“We’ve saved the princess, Holmes,” I said.
Holmes nodded and drew at his pipe. “Indeed, Wells, though I fear this particular evil is but one severed tentacle heralding much darker forces to come.”
I pulled my cloak tightly about my shoulders as the sun began filtering through the trees.
Holmes was correct: the journey had been inspirational, in a most horrific manner. The girl, Sarah Cookson, was released and provided a modest endowment for her silence. Upon the king’s subsequent death, the Princess Wilhelmina did indeed ascend the throne, at age ten, and conduct her country admirably through the Second World War. I can only assume that Holmes confiscated and destroyed the evil Necronomicon, though I have never dared to broach the subject. For when social occasions brought the two of us together, he refused to speak openly of the matter—though I observed that the silver ring, twin to my own, remained always upon him.
The Weeping Masks
JAMES LOWDER
In looking back over the accounts I have written about the singular exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and remembering all those cases which I never set down upon paper, I recognize only now how foolish I was to deny him the chance to solve the greatest mystery I ever encountered. He would have welcomed the challenge, of course. His keen mind would have pierced the veil of strangeness surrounding those awful events in Afghanistan, and focused upon the true cause of the things I witnessed there. Then, with a glitter in his eyes akin to boyish mischief, he would have explained away the horrors, made them vanish under the intensity of his intellect like so much moor mist before a bright morning sun.
Now that sun has set, its fires doused by the torrent of the Reichenbach Falls, I am left to wonder why I did not allow its light to shine upon the darkness secreted within me while I had the chance. He recognized its presence; it was impossible to hide anything from Holmes completely. I suspect he saw the telltale signs of habitual dread upon me even at our initial meeting. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” he noted after he shook my hand that very first day. He later revealed the details about my manner and appearance that had led him to that conclusion—my medical knowledge, military air, tanned face, and stiff, obviously wounded left arm. But those things might just as well have marked me as an army doctor come from the Sudan or Zululand. No, he observed something else in my haggard face: The stunned stare common to those who serve in Afghanistan. No British soldier leaves that desolate land without it. And my features were all the more blasted for the extraordinary things I had witnessed in that hellish place.
In those early days of my friendship with Holmes, I sometimes hinted at the reason for my disquiet. The prompts were obscure and offered halfheartedly, I must admit. But the awful events were still fresh in my mind, and both my composure and my trust of Holmes too tentative to inspire a more direct disclosure.
The reason why Holmes never pursued the matter still eludes me. Perhaps he did not question me out of courtesy. He could be surprisingly kind at times, especially to me, and he often made it clear that he respected my privacy, beyond what his powers of observation made obvious to him. Or perhaps he never gave the subject a second thought, once he had correctly deduced the origins of my wound and my military bearing. He could be oblivious to such human concerns as fear and despair, too, even when they impacted on his tight circle of friends.
The rest of humanity is not so well armored against the more baneful emotions, and we must deal with them as best we can. Some transmute them into rage and lash out at the world. Others attempt escape. Memories of those Afghan experiences proved so insistent in their companionship, even after my return to England, that I myself took refuge in the bottle. Had Stamford not happened upon me at the Criterion Bar and taken me that same afternoon to meet Holmes—a meeting that resulted in adventures all but guaranteed to reassure me of the supremacy of reason over mystery—I would today be well along the path to gin-fueled dissolution. My only brother followed that same sad road to its inevitable terminus. When I learned of his death, just a year before I shipped out for the East, I could not understand how things could get so bad as to push a sane and well-to-do man to such an end. I pray now that whatever overwhelming unhappiness goaded him to self-destruction was born of more mundane hardships than the ones I faced in Afghanistan.
Maiwand provided me reason enough to take to the bottle. I was but a newly minted soldier when I took my place in the field as assistant surgeon for the Berkshires. I had traveled the East extensively in my younger days, so that I expected the conditions in Afghanistan to be far from inviting. Still, I was unprepared for the long marches across miles of barren ground, with temperatures reaching nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, were any such luxury to be had.
“Let this heat serve as a caution against an intemperate life,” noted Murray, my orderly, as we trudged toward our fateful meeting with Ayub Khan’s army. “If this weather strikes you as unbearable, imagine what the furnaces of hell are like.”
“Can you be so certain we are not there already?” I replied, hoping the scowl in my voice conveyed the expression my lips were too sun-seared to frame.
Murray gave me a look that surely has passed between veteran and green trooper on every battlefield since time began. “Begging your pardon, sir, but you’d be safer to reserve judgment about hell until after your first battle.”
“Have no fear for me, Murray. I shall acquit myself with distinction when the shooting starts.”
“No doubt, sir, no doubt. But the fighting will be unlike anything the officers described in your training or even the firsthand accounts published in the newspapers back home.”
He paused to swipe away a large swarm of sand flies that had gathered around one of the wounded litters close by in the column. It was a seemingly pointless bit of kindness—the flies buzzed everywhere, and hung especially thick among the pack animals and the wounded—but an act typical of Murray. He went nowhere without pausing to do some little bit of good. He was a veteran of some years, but had long ago rejected the hardness of heart that so characterized the medical personnel drawn to the Queen’s service. To them, suffering was a fact of camp and campaign to be accepted or, worse still, ignored. Murray regarded all hardship as a test of character. To surrender to callousness or despair in the face of such sorrow was to be revealed as its accomplice.
“There’s just no way for anyone to explain what a battle is like,” he continued after he had more securely fixed the netting over the unconscious man. “The words don’t exist to describe the vastness and weight of even the smallest skirmish—not ones that can do it justice. You’ll find that out for yourself, if you’re ever called upon to describe one.”
As he was with so many things, Murray was correct about this. When I attempt to relate the events of that fateful day, the resulting narrative either scuffs along with the parched precision of our column on the way to the fight that morning, or swirls out of control, like the retreat of the survivors from the field a scant four hours later. Only fragments can be made clear—the awful shriek of the cavalry horses when a shell landed in their midst; the unearthly sight of a lone Afghan woman, veiled and ghostlike, moving among the massed enemy, exhorting the warriors to vengeance and glory; the palpable feeling of hatred that enwrapped the battlefield as each side did its utmost to annihilate the other.
Positioned as we were on the right flank, the Berkshires confronted the enemy in the form of Ghazis. Thousands of these religious zealots had joined with Ayub Khan in hopes of driving the hated British from the land or, failing that, hastening their own trip to the afterlife. To this end, they came to the fighting ready-clad in shrouds. Some even charged at us unarmed, so eager were these madmen to gain whatever eternal reward their mullahs had promised them. I still see them in my nightmares: fearsome white-wrapped figures emerging from the dry riverbed that ran alongside our position. Brilliant bit of strategy that, using the ditches to hide an advance. Their abrupt appearance had added impact in that it resembled nothing so much as shrouded corpses scrabbling up from some mass grave.