my comment and tried to engage himself in work on another monograph he was writing on cryptography, but it turned out to be a hopeless endeavour. By the end of the evening he had given it up for a hopeless job and started openly muttering and glaring at the tickets that lay innocently on the table.

*   *   *

So it was that I arranged to wake early the following day and engage a four-wheeler in the early afternoon. By three o’ clock, we were clattering to Hyde Park where we had our first look at the Circus of Amun-Ra. The weather was fairly accommodating for one such as myself afflicted with vampirism. That is to say, it was severely overcast, so that while I brought a hat and gloves for shelter from the sun, I was not obliged to put them on.

“I found an article in the paper that described this show as quite extraordinary,” I said in the cab, but Holmes made no reply.

The ticket booth, banners, and various tents were garish in the way obligatory to such affairs, patterned in colours of gold and lapis lazuli, wet and shiny with the desultory rain, but did not otherwise seem very extraordinary. The big top tent itself was the exception, being far larger than I had expected. It, too, was gold and blue and slick with rain. I had found, since my transformation, that I rather enjoyed wet days since it muffled somewhat the olfactory cacophony that is London on an average day, so I was in good spirits. Holmes, however, looked as morose and grim as I had ever seen him. I led the way to the big top for the main show. Any passer-by looking at Holmes’s expression might have thought we were heading for our own appointment at the gallows.

We milled into the oversized tent with the rest of the crowd and found seats on the wooden stands set up in a ring inside. The air was redolent with the scents of straw, jungle animals, tobacco, perfume, snacks, and sweat from the crowd around us. We had excellent seats, almost ringside, and I felt a thrill of expectation as the lights dimmed.

A single shaft of slanted light shone down from a corner of the tent, illuminating the centre of the arena, where a large, square wooden post was sunk into the dirt. It was easily the height of a man and nearly a foot wide.

A tribal drum music started and then grew slowly around us. To my vampiric ears, it was nearly deafening, rattling the wooden slats of the stands underneath my feet. I turned and squinted past the boots and shoes of the people seated behind me. Drummers beneath the stands, and quite a few of them from the din.

A second spotlight snapped on, shining on a spot near one of the stands, and a striking, tall, blond man stepped into it bearing two guttering torches. He wore a black domino mask, a suit coat with bright crimson lapels, and red and black striped trousers, but while the dramatic flair certainly fitted the circus setting, it was cut in the European style and seemed, overall, of a much higher quality than the usual glittering and gaudy circus fare. This being touted as an Egyptian circus, I had expected someone of a swarthier skin colour, but what the mask revealed of the man’s skin was pale.

The man pranced and danced to the centre of the arena, the spotlight following him. He whirled the torches in time to the pounding rhythm of the drums in a chaotic and impressive display. He tossed them dozens of feet in the air with cavalier abandon and alarming dexterity. He bounced them off the square post, sending up a flurry of sparks, but catching the torches again with ease: behind his back, through his legs, around his neck and again into the air. The torches whirled and danced and I had no doubt that every eye in the venue was fixed irresistibly on the spectacle. Even Holmes had sat up and started to pay attention, so entrancing was the show.

Then, while the drums became faster, louder, more frenzied, the man in the ring threw both of the torches into the air. They went one after the other, spinning end-over-end so high that I thought they might brush the top of the tent and set the entire thing ablaze. So transfixed was I with the arc of the torches that I nearly missed the man’s sudden motion as he vaulted easily up to stand on the very top of the post. He stood gracefully balanced on the foot-wide platform as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Then, he bowed his head and slowly, almost lazily, stretched out his arms to either side in time to catch the two spinning torches. The drums all stopped at the same time as if by magic.

Everything was still in the sudden, shocked silence, then the crowd, myself included, bolted to its feet and gave a thunderous ovation.

“Did you see that, Holmes!” I shouted over the din. “Have you ever seen the like?”

“Remarkable,” Holmes agreed. There was a note of curiosity and suspicion in his tone that brought me back to my senses. Mycroft had sent us here to find something remarkable, and clearly we had. Was there something more than skill and talent that we needed to investigate here? Something hiding in plain sight? Still, a remarkable circus act hardly constituted a threat to the realm.

The man waved his torches for silence and we all complied.

“My thanks,” the man in the domino mask said and I could see several of my fellow audience members lean forward to better hear him. He was a man who commanded silence when he wanted. His voice was musical, filled with mystery and secrets, and with a trace of a foreign accent. I doubt that most of the crowd could have heard him under normal conditions, with all the background and ambient noises so many gathered people must always make, but in this moment, everyone had grown so silent and entranced that his voice carried to all.

“You have come today,” he said, “to see marvels and wonders, and marvels and wonders you shall have! I am only the Ring Leader, the humblest of performers, whom you shall likely all forget about once you have seen the true court of Amun-Ra. Allow me some introductions!”

