"Fever," said Carnaki, coming into the room with a slender young lady whom I instantly recognized from the miniature Burnwell Colby had showed us as Miss Judith Delapore. "I have never seen so rapid a rise of temperature in so short a time; you must have taken quite a severe chill."
I shook my head, wondering what it was about Miss Delapore's haggard calm, about her golden-hazel eyes, that filled me with such uneasy horror. "I remember nothing," I said. "Dreams… Your uncle came here, I believe," I added, after Holmes had introduced the young lady. "At least… I believe it was your uncle…" Why was I so certain that the wizened, twisted little man who had come to my room-whom I believed had come to my room-yesterday had been Carstairs Delapore? I could recall nothing of what he had said. Only his eyes…
"It was my uncle," said Miss Delapore, and as I looked at her again I realized that she wore mourning. "You remember nothing of why he came here yesterday? For before he could mention the visit to anyone at the Priory…" And here she glanced across at Holmes; "He fell down the stairs there, and died at the bottom."
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 draught 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 sub-crypt, 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 draught 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 Gaius 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' room, wrapped in its red cardboard box.
Dynamics of a Hanging by Tony Pi
Tony Pi has a Ph.D. in Linguistics and currently works as an administrator at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. At the time of this writing, he is a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. His work has appeared in (or is forthcoming from) Abyss & Apex, On Spec, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the anthologies Ages of Wonder, Cinema Spec, and Writers of the Future XXIII. He is currently working on a novel manuscript about the shapeshifters who first appeared in his story "Metamorphoses in Amber," which was a finalist for the Prix Aurora Award.