The Moor - Laurie R. King [11]
"So you agree there's something wrong up there?" I heard the last two words come out of my mouth with a definite emphasis, and thought with irritation that this habit of referring to a deserted bit of landscape as if it were another planet seemed to be contagious.
"There's certainly something stirring, though truth to tell I cannot read the currents well enough to see if it be for ill or not. I will say I received a faint impression that the moor was readying itself for a convulsion of some sort, though whether an eruption or a sudden flowering I couldn't say."
He stopped abruptly and looked askance at the empty glass balanced on the arm of his chair, and I had to agree, it was very unusual to hear him wax quite so poetic. He picked up the glass and put it firmly away from him onto the nearby table, then settled back with his pipe, not meeting my eyes.
"As with any isolated setting, the moor seethes with stories of the supernatural. Unsophisticated minds are apt to see corpse lights or 'jacky-twoads' where the scientist would see swamp gas, and long and lonely nights encourage the mind to wander down paths poorly illuminated by the light of reason. The people firmly believe in ghostly dogs and wraiths of the dying, in omen-bearing ravens and standing stones that walk in the dark of the moon. And pixies—the pixies, or pygsies, are everywhere, waiting to lead the unsuspecting traveller astray. The author of a respectable guidebook, published just a few years ago, recommends that the lost walker turn his coat out so as to avoid being 'pygsie-led'—and he's only half joking."
"What does Baring-Gould make of all that? He's an educated man, after all."
"Gould?" Holmes laughed. "He's the most gullible of the lot, full of the most awful balderdash. He'll tell you how a neighbour's horse panicked one night at the precise spot where a man would be killed some hours later, how another man carried on a conversation with his wife who was dying ten miles away, how—. Revelations, visitations, spooks, you name it—he's worse than Conan Doyle, with his fairies and his spiritualism."
All this made the purported friendship sound less and less likely. Sherlock Holmes was not one to suffer fools even under coercion, yet he was apparently here under his own free will, and without resentment. There was undoubtedly something in the situation that I had thus far failed to grasp.
"I was here for some weeks during the Stapleton case," he was saying, "and since then once or twice for shorter periods of time, so I have a basic working knowledge of the moor dweller and his sense of the universe. The stories he tells are a rich mixture that ranges from the humorous to the macabre. They may be violent and occasionally, shall I say, earthy, but they are rarely brutal and have thus far appeared free of those terrors of the urban dweller, the two-legged monster and the plagues of foreign diseases.
"This time it is different. In two days, nursing my beer in the corners of three moorland public houses, the stories I heard could as easily have come from Whitechapel or Limehouse. Oh, there are the standard stories too, the everyday fare of the moor dwellers, although the recent preoccupation with ghostly carriages and spectral dogs that has Gould worried does, I agree, seem unusually vivid and worth investigating. Still, they are a far way from the other stories I heard, which were along the lines of a dark man with a razor-sharp blade sacrificing a ram on top of a tor and drinking its blood, and a young girl found ravished and dismembered, and an old woman drowned in a stream."
"Have these things happened?" I asked sharply.
"They have not."
"None of them?"
"As far as I can discover, they are not even patched-together exaggerations of actual incidents. They seem to be rumours made up of whole cloth."
I could think of no proper response, but as I took another swallow from my glass, I was aware for the first time of a feeling of uneasiness.
"Yes," I said. "I see."
"Except," he added, "for one."
"Ah."
"Ah indeed.