The crowd shouted its approval.

“Every schoolboy and girl knows who guards the dead of Egypt, do we not?”

Another spotlight flickered up at an angle, landing on a tall catwalk almost touching the roof of the tent, which had to be at least four storeys up. A figure decked out in black and gold robes cavorted wildly. He wore an animal-head mask to evoke the jackal-headed visage that went with his name, covered in curly grey fur and sporting large, upraised, pointed ears. The dance was wonderfully unnatural, too, its movements irregular, giving the impression through artful motions that the body underneath the robes was something other than human.

“Anubis!” the Ring Leader announced grandly. “Behold the power of the gods!”

The figure of Anubis, without so much as pausing in its madcap dance, suddenly produced and hurled a glittering dagger. The effect in the beam of the spotlight was startling. Somewhere in the tent, someone shook a sheet of tin as the dagger struck the wooden post just beneath the Ring Leader’s feet so it landed with both a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder. No mean shot from that distance. An appreciative murmur and more than a few shouts of glee sprang up from the crowd around us, then an explosion of applause. Twice more Anubis repeated the feat and the applause grew each time.

The Ring Leader did a little shuffle and caper on top of the post. “Next we have the grand figure of Osiris, King of the Underworld!” he shouted.

The various stands filled most of the big top’s space, but there were three different spots at the edges of the huge tent that were not lit and were covered with draperies that ran all the way up to the ceiling, forming sheltered antechambers of sorts. The one nearest our position rippled and the curtains were yanked away. A rider and horse plunged past us and into the centre of the tent. Both horse and rider wore matching outfits of emerald and gold and a great deal of spangles. The horse was the colour of sea foam while the rider was burly, barrel-chested, with smallish legs not quite befitting his stature. With an alacrity belying his girth, Osiris easily launched into a handstand on the moving horse’s shoulders, dropped to hang briefly on the left-hand side of the horse’s neck, then slipped under, coming up on the right-hand side, and flipped back into the saddle, emerald robes flapping around his burly form.

“I say, Holmes,” I said, pitching my voice so that no one else could hear when the applause had died down. “Reminds me somewhat of Mr Hyde, eh?” I was thinking of watching our comrade, Mr Edward Hyde, and his simian-style ascent of a Whitechapel tenement building.

“Very much like Hyde,” Holmes murmured. The trick rider had captured his imagination, it seemed, for his eyes were riveted to the sight.

“The masks and costuming are incredible,” I murmured.

The astonishing show continued, displaying phenomenal feats of strength, agility and skill. After Osiris had finished, Isis, a woman in a fox mask and russet hair, came out armed with bow, spear and knife and proceeded to bury arrows, knives and finally the spear into the wooden post, each time narrowly missing several other performers, including the Ring Leader, who all danced intentionally in front of the target. Bastet and Horus did daring leaps and somersaults from the trapeze, Seth performed displays of strength, including lifting Osiris’s horse clear off the ground. Thoth, Sobek and Apis, clowns and gymnasts, bounded and rolled around the ring, flipping each other over and through all manner of obstacles and hoops in between tumbles. Anubis reprised his dagger-throwing routine, this time with both Isis and Hathor as willing near-targets. Amun-Ra, the king of the Egyptian court, walked and somersaulted on a tightrope. There was a notable absence of any kind of animal act aside from the trick rider, but the gymnastics had to be the best I’d ever seen, given how large most of the performers were. It was even more impressive considering the animal masks and heavy robes that all the performers wore. Each performer played to this aspect heavily, growling and moving as often on all fours as they did on two feet.

“Do you detect a certain animal scent, doctor?” Holmes asked, leaning close to make himself heard over the din.

“Of course,” I said. “Nothing unusual in a circus, but we haven’t seen any elephants or lions or the like, have we?”

“We have not,” Holmes agreed. “Only the horses, and not very many of them. Certainly nothing to account for the odour.”

I couldn’t help but agree, but the odour of something more than horses persisted. There was no mistaking it.

After the show, while the rest of the audience was filing out, Holmes nonchalantly strode away from the crowd and through the curtain into the cloth antechamber hidden from the rest of the big top. We could see a groom working on Osiris’s horse. Behind them, another large curtain hung, clearly leading into another sizeable tent that must have held the circus performers themselves.

“I say,” Holmes said to the groom. “Is that horse a Belgian?”

The handler, a normal enough chap with reddish-brown hair and a pug nose, looked up in surprise. “You’re not supposed to be back here.”

“I had a bet with my friend here,” Holmes continued affably, “that this horse was a Belgian. For fifty pounds. I should like you to tell him how wrong he is so that he pays up.”

“Then you are out your fifty quid,” the man said with a sly smile. “Blanchard here is a Percheron. We use all Percheron.”

