Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula E-Book

Loren D. Estleman

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 298

Beschreibung

A mysterious schooner runs aground in an English harbour. Its cargo is fifty boxes of earth; its only living passenger, a black dog. The captain's body is lashed to the wheel—drained of blood. Soon, a rash of bizarre nocturnal crimes terrifies London. It can only be the work of Count Dracula, and only one man can save the city: the world's greatest detective, SHERLOCK HOLMES.

Leseprobe

AVAILABLE NOW FROM TITAN BOOKS THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES:

THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN

Daniel Stashower

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

Manley Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman

THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD

David Stuart Davies

THE STALWART COMPANIONS

H. Paul Jeffers

THE VEILED DETECTIVE

David Stuart Davies

THE MAN FROM HELL

Barrie Roberts

SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE

Fred Saberhagen

THE SEVENTH BULLET

Daniel D. Victor

THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS

Edward B. Hanna

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES

Loren D. Estleman

THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA

Richard L. Boyer

THE PEERLESS PEER

Philip José Farmer

THE STAR OF INDIA

Carole Buggé

THE WEB WEAVER

Sam Siciliano

THE TITANIC TRAGEDY

William Seil

SHERLOCK HOLMES VS. DRACULA

WILLIAM SEIL

TITAN BOOKS

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES SHERLOCK HOLMES VS. DRACULA

Print edition ISBN: 9781781161425

E-book edition ISBN: 9781781161432

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition: November 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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 dramatic purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 1978, 2012 Loren D. Estleman

Visit our website: www.titanbooks.com

What did you think of this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at: [email protected], or write to Reader Feedback at the above address. To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website: www.titanbooks.com

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.

Printed in the USA.

To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and to Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, from whose fertile brains sprang the two most enduring characters in fiction, this volume is gratefully dedicated.

“This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

SHERLOCK HOLMES,AS QUOTED IN “THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE”

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

SHERLOCK HOLMES,AS QUOTED IN “THE SIGN OF FOUR”

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Chapter One: The Death Ship

Chapter Two: The Riddle

Chapter Three: Sherlock Holmes Investigates

Chapter Four: The Hampstead Horror

Chapter Five: A Ghastly Death

Chapter Six: The Tale of the Count From Transylvania

Chapter Seven: We Meet the Fiend

Chapter Eight: The Hunt Begins

Chapter Nine: Dracula Makes a Mistake

Chapter Ten: A Horrible Revelation

Chapter Eleven: Trail of the Vampire

Chapter Twelve: In Full Cry

Chapter Thirteen: Confrontation

Chapter Fourteen: End of the Adventure

Chapter Fifteen: A New Mystery

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Sample of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Holmes

Preface

One: The Mysterious Beneficiary

Foreword

Da Vinci’s final notebook, the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s last airplane, the civilization of Atlantis—none of these long-lost items holds more value for the student of history than the famed “battered tin dispatch-box” in which Dr. John H. Watson claimed to have stored the records of a number of cases he shared with Sherlock Holmes and never published. Surely it is there that we will find the shocking particulars of the adventure of the giant rat of Sumatra, “a story for which the world is not yet prepared,” and read at last about the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant, two of the many problems which Watson bandies about with the expertise of a professional fan dancer, giving us just enough of a glimpse of the good parts to make us whistle for more. We know for a fact, because Watson has told us, that the twin mysteries of the disappearance of the cutter Alicia and of Isadora Persano, who was found “stark staring mad” in the presence of a matchbox containing “a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science,” await us beneath that battered lid. What a shame, and what a loss to the world, that all of these case histories are believed to have perished when, during the London Blitz, a German bomber pilot with no feeling for posterity deposited his load onto the bank of Cox & Co. in Charing Cross, where the dispatch-box was kept. War was never more devastating than this!

