Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows E-Book

James Lovegrove

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In London's East End, an outbreak of insanity sees ordinary men and women reduced to gibbering wrecks, and a mysterious creeping fog hides terrifying apparitions within it. Sherlock Holmes deduces a connection between these sinister "shadows" and an Oriental drug lord. Yet there are even more sinister forces at work, as the great detective faces a challenge so fearsome and deadly that his career may be over almost as soon as it has begun.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by James Lovegrove

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface by James Lovegrove

Foreword by Dr John Watson, MD

Chapter One: A Study in Scar Tissue

Chapter Two: A Private Clarence

Chapter Three: To 221B

Chapter Four: The Four Deaths

Chapter Five: Gregson of the Yard

Chapter Six: A Horribly Familiar Language

Chapter Seven: A Moveable Feast

Chapter Eight: The Lair of the Dragon

Chapter Nine: The Trespasser in the Night

Chapter Ten: The Box Hill Barrows

Chapter Eleven: The Dream-Quest of Sherlock Holmes

Chapter Twelve: The Lost City of Ta’aa

Chapter Thirteen: Speaking of the Devil

Chapter Fourteen: Not Prey but Guests

Chapter Fifteen: An Anonymous Admonition

Chapter Sixteen: Students of the Unusual

Chapter Seventeen: Sequestered Volumes

Chapter Eighteen: Moriarty

Chapter Nineteen: A Little Mesmeric Legerdemain

Chapter Twenty: Unhappy Christmas

Chapter Twenty-One: A Caller and a Telegram

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Queerest Club in Christendom

Chapter Twenty-Three: Forearmed Mice

Chapter Twenty-Four: Magic Bullets

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Triophidian Crown

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Onyx Obelisk

Chapter Twenty-Seven: An Issue of Quality not Quantity

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Crawling Chaos Comes!

Chapter Twenty-Nine: A Serpentine Lynch Mob

Chapter Thirty: Rectifying a Desecration

Epilogue

ALSO AVAILABLE FROMJAMES LOVEGROVE AND TITAN BOOKS

THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities (November 2017)

Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils (November 2018)

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

The Stuff of Nightmares

Gods of War

The Thinking Engine

The Labyrinth of Death (June 2017)

The Devil’s Dust (June 2018)

The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell ShadowsHardback edition ISBN: 9781783295937Paperback edition ISBN: 9781785652912Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783295944

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

First edition: November 20162 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by James Lovegrove. All Rights Reserved.

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.

This book and its sequels are dedicated to Miranda Jewess, who not only instigated them but edited the hell out of them – or should that be into them?

PREFACEBY JAMES LOVEGROVE

IN THE SPRING OF 2014 I RECEIVED AN EMAIL OUT of the blue. It was from a firm of lawyers based in Providence, Rhode Island. At first I thought it was spam and nearly deleted it. As I scrolled through, however, I realised the email was bona fide, and I read on with curiosity and a growing bemusement.

The sender was Mason K. Jacobs III, a senior partner at Laughlin Jacobs Travers LLP. The subject heading was “A Legacy”, which was why I’d been suspicious about the email, thinking it might be one of those scams where some Nigerian princeling wants to use your bank account to stash several million dollars temporarily, with you getting a percentage cut for your trouble (and in no way will your account details be stolen).

The text began as follows:

Dear Mr Lovegrove,

You are likely unaware of the recent passing, at the age of 82, of Mr Henry Prothero Lovecraft. This individual was a lifelong resident of Providence and a longstanding if not regular client of Laughlin, Jacobs, Travers. Unmarried and without issue, he succumbed to heart failure in the fall of last year, leaving behind an estate worth in the region of $75,000.

As part of our due diligence in probate we have been chasing down relatives who might be in line to inherit part or all of his legacy. Mr Lovecraft was a solitary man and died intestate. He lived in a modest condominium in Smith Hill, which as you may or may not know is one of our city’s less favored areas. The bulk of his estate accrues from the sale of his apartment, said property amounting to a $95,000 capital value. After taxes, various other duties and our fees have been deducted, we arrive at the residual $75,000 figure mentioned above.

By this point my heart had started to race. I was beginning to infer that I was in line for a cash windfall equivalent to roughly £50,000 sterling. The email certainly seemed to be heading in that direction. Ker-ching!

My hopes of a new car and a reduced mortgage, and perhaps a Caribbean holiday, were dashed by the next paragraph.

We have managed to track down a grand-niece of Mr Lovecraft’s in Kennebunkport, Maine. To her – a Ms Rhonda Lachaise – goes the legacy, and to her it has been accordingly disbursed.

