THE IRREGULAR CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (21 page)

Holmes leant out of the window. ‘Carry on, driver. See, wisps of straw still in the gutter,’ he added with quiet satisfaction.

Once the street was passed, Mycroft was able to recall enough of the conclusion to his journey to bring us to a halt in a street of imposing houses.

‘We alighted from the carriage on the left,’ said Mycroft, ‘and it was only four paces to the house.’

‘So it must be a house on this side of the road,’ Holmes observed.

‘And we mounted five steps to the front door.’

‘Then it was not this part of the street. Go on, driver. See, we are now coming to houses that have five steps. It must be around here.’

‘I remember that the steps rang hollow as we climbed them.’

Holmes nodded and directed our attention to the houses. ‘As you see, every house has what is called an area, below ground level, with a door to the kitchens, which lies under the entrance stairs. That would explain why the stairs rang hollow.’

‘They did not ring a bell, but struck a knocker.’

‘It is highly likely that they would have used a bell had there been one. It would have made less noise outside, and attracted less attention to you in your blindfold. So we may be looking for a house that has no bell pull, but has a door knocker much used.’

‘Most of these houses have bell pulls,’ I observed. ‘Except for the one back there.’

‘And it does have a large door knocker.’

‘Watson, be so good as to test it out. If anyone answers, ask directions to—oh, let us say Hamilton Square. That should be far enough away to make you seem hopelessly lost.’

I approached the door and knocked. At the third attempt it became clear that no one would answer. I returned to the carriage.

‘The street seems quiet,’ said Holmes. ‘Let us step over and descend into the area. I have my locksmith’s roll with me. It looks like a case of breaking and entering for us.’

We descended as quickly and quietly as we could. Holmes worked the lock on the door under the stairs. After a few seconds it gave with a click.

‘Close to my record, Sherlock,’ whispered Mycroft.

Holmes grunted.

‘Equal, I think.’

We entered the below stairs rooms and made our way through a cold deserted kitchen, bare pantries, and wash rooms. The ground floor proved no more populous or inviting. By the time we had reached the attic rooms it was obvious that the house had been deserted for some time.

‘We may be in the wrong house,’ I conceded.

‘Possibly,’ said Holmes, as we descended the stairs, ‘but it fits the bill so well. I confess I was hoping we might have found Mr Machen and solved at least one of our problems. But there are still secrets that this house might give up. Have you observed anything about the smell of must and stale air?’

‘There is no such smell,’ said Mycroft testily.

‘Precisely! from which fact I would deduce that this house is aired too regularly to be completely empty.’

By this time we had reached the ground floor. Holmes stood in the hall, a finger to his brow.

‘This is the house, I am sure.’ He looked again into the small, panelled room that must once have been a study.

‘Perhaps we are not so far from a solution. Do you see what I see, Mycroft?’

‘There is nothing to see!’ I interjected.

‘You mean that you see nothing. That is quite another thing. Look, Mycroft. It seems that the kitchen is not the only place where someone may be overly generous with the salt and pepper.’

‘Yes, I see! A case of over-egging the pudding, you might say.’

‘I do not see the joke,’ I complained.

‘Oh yes you do, Watson! Observe the unbroken surface of dust on the floor.’

‘It proves that no one has been in there. Just like every other room in the house!’

‘Not quite. The dust is considerably thicker here than in any other place. That it should be just as thick would be perfectly natural. That it should be thicker is quite inexplicable unless——’

‘Unless,’ Mycroft completed, ‘the dust was scattered to cover footprints in order to make the room look unused. Clever, but done just a little too well. The door of that press over on the far wall might reward examination.’

It may have looked like a press from outside, but, once opened, it revealed a narrow passage into a larger room.

‘This is the place,’ said Mycroft grimly.

The room was lined with black marble and hung with crimson curtains. An altar of intricately inlaid stone stood at one end. A number of chairs were arranged in rows through the main body of the room. Mycroft tapped one chair disdainfully.

‘I was sitting here. There were trappings that have been removed—candlesticks, ornaments, and a book on a lectern. The one thing remaining is the picture on the wall above the altar.’

Holmes climbed up and looked about him.

‘From the scorch marks on the altar top, there were two small braziers of coal burned here.’

‘For incense?’ I suggested.

‘I am sure there were no braziers burning there that night,’ Mycroft said.

‘Really,’ muttered Holmes. ‘That is interesting. Was there then no incense?’

‘Clouds of it throughout the ritual.’

‘Yet not from the two burners on the altar. I think that in the absence of any other clues, we must add theft to breaking and entering, and take this picture with us. I feel it will be of assistance. Come, let us leave this place.’

‘My main reason for taking the picture,’ said Sherlock Holmes when we were back in Baker Street, ‘is that it seems an unlikely subject to hang in such a place. Look at it! No devils or mythological beings: no signs or symbols. It is not easy to see why it would appeal to a group given over to Satanic Masses. It is a pleasant enough landscape, but no Bosch or Breughel. In fact it is a little dull. Just a flat tract of land, under a dark, stony sky. The frame is plain in the extreme, and could conceal no symbolism. And not so much as a label on the back.’