Still, there is hope. Just as there are thousands of attics and cellars in Italy, any one of which night hold Leonardo’s wonders, and just as the ocean may yet give up the secrets of Lady Lindy and Atlantis, so it is possible—even probable—that Watson’s treasures were transported after his death in 1940 to some safer place than wartorn London, patiently waiting to be discovered. It is this kind of hope that keeps the collector going when others have given up. Indeed, without such hope I would not be writing this now, for it was while I was engaged in tracking down the good doctor’s dispatch-box that I stumbled upon the material which follows this Foreword.

Some backtracking is necessary. Since what little we know about Sherlock Holmes’s background comes almost wholly as a result of a handful of oblique references to his family when the detective was in a discursive mood, the scattered places in which Watson recorded these offhand comments are of enormous importance in unraveling the mystery of what happened to the unpublished accounts. In “The Greek Interpreter,” Holmes, in addition to astounding his friend with the revelation that he has a brother whose deductive skills surpass his own, dwells briefly upon his ancestors, country squires “who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class.” In the same paragraph we learn that his grandmother was “the sister of Vernet, the French artist.” The question as to whether or not the detective was indulging in mere braggadocio seems to be answered by Watson’s statement some ten or twelve years later that he had sold his practice to another physician by the name of Verner who turned out to be a distant relative of Holmes’s. The names are too similar to be coincidental.

At any rate, it was the name Verner which caught my attention while I was scanning the obituary pages of the Detroit News early last July. It was a fairly short item beneath the heading DEATHS ELSEWHERE, and read as follows:

LONDON, ONTARIO (UPI)—Creighton T. Verner, believed by many to have been the last living relative of legendary British detective Sherlock Holmes, died here today at the age of 98. He was found early this morning seated in an armchair in the living room of his home at 4417 Royal Street by his housekeeper. His death was attributed to natural causes.

Verner, a retired physician, left England in 1916 following the death of his only son Victor in the trenches of World War I and never returned. The last forty years of his life were spent in the modest four-room cottage in which he died. No funeral services are planned.

As a Sherlockian in good standing with the local affiliate of the New York-based Baker Street Irregulars, I was naturally saddened by the demise of this last link with the Holmes legend. I was not, however, sufficiently moved to make the hundred-mile journey to view either the dead man’s remains or the soulless little dwelling in which he spent his declining years. It was this item, culled from a later issue of the News, which changed my mind:

LONDON, ONTARIO (UPI)—Sherlock Holmes scholars from all over the world are expected to be in attendance next Monday when the estate of Dr. Creighton T. Verner will be auctioned off by the Canadian government to pay his back taxes. Verner, who passed away last week at the age of 96 [sic]; was a distant cousin of the world’s first consulting detective.

Among the items scheduled to go on the block are a number of the famous “commonplace books” in which Holmes pasted the reference material he gleaned from whatever periodicals he could lay his hands upon; the Persian slipper, now motheaten and encrusted with mold, which once held the sleuth’s tobacco; a collection of charred pipes; and miscellaneous articles believed to have belonged both to Holmes and to Dr. John H. Watson, his biographer. In addition, several pieces of antique furniture will be up for sale.

The auction, which will begin at 9:00 a.m. EDT before Verner’s home at 4417 Royal Street in London...

I cannot remember if I finished reading the article before I began packing. The next morning, my car loaded with enough clothes and supplies to last me a week, I crossed over to Canada via the Ambassador Bridge and drove nonstop to London. All the way there my thoughts were centered upon one question: Could the “miscellaneous articles” mentioned in the newspaper story include the elusive dispatch-box?

The answer was no. Varied as were the items which had filled an unused room of the tiny cottage for forty years, from an intricately carved chiffonier of inestimable value to a number of worthless chipped enamel “thunder-mugs,” the tin box was not among them. Even Holmes’s and Watson’s personal effects, of no great value except to the collector, were denied me due to the ridiculously high bids they drew from the rabid auctiongoers. Disappointed, but nonetheless determined not to go home empty-handed, I bid five dollars for a dusty cardboard carton of junk from the last century, got it, and without bothering to examine its contents, slid it into the back seat of my car and drove straight home.