“Are you certain?” Holmes asked. “This is a fine enough horse. I was sure it was a Belgian.”

“Sorry,” the man said. “See how Blanchard is a little higher up from the ground than you’d expect from a Belgian. Better for our purposes. And smart, too, aren’t you, boy?”

Holmes accepted his ‘defeat’ with grace and continued chatting amiably with the man, who was garrulous enough and happy with his current situation. We found that his name was Tommy Bloom, a local man hired when the circus set up in London six months ago. The ‘Egyptians’, as Tommy referred to them, were a mysterious bunch that didn’t fraternize with the local help.

“Can’t say as I blame them,” Tommy added, still rubbing down the horse. “Freaks, all of them, with all manner of deformed legs and even some deformed faces. Leastwise that’s what Marcus Roberts says and he even spoke to one. Mostly they have little to do with us and keep to themselves. We do our work and they do theirs and everybody stays out of everybody else’s way.”

“What about the Ring Leader?” Holmes asked.

“Don’t know much about him,” Tommy said. “No one does. The rest of the Egyptians bunk down here at the circus after close, but he don’t. He’s not one of them, but he manages them. He hired two managers to deal with the likes of us local folk and I’ve never even exchanged three words with the man in the mask. No knows his name, either. Leastwise not me. Everyone just calls him the Ring Leader. But I’m pretty sure he’s the money behind the whole enterprise.”

“What makes you say that?” Holmes asked.

Tommy shrugged. “Just a feeling I get.”

Holmes had opened his mouth to ask another question when the flap leading to the other tent was pulled back, very slightly, revealing a shadowy figure with the flickering light of a torch behind him. A brief gust of smoke-scented hot air and a strong whiff of the animal smell that Holmes and I had both noticed blew in. The poor lighting prevented me from getting a good look, even with my excellent vision, but the shape, complete with the unique canine ears, made it clear that this was the performer Seth.

Anubis, I seemed to remember, was the jackal-headed god of ancient Egypt, while Seth was an amalgam of features from the aardvark, dog, donkey and more. But the performer here that had played Seth was far larger than the one playing Anubis and there could be no mistake that this was the former. Still, the ears in profile looked very much like a hyena’s to me.

Seth revealed himself just long enough to issue a low, but fearsome-sounding growl that made the hackles rise up on the back of my neck. It had a similar effect on Tommy, for he went white as a sheet.

At a distance, in the ring, I’d assumed Seth had been wearing a fairly well-made mask, but I had sudden doubts now. Then, just as Seth stood there – I could not see him well, for he was backlit and concealed in shadow – I could have sworn I saw one of the jackal-like ears flicker, that way an annoyed dog’s would.

“I’m sorry,” Tommy said to us quickly. “You can’t be back here and I’m not supposed to talk about any of this. You’ll have to leave now.”

“Yes,” Holmes said, seemingly oblivious to the tension around him, but checking his watch as if late for an appointment. “Quite right.” He then turned and said something unintelligible to the figure in the doorway. Several phrases in quick succession, with brief pauses in between. He got no answer or reaction to any of his statements. Seth merely let the curtain fall back into place, obscuring himself again.

“Holmes,” I said, feeling a deep chill run up my back. I wasn’t certain if Holmes had seen it.

“Come, Watson,” Holmes said casually. “We had best be on our way.”

He led me swiftly out of the tent.

“Holmes,” I said as soon as we’d put a little distance between us and the big top tent, “did you see—”

“I certainly did, Doctor,” Holmes said. “What do you think of their costumes and masks now?”

“Not masks at all!” I said. “Holmes, I saw the ear twitch. The ears are real, which means…”

“Yes,” Holmes said, “I saw. The right ear, and a most remarkable ear at that. I noticed, too, that while the beaks of Amun-Ra and Thoth and Sobek’s entire mask were clearly fabrications, I imagine that the rest of the unusual animal traits are quite real.”

“The Ring Leader had no such traits,” I observed.

“None of the animal resemblance,” Holmes said, “but a great deal of the astonishing agility. He is something distinct from the rest of them, I believe.”

“The entire enterprise is almost beyond belief,” I said, “and yet none of our fellow audience members seemed to notice anything awry.”

“There is often no better place to hide than in plain sight. I noticed that the lighting was quite artful, with so much glittering costumery to catch the eye. They did a very good job of making their animal traits look realistic, but not real, if you take my meaning.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Circuses often employ people with deformities but I begin to think that our ‘Egyptians’, as Tommy calls them, are something quite beyond the pale. And I do not think ‘Egyptian’ is the correct term. At least, I do not believe they were born in Egypt.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I asked.

“When I tried speaking to them using Arabic, I got no response, as you saw. Since I tried both the Egyptian and Modern dialects of Arabic, which I picked up during my time in Khartoum, I conclude that our friend Seth does not speak either language.”

