I expressed my horrified condolences while trying to suppress an inexplicable sense of deepest relief that I somehow associated with dreams I had had while delirious. After inclining her head in thanks, Miss Delapore turned to Holmes, and held out to him a box of stout red cardboard, tied up with string. “As I promised,” she said.
I lay back, overcome again by a terrible exhaustion—as much of the spirit, it seemed, as of the body. While Carnaki prepared a sedative draft for me Holmes walked Miss Delapore out to our mutual parlor, and I heard the outer door open.
“I have heard much of your deductive abilities, Mr. Holmes,” said the young woman’s voice, barely heard through the half-open bedroom door. “How did you know that my uncle, who must have come here to take you as my grandfather took Burnwell, had seized upon your friend instead?”
“There was no deduction necessary, Miss Delapore,” said Holmes. “I know Watson—and I know what I have heard of your uncle. Would Carstairs Delapore have come down into danger to see what he could do for an injured man?”
“Do not think ill of my family, Mr. Holmes,” said Miss Delapore, after a time of silence. “The way which leads down the six thousand stairs cannot be sealed. It must always have a guardian. That is the nature of such things. And it is always easier to find a venal successor who is willing to trade to Them the things They want—the blood They crave—in exchange for gifts and services, than to find one willing to serve a lonely guardianship solely that the world above may remain safe. They feared Lord Rupert—if the thing that all knew as Lord Rupert was in fact not some older spirit still. His bones, buried in the subcrypt, shall, I hope, prove a barrier that They are unwilling to cross. Now that the skull, which was the talisman that commanded Their favors, is gone, perhaps there will be less temptation among those who study in the house.”
“There is always temptation, Miss Delapore,” said Holmes.
“Get thee behind me, Mr. Holmes,” replied the woman’s voice, with a touch of silvery amusement far beyond her years. “I saw what that temptation did to my uncle, in his desperate craving to snatch the rule of the things from my grandfather. I saw what my grandfather became. These are things I shall remember, when the time comes to seek a disciple of my own.”
I was drowsing already from Carnaki’s draft when Holmes returned to the bedroom. “Did you speak to Colby?” I asked, struggling to keep my eyes open as he went to the table and picked up the red cardboard box. “Is he all right?” For my dreams as to his fate had been foul, terrible, and equivocal. “Warn him . . . prevent the old viscount from doing harm?”
Holmes hesitated for a long time, looking down at me with a concern that I did not quite understand in his eyes. “I did,” he replied at length. “To such effect that Viscount Delapore has disappeared from the district—for good, one hopes. But as for Burnwell, he, too, has . . . departed. I fear that Miss Delapore is destined to lead a rather difficult and lonely life.”
He glanced across at Carnaki, who was packing up what appeared to be an electrical battery and an array of steel rods and wires into a rucksack, the purpose of which I could not imagine. Their eyes met. Then Carnaki nodded, very slightly, as if approving what Holmes had said.
“Because of what was revealed,” I asked, stifling a terrible yawn, “about this . . . this blackmail that was being practiced? The young hound, to desert a young lady like that.” My eyelids slipped closed. I fought them open again, seized by sudden panic, by the terror that I might slide into sleep and find myself again in that dreadful abyss, watching the horrible things that fluttered and crept from those angles of darkness that should not have been there. “Did you learn . . . anything of these studies they practiced?”
“Indeed we did,” said Carnaki. And then, a little airily, “There was nothing in them, though.”
“What did Miss Delapore bring you, then?”
“Merely a memento of the case,” said Holmes. “As for young Mr. Colby, do not be too hard on him, Watson. He did the best he could, as do we all. I am not sure that he would have been entirely happy with Miss Delapore in any event. She was . . . much the stronger of the two.”
Holmes never did elucidate for me the means by which he bridged the gap between his supposition that Viscount Delapore was engaged in kidnapping children for the purposes of some vile cult centered in Depewatch Priory, and evidence sufficient to make that evil man flee the country. If he and Carnaki found such evidence at the Priory—which I assume was the reason he had asked the young antiquarian to accompany us to Shropshire—he did not speak to me of it. Indeed, he showed a great reluctance to refer to the case at all.
For this I was grateful. The effects of the fever I had caught were slow to leave me, and even as much as three years later I found myself prey to the sense that I had learned—and mercifully forgotten—something that would utterly destroy all my sense of what the world is and should be; that would make either life or sanity impossible, if it should turn out to be true.
Only once did Holmes mention the affair, some years later, during a conversation on Freud’s theories of insanity, when he spoke in passing of the old Viscount Delapore’s conviction—evidently held by others in what is now termed a folie à deux—that the old man had in fact been the reincarnated or astrally transposed spirit of Lord Rupert Grimsley, once Lord of Depewatch Priory. And then he spoke circumspectly, watching me, as if he feared to wake my old dreams again and cause me many sleepless nights.
I can only be sorry that the case ended without firm conclusion, for it did, as Holmes promised me that night on the Embankment, show me unsuspected colors in the spectrum of human mentality and human existence. Yet this was not an unmixed blessing. For though I know that my fever dream was no more than that—a fantastic hallucination brought on by illness and by Carnaki’s own curious monomania about otherworld cults and ancient writings—sometimes in the shadowland between sleep and waking I think of that terrible blue-lit abyss that lies beneath an old priory on the borders of Wales, and imagine that I hear the eerie piping of chaos rising up out of blasphemous angles of night. And in my dreams I see again the enigmatic Miss Delapore, standing before the chittering congregation of nightmares, holding aloft in her hands the skull of Lord Rupert Grimsley: the skull that now reposes in a corner of Holmes’s room, wrapped in its red cardboard box.
The Mystery of the Worm
JOHN PELAN
I have reviewed the remarkable facts of this narrative and conclude that even now, in a world where air travel is considered unremarkable and engines of war can spit death from the skies, the world is not yet ready for the truths exposed in it. The events of that awful night in 1894 shall remain chronicled in these pages, safely among my other papers until such a time as our world is prepared to learn great and terrifying truths.
Over the years my friend Sherlock Holmes has had his share of odd visitors, from women of the hysterical type in various sorts of distress to members of the royal family, ludicrously disguised in an effort to maintain a degree of anonymity. Whatever the nature of the errand, whatever the request for aide, Holmes has, as may be expected, remained the perfect gentleman and treated one and all with courtesy and aplomb. The unusual sequence of events culminating in the affair that I have previously referred to as “The Case of the Remarkable Worm Said to be Unknown to Science” began in the late spring of 1894, some mere weeks after the conclusion of the business with the ferocious Colonel Moran.