It was not until the next morning, after I had had a decent night’s sleep, that I had a chance to look at my purchase more closely and discovered a tattered sheaf of papers crammed between one of the cardboard flaps and the inside of the box. That it had not received close attention from someone before me I blamed upon the nearly indecipherable handwriting which filled the gray pages. It took me over an hour to get through the preface and the first chapter, and once I realized what it was, my breakfast, lunch, and dinner were forgotten as I hastened to read the manuscript all the way to the end.

The skeptic will no doubt wonder, and he would be quite right to do so, why this account was not published when it was written some eighty years ago. It is my contention that Watson fully intended to submit it to his publishers, but that he was talked out of it by his ever-discreet companion on the grounds that it would be better for all concerned if it never saw print, since the public had already accepted Bram Stoker’s version as fiction, and there was no sense in alarming Victorian society’s sensibilities. What, I have often asked myself, was Watson’s reaction? Did he, after all the work he put into setting it down, turn it over to Holmes with express and anatomical instructions as to what he was a physician, subject to the cryptic scrawl that is common to do with it? Probably he expressed himself more delicately. In any case, I believe that he did something of the sort, but that the detective did not follow his advice and simply stuck it away among his other records, where it was forgotten. When he died early in the first third of this century it was sent to his cousin along with all his other possessions. That Verner never threw anything away is something for which we can all be thankful.

This hypothesis may also be stretched to answer another damaging argument against the manuscript’s authenticity. Readers of “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” which experts agree took place in 1897—the year in which Watson wrote the present chronicle—will note that Sherlock Holmes was quite emphatic in his disavowal of any belief in vampires and the supernatural, referring to it as “rubbish.” I believe that this statement is fiction. If the detective team agreed that no one should learn of Holmes’s involvement in the Dracula affair, it follows that the Baker Street sleuth would be expected officially to pooh-pooh the possibility of such things existing.

If, however, it was not fiction, then perhaps the detective was being ironic. He was no doubt still chafing over Stoker’s omission of his and Watson’s names from the official account of the case, published not long before (see Watson’s Preface), and may have been inclined to treat yet another vampire challenge with less than his usual professional calm. There may be other explanations, but these two seem the most obvious.

Herewith, then, is “The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count,” much as Dr. Watson set it down nearly a century ago. It must be remembered that the stalwart veteran of the Afghanistan campaign was a physician, subject to the cryptic scrawl that is common to the members of his profession, and that some passages have defied the efforts of the editor to translate them into legibility. Where these appear I have been forced to substitute, and although I have done my best to anticipate what he had to say and to emulate his style in setting it down, I have few illusions but that some erudite individual will seize upon the inevitable inconsistencies as proof that the entire manuscript is a forgery. To these charges I can only respond by quoting the good doctor’s own words, from “A Study in Scarlet”:

“What ineffable twaddle!”

Loren D. Estleman

Dexter, Michigan

April 30, 1978

Preface

Before I begin my narrative, I feel that it is my duty to set the reader straight upon a number of erroneous statements made recently regarding the events therein described. I refer in particular to a spurious monograph which has enjoyed a certain amount of popularity since it first appeared some four months ago, authored by an Irishman by the name of Bram Stoker, and entitled Dracula.

To begin with, the book, which purports to be a collection of letters and journals written by some of the principal figures involved, completely ignores the part which Sherlock Holmes (and, to a lesser extent, myself) played in bringing that affair to its successful conclusion among the snow-capped peaks of Transylvania. Although Holmes does not agree, it is my belief that Professor Van Helsing induced Stoker to deliberately falsify the facts where our line of investigation transected his, in order to build up his own reputation as a supernatural detective, and to invent entire episodes to explain the discrepancies. That I do not make these charges lightly will be borne out by what follows.