“Perhaps he just refused to engage you?”

“Possible,” Holmes admitted, “though he did not strike me as a person of great forbearance and I said some very inflammatory things. Things I hesitate to render in English in civilized company.”

“Holmes,” I said, a little shocked despite myself. “You didn’t!”

“Risks must be taken,” Holmes said lightly.

Outside, the rain had become a little heavier so that I was not over-worried about the sun. Holmes used the brim of his top hat to shield his hands from the rain while he lit a cigarette. But I did not think he cared much for the cigarette itself. Rather, he was using the excuse to look around without announcing his curiosity. He inclined his head towards a group of mean, temporary wood shanties outside the rear tent.

“How long has this circus been camped here?” he asked me. “Did the paper say? At least a week or two, to judge by the weathered wood.”

“I believe it’s been a few months,” I said. “According to the paper.”

“If they did not choose to travel, the way many smaller circuses do, in order to reach fresh, new audiences,” Holmes mused, “then you would expect them to rent or build an amphitheatre like Hengler’s, would you not?”

“That makes sense,” I agreed. “Certainly I would not enjoy such poor accommodation as theirs appears to be.”

“Curious,” Holmes said.

Then his brow furrowed. “Still, while it makes for some interesting avenues of investigation, and one that is rather in our line lately, I don’t yet see why Mycroft has directed us there. He is not one for idle curiosity, even with something so remarkable as this appears to be. I see no crime and certainly nothing of danger to anyone, if you don’t count the intentional risks of the circus performers themselves, who seem remarkably fit and capable. No, a certain amount of risk comes with their job, too, and that would not attract Mycroft’s attention.”

We had reached the road, our boots squelching in the puddles, and Holmes hailed a cab.

“I believe, Watson,” he said to me as the driver stopped, “that it is time we bearded the lion in his den.” He turned and gave the driver directions to the Diogenes Club, Mycroft’s usual refuge when not at home or in the office. Since Mycroft’s home in Pall Mall and his office in Whitehall were a stone’s throw from each other, and since he rarely went anywhere else, it should have been the easiest thing in the world to track the man down.

When we arrived at the club, however, we were greeted by a waiter with a sealed envelope bearing Holmes’s name. Holmes looked briefly at the outside of the envelope, frowned, then tore it open. He quickly scanned the letter and his expression grew startled.

“It’s serious, then?” I asked.

“I cannot imagine anything more serious,” Holmes said, “or more mystifying. My brother, who loathes anything out of his routine, has done something remarkable.”

“Remarkable?” I said.

“Quite,” Holmes said. “He has left the country.”

Chapter 2

THE CIRCUS OF AMUN-RA

We returned to Baker Street where Holmes proceeded to sit, unspeaking, and fill our sitting room with bluish-grey smoke. After an hour of this, he jumped up, scribbled several telegrams and sent them out without illuminating their contents to me. He received two replies shortly, but again said nothing. Well used to his curious ways as I was, I was happy to let him explain to me his theories when he was ready, but wondered, as the night wore on and Holmes refused to speak, what kind of tangled problem Holmes’s brother had directed us to.

Certainly Mycroft’s actions spoke volumes. I had never known Mycroft to so much as leave London, let alone England. Holmes had only told me that he’d left on a government-issue steamer early the previous morning. I found it hard to imagine the enormously corpulent elder Holmes standing at the prow of some steamer, his grey eyes shining, the wind and sea spray in his barest fringe of salt and pepper hair. Mycroft, by his own admission, possessed so little sense of adventure and energy that it was quite beyond him to essay into the average London railway station, to say nothing of boarding a ship leaving England.

I lost track, as the night wore on, of how many times Holmes filled his pipe, but I think it safe to say that the three-pipe threshold was breached before the clock struck four. Still, it was not until an ashen light had started to paint our window, signalling morning, that I considered retiring. This was when Holmes finally stirred and spoke.

“This will be a difficult business, Watson,” he said. “I should very much like to get closer to these circus workers, but they are so secluded and unique that infiltrating them is going to be a pretty little problem. The regular workers are all managed by a man named Marcus Roberts, whom Tommy mentioned yesterday. At the time, the name was unknown to me, but that was quickly rectified and I have received reply already that the man exists and handles the cleaners, maintenance staff, ticket-takers and the like, and has had no exposure to the Egyptians themselves. Isolated at every turn...”

“Have you deduced what portion of this unusual situation has attracted Mycroft’s attention?”

“I need more information to make anything of it, Watson,” he said. “I cannot, as yet, explain either Mycroft’s interest in the circus or his even more remarkable and sudden lust for travel. All the threads start at the circus. As such, I think it may be time for a little old-fashioned surveillance? We have seen what the place is like during a performance at day. Will you join me in looking the place over at night?”

“I should be deeply hurt to miss it,” I said at once.

