Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver (Sherlock Holmes Revival) by Ross Husband Page A
Authors: Ross Husband
Tags: detective fiction
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and your invaluable assistance in these matters, I doubt much that your new domestic estate would be improved if you did not immediately telegraph Mrs Watson and inform her that you may, perhaps, be occupied here for some days longer.”
* * *
CHAPTER FOUR
A Night in Bedlam
Sleep came hard to me that night, and when finally Morpheus grudgingly admitted me to his salon of somnolence, he served me not with that sweet nocturnal interlude of rest and blessed oblivion, but instead, with a night-long pageant of nightmarish and bizarre tableaux.
No doubt the day’s surfeit of overly-rich food, sweetmeats, strong cheese and wine took its due toll, and so it was that my first night back at 221B was broken by the most troubling of images, occasioned – I realised the next morning – unquestionably by the disturbing revelations of the elderly master engraver.
Mr Freud, I am led to believe, proposes the notion that dreams may be the brain’s subconscious attempt to bring order and understanding to the tangled chaos of matters which the conscious, analytical mind is unable to comprehend.
Eventually, a strange form of sleep overtook me...
...I stood in night so black I might have been a blind man. The air was suffocatingly humid, tropical and heady with the thick, cloying scent of exotic flowers. Steadily the temperature was rising – the ground beneath my feet was becoming hellishly hot at a fearful rate!
Cautiously I felt down through the gloom to investigate the cause – and cried out aloud in mingled pain and shock; nursing my seared fingers, I realised I was standing over a serpentine maze of giant gurgling metal pipes as fiercely hot as Dante’s inferno! To my horror I felt my scorched right hand blistering and tightening into a malformed sinewy claw, although, curiously, I no longer felt pain.
Warily I stepped forward, feeling before my face with my good left hand. The footing beneath me became blessedly cooler.
Something large fluttered past me so close I felt the touch of its wings; suddenly I was engulfed in a swarm of huge soft, furry insects – giant moths or butterflies I calmly decided; not so alarming – indeed, perfectly reasonable; after all I was apparently in some tropical jungle...
Just when the swarm seemed never-ending, abruptly it passed by. I felt my way on through the humid heat, along a seemingly endless path bordered with what felt refreshingly like cool damp foliage; thousands of leaves seethed around me as if trying to identify this alien intruder in their private, exotic and rarefied domain. My investigation was halted abruptly when I encountered a smooth hard wall; I explored it cautiously and found it, perhaps, to be cold glass – so I was not after all in a jungle, but mayhap in the palm house at Kew or some-such? Much reassured I resolved to continue my journeying.
Abruptly and shockingly, and with an enormous report, the glass wall shattered inward, cascading razor sharp daggers all around me but I, strangely, remained quite unscathed.
Peering through the resultant jagged hole I was confronted by a cheery, ruddy-cheeked workman; grey dawn light and a bitter cold wind assaulted me, pungent with the distinctive odours of his trade – paint, burnt paraffin, putty and linseed oil.
All around me the tender seductive flowers shrivelled, drooped and died in face of the icy blast. The workman grinned demonically:
“If you’ll just step aside through here Sir – mind the glass – I’ll get on and fix this lot up in short order.”
That seemed to me to be an eminently sensible proposal and so I unquestioningly complied. Passing by his tall moustachioed companion, whose features I was not quite able to discern in the gloom, I observed that outside, dawn was breaking and it had started to snow exceptionally heavily – gigantic flakes drifted down all around me. I reached out and caught one, but no sooner had I seized it than it turned to
* * *
CHAPTER FOUR
A Night in Bedlam
Sleep came hard to me that night, and when finally Morpheus grudgingly admitted me to his salon of somnolence, he served me not with that sweet nocturnal interlude of rest and blessed oblivion, but instead, with a night-long pageant of nightmarish and bizarre tableaux.
No doubt the day’s surfeit of overly-rich food, sweetmeats, strong cheese and wine took its due toll, and so it was that my first night back at 221B was broken by the most troubling of images, occasioned – I realised the next morning – unquestionably by the disturbing revelations of the elderly master engraver.
Mr Freud, I am led to believe, proposes the notion that dreams may be the brain’s subconscious attempt to bring order and understanding to the tangled chaos of matters which the conscious, analytical mind is unable to comprehend.
Eventually, a strange form of sleep overtook me...
...I stood in night so black I might have been a blind man. The air was suffocatingly humid, tropical and heady with the thick, cloying scent of exotic flowers. Steadily the temperature was rising – the ground beneath my feet was becoming hellishly hot at a fearful rate!
Cautiously I felt down through the gloom to investigate the cause – and cried out aloud in mingled pain and shock; nursing my seared fingers, I realised I was standing over a serpentine maze of giant gurgling metal pipes as fiercely hot as Dante’s inferno! To my horror I felt my scorched right hand blistering and tightening into a malformed sinewy claw, although, curiously, I no longer felt pain.
Warily I stepped forward, feeling before my face with my good left hand. The footing beneath me became blessedly cooler.
Something large fluttered past me so close I felt the touch of its wings; suddenly I was engulfed in a swarm of huge soft, furry insects – giant moths or butterflies I calmly decided; not so alarming – indeed, perfectly reasonable; after all I was apparently in some tropical jungle...
Just when the swarm seemed never-ending, abruptly it passed by. I felt my way on through the humid heat, along a seemingly endless path bordered with what felt refreshingly like cool damp foliage; thousands of leaves seethed around me as if trying to identify this alien intruder in their private, exotic and rarefied domain. My investigation was halted abruptly when I encountered a smooth hard wall; I explored it cautiously and found it, perhaps, to be cold glass – so I was not after all in a jungle, but mayhap in the palm house at Kew or some-such? Much reassured I resolved to continue my journeying.
Abruptly and shockingly, and with an enormous report, the glass wall shattered inward, cascading razor sharp daggers all around me but I, strangely, remained quite unscathed.
Peering through the resultant jagged hole I was confronted by a cheery, ruddy-cheeked workman; grey dawn light and a bitter cold wind assaulted me, pungent with the distinctive odours of his trade – paint, burnt paraffin, putty and linseed oil.
All around me the tender seductive flowers shrivelled, drooped and died in face of the icy blast. The workman grinned demonically:
“If you’ll just step aside through here Sir – mind the glass – I’ll get on and fix this lot up in short order.”
That seemed to me to be an eminently sensible proposal and so I unquestioningly complied. Passing by his tall moustachioed companion, whose features I was not quite able to discern in the gloom, I observed that outside, dawn was breaking and it had started to snow exceptionally heavily – gigantic flakes drifted down all around me. I reached out and caught one, but no sooner had I seized it than it turned to
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