A case in point: As set down by Stoker, the professor’s friend Dr. John Seward claims that the “Bloofer Lady” (so she was named by the newspapers) was destroyed during the hours of daylight on September 29. In reality, it was on the night of the twenty-eighth, or, to be more precise, early on the morning of the twenty-ninth, that Lord Godalming pounded the sanctifying stake into her unclean breast, thus freeing her of the vampire’s curse. A further example of the author’s and Van Helsing’s duplicity takes place when the professor mentions that the Czarina Catherine left Doolittle’s Wharf in London bound for Varna, on the Black Sea, with the Count aboard on the afternoon of October fourth, when even a halfhearted perusal of the shipping schedules for that period will show that it was not until the following morning that the ship sailed and that its port of departure was Whitby, in Yorkshire, and not London. As to the reason for this alteration of the facts, and for the fanciful tale which Stoker dreamed up to cover his indiscretion, the only solution I can render is that this was merely another attempt to discredit any claim which Holmes or I might make regarding our breakneck pursuit of the vampire throughout the night of the fourth.

Lest I emerge from these pages a complete simpleton in the eyes of my readers, some explanation is necessary regarding the knowledge of vampire lore in England in 1890. Now that everyone who reads has become conversant with the meaning of such things as garlic and wooden stakes and the presence of tiny wounds upon the jugular, I suppose that my failure to recognise these apparent trifles for what they were will brand me obtuse. But the fact remains that, before the appearance of Stoker’s abomination, such things were as foreign to the average British subject as are the rites of tree worship as practised among some primitive tribes. I dare say that fewer than one in a hundred Londoners could have seen the truth, as Holmes did, when faced with a jumble of such seemingly unrelated oddities.

The account which follows is the correct one. I have double-checked the copious notes which I took at the time of the events I describe and am reasonably certain of their accuracy. In order that the reader who is interested in substantiating my narrative may do so without confusion, I have in this case abandoned my customary practice of substituting fictitious names in place of those of the actual participants, and have clouded none of the pertinent facts, so indignant am I at the injustice which some chroniclers will do in the name of art. To those who would defend Stoker, I refer them to the section in his book dealing with the Bloofer Lady, in which he is unable to decide whether the colour of her attire was black or white. It is a distinction which both he and Professor Van Helsing seem to have difficulty in determining.

John H. Watson, M.D.

London, England

September 15, 1897

Chapter One

THE DEATH SHIP

I need hardly consult my notebook for 1890 to recall that it was in August of that year that my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, with some slight assistance by me, set out to unravel the single most terrible and bone-chilling mystery which it has been my privilege to relate. Those who are familiar with these somewhat incoherent accounts may remember that I have made much the same observation upon more than one occasion, most notably in the case of Miss Susan Cushing of Croydon and the grisly package she received through the mail, elsewhere recorded as “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.” In my defence, I can only state that the affair I am about to set down is the only one in which I have Holmes’s complete agreement concerning the singular nature of the chain of events that led us, in spirit if not in body, from his comfortable quarters in Baker Street to the bleak, snow-swept landscape of one of the easternmost provinces of the European continent.

The heat wave which at the beginning of August had emptied London of all those fortunate souls who could afford to leave for the cooler temperatures of the country had just broken. My temper being of the sort that vanishes as the mercury climbs—despite a higher than average tolerance to such hardships gained through an extended sojourn in India—I had sought to make use of the break by taking the air and thus give my long-suffering wife a chance to forgive the unreasonable misanthrope with whom she had been living for the past few days. It was late morning, then, when I chanced to drop in upon my friend in his Bohemian lodgings and found him hard at work imparting in formation into one of those commonplace books upon which so many criminals would dearly love to lay their hands.

“You are right, Watson,” said Holmes, breaking a silence of some minutes which had settled in after greetings had been exchanged and I had ensconced myself in the chair opposite him. “Dr. Grimesby Roylott was indeed a murderer and a bully, who no doubt richly deserved his fate.”