Our arrangements having been made, I went to bed and rose early (for my kind) so that Holmes and I could take an early supper at Simpson’s. They didn’t serve much I could consume, of course, and some of the rare meat dishes cast off a distracting aroma that is, for me, both tantalizing and filled with disappointment. However, I supped before going and I find it pleasant to be among people for short periods, despite the assault such a place makes on my senses. More importantly, I knew the importance of getting Holmes to take care of himself, especially since he often eschews food during his more difficult cases. Tonight, he acquitted himself admirably on a plate of mutton and potatoes while I pushed a lamb risotto around my plate.

In between bites, Holmes told me what little he had discovered about the circus while I slept. He’d gone through the public records and carried out some careful cross-referencing with his index files and newspaper clippings. The Circus of Amun-Ra being in Hyde Park, which lay just across the Serpentine River from Kensington Gardens, would require several permits to set up and run for as many months as it had.

“Could Mycroft have had a hand in their activities?” I asked. “His involvement is still a mystery to us.”

“Mycroft? The patron of a circus?” Holmes said, amused. “It certainly seems unlikely. As far as I have been able to gather until now, and my investigation is only in the preliminary stage, it seems as if the way for their occupation has been paved the good old-fashioned way: with a great deal of money. Mycroft is not what anyone would refer to as a poor man, but he neither has, nor needs money in the usual sense. No, if he had been instrumental in setting them up, it would have been done with much more care. I doubt that monetary payments would have been involved at all and if they had been, it would have been handled with greater discretion. It may well be worth tracing where some of those payments came from if our campaign tonight does not yield any results.”

Dinner was cleared away shortly and we ordered coffee and whisky. There may be those that envy the disease of vampirism as I have described it, but they should not. It is a terrible way to live one’s life. There are, however, a few compensations: chiefly the enhanced taste of whisky. Another, even purer delight is coffee. After my infection, I found that coffee now tasted the way it smelled. My system could only handle a little foreign matter and the coffee and whisky together would push it to the limit, but it was entirely worthwhile.

It had rained while we dined but let up as Holmes and I left the restaurant. Night had fallen softly and incompletely on the Strand and while a little wet fog trailed around our ankles, it was not terribly cool and made a pleasant enough scene to my eye. Lanterns and the amber light from shop windows spilled over wet pavements, carriages and pedestrians alike as a brisk amount of traffic of all kinds flowed through the centre of London. Holmes hailed a cab and we were soon alighting near the circus grounds in Hyde Park.

The circus had finished their last performance of the day, so there was far less foot traffic here – such pedestrians as there were did not pay us any attention.

“We are in enemy territory now, Watson,” Holmes said in a low voice as we left the main road and crossed into the gardens themselves. We left the paths and Holmes steered us through a carefully cultivated stand of trees, aiming to approach the circus from the rear. The huge big top was dark and clearly deserted, but a warm light glowed in the smaller tent behind as well as in a few of the shanties nearby. I pulled Holmes further back into the shelter of the trees as I saw figures moving between the two light spills. It seemed that people were heading in small groups into the smaller tent. The middle of the path between the shanties and the smaller tent was sixty or seventy yards from us, but we dared not get closer.

One figure, immobile, was standing just off the path and seemed to be keeping watch. The bulky, pointy-eared silhouette of Seth. We waited while the rest of the performers filed into the tent.

“We seem to have arrived just in time for something,” Holmes said in a low voice.

My pulse jumped as I saw the ears of the imposing Seth flick slightly in our direction a half-instant after Holmes’s statement and I gripped his arm in an appeal for silence. Holmes immediately understood and we waited.

Seth stood, looking in our direction for a full two minutes, his ears twitching occasionally, before he finally trudged off to the glowing yellow slit of the entrance to the tent. When he had gone, Holmes and I were alone in the expanse of the garden with only the few trees and the bulky shadow of the tent for company.

We took a few long, slow breaths, waiting to see if there might be any other sentries, but nothing moved. Finally, at a signal from Holmes, we crept across the lawn to the opening of the tent and peered in.

Flickering candlelight painted the walls of the tent in a way that made me think of prehistoric caves. This tent, although smaller than the main one, was still about the size of a small church. And church it might as well have been, for there was an altar with a dazzling array of candles and rough benches for makeshift pews. The door flap to the tent was near the back, so they all faced the altar off to our right, with the result that there was little chance of them seeing us. We crouched just outside the tent flap in total darkness and beheld the strangest congregation I’d ever seen. With their costumes and masks off, the Egyptians looked more wondrous and bizarre than they had when performing.

Anubis stood at the altar, robed, his arms raised. The gold Egyptian headdress was gone, as well as the jackal ears, but I could see now that his snout had not been part of any ornament at all. His eyes shone in the light with the horizontal, blocky slits of a goat. Anubis’s mouth opened and his voice rang out: “Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law!”