Curse Mason K. Jacobs III and his lawyerly punctiliousness. He’d never intended to mislead me. He’d just set out the facts of the matter in order, failing to appreciate that the reader – me – might imagine his preamble was heading in one direction when it was actually heading in another. He inadvertently led me up the garden path, only to slam the front door in my face.

Nonetheless, there were certain items among Mr Lovecraft’s effects to which Ms Lachaise wished no claim. He was, it seems, an inveterate hoarder of books, papers, exotic paraphernalia, and sundry pieces of statuary and handicraft whose purpose appears to be religious but whose provenance is hard to determine and, frankly, baffling.

These have been disposed of, on the grounds that they have no obvious useful function and in some instances constitute a public hygiene hazard. The books and papers were of little value, according to representatives of both the public library and the John Hay Library at Brown University, while the majority of the objects – figurines, effigies, fetishes and such – were fashioned from organic materials such as hide and hair and were rather moth-eaten and sordid. I would not be surprised if Mr Lovecraft had made them himself. They had a kind of homespun crudity about them.

One particular item stood out, however, and seemed worthy of preservation. It is about this that I am contacting you.

During our researches we ascertained that you, Mr Lovegrove, are a distant relative of the late Mr Lovecraft. The connection is attenuated, dating back some three hundred years, but real enough.

Furthermore, a junior partner in our firm is an avid consumer of genre fiction and is familiar with your work. It was he who suggested you were the appropriate candidate to receive the item in question.

The artifact, the nature of which you are no doubt eager for me to divulge, is a book manuscript. To be precise, three typed manuscripts which together tell a single tale. They are of some antiquity, perhaps a century old, and at a cursory glance purport to have been written by none other than Dr John Watson, a literary figure with whose oeuvre you have a more than nodding acquaintance, to judge by your own recent published output. They were discovered at the back of a closet in Mr Lovecraft’s bedroom, inside a rusty strongbox.

Now my heart was racing again, but this time with a mixture of excitement and incredulity.

To cut a long story short, we believe these manuscripts to be nothing more than forgeries, at best some kind of pastiche. They center around Sherlock Holmes, naturally enough, given the purported author. The adventures they narrate, though, are like none to which aficionados of the character are accustomed. In point of fact, with their emphasis on strange and uncanny events they seem utterly antithetical to the spirit of rationalism which to my (admittedly limited) knowledge typifies the Holmes canon.

You, Mr Lovegrove, deserve to take possession of the manuscripts, by virtue of your familial association with Henry Lovecraft. You are also the best person, we feel, to adjudge their quality and authenticity, by virtue of your professional experience in the fields of fantastical fiction and, if I may use the term, “Holmesiana.”

I am therefore dispatching them to you by international courier and they should arrive within the next two weeks. If by any chance you are able to make something of them, and perhaps even deem them publishable in some guise or other, we would of course be more than happy to represent you in whatever legal or executive capacity we are able.

Yours sincerely,Mason K. Jacobs III

I spent the rest of that day visiting genealogy websites, frantically trying to establish how Henry Lovecraft and I were related. At the back of my mind lay the thought that this Lovecraft must be a descendant of the noted author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) whose horror fiction has been so seminal and enduring. There was the coincidence, or not, of the two men’s identical initials. Of more relevance was the location, Providence, which was the birthplace and, for most of his life, home of the more celebrated Lovecraft.

I soon discovered that the three of us were indeed linked by bloodline. It turns out that our ancestral roots lie with Bavarian nobility, the Von Luftgraf family. The word Luftgraf translates loosely from the German as “high count”. The Von Luftgrafs owned a large swathe of Upper Franconia, up until the 1760s when they experienced some sort of financial calamity and lost their estates and castles. As far as I could work out, one scion of the dynasty became involved with a cult of demon-raising black-magic practitioners, went mad, and essentially bequeathed his fellow acolytes all his worldly wealth, thereafter living out his final days in an insane asylum, the proverbial gibbering wreck.

To escape the shame and penury caused by this incident and seek a fresh start, the remaining handful of Von Luftgrafs emigrated in two directions, some north to Great Britain, others west to the United States. Both groups shortened and anglicised their surname on arrival in their new homelands, the British contingent adopting the spelling Lovegrove, the American contingent Lovecraft. Henry Prothero Lovecraft belonged to a different branch of the family tree that spawned Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the trunk of which was from those first mid-eighteenth-century arrivals in New England. All the same, he seems to have shared his relative’s keen fascination with the occult and the arcane.