“No doubt,” I echoed, and then realising with a start that he had just responded to my inmost thought, I came forward in my chair and stared at him in disbelief.

“My dear Holmes!” I cried. “This is too much! Am I to assume that you have transcended the bounds of reason and are now on a level with the palmsters and mind readers?”

He chuckled and leaned back, filling his cherry-wood pipe with shag from the toe end of the Persian slipper he kept always within reach. “Nothing so mysterious as that, I fear,” he said, between puffs. “There is no magic at 221B, unless one counts the ability to observe and make deductions based upon those observations.”

“But I have done nothing that could be observed!” said I. “I have been a fixture since I sat down!”

“No man is a fixture, Watson. He may think he is, and yet by a careful observation of his unconscious gestures, of his expression, and of the direction in which his eyes wander, a close reasoner would find rare instances in which he could not divine the mental processes of a man deep in thought. For example, as you were assuming your present seat, I noted that your attention was momentarily claimed by my little monograph on poisons, lying upon yonder table. It is open to the chapter which deals with vipers and their venom. Now, since our only brush with such a means of death occurred in the case of the swamp adder used by the villainous Dr. Roylott in the attempted murder of his stepdaughter—an imaginative account of which I believe you are planning to publish under the title ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’—it was not so difficult to surmise that your thoughts were turned in that direction. My suspicions along these lines became confirmed when I saw the look of disgust and revulsion which crossed your face at this point. When that expression turned to one of righteous anger, I was certain that I was on the right track. Whereupon I agreed with you that Dr. Roylott was a bounder of the worst sort and was pleased to see by your reaction that my reasoning was sound.”

“Holmes, Holmes.” I shook my head, smiling. “Again I must state that you do yourself a disservice by explaining your methods. The effect would be so much greater if you left your subjects in the dark.”

“And your chronicles of my little exploits would as a result be shelved alongside the fanciful works of Monsieur Verne and the Brothers Grimm. But see what you think of this telegram. It arrived this morning during breakfast.”

I took the scrap of paper he proffered and read:

WOULD LIKE TO CONSULT YOU IN THE MATTER OF THE LEAD COLUMN IN THIS MORNING’S DAILYGRAPH.

THOMAS C. PARKER

WHITBY, YORKS.

“It appears to be a legitimate request for your services,” I said, handing back the wire.

“So it does.”

“Have you read the article he mentions?”

“I sent down for it after receiving the wire. The problem therein reported presents one or two interesting facets, and I think we should both profit from learning more of the particulars. I assume your practice will make no demands upon your time for the next hour or so?”

“None whatsoever. The heat wave has seen to it that most of my patients are out of the city.”

“Excellent!” said he, closing the scrapbook and returning it to its place upon the shelf beside the others. “For here, unless I am very much mistaken, is Mr. Parker’s tread upon the stair.”

No sooner had my friend finished speaking than there was a rap at the door. “Come in!” Holmes called.

Our visitor was a young man, six-and-twenty at the outside, with a beardless face nearly as narrow as Holmes’s but less sharp, and dominated by a pair of large and watery blue eyes. He wore a lightweight suit of a pale grey and a billycock hat, which he snatched off immediately upon entering; in so doing he revealed a prematurely bald head ringed by a fringe of hair the colour of rust. “Mr. Holmes, I think?” he said, looking at my friend.

“I am he,” Holmes acknowledged, rising and extending. his hand for the visitor to take. “And you, I take it, are Mr. Thomas C. Parker of Whitby. Allow me to introduce my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson. Sit down, Mr. Parker, and bask in the warmth of London in the summertime.”

“You have read the item to which I referred in my wire?” asked Parker, assuming the seat which I had newly vacated.

Holmes nodded but said nothing.

“I am its author.”

“I am aware of that.”

“Indeed! And how?”