Here the congregation answered: “Are we not men?”

“Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law!” Anubis intoned. His fur was not black, like that of the Egyptian namesake he’d portrayed, but grey and curly. A great mane that must have been mostly held in check before now stood around his face, which was both bestial and undeniably human. He raised hands that were not those of a man, but something like nimble cloven hooves, with two thick, hard, black curved fingers that held a thin book. He wore vestments of a kind, including a sash of black and gold, striking against the pervading grey of his person. There was something of man, deer, wolf and lion in the face and hands, a monstrous amalgam.

“Are we not men?” the congregation answered.

“Not to eat Fish or Flesh,” he said. “That is the Law!”

“Are we not men?”

“Not to claw the Bark of Trees. That is the Law.”

“Are we not men?”

“Not to chase other Men. That is the Law.”

“Are we not men?”

As this litany echoed through the tent, I tried as best I could to make out the various participants in greater detail. The candlelight was not ideal for most, but my eyesight was more than up to the task. Yet I found such a great cornucopia of strange physical characteristics, in such awe-inspiring variety, that my mind struggled to absorb their nature.

Seth was closest to us, standing at the rear of the tent, and it was clear, as we had seen just a moment ago, that his ears were completely his own without having to resort to the headdress as Anubis did. His snout was wider than Anubis’s and his form bulkier. There was something of the boar in his snout, something of the hyena in his ears. His hands had terrifying heavy talons and his legs and feet were visible with the short tunic-style outfit that he wore. These bent backwards like a beast’s, with equally heavy talons on his feet, though he stood erect like a man.

Seated on one of the benches immediately in front of Anubis was someone I had not seen during the performance, with a leopard head that was clearly no mask. The mystery became clearer when I saw the heavy crocodile mask of Sobek sitting next to him on the bench. Fantastical as the crocodile visage had seemed tumbling during the performance, I had never dreamed that a face even more fantastic lay underneath.

By contrast, Horus’s face looked exactly as we had seen before, the head of a bird of prey with a fearsome beak, delicate and small compared to Seth’s bulk. It watched Anubis carefully, looking with first one eye, then the other. What had been covered by the baggy costume before was now revealed to be not arms at all, but glorious wings. The back, sporting patches both of feathers and thick fur, was more like that of a white, spotted snow leopard, complete with lashing tail, but the legs, under the bench, looked to be a mixture of animal and human, with more snow leopard fur, and shaped more like a lion than anything avian. The feet were clawed, also feline.

The rest were an equally unbelievable, savage and sometimes beautiful motley assortment of man and all manner of beasts. Osiris the Ape man, Bastet the Puma woman, a rhino woman we had not seen before, all sat on one side (and with little clothing, there could be no mistaking this last person’s particular gender). To the left I saw Thoth, who without his beaked mask was shown to be something of man, bear and wolf, and Isis, similarly possessing traits of both fox and bear. Two ox men, so alike as to be twins, sat behind them, alongside another person, Amun-Ra, I thought, with goat’s legs and hooves and a man’s torso: a disturbing satyr with both horns and an archetypal leer on his face, even in repose.

In a lifetime and career that had experienced murderous, luminescent hounds, treacherous Andaman savages, vampires and shapechangers, nothing had prepared me for the strange and grotesque gathering we now saw.

Holmes gripped my arm and we withdrew a foot or so just as Seth turned and stared at the slit in the tent. With the light inside and the darkness around us, I couldn’t imagine that any kind of normal eyesight would have detected us. I didn’t think even vampire night sight would do so, but we were clearly not dealing with anything within our experience. My shoulders clenched as Seth continued to stare, while Holmes and I sat as quiet and still as we could. When the hyena ears twitched again and he turned away, I almost breathed a sigh of relief.

We carefully and slowly withdrew.

“Well,” Holmes said once we had gone a short distance and could speak without fear of discovery. “This case has certainly grown more and more unusual with each passing morsel of information, but I still see nothing that represents a serious crime or a threat to others.”

“Holmes,” I said, my head still spinning. “I could hardly imagine what we’ve just seen. Where did these creatures come from? How have they hidden in plain sight so long? Are they part of some plot?”

“I have yet to see any sign of that,” Holmes said.

“How they came to exist is certainly the foremost question, is it not?”

“Perhaps,” Holmes said thoughtfully. “But would it be Mycroft’s main concern? Somehow I think not.”

It’s near unbelievable, at any rate,” I said. The presence of such unusual creatures in the heart of London, within a stone’s throw of Kensington Palace and royalty, seemed near impossible to believe had I not seen it with my own eyes.

“Did you notice the absence of the Ring Leader?” Holmes asked. “It seems that Tommy’s notion that he is not one of them seems to hold some merit. Certainly his outfit was not designed to hide abnormalities the way the other performers’ are. There is a great deal to find out about all of this, but I feel we shall next try to find out more about him.”

