Warlock Holmes--My Grave Ritual Read online

  “Um… good morning,” I said.

  Lestrade shuffled his feet, gazed down at the toes of his shoes and said, “Dr. Watson, I have captured this goose.” He brandished it at me.

  “So I see.”

  “I thought I would… well… I thought I would pull its head off and drink all its blood out through the neck. You know… for Christmas.”

  “How festive.”

  He shrugged at me and shuffled his feet again. Since he seemed to have naught to add and nothing better to do than stand about at my door holding a doomed goose, I continued, “I suppose I should have expected you’d be up to something of the sort. I confess, it would not bother me at all if it were not for one small but worrying detail: you came here. I hope you did not intend to enact this little yuletide murder at my home.”

  “I… rather did…”

  “Lestrade—”

  “No! Wait! I only want the blood, you see. The body is no good to me. So I thought… if you and Holmes had no plans for Christmas…”

  I recoiled from the open door and stammered, “Did you just… Did you invite us to Christmas dinner?” Not only were such gestures of camaraderie foreign to Vladislav Lestrade, I had thought such an offer impossible. Honestly, I hadn’t even realized vampires observed Christmas. Perhaps it was my upbringing; the superstitious Scottish side of my family would have no trouble accepting the existence of vampires, but I’m sure that, to a man, they’d insist that any vampire who dared to utter the word “Christ” or “Christmas” would burst into guilty flame instantly.

  “A partial invitation!” Lestrade insisted. “You can’t come to my house; it is not suited for company.”

  Indeed not. In fact, to call any of Vladislav Lestrade’s haunts “houses” was to abuse the definition beyond all bearing. The diminutive inspector lodged not in any recognized form of dwelling, but in little dugouts and crawlspaces he’d constructed for himself under a few of the city’s busier abattoirs. They had the advantages of anonymity and solitude as well as providing him with the constant supply of blood he required to keep the unpleasantness he called life from ending. Yet, they came with no small assortment of disadvantages, as well. They were not ideal for entertaining.

  “I have captured this goose.”

  Lord only knows how he kept his clothes clean.

  “So we’ll have to do it here,” insisted Lestrade. “We can’t use Torg’s because he won’t tolerate the mess. But we must invite him. He gets lonely around Christmas. You probably hadn’t realized, Doctor, but he drinks.”

  This was enough to cause me to recoil a second time. Not from surprise, but from abject fear. Lestrade’s fellow inspector, Torg Grogsson, was a literal ogre, so far as I could tell. He had five traits for which he was truly remarkable: his size, his strength, his vocabulary, his physical resilience and his ability to self-govern. Three of these were so great as to beggar belief. The other two were somewhat sub-par. I’ll leave it to the wit of the reader to guess which was which.

  And that’s when he was sober. The amount of damage an overindulged Grogsson could do to an unprepared London suburb must be great indeed.

  “By Jove,” I reflected. “How much liquor would it take to get Grogsson drunk?”

  “It’s probably why he doesn’t do it more often,” said Lestrade, nodding. “The sheer expense dictates we are safe for most of the year. Yet, every Christmas Eve he buys a barrel of Scotch from the publican down on Little Turnbridge Street. Every Boxing Day, he returns the empty barrel.”

  “Egad! We’ve got to stop him!”

  “So you’ll do it, then? You’ll have dinner with me?”

  “Well… I… er…”

  I was rescued—or at least interrupted—by Holmes, who called out from the confines of his room, “I say, Watson, who is that you’re speaking to?”

  “It’s Lestrade. He wants to murder a goose all over our sitting room, drink the blood out of it and use the rest to throw a friendly feast for you and me, Grogsson and himself.”

  “That sounds capital!”

  “Does it?”

  “Most of it. Do come in, Lestrade! Compliments of the season to you!”

  “Thank you, Holmes. Merry Christmas to you as well,” said Lestrade, failing to burst into flame.

  Holmes went to the window, threw it open, took in a deep breath of refreshing December air and used it to shout, “Oi! Wiggles!”

