Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [15]
The darkness thickened, and thickened, until the rays of the lamp couldn’t pierce it, as if a hand of invisibility were slowly closing around the light-source, crushing the glow back in. Peter’s voice ahead of us suddenly sounded a vast distance away, dimming down a long corridor. “Bobbie? We’re here to save you—”
Holmes stopped. What little light remained showed me a wall ahead of us, dark and seemingly soot-stained. Holmes put out his hand to touch it, yet I could hear Peter on the far side of it, his voice fading, “Bobbie—”
I said, “We can go through. We only think it’s there.” I’d encountered such walls in the Neverlands. Evil Wizards use them all the time. “Close your eyes—”
I set the carpetbag down — and it settled with a metallic rattle to the floor — and closing my eyes, walked forward, hands outstretched.
After perhaps a dozen steps, I could hear the sound of the breakers, far off on Neverland’s shores.
I turned around, and Holmes was gone.
I was in the blackness of a dungeon, cold rock under my feet. By the taste of the air, the smell of horror and damp, I knew I was in the Nightmare Realm somewhere, and I knew there was evil close-by. Peter darted up beside me, his face grim in the tiny glow shed by Ten Stars — goodness knows where she’d come from — and his knife in his hand. “Did they get him?” he whispered. “The Black Knights. They’re everywhere…”
I shook my head, grieving and very frightened, at least in part because I suspected that Peter did not hold the power here in these realms that he had in the kindlier skerries of dreams. “He can’t come through,” I whispered. “He doesn’t remember the way. Mr. Holmes!” I called, as loudly as I dared. “Mr. Holmes, just close your eyes! Walk forward!”
We stood for what felt like an eternity — what could have been eternity, I was well aware, for this realm was neither in the real world nor the Neverlands themselves, like a pocket of darkness in the curtain that separates them. An old pocket, filled with the smell of things that belong in no child’s dreams.
“Holmes!” Peter cried, a little louder, and somewhere in the dark behind us, I heard the soft, deadly whisper of metal on metal, the distant clicking of machinery, like a dozen vile clocks.
I kept my voice steady with an effort. “Mr. Holmes,” I said. “Mr. Holmes, if you can hear me… What was the first song you learned to play?”
I listened hard in the darkness, in my mind and my heart, but heard nothing from him.
Peter whispered, “It was this one.” He took from his pocket (the only pocket he had, hanging from the belt where he carried his knife) his pipes, and played: it was an Irish tune that I’d heard Mr. Holmes weave into fantasias of melody on his violin. Yet it was very simple, the kind of thing a boy might whistle, when he’s been locked in his room for seeing too clearly, and for making deductions about his elders from what he sees.
Behind us the clicking grew louder, and by the glow of Ten Stars’ fairy-light I could see them, at the far end of the corridor. Four Black Knights, towering and identical. Faceless, as Holmes had said, only through their helmets’ visors I could see the cold glitter of something moving steadily, mechanically. Peter’s eyes widened, but he kept playing, playing as he and I slowly backed from them, until we reached the wall at the end of the corridor, trapped by that pocket of blackness. The lead knight raised its hand, and I could see that instead of a hand it had glittering steel blades coming straight out of its wrist, blades that whacked back and forth like saw-toothed scissors.
In panic, in despair, my adult self somewhere in dreaming cried, John—!
Then Holmes was beside us, stepping out of what looked like a pocket of still-deeper blackness by the wall. Ten Stars flickered, dove about him as he dropped the heavy carpetbag, dug from it a second electromagnetic rod. “We’ll only have current for a moment,” he warned as he handed