*   *   *

So it was that the next day, Holmes implemented the first stage of his plan, which involved the guise of an out-of-work labourer.

Holmes came out of his room in the morning and presented himself for inspection. Used as I was to Holmes’s ways, it always impressed me how complete a transformation he could achieve. His hair, clothes, height, gait, even face and voice were all distinctly different from the Holmes I knew and I could see no flaw that would give him away. I also noticed that he had added a distinctly olfactory element to his ensemble, with the scents of coarse tobacco, horse and what I thought might be Airedale terrier, though how he accomplished the last two I could not begin to imagine.

“You have yourself and your fellow victims of vampirism to blame,” Holmes said when I commented on the smells. “Between vampires, and shapechangers like Hyde, to say nothing of our animal people from last night, I might as well be investigating a criminal organization comprised of bloodhounds. Measures had to be taken.”

However, he came back in the evening with a tale of denial and frustration.

“The truth is, Watson,” he said ruefully, “I was outmanoeuvred, which happens more often than you share with your readers. I had thought Jefferson Hope’s accomplice in the Lauriston Gardens murder a cool customer when he gave us the slip, but I tell you now that he, and I, may have met our match.”

“I find that difficult to believe,” I said.

“Let me lay out the events in sequence,” Holmes said. “You be the judge. I was able to talk myself into some temporary work for the day easily enough. In fact, I even helped Tommy Bloom with the horses without Tommy having any idea as to my true identity. Of course, my true purpose was to watch the Ring Leader, and this was easy enough.”

“Tommy did not recognize you?”

“No,” Holmes said. “Not then, at least. He stayed after the show for a short time, though I was unable to get close enough to the back tent to overhear or see much, but at one point he left the tent and returned with various supplies: food, water, and some sundries collected from the living quarters. What I take to be routine tasks, but they took some time. As such, the sun was getting low in the sky before he left. I followed him from the park easily enough, carefully leaving enough space between us as to not attract attention.

“He went north out of Hyde Park, crossed Edgware Road and started east on Oxford Street. I followed at a discreet distance, or so I thought. His back was to me, of course, but I could still make out, as he looked occasionally to the right or left, that he had discarded his mask, which would certainly attract attention, and now wore a pair of pince-nez with very thick, emerald lenses and a silk muffler around the bottom half of his face, creating a rather effective disguise.

“He did not wear gloves,” Holmes went on, “and since the sun was still out at the start of our trip and he showed no sign of discomfort, we can conclude that our quarry in this investigation is not a vampire.

“There was a large cart loaded with barrels parked near the end of the block. He made as if to cross the street just ahead of the loaded cart, then doubled back as casually as you please, passed two women on the pavement, tipping his hat. Then, when he was only a few steps past the women, he jumped, touched one of the barrels briefly with his foot, and landed precisely and cleanly on the railing of a balcony overlooking the street. Watson, I must tell you, the balcony was eighteen feet or so above the street. There was little I could do to follow. He made a point of tipping his hat to me and giving a slight bow and then he was gone. The building was a hotel and by the time I entered the lobby and ascended the stair to the next level, he was quite gone.”

“That’s astonishing, Holmes!”

“Is it?” Holmes said. “I’m not so sure, considering that his abilities were on full display during the circus performance. I am more concerned with how easily he discovered that I was following him in the first place. At no point and time either during the day or during my attempt to follow him did I come within a dozen yards of either him or any of the other performers, so I do not feel that they had any reason to suspect me. Nor do I think they would have let me remain if they had detected my secret. This means that our Ring Leader must have realized that I was following him and taken steps. It is a most formidable person we investigate, and I would very much like to know where he spends his nights, Watson.”

“If this is a man capable of travelling the rooftops,” I said uncertainly, “perhaps we should enlist help?” I was thinking of Dracula, Mina and Hyde, all of whom seemed capable of effortlessly travelling the rooftops. While my vampirism had increased my strength, and would, over time, even decrease my weight as the cells in my body transformed even more completely than they already had, vampires’ strength and durability increased with their decreasing weight over the decades, although so did their vulnerability to sunlight and silver. I’d seen Dracula crawl up the side of a building like some giant spider, both by himself and with Mina’s additional weight, an unsettling sight. But younger vampires such as Miss Winter and myself were as yet incapable of the feat.

Holmes shook his head. “Dracula has been a valuable ally, but the previous times he has stood at our sides it was because either Mina or Van Helsing was involved. Should something threaten London itself, I should not hesitate to call on him, but he is not a man to be summoned for trifles. And all we have is Mycroft’s exceedingly uncharacteristic behaviour, which means nothing to Dracula, and some few curiosities.”

“‘Curiosities’, as a word, does not seem to cover the situation,” I said, thinking of the unusual persons we viewed last night. Holmes could sometimes excel at understatement.