What this meant was that I was, in fact, a cousin about a hundred times removed from H.P. Lovecraft himself, whose stories I had devoured in my teens. That was fairly thrilling to learn, I can tell you. Lovecraft’s facility for evoking the eldritch and for imparting a sense of creeping dread is unparalleled, but also anchored by a cool, cerebral reportage/memoir/diary technique and by fleeting winks of black comedy. His less wholesome personal attributes – principally his racism, a disgust for non-Anglo-Saxon cultures often expressed in his journalism and private correspondence – were unknown to me when I first discovered his work. Awareness of them blights it now to some extent, as does the occasional imprecision and over-baked ungainliness of his writing style, the latter more noticeable to me in middle age when I am an author myself and, I like to think, conscious of what does and doesn’t constitute decent prose.

All the same, the H.P. Lovecraft. He and I had an affinity that was more than the simple fact that both of us eked a living from our pens. This was the man who explored and codified that amalgamation of ancient elder gods, forbidden knowledge, hostile supernatural forces and cosmic indifference which has come to be known as the Cthulhu Mythos – and he was family. We shared DNA. I even became aware of a vague physical resemblance between us, especially around the eyes.

The manuscripts arrived at my house a fortnight later, and I unsealed the package straight away and got to reading. The paper was yellowed and brittle, the text faint in places yet still perfectly legible.

The contents were, to put it mildly, remarkable.

I’m not going to say much further. The books should speak for themselves. I’ve had the paper checked by an expert, who tells me that the watermark and the high rag content denote that it is exactly the sort of bonded foolscap which someone in the 1920s might have used. Another expert confirms that the typewriter employed is an Imperial Model 50, judging by the font, the width of the carriage and the strike depth of the characters. That particular make was popular in Britain between the wars, which is when Watson, according to his foreword, wrote the books. In other words, on the face of it the manuscripts seem to be the real deal.

At the same time, I can’t help wondering if they’re a monstrous hoax (and I use the adjective advisedly). Reams of the right paper and a typewriter of suitable vintage are readily purchaseable. I’ve checked on eBay. For a few hundred quid, they could be yours. That and a bit of skill with literary mimicry is all you’d need to make the deception look credible.

I’ve spent a year or so, on and off, studying the manuscripts, rereading them, evaluating their worth, trying my very best to decide whether or not they genuinely are the work of the esteemed Dr Watson and do, in his own words, present “an alternate history of the career of Sherlock Holmes”.

A part of me, for my own sanity, hopes that they don’t; hopes that someone else, not Watson, perhaps Henry Prothero Lovecraft himself, is their creator, and they are just some abstruse metafictional joke, something designed to fascinate and bamboozle the world, that’s all.

Because otherwise, almost everything we know about the great detective – his life, his work, his methods, his accomplishments – has all been a big fat lie, a façade concocted to mask a deeper, darker, more horrible truth.

I’m submitting the three manuscripts in published form under the umbrella title Cthulhu Casebooks. The individual volumes bear the titles Dr Watson gave them – Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities and Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils – and the central events in each take place at fifteen-year intervals, in 1880, 1895 and 1910 respectively. All I’ve done to the original texts after scanning them into my computer is correct a few solecisms and grammatical errors, resolve the continuity glitches for which the author is famous (some might say notorious), and weave in a sentence or two of explanation here and there to shore up an otherwise obscure reference.

I leave it to you, the reader, to make up your own mind about the books. You can decide if they effectively rewrite the Holmes canon, skewing it through the distorting prism of the Lovecraftian one, or if they are just the fevered outpourings of some reclusive, semi-anonymous scribbler exploiting the popularity of not one but two iconic figures of our times.

Call it crossover. Call it mash-up. Call it cash-in.

Or call it a revelation.

It’s up to you.

J.M.H.L., EASTBOURNE, UKNovember 2016

FOREWORDBY DR JOHN WATSON, MD

I AM AN OLD MAN. A TIRED, FRIGHTENED OLD MAN. I have lived a long time, done much, seen much. Now my eyesight is fading, my body is gnarled and weak, and I feel my life ebbing with each passing day. I am a trained medical practitioner. I know senescence when I see it, and the mirror habitually shows it me in all its greying, decaying glory, ever more blurred, ever more saddening.

That is when I can bear to look in the mirror at all. For the reflections in mirrors do not reveal only remorseless corporeal collapse. They also, potentially, expose things hiding in corners, things lurking at the periphery of one’s vision, things that, once glimpsed, start to titter or whisper or else sometimes simply sit silent, watching.