Sherlock Holmes, hands in the pockets of his old purple dressing-gown, smiled condescendingly down at his guest. “I knew you were a journalist from the moment you entered the room. The ink stains upon the insides of the index finger and thumb of your right hand, together with the bulge in your breast pocket, which I perceive to be created by a notebook residing there, told me that you spend much of your time writing. That you are seldom off your feet is borne out by the run-down appearance of your heels. Journalism is the only profession I can think of which combines such energy with the more placid activity of putting pen to paper. I thought it likely that you were the same journalist who had penned the rather interesting account to which you directed me. But all this is elementary. Pray tell us what is on your mind. It is obvious that your mission is not an unpleasant one personally, for your knock at the door was not the knock of a worried man.” Upon which cryptic statement my friend lounged into his big armchair and studied the man opposite him from beneath languidly drooping lids.

For some seconds Mr. Parker eyed my friend with the sort of professional interest shared only by the scribblers who work for the daily journals and chroniclers such as myself. Presently, however, his expression became businesslike. “Mr. Holmes, I have been authorised by my editors to extend to you a fee in the name of The Daily graph in return for providing us with the solution to the mystery which took place in Whitby harbour at midnight last night.”

My friend made an impatient gesture with his left hand, as if to flick away a persistent fly which was causing him bother. “We shall discuss such things as my fee later. For now, I wish to hear a summary of the facts as you know them in your own words, independent of the restraining hand of some over-cautious editor.”

The journalist nodded agreement and began his singular narrative, which I will endeavour to set down exactly as he delivered it. It ran as follows:

“Until yesterday evening,” he informed us, “the weather in Whitby since the beginning of August has been much like that which you are now enjoying in London. Just before midnight, however, and with a suddenness that is not normally experienced upon the coast, the air became so oppressively still that even the most ignorant of city-dwellers could be naught but certain that a storm was approaching.

“There is a great flat reef in Whitby harbour which has spelled doom for many a vessel whose master was unaware of its presence. With this in mind, the Royal Navy has installed a searchlight atop the East Cliff for the purpose of guiding harbouring craft through the narrow alley that affords the only safe passage from the open sea into the dock area. Last night I was assigned by my editor to accompany the workers who were labouring to put the light into operating order and report upon the project’s worth for the benefit of the shipping companies whose paid advertisements are The Dailygraph’s main staple; This promised to be a boring as well as an uncomfortable task, and so I was not in the most receptive of moods when I arrived on the cliff’s summit just as the bell in the church tower was striking the hour of twelve.

“The final chime had scarcely begun to fade when the storm struck in all its terrible fury. The wind howled like a pack of ravenous wolves and rain lashed the cliff with the force of an explosion. My father was a correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War, Mr. Holmes, and from what I know of his experiences, a hail of lead from Napoleon’s Gatling guns was no more terrible a sight than the spectacle of all that water pounding at the wall of the cliff as if it were trying to bring it crashing down into the harbour. The workers had all they could do to hold their footing as they strained to swing the big searchlight into position so that it could do some good. At one point I even lent my own shoulder to the task, and suffered a severely pulled muscle as a result of my exertions. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that a great sigh was heaved by all concerned when the light was lit and its bold yellow beam shone out through the rain and the darkness.

“In the next moment, however, that sigh was strangled in our throats when we saw what that beam revealed.

“Ghastly yellow in the circle of light, a foreign schooner with all its sails set was racing inexorably towards the murderous reef!”

“Foreign, you say?” Holmes interrupted. “What were her colours?”

“She flew none, but her hull was unmistakably Russian in design.”

“I see. Pray go on with your narrative.”

“The supreme folly of the captain and crew in failing to furl the sails at the first sign of a squall was, I am certain, uppermost in everyone’s mind at that point, for now there was no force on earth that would prevent that fragile wooden hull from being dashed to splinters against that natural obstacle and all its hands from being flung into the merciless sea. We braced ourselves for the ear-splitting crash we believed was inevitable. And then a curious thing happened.