‘Perhaps,’ I offered, ‘this was not the painting usually on display in the temple. It may have been replaced with this one to ensure that it offered no clues.’

‘Except that the cult had no reason to think that we would locate their temple. They could hardly know that two boys had once trained their minds to memorise blindfold journeys! And the faded area on the wall behind the picture matched perfectly, down to the undulations in the outline of the frame. No, it is the picture all right. It has some significance that we cannot discern.’

Further attempts to speak to Holmes were pointless. He settled in front of the picture and stared at it, as though his vision might bore right through the canvas and reveal its secret.

Hours passed, during which Holmes did not move a muscle. We settled into a strained silence, aware that some unguessable process must be going on, and loath to disturb it.

Dawn rose over London and we pulled back the blinds and extinguished lamps. The changing light lent to the picture a hundred fleeting aspects. Holmes stirred, clapped his hands, and laughed aloud. Crossing over to the table on which he conducted his chemical experiments, he cleared a space, placed two metal bowls a few inches apart, and propped the picture up against the wall behind them.

‘Loyolla has stated that if one adopts the posture of prayer, the desire to pray will eventually follow. I have placed this picture in the position, just behind the two braziers, that it occupied in the temple. Let us see if it reveals its hidden character to us.’

Saying this he crossed to the fireplace, and, with the tongs, carried burning coals over to the bowls.

‘We have no braziers, but these will serve.’ When he had piled enough red coals into the bowls be stood back and waited.

The sight that gradually unfolded was the most eerie I have ever seen. Before our eyes a darkly hooded figure appeared in the foreground of the picture. Then another was suddenly standing to its left. Like ghosts manifesting before our eyes, a host of cowled figures began to fill the central area of the picture. All were positioned so that they looked in, towards the centre, and there a shape was forming, like smoke, in the air. Second by second the rough texture and dull coloration of stone formed out of nothing, until the focus for the attention of that ghostly multitude stood revealed. The whole middle section of the picture from top to bottom was filled by a tall slender column of gnarled stone.

‘The solution lay not with the picture, but with the two braziers,’ explained Holmes. ‘I asked myself why two of them? Not for the burning of incense, as Mycroft pointed out. One would have been sufficient in any case. For light then? This is clearly not their intended purpose, and in any case there were other sources of light. What else could they do, aside from producing smoke and light? The only possible answer was heat.

‘I think that Zoffer ore was used, disolved in
aqua regia
. Dilute it and paint it onto a blank surface, and it will remain invisible until heated, when it turns rich green. When the surface cools, it vanishes. If you were to dilute the same ore in, say, spirits of nitre, you could achieve the same effect in red. Combine them and you get other colours. The braziers were there to heat up the surface of the picture, so that the pillar and the host of figures appeared “by magic”.’

‘If this picture represents the cult gathered around a standing stone,’ offered Mycroft, ‘it must be somewhere of special significance to them. Somewhere they might actually gather.’

‘The position it occupied in their temple would lead me to conclude as much,’ replied Holmes.

‘Presumably it is somewhere far from London,’ I said, ‘or they would not need a pictorial representation of it for their rituals.’

‘So do we agree that this stone must be a real topographical feature?’ asked Mycroft.

Holmes nodded. ‘We must certainly explore that possibility. Whether our modest library contains the information we need is quite another question.’

‘The Diogenes Club has a fine collection of archaeological works,’ said Mycroft. ‘I will go and see what I can find.’

‘We will search here,’ replied Holmes. ‘Our reference books may tell us something.’

Even as Mycroft departed, we set to, searching the volumes on the shelves. Apart from his notebooks and scrapbooks, Holmes had accumulated a great mass of reference material on a hundred obscure subjects, from the study of the human skull to a history of writing implements, but, as I had surmised, he had not thought it necessary to collect anything on the subject of standing stones.

‘It is a fault, Watson, definitely a fault. Nothing is too obscure or abstruse to be of assistance in our kind of work. As I have said before, and will no doubt have bitter cause to say again, a consulting detective must know everything and remember everything.’

In an hour we had reduced the rooms in Baker Street, which were never the tidiest, to a state of book-strewn chaos. It was our misfortune that Mrs Hudson chose this moment to enter, stood in silence, then left speechless, her lips and knuckles white. We had given up the search when Mycroft returned, his face flushed with exertion and, I at once suspected, success.

‘Post-Y-Wiber
!’
he cried triumphantly. ‘The Pillar of the Serpent! And it stands in a location that would have been instantly recognisable to Mr Machen. It is a desolate, mountainous region of South Wales.’

‘There you have it,’ said Holmes, leaping to his feet. ‘The reason they were so certain that Machen had information about them. He lives in the very region where they practise their most devout rituals. We did not find him at their London headquarters because they have taken him to Wales.’