  An instant later a little brown rat scurried onto the curb below and looked expectantly up at him. I never knew exactly what to expect when Holmes called for his lycanthropic friend, but on this particular occasion, I should have guessed. Being a shape-shifter, Wiggles might choose to appear either as one of London’s innumerable street urchins or one of London’s innumerable rats. Then again, we’d just had snow. One of Wiggles’s forms wore tattered rags and worn-out shoes, stuffed with newspapers to keep out the cold. The other came with a nice fur coat.

  “We’ve got a Christmas turkey,” Holmes called down. “Go and fetch Grogsson, won’t you? He may be a bit tipsy already, but if you can get him here we’ll give you… oh, I don’t know… the intestines, or something. Oh! And all the feathers to make a warm little nest for yourself. Won’t that be nice? Off you trot.”

  As Holmes negotiated with the local rodentia, Lestrade plunked the unhappy goose down on our table. He removed the handcuff from his wrist and clasped it shut around the table leg. From the bird’s foot, he removed a battered gift tag, which read: To Mrs. Henry Baker. It was crudely emblazoned with the logo: Alpha Inn Goose Club.

  “Can’t trust this bird,” said Lestrade. “I tell you, he’s almost got the better of me four or five times.”

  Holmes closed the window, gave a happy little sigh and said, “What a fine idea, Lestrade! It’ll be a delightful evening for all. Well… except this poor little fellow. I must confess, I get rather sad about turkeys at Christmas. Hardly fair on them, is it?”

  He looked with sympathy at our intended dinner. The bird turned haughtily towards him and fixed him in a cold, merciless gaze. Until that moment, I had no idea geese could sneer. He seemed particularly fascinated with Holmes—in his beady little eye, one could almost read the thought, “Ah! It’s you! My great enemy! You may have the advantage of me, sir, but I am the better man. Take it from me, this is your final hour.”

  There was something just deeply wrong with him. I boggled for a few moments, watching the goose examine Holmes from head to toe, carefully cataloguing his weaknesses, then turn his eyes slowly all about the room, noting each potential avenue of escape.

  “Er… where did you say you’d bought this goose, Lestrade?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. I captured him.”

  “Out in the wild, you mean? Or from some sort of evil poultry farm?”

  “It’s a queer story,” said Lestrade, with a toothy smile. “I suppose we’ve time for it, while we wait for Torg.”

  “I love a good Christmas story!” Holmes enthused. “Do tell all!”

  “Just this morning, I was proceeding down Tottenham Court Road, having just received testimony from a terrible liar who—I strongly suspect—killed his business partner. As I turned the corner down near the bakery, I spotted a man coming the other way, carrying this bird. He was a shabby sort of fellow who looked as if he were trying to appear the gentleman on a pauper’s budget. He’d hardly made it halfway down the street when another man lunged out of a shadowy alley, crying, ‘He’s mine! The white one with the black-barred tail! Give him to me!’ Well, the first fellow tried to defend himself. He raised his walking stick and harried his attacker around the head and shoulders. Little good it did him! The ruffian didn’t pay any heed to it. In fact, the only solid blow the old man landed was on this goose! He fairly knocked it senseless.”

  I leaned in to examine the goose, but the creature yanked his head away and snorted as if to say, “Unhand me! If I require medical aid, I shall call for it! If I do, I certainly hope for a more qualified practitioner than you
rself! Tell me about your current practice, Doctor, and I’ll tell you a tale of hard-earned skills wasted by disuse!”

  He was, on the whole, a highly suspicious bird.

  “Go on, Lestrade,” Holmes insisted. “I do love a two-old-men-fighting-over-a-turkey-with-sticks-on-Christmas story!”

  “It’s a goose, Holmes,” I said, but he had no mind for me, only Lestrade’s tale.

  “I ran forward, waved my badge and shouted for them to stop fighting. So… both men… well, they ran away.”

  “Why?” Holmes asked.

  “I was shouting, you see,” said Lestrade, with a guilty blush. “I may have let my mouth open a little farther than I should have.”

  “Ah!” I laughed. “So the two of them had their fight interrupted by a slavering fang-beast from hell.”