“Just when all seemed lost, the wind, which until now had been raging in an easterly direction, suddenly and abruptly shifted to the northeast, and the schooner glided into the harbour with the ease of a book being slid into its allotted space upon a shelf. This occurrence was so unlike the disaster we had been expecting that I doubt any of us believed what our eyes had told us. It seemed to all of us upon the East Cliff then that perhaps there was something to that biblical quotation about the Lord looking after fools and drunkards. I hope I am not boring you with all these details, Mr. Holmes, for I am trying to impress upon you what it was like to witness this event.”

“On the contrary, it is a most lucid and informative account. What occurred then?”

“It seems that it was a night for disillusionment,” continued our guest sadly. “Once again our feelings of joy were premature, for, as the schooner slid past, the searchlight fell upon a horrendous sight: that of a corpse lashed to the helm, its drooping head swinging to and fro with each motion of the ship. So spine-chilling was this unexpected vision that we forgot to swing the light, and the vessel with its grotesque cargo slid from view into the blackness of the night. By the time we recovered enough to act, there was a wrenching sound, followed by a crash, and presently the light revealed what I think most of us already suspected—that the schooner had run itself aground atop the accumulation of sand near the southeast corner of Tate Hill Pier. The second noise, of course, had been caused by a large section of the top-hamper dropping heavily to the deck.

“There remains one more incident to relate, although I doubt that it is of much use.”

“Every scrap of information is of use at this point, Mr. Parker,” said Holmes.

“Well, no sooner had the light been trained upon the deck of the beached ship than something that resembled an immense dog leaped up from below and bounded off into the darkness.”

Holmes’s eyebrows went up at that. “A dog, you say?”

“Yes, sir. I rather fancy that it was a pet of one of the crew members, but I suppose you may have some other theory as regards its presence upon the ship.”

“As I have told the good doctor upon more than one occasion, it is a capital mistake to theorise before one has all the evidence. But it seems strange that the captain would allow one of his hands to carry aboard a pet as large as the one you describe, when space is so important.”

“Perhaps that question is best left to a student of the Russian mind,” commented Parker.

“Perhaps. But we have yet to establish that the captain and crew were as Russian as the schooner.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “But has no one questioned the members of the crew regarding the mystery of the dead man and the dog?”

“That would be quite impossible, Doctor,” replied the journalist, his tone heavy with meaning. “You see, with the exception of the corpse at the wheel, there was no one aboard the ship.”

Chapter Two

THE RIDDLE

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. I looked to Holmes to see if Parker’s extraordinary statement had affected him as deeply as it had me, but he retained his languid expression. Presently, however, he sat up in his chair and his face took on all the characteristics of a hunting creature: his complexion darkened, his brows drew together, his lips grew tight. His nostrils appeared to dilate exactly as does a dog’s when it is on a scent. It was an expression I had seen him assume innumerable times in his dealings with subjects on both sides of the law, and I hoped for Parker’s sake that the account he had given us was accurate, for my friend could be ruthless once he had uncovered a chink in the story of the man he was interviewing.

“Who was first on board the ship after it beached?” he asked the journalist. His voice was strident; there was now no trace of cordiality in his tone.

“The coastguard on duty,” answered Parker.

“Did he examine the dead man?”

The visitor nodded. “That was the first thing he examined. Upon receiving his first close-up view of the corpse, he threw up his hands and made an exclamation of terror.”

“Indeed! And why was that?”

“Mr. Holmes, I saw the dead man’s countenance when I went aboard. It was distorted so grotesquely that it was difficult to believe it was the face of a human being.”

“Distorted how?”

“With horror, Mr. Holmes. Naked, unrestrained horror. Such a horror as no man has experienced since the beginning of time, when man-eating creatures ruled the earth.”

“You have a poetic turn, Mr. Parker,” remarked my friend. “I urge you to put it to constructive use. Describe the body.”