‘But this rat,’ I asked: ‘where could it have sprung from?’
‘Well, Dr. Watson,’ Gable replied, ‘when you collect and study fronds, you learn to expect the discovery of all kinds of living creatures, spiders, beetles and a few rather more outlandish insects, which have crept unnoticed inside the packing crates. But a rat, and of such a dimension! I can only suppose that the native bearers, who are lazy at the best of times, had been especially dilatory. The point, Mr. Holmes, is that this … this rat has poisoned my whole existence! Although I myself am persuaded that it must have made its way into the grounds, where it would soon have perished for want of its natural sources of nourishment, it has not ceased to cast an evil shadow over my house.’
‘You interest me extremely,’ said Holmes, refilling his pipe. ‘Continue, do.’
‘I know not if it is the animal itself or its legend that has since grown to monstrous proportions, but we have all, for a month now, heard queer nocturnal patterings under the floorboards as of some huge, restless beast on the prowl. Meat has been found, half-devoured and spat out in a corner of the pantry. And if these manifestations already had the servants quivering with dread, just above a week ago one of the scullery maids, on her way upstairs to bed, saw what she swears was an enormous rat, with bright yellow phosphorescent eyes and a head the size of a full-grown otter’s, slithering across the first-floor landing! On that same night, too, as the first excitement was subsiding at last, there was a further alarum when Edward awoke to find the creature lurking in his bedroom.’
‘And Jerrold?’ Holmes asked. ‘How has he fared?’
‘Jerrold?’ said Gable, seeming distracted by the question. ‘Oh, he lay in a bad fever for several days but is now quite recovered. My worry is not with Jerrold. It is with servants who daily threaten to hand in their notice, with tradesmen who will no longer deliver their wares – the atmosphere in the household has become, as I say, poisonous, quite unbreathable. As a man of science, I refuse to lend credence to old wives’ tales of phantom rodents with phosphorescent eyes, but I tell you something must be done or I shall go insane! Will you help me, Mr. Holmes?’
For a while Holmes reflectively rubbed his fingertips against his chin. He finally said, ‘Well, Dr. Gable, it is a most interesting and outré story that you have told us. And though, notwithstanding my versatility, I have never before been hired as a rat-catcher, yes, I shall indeed take your case. What say you, Watson, are you game?’
Having done everything I could to make my patient as comfortable as was humanly possible for one in so touch-and-go a condition, I answered that I would be very pleased to join Holmes on this oddest of missions.
‘Then how shall we proceed?’ he asked his new client.
‘I hardly dare impose upon you further,’ said Gable hesitantly, ‘but if it would not inconvenience you to accompany me to Aylesbury this very evening on the 8.15 from King’s Cross, Jerrold will be waiting to take us on to The Gables.’
‘Capital,’ said Holmes. ‘To Aylesbury it is.’ And Mrs. Hudson was immediately instructed to prepare our bags.
*
The journey itself was uneventful. With Holmes immersed in a volume of Petrarch while Gable and I chatted about India, a land with whose mysteries we were both intimately familiar, we arrived at Aylesbury just after ten o’clock. And even if the station forecourt had not been deserted, I believe I should have recognised Jerrold from Dr Gable’s description: he was indeed of robust build, his right arm still bandaged at the wrist and hanging more slackly than the other.
There was a dog-cart standing by and we at once set forth for The Gables.
Not three-quarters-of-an-hour had elapsed when, without any apparent prompting from Jerrold, the horse turned in at a pair of wrought-iron gates then imperturbably trotted up the driveway to the house. It was a starless night; but although most of The Gables’ turreted façade was obscured in the enveloping gloom, I imagined I could make out a pinprick of light, as if from a waving lantern, directly in front of us. And so proved to be the case for, to our astonishment, before we had quite reached the main entrance, a wild-eyed young woman clad in a tartan dressing-gown, her hair all dishevelled, dashed forward into our path.
‘Oh, Dr. Gable, Dr. Gable, thank God you’ve returned at last!’ cried this apparition, swinging her lantern crazily from side to side.
‘Why, Mary Jane,’ rejoined Gable, nonplussed by her greeting. ‘Calm yourself! What is the matter with you?’
‘’T’aint me, sir!’ she screeched. ‘’Tis Master James, sir!’
‘Master James?’ said Gable, and he turned ashen-grey. ‘What about Master James?’
‘Oh, he’s dead, sir! Killed, sir! Killed by the rat!’
Preceded by our guide, and by the lantern which swayed and pitched ungovernably in her trembling hand, we descended from the carriage and rushed inside the house. So hurried was our pace, and so dimly lighted the downstairs area, Holmes and I had next to no opportunity to note the style or disposition of its furnishings. For it was up two flights of a broad central staircase that Mary Jane led us, until we found ourselves in a dark top-floor corridor, at whose far end, assembled on the threshold of an open doorway, a tight little huddle of people were to be seen.
When we, in our turn, stood outside that open door, the spectacle we encountered was perhaps the most extraordinary that I have ever known, even in my long association with Sherlock Holmes.
The room itself was in the nature of an attic, stark and cell-like, higher than it was long, save where its ceiling sloped down to nearly the halfway mark of the wall furthest away from where we stood. It was very sparely equipped, its furniture consisting, for all in all, of a low, monkish cot, two cane chairs and a massive mahogany chest-of-drawers whose legs were curved and squat like those of a bull mastiff. Just above it, with perhaps a foot-and-a-half to separate them, was the room’s only window, which was small, rectangular and glassless, and crosscut by a pair of narrow iron bars.
But it was the awful sight of James Gable, a boy of some sixteen summers, which transfixed our gaze. He lay stretched out lengthwise on the cot in the exact pose, and with the same deathly pallor, of the dead Chatterton in Wallis’s celebrated painting, except that his two hands tightly gripped his own neck and his naïve and youthful features had been warped out of shape by a grimace of ineffable and indescribable horror.
With a ghastly moan the boy’s father made as if to fling himself on the cot, but Holmes, his lean frame suddenly exploiting that unexpected reserve of physical strength that has got the better of many a Limehouse bruiser, managed to hold him back.
‘Courage, man, courage!’ he cried. ‘Something foul has taken place here, and it would be best if the lad were left undisturbed for now.’ He turned to me. ‘Watson, there is, I fear, little doubt as to the ultimate diagnosis, but examine him nevertheless. And do so, pray, without moving him. Watson? Are you unwell?’
‘I am sorry, Holmes,’ said I, and my voice quivered. ‘It’s … it’s just that it is all so uncanny … like a stage-set. Forgive me.’
While Holmes continued to hold his client back by the shoulders, I quickly stepped over to the cot. Although no doubt remained that young James Gable was gone, I was obliged to prise his hands from off his neck to learn the precise cause of his death. And there I discovered a cut so deeply incised that it had utterly severed the jugular vein, a cut, as I observed to my consternation, corrugated in form – just as Jerrold’s was said to have been – and apparently effected by a row of huge razor-sharp teeth. Judging by the rictus on the youth’s face, I supposed that he had expired both from that cut and from the abrupt heart failure which would have been its immediate consequence.