Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [84]
“Now!” cried Holmes, and together we fired shot after shot into the unholy thing, the reports echoing and re-echoing from the ancient stone walls. The beast was visibly hindered by our efforts, shuddering back momentarily before plunging forward again. Impeded but far from stopped.
It rushed past Holmes, ignoring him as he emptied his last chamber into it. My final shot was at point-blank range, fired just as it flung itself across the barriers of the pentacle, straight for Professor Westen. The three of us fell back. The thing hung in mid-air, checked an instant in its leap, and fell back, giving a single scream far more human than its cries hitherto. It clawed the air with its terrible arms. Carnacki, Westen and I rushed forward, grappling with those flailing limbs, thin and incredibly strong, touching something rough and hot and strangely soft while Holmes on the other side hammered at it with his revolver.
The thing surged forward a little more, scything wicked claws this way and that. I heard Carnacki yell and felt warm blood splatter across my hands.
It edged closer, its claws slashing, its fangs and slavering jaws alive with hunger.
It was crossing into the pentacle!
An arc of glittering gold caught my eye and I saw Holmes, having wrenched off his gold pentacle, swing it like a medieval knight’s mace and land it smartly down upon the creature’s head. Though it had resisted his hammering and was overcoming our three-fold fight against it, the gold pentacle smote with a sharp crack and in an instant it lost all vitality, slid to the floor and melted away to nothing.
It took me a moment to realize we had won, but a glimpse of the blood upon my clothes and hands reminded me victory had not been won without cost. I turned to Carnacki standing beside me, his face a mask of dazed horror, his right coat sleeve in ribbons and soaked in blood.
As I thought of suture and needles, disinfectant and morphine, the rents in his clothing sealed up and the blood faded, as did his expression of pain. He rolled up his sleeve and found no marks at all.
“If it had cut at your throat,” said Sherlock Holmes, shining the light full on Carnacki’s unbroken skin, “I fancy your mind would have killed you instantly.”
“Yes,” said Carnacki, nodding grimly.
“The ghost!” Westen suddenly exclaimed.
We looked to the library doorway but the watching apparition had gone.
We found the body of Susan the maid among the ruins of Grantchester Abbey early the next morning. In her right hand were hawthorn and rowan berries and what later proved to be cuttings of St. John’s Wort. In her left was a rag doll shaped into the form of some uncertain species of beast.
“I am shocked,” said Sherlock Holmes quietly as we looked upon the girl lying dead in the grass. “Shocked, but not surprised that such simple beauty should hide such diabolical evil.”
Later that day we apologized to Mrs. Westen for the fiction we had told her with such straight faces; apologies which were readily and gracefully accepted. The nightmare had been ended, and her husband returned to her, alive and healthy.
In the maid’s room, under the roof, we found further evidence that she had been meddling in the Mysteries, amongst her possessions were found two grimoires — The Book of the Cypress Tree and The Book of the Forty Words. Their contents, Carnacki assured us, were not for the uncertain and the amateur. As he leafed through her secret notebooks he shook his head sadly, declaring her a poor student.
“Who knows what disasters she might have wrought had she tried to put Sigsand’s text into practice,” he said, and shuddered a little. “We all strive to better ourselves,