Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [7]
It was what we called him, Meg and I, because Meg dreamed about him, too. We both knew he had another name, a real name, and that other children had called him other things over the years. We both knew — the way you do in dreams — that he was more than he appeared to be, and more than he himself realized he was much of the time. We were both certain that it was possible for him to cross through the film that separates the Neverlands from the damp chilly world of girls’ schools, and account-books that don’t add up, and bleak London streets, and knowing one is going to die.
Meg had told me once back then — and I believed her — that she had seen him do so.
Now she said — and I believed her — “I saw him in the night-nursery, a week ago.” She watched my face as she said it, knowing of course that John — my John, after whom her own seven-year-old son was named — was a doctor, and fearing that my immediate conclusion would be that she was mad.
When I said nothing, she went on softly, “It was only for a moment. I dreamed he had rent the film, that separates the Neverlands from us—” That was what we’d called them, Meg and I: those endless skerries of islands, where children go when they dream. “I dreamed the children peeked through, and saw. I woke, and he was there still, looking just as he always did.” She shook her head, at the shared memory of that shock-headed child clothed in skeleton leaves, smiling his ageless brilliant smile.
“Did the children see him?” I asked, and she hesitated, calling the scene back to her mind.
“I think so,” she said slowly. “I screamed, and he flew away through the window, like a swallow flies—”
How well I remembered — though I had not until she said it — the motion of his flight, a darting swoop, the tiny lights of whatever fairies he had with him just then flicking in his wake.
She whispered, “He left his shadow behind.”
John came home early that evening, though he had stopped at Baker Street to visit with Mr. Holmes. I was ill a great deal that year, and though John kept closer to home than he had before, he also saw a good deal more of Holmes. He would stop at Baker Street for a half an hour on his way back from his rounds. Though I would take a Bible oath that he never so much as mentioned to Holmes his fears for me, nor did Holmes offer so much as a shred of a reassurance that he would have disdained as illogical, still, John would come home comforted, and full of the details of whatever case occupied his friend’s keen mind.
Thus that evening I heard all about George Darling’s visit to Holmes. “Old George kept his head remarkably,” John said, as he stirred cocoa for us both in a little pan on the bedroom hearth, while I lay among my pillows sorting through his medical notebook. It was my duty always to keep track of his patients, and tot up the bills which half the time John then left uncollected. “Holmes could not have done better. George knew the height of the window-sill from the pavement, the names of the cab-men at the corner of the road; before he came to Holmes, he went through the whole of the rear yard examining the ground there, and found no marks of a ladder, nor smudges on the window-sill, nor signs on the drain-pipe that it had been climbed. Of course Holmes returned to the house with him in any case, but he found nothing, either.”
I nodded, and the part of me that had years since ceased to believe in that small, shining boy with the wonderful smile wept with sickened shock, that the three children John and I loved as if they were our own might at that moment be dead. Or if not dead, in the hands of the human horrors that he and I both knew too well populated the adult world.
John wrapped his hand around mine as he handed me my cocoa. “They’ll be all right, Mary,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Holmes will find them. They’ll come to no harm.”
I whispered, “I