I have written at length about the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known, a man I was proud to call friend and by whom I was proud to be called friend. I refer, of course, to Mr Sherlock Holmes, and to the dozens of narratives, all well received, in which I have recounted his adventures. I have expatiated on his deductive powers, his ratiocination, his peerless ability to penetrate to the truth of a matter, uncover malfeasance and bring wrongdoers to justice. His analytical methods, by my auspices, are known worldwide and have indeed been adopted and emulated by representatives of several international police forces. I flatter myself that in bringing his exploits to the attention of the masses, I have contributed significantly to the science of detection and improved the lot of law-abiding citizens everywhere, and by extension vitiated the efforts of the less law-abiding.

I can now, in the twilight of my life, confess that I have not told the whole story. Far from it. I have in fact told one sort of story in order to deflect attention from another, which strays into realms most ordinary people are incognisant of and are all the better off in their ignorance. I have constructed a shell of artifice around a dark, rotten kernel so as to protect civilisation from certain facts that would throw its cosy self-assurance into drastic and lasting disarray.

The time has come to unburden myself of secrets I have kept long after Sherlock Holmes died. At his express request I have buried the truth, but its grave has been unquiet and disturbances from it have since troubled me in the night. I would not go to my own grave without just this once, at last, exhuming the undecaying corpse and exposing it to scrutiny.

Hence I have decided to write three last books about Holmes, a final trilogy in which I shall lay bare all that he really did, all that he really achieved over the course of his life. They make up, for better or worse, an alternate history of his career, one that has the benefit of being unimpeachably true.

I do not expect them to be published. On the contrary, it is imperative that they never see the light of day. I plan to entrust them to the care of an American author, name of Lovecraft. His work is garnering repute in the pages of the so-called “pulp” magazines across the Atlantic – an offshoot of the penny dreadful and the shilling shocker, no less sensationalist, yet now and then, almost by accident, the repository for some fine creative endeavours – and, more pertinently, he seems well versed in the blasphemous and often perverse material that these books cover. Lovecraft and I have been corresponding of late – his letters are lengthy and detailed, and arrive with a frequency I cannot hope to match – and he is as intimate as anyone with the esoteric territory mapped herein (although a couple of his peers, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, are almost equally adept). He and I are kindred spirits and fellow travellers, his writings revealing as great an understanding as my own of the uncanny forces that hover at the very edge of reality, trying to break in.

Lovecraft will know what to do with the books, which is to lock them in a strongbox and throw away the key. I do not need him even to read them. I merely want them out of me, as it were, in the manner of a diseased organ removed by a surgeon. Before I die I wish to be rid of their accumulated weight, the plague of their presence in my soul. This, then, is a kind of literary exorcism.

My fingers are swollen with arthritis, pecking at the typewriter keys like twisted bird beaks. It aches to write, it hurts. Yet write I must. I keep the electric lights burning in my study, to banish the London gloom outside. To banish the shadows, too, for I know all too well what shadows may hide within their dark folds.

Holmes, my erstwhile companion, wherever you are, I trust that you will forgive me this shriving of my inner self, even if it goes against your recommendations. At the very least you will look on me with those sharp grey eyes, utter a fond chuckle, and declare that I am a foolish, blundersome oaf whose intellectual incompetence is equalled only by his lack of observational acuity – which, from you, amounts to a declaration of absolution.

J.H.W., PADDINGTON1928

“THE MOST MERCIFUL THING IN THE WORLD, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

So has written another author, one H.P. Lovecraft, and it is a sentiment to which I, Dr John H. Watson, subscribe more wholeheartedly than most. Indeed, never was I so glad of being unable to make full sense of certain experiences as in the autumn of 1880 when I returned from Afghanistan to England sound in neither mind nor body. The physical injuries I had sustained during an expedition to a lost city in the Kandahar Province and an encounter with the dwellers therein were unpleasant enough. Worse, however, far worse, was the damage inflicted upon my psyche. Memories of the incident plagued me with the garish intensity of a nightmare. In order to dilute the power of those memories and preserve what was left of my sanity, I retreated into what I can only describe as a madness of self-denial. I swore blind to myself that the events of those days had never taken place, that I had succumbed to a delusion, some feverish aberration of the brain. None of it had been real.

The belief sustained me, and saved me from a spell at Netley, the very institution where I had trained as an army surgeon two years earlier. There is a certain ward at that military hospital in Hampshire, tucked away in a side wing, which is designated for those returning from warfare affected by no great bodily impairment but rather by mental traumas brought on by the horrors of the battlefield. The beds are fitted with restraints and occupied by men who, when their sedation wears off, are apt to resort to incoherent babbling and sometimes screaming. I, but for my half-conscious, half-instinctive decision to refuse to accept the evidence of my own senses, might well have been amongst their number.