  “I wasn’t slavering.”

  “Well, eye of the beholder, eh, Lestrade?”

  “I wasn’t! Anyhow, both men made away in opposite directions and I was left with the spoils of battle. The shabby fellow had dropped this goose—which was too stunned to get away—and his hat as well. That’s it, over there.”

  As I made for the hat, Holmes gave a laugh. “And thank you for this second gift, Lestrade. If Watson doesn’t get to do his little deduction trick every few days, he gets quite testy.”

  I turned and gave my friend an acidic look, but he stared defiantly back at me and said, “Well? What do you make of it, Watson?”

  I had just one chance to put the hat back on its hook and prove that I didn’t need to do my little deduction trick every few days, but… Argh! I just couldn’t! I carried the thing back to the table, set it next to the evil goose and its recently removed leg tag and regarded it carefully. It was shabby, even by Lestrade’s none-too-demanding standards. It had been tallow-stained again and again, but the spots had been inexpertly masked with ink. At first I thought the ink was black, but as the light of our fire fell across it, it gave a distinctive violet gleam. The inside of the hat was lined in faded red silk and the initials H.B. were just visible.

  “Hmmm… I think I feel very sorry for Mr. Henry Baker,” I said. “I’ve the sudden desire to return this hat and goose to him, as I suppose it is most unlikely he will be able to afford a replacement for either of them. He’s newly poor, but accustomed to better times. He still has a strained sense of self-respect, but it’s difficult for him to maintain even that, as his marriage is on the rocks, his apartment has no gas, and I suspect him to be a massive drunkard. It’s likely he made his living as a poet—but can’t anymore because he’s just awful—and that his wife is toying with the idea of murdering him.”

  The look of shock both my companions gave me was… well… perhaps I’ll just go ahead and admit that Holmes was right and I rather did enjoy the odd bit of deduction, answered by the acclaim of my fellows. It was indeed a welcome gift Lestrade had brought me, that Christmas.

  “You got all that from the hat?” Lestrade exclaimed.

  “Didn’t you? It is perfectly apparent. Look here: this hat is of a sort very popular three years ago. It’s well-made, monogrammed, silk-lined and of no small cost. Three years ago he was well in funds. Yet, look at the amount of wear on this poor hat! If he still had any money, he would surely have replaced it.”

  “Well done, Watson,” said Holmes. “Tell me, how do you read of his embattled self-respect?”

  “He’s tried to cover the stains over with ink. It’s not working, as you can see, but time and again he strives to keep up appearances.”

  “But… the gas in his apartment?” asked Lestrade.

  “All five of these stains are tallow. He spends a great deal of time around candles.”

  Holmes leaned in, wondering, “How do you know he is a poet?”

  “I don’t, with certainty. Yet I have only ever known three men who employed ink such as this. All were poetic and all insufferable—the kind of fellow who not only enjoys purple prose, but who feels it needs to be written in actual purple. Percy Phelps used ink like this, if you’ll recall.”

  “But how can you be sure the man is married?” Holmes wondered.

  Lestrade jumped in with an answer, just to prove he was still a detective, after all. “The initials in the hat are H.B. The tag on the goose is addressed to Mrs. Henry Baker.”

  “And the state of his marriage?” prompted Holmes.

  “Three years ago, his wife was married to a prosperous man. Now, her apartment has no gas. Trust me, the marriage is troubled.”

  “Even to the point where she considers murder?”

  “Wouldn’t you? Imagine standing behind this man, ironing one of his shirts in your cold, dark, gasless apartment, watching him hunched over his little desk fretting over every word of some wretched sonnet you know has no hope of restoring your fortunes. How could you do that every day without reflecting what a relief it would be to step up behind him with that iron and just bash and bash and bash him, until he moved no more? Poor fellow… The goose was a peace offering, I shouldn’t wonder. He’s been saving up for it. Look: it’s from a local inn’s goose club. He’s probably been putting his pennies in all year, waiting for his Christmas goose. Now, see what’s come of it…”

  “Ah!” cried Lestrade. “And you naturally assume that any fellow with fortunes so low would resort to drink!”

