Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [19]
My return to Baker Street and resettling of some of my personal effects seemed to interrupt Holmes not at all. He seemed to be cocooned in a realm of chemical formulae and calculations, and would sit for hours painstakingly measuring droplets of fluids and solutions that he mixed and boiled on his Bunsen burner. When he did speak of his current work he claimed he was seeking an alternative chemical explanation for a spattering of dye stains he had found on a murderer’s dye-apron, because that killer’s height and infirmity of the left elbow precluded his wielding a left-handed blow that killed his much taller attacker. Due to the fact I was in sombre spirits I made a poor attempt at humor and suggested the killer might have stood on a ladder and turned his back to his victim, stabbing that poor person with his right hand, but in a backwards thrust. Holmes glared at me curiously and instead of expressing disgust or amusement he became quite absorbed in the notion. He proclaimed “Watson, you have increased your deductive capacity greatly since our last shared occupancy — that was positively luminous!” and he spoke not another word for the remainder of the week as he completed his investigations.
So I had much to ponder in those first days back in the old digs, and much to ponder without the company of another’s conversation. I surveyed our old quarters, noticing that Holmes had changed little about its character and appearance. Cigars lay sequestered in the coal scuttle, tobacco was to be found in the toe of a Persian slipper Holmes kept near the gasogene, and a bust of Napoleon near a window often served as a hat rack. I wandered to the mantelpiece cluttered with the essential items that marked Holmes’ day — tobacco dottles, correspondence answered and unanswered, souvenirs of his most recent case — and here I stopped.
The mantle-corner was the place he always left a souvenir of his last effort; be it a coin, a letter; anything that allowed him to reflect on the relative successes and failures of his last inquiry; and the object always remained there until replaced by the next dirt sample, bent hairpin or scribbled cryptogram that merited his scrutiny.
The latest item was a curious flattened stone, almost perfectly triangular but with rounded corners. On the uppermost side there was carved into the surface a writing of some kind, vaguely like Sanskrit or the Arabic language, whilst on the reverse I was surprised to discover a sort of pictograph; an image carved into it. The writing meant nothing to me, but the image was another matter, infuriatingly, it seemed familiar yet impossible to place into context. The image was clearly a face of some kind, but a monstrous one, of a leering, demoniacal caricature, an ugly fetish, bulging-eyed and sporting a jaw full of menacing teeth, clearly meant to frighten the simple-minded and superstitious. Although it seemed unlike that of the native art of any cultures of the Middle East I had encountered — though I was far from an expert I had spent many years abroad — I felt the nagging sense I’d come across such a totem before.
I knew Holmes would ignore me if I asked him about a recent case whilst he was engaged on a new one, so I decided to wait until he had finished his chemistry work. I could not put the issue, and my possible memory lapse, from my mind easily, but I consoled myself by recalling that during the frantic events of my time of service in the East, including the brush with death that my one-time orderly Murray had saved me from in Afghanistan, there were many experiences that were lost