“Mother?” she said softly, her voice barely more than a rasp.
“Yes, dear, and Tom is here early today. He has brought a doctor and another friend.” With one hand, Mrs. Stone urged us to come closer.
“Another doctor?” the wraithlike girl asked in a tone of resignation. Over time, she had doubtless come to associate the visits of physicians with gropings of her fragile limbs, tests of the blood, and other discomforts.
“Miss Stone,” said Holmes, bowing to the girl, “I am Sherlock Holmes. This is my—”
But before Holmes could finish his introductions, the girl lunged forward in the bed and seized Holmes’s right arm by the wrist. “You!” she cried, her bright eyes burning with that eerie, maniacal fire. Her tiny hand was withered almost to a claw, but her grip on my friend’s arm must have been preternaturally strong, for Holmes did not pull away. Never had I known him to bear unexpected physical touch with anything like equanimity. However, in this instance, he stood quite still, nor did he speak or betray any emotion whatsoever.
“You can help me,” gasped the girl. “Yes, you. You have the necessary mental capacities.”
“What’s this?” I demanded, edging forward even as both the Stones took involuntary steps back from the suddenly animated girl.
“I have come here by mistake. It has all gone quite badly. We are new to this science of replacement. I am trapped here in the body of this girl child and I must return. There have been errors in the process. We are imperfectly joined.” The girl seemed quite out of her mind.
“I see,” said Holmes, his face a curious blank mask.
“You have access to a lens grinder? A metallurgist? Perhaps the shop of a machinist?” The girl’s pale eyes were desperate. All the life essence in her form seemed concentrated in those eyes. Her skin, hair, even the grayish bedclothes pooling at her waist seemed drained of any spark or color, but her eyes were as bright as those of the unfortunate lunatics I had been called upon to treat in London’s sanatoriums.
“Yes, all of those,” Holmes replied, still oddly blank of aspect and strangely passive before this wild-eyed wraith of a girl.
“You must help me,” the girl reiterated. “Tom?”
“Yes, Violet?” answered Stone after a pause, still recovering from the shock of his sister’s sudden animation.
“Where is my book of notes?” she asked him.
From a chest by the bed, Stone withdrew a small flowered notebook of the kind young English ladies are encouraged to keep as diaries. “It is here, sister,” he said, laying it beside her on the coverlet.
Releasing Holmes’s wrist, she pressed it into his large, dexterous hands. “All of the instructions are here,” she told him. “Follow them to the letter. Please do not fail me, Mr. Holmes!”
“Yes, Miss Stone,” said the still curiously passive Holmes. “I will endeavor to do my best.” And with that, he tucked the diary into his waistcoat and left the bedside without another word. I remained there with the equally startled Stones. Violet Stone settled back against the bedclothes and let her eyes drift shut.
After explaining to the Stones that surely my friend had excellent reasons for his abrupt departure from the room, I conducted a brief physical examination of Miss Stone. Failing to detect any immediate threat to her life, I followed the Stones back downstairs to the drawing room.
We found the detective’s lanky form folded into a chair, his long nose buried in the girl’s diary. “Fascinating,” he muttered, fishing a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it with a wooden match. “Utterly amazing.”
“What is it, Holmes?” I asked him, as anxious as the Stones for some explanation.
“Ah!” said Holmes, arising from the chair and closing the little book with a snap. “Mr. Stone, madam, we shall return in a few days’ time, when I hope we shall set things to rights.”
And saying little more, we retrieved our coats and made our way back out to the waiting hansom.
On the return trip to Baker Street, Holmes continued to peruse the young girl’s diary. I wondered what on earth could command such rapt attention from my friend, but many years of Holmes’s caprices and occasional erratic behavior had taught me to wait, for he would answer no questions but in their hour.
Burning with curiosity, however, I did contrive to steal a look at the pages. I do not know what I expected, but what met my questioning eyes was a complete shock. Rather than pages of a schoolgirl’s neat hand, the diary seemed full of highly technical drawings and schemata. While most of the letters and symbols I glimpsed were familiar, there were several lines of a flowing script that vaguely resembled Arabic, and on one page a shape that appeared to twist itself into eldritch configurations before my very eyes. If I were a superstitious man, I suspect the sight of that shape would have made me seize the book and hurl it out of the cab. Instead I averted my gaze until Holmes turned the page.
Finally, I could bear it no longer. “What has she written there, Holmes?”
“Instructions, Watson,” Holmes answered vaguely, and it was then I noted the queer expression in his eyes. It was as if he were not entirely there with me in the coach. He looked vastly preoccupied, as if even as he spoke, the wheels of his mind were already turning and he was buried in some faraway set of problems and calculations. “Miss Violet Stone has provided me with a very detailed list of instructions.”
Upon our arrival back to our rooms, Holmes prepared himself an especially large dose of cocaine. As he rolled up his sleeve, he said to me, “I shall be spending a great deal of the next few days in private, in my study. Pray do not interrupt me except in the direst emergency.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said as he carefully found a site for the injection and released the cocaine into his bloodstream. “But I have never known you to take cocaine at a time like this, Holmes.”
“Ahhhhhhhhhh . . .” he sighed. Instantly his head lolled on his shoulders as the powerful drug coursed through him. “Normally cocaine sends me to a drowsy land of dissociated dreams.” He chuckled softly. “But today’s events have left me believing that I may be lost in one of those dreams and only dreaming that I am awake and aware.”
With infinite care, he extracted the gleaming hypodermic syringe from his arm. After a moment of reverie, he leaped from his chair and began to pace the room. “Watson, I am going to tell you this now. The drug has loosened my tongue, but we shall never refer to it again, because I fear I would feel a fool.”
I waited silently in my chair by the fire. Rarely have I seen my dear friend in the throes of the drug, and certainly not at such a copious dosage. His eyes were as fever bright as those of Violet Stone. His stately forehead gleamed with a sheen of sweat, and a vein pulsed ominously at his temple. He hastily poured himself a whiskey from the sideboard and, seizing a poker, began to jab savagely at the fire.
“Watson, what is the earliest record of a sentient race on this planet?”
“The Sumerians, I believe, from approximately 4000 B.C.”
“What if I told you that this was a gross instance of humanity’s shortsightedness? That a much wiser race preceded us?”
“I would ask you what evidence you have to support this claim.”
“Ah, dear Watson, ever the pragmatic scientist.” He downed the whiskey in two neat swallows and returned to the sideboard for another. “Cigarette?” he asked me, proffering the gilt box. I stated that at this hour I would prefer a cigar, with which he gladly provided me.
“Watson, my old friend, something singular occurred in that house today. When young Miss Stone seized my wrist, it was as if, as if . . .” He downed the second whiskey and took a chair in order to prepare his syringe for a second injection.