  “No,” I told him. “It was the hat again. Any man who’s managed five tallow spills in three years has the unsteady hand of a man who may possibly drink. Any man who’s managed five spills up onto his hat… well…”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Imagine what his shoes must look like.”

  My attention was arrested, somewhat, by the extraordinary behavior of Mr. Henry Baker’s lost goose. It seemed to have momentarily lost its appetite for revenge and was staring absentmindedly at our ceiling, as if nothing very interesting were going on at all. Such was its conviction that it took me some time to notice the disturbing regularity of the movements of its wings and legs.

  “Wait a moment!” I cried. “Look at the goose! It’s trying to work its ropes loose!”

  “Wouldn’t you, Watson?” said Holmes with a shrug.

  “Not if I was a goose! That bird is ten times smarter than it ought to be!”

  The goose ceased its struggles and shot me a savage look.

  “Twenty?”

  It arched an eyebrow at me, as if to say, “Oh a great deal more than that, as you are about to learn. At no small cost, I should think. At no small cost.”

  Yet my attention was caught once more, this time by the arrival of Grogsson and Wiggles. As Wiggles had chosen to wear his human form, they were both able to issue raucous shouts of Christmas cheer, which drew thumps of protest from Mrs. Hudson in the rooms below. Grogsson had elected to bring his “Christmas feast” and share it with all his boon companions. That is to say, he had four humongous puddings and a half-empty barrel of Scotch whisky strapped to his back. In his right hand he gripped a magnificent wooden tankard, which he’d obviously been quaffing from during the walk. He’d several times encouraged Wiggles to join him. Wiggles had dutifully protested that he was too young for such things. But he hadn’t protested very hard and the two of them were fairly well on.

  Greetings were exchanged and Lestrade was encouraged to once again relate the tale of his fortuitous goose-capture. What a jolly holiday it might have been if not for two notable occurrences during the second telling that had been absent from the first.

  This time, Lestrade described the gentleman who’d attacked Henry Baker. “Oh, he was a piece of work,” said Lestrade, who was quite enjoying the attention, in spite of himself. “He looked like an aristocrat gone feral. Like a man with plenty of money, accustomed to every comfort who one day forgot he had all that and went to live in the street, hunting rats to survive. Ah… Present company excepted, of course.”

  “Course,” said Wiggles, sneaking yet another sip of Grogsson’s brew.

  “You know the funniest thing: I could
even name the aristocrat he looked like,” snorted Lestrade. “Bless me, but he looked just like the rough-and-ready twin of Lord Holdhurst!”

  I gave a cry of alarm and jumped to my feet. Even Holmes recognized the severity of that statement, for he got all wide-eyed and muttered, “Uh-oh. Are we in trouble, Watson? Because it feels like we’re in trouble.”

  Holmes and I had yet to tell our Scotland Yard friends about our previous misadventure with Lord Holdhurst. We began it with some earnestness. Yet, in our excitement we failed to pay as much attention as we might have to our surroundings, which occasioned an opportunity for the second notable occurrence.

  While we were distracted by the tale, the goose worked one leg loose from its twine. Silently, carefully, it reached up with one webby little toe and pried the strap off its beak. Next, mindful of every metallic clink, it inched its neck back through the handcuff. Thus, nearly freed, it turned its attention to the final and most important element of its bondage—its wings. Try as it might, the frustrated fowl could not pull free. The loops around each wing played against the other and could not be made loose, even with the wings stretched back as far as they could go.

  At least…

  Not with them stretched as far back as they could naturally go. It lowered its left wing to the table top and stepped down on it.

  “Ha!” said Holmes, pointing. “Look what the turkey is doing. Silly little fello—”

  The goose wrenched its body to the right, yanking as hard as it could until its left shoulder slid out of joint with a horrible “pop”.

  “Oh!” cried Wiggles, Holmes and I.

  Our feathery prisoner slipped its right wing out of the loop, then let himself fall sideways onto the table. There was an audible crunch as its left wing reseated in its socket.