“Perhaps not,” Holmes admitted, “but there is no threat or crime that we yet know about and I am hesitant to bother him without need.”

I thought of Dracula’s grim, severe expression and had to admit that Holmes had a point. “What about Hyde or Miss Winter?”

“There we have a less predictable response,” Holmes said.

“Miss Winter would certainly come if we asked, but is, perhaps, too easy to spot and is no swifter along the roofs than we are. Hyde undoubtably is, but is mercurial in temperament, at best. I will send a telegram to Jekyll’s address in Soho and see if we might entice him, but you know as well as I how much the response will depend on his mood.”

“Perhaps Miss Winter will compel him?” I suggested. “She has,” Holmes said, “perhaps, more influence on him than any other person alive, and I include Doctor Jekyll in the tally. It is a promising suggestion and we lose nothing in trying. Let us see what Miss Winter can do.”

So saying, he pulled out a telegram form and wrote out three messages to Miss Winter, Hyde and Jekyll, since we could only hazard a guess as to who might be there to receive them.

“I wonder,” I added, “if the Midnight Watch could assist us?” Miss Winter had a number of workers and agents under her care who assisted her in watching the morgues and cemeteries, constantly on the lookout for fledgling vampires.

“No,” Holmes said. “Miss Winter has carefully and precisely trained the Midnight Watch in their tasks, of which they are quite capable, but they have strict instructions not to engage with anything more mature or dangerous than a nascent vampire. That is for a reason. They would be out of their element with anything more serious and I believe our Ring Leader falls into that category. We do not want another Somersby incident or I should never forgive myself.”

Somersby had been a young man under Miss Winter’s guidance and our care who had joined our incursion to a truly monstrous vampire nest and had died there. I felt a flash of regret and guilt.

“Now,” Holmes said, “let us plan without referring to the possibility of assistance and make adjustments if we should become fortunate enough to receive any. It will require hat and gloves for you, since I shall need you to start before the sun is fully down.”

*   *   *

Unlike many circuses, the Circus of Amun-Ra had only three performances a week – Thursday, Friday and Saturday – and was closed the other four days of the week. This being Sunday night, it gave us three more nights to attempt to trail the Ring Leader through London, for Holmes had discovered through his conversation with the other workers that there was no guarantee the Ring Leader would be present during the off days.

The first night I never even saw him, for he left the park through the southern entrance, while Holmes had stationed me outside the northern entrance on Oxford Street.

“He is altering his routes,” Holmes explained to me ruefully after we had met again in the street. “It is possible he is cagey enough to vary his routes normally, but it is far more likely that my failure to avoid detection last night has put him on his guard.”

I glared at the sign for Hyde Park, irritated with its namesake. There had been no answer to our messages. Holmes had even contacted the Midnight Watch lieutenants in an attempt to reach the normally reliable Miss Winter, but they had only sent a reply stating that they had not seen her for the last forty-eight hours. There were several teams, each assigned to one of the various sections of the city. Any one team often worked without her direct guidance for days at a time, as she might be busy with another team or portion of the city. As such, none of them noticed her absence. She had, however, been in contact with them by messenger on routine matters, so while unusual and inconvenient to our current surveillance, her absence was not yet a cause for alarm. She was a woman of rough exterior, but had proved her judgment sound on many an occasion.

“There are only so many ways out of Hyde Park,” Holmes said, “and there is no pressing deadline that we know of. We shall have to be persistent. We only need succeed once.”

The next night, fortune was with us and I was able to pick up the Ring Leader’s tall form and blond hair on Oxford Street, staying well ahead of his path, while Holmes followed at an even more discreet distance than before. I had another opportunity to see the man’s athletic agility as he turned down an alley and I peered in after him. I had no trouble picking him out from the alley’s velvet shadows and seeing him spring up and kick off from the alley wall with one boot, which propelled him to another impossibly small foothold on the opposite wall. In less time than it takes to tell, he had bounced from one wall to the other and back again, like a ball made of India rubber, and landed neatly on the roof.

I dashed back out into the street proper, waving at Holmes, who was still nearly a block behind me, then ran to the other side of the building to look for any sign of our quarry. I saw none. We had lost him again.

“He went up onto the roofs,” I said to Holmes when he reached my side at a run.

“Where?” he said.

I took him to the alley in question and described his rapid ascent.

“Well,” said Holmes. “We are not so spry, perhaps, as shapechangers and circus performers, but that gallery window and cornice looks serviceable enough. Let us see if we can’t follow.” Holmes made a small leap to reach hold of a protruding stone, managed to get a boot up onto the window ledge and proceeded to climb. It seemed, perhaps, a large effort and danger considering that we still had no crime to motivate us and no injustice to detect or avenge, but I trusted Holmes’s instincts and followed.