Sherlock Holmes

Read Sherlock Holmes for Free Online Page A

Book: Read Sherlock Holmes for Free Online
Authors: Barbara Hambly
Tags: sherlock holmes, cthulhu mythos
the thing that all knew as Lord Rupert was
in fact not some older spirit still. His bones, buried in the
sub-crypt, shall, I hope, prove a barrier that They are unwilling
to cross. Now that the skull, which was the talisman that commanded
Their favors, is gone, perhaps there will be less temptation among
those who study in the house.”
    “There is always temptation, Miss Delapore,”
said Holmes.
    “Get thee behind me, Mr. Holmes,” replied the
woman's voice, with a touch of silvery amusement far beyond her
years. “I saw what that temptation did to my uncle, in his
desperate craving to snatch the rule of the things from my
grandfather. I saw what my grandfather became. These are things I
shall remember, when the time comes to seek a disciple of my
own.”
    I was drowsing already from Carnaki's draught
when Holmes returned to the bedroom. “Did you speak to Colby?” I
asked, struggling to keep my eyes open as he went to the table and
picked up the red cardboard box. “Is he all right?” For my dreams
as to his fate had been foul, terrible, and equivocal. “Warn him …
prevent the old Viscount from doing harm?”
    Holmes hesitated for a long time, looking
down at me with a concern that I did not quite understand in his
eyes. “I did,” he replied at length. “To such effect that Viscount
Gaius has disappeared from the district – for good, one hopes. But
as for Branwell, he too has … departed. I fear that Miss Delapore
is destined to lead a rather difficult and lonely life.”
    He glanced across at Carnaki, who was packing
up what appeared to be an electrical battery and an array of steel
rods and wires into a rucksack, the purpose of which I could not
imagine. Their eyes met. Then Carnaki nodded, very slightly, as if
approving what Holmes had said.
    “Because of what was revealed,” I asked,
stifling a terrible yawn, “about this … this blackmail that was
being practiced? The young hound, to desert a young lady like
that.” My eyelids slipped closed. I fought them open again, seized
by sudden panic, by the terror that I might slide into sleep and
find myself again in that dreadful abyss, watching the horrible
things that fluttered and crept from those angles of darkness that
should not have been there. “Did you learn … anything of these
studies they practiced?”
    “Indeed we did,” said Carnaki. And then, a
little airily, “There was nothing in them, though.”
    “What did Miss Delapore bring you, then?”
    “Merely a memento of the case,” said Holmes.
“As for young Mr. Colby, do not be too hard on him, Watson. He did
the best he could, as do we all. I am not sure that he would have
been entirely happy with Miss Delapore in any event. She was … much
the stronger of the two.”
     
    *
     
    Holmes never did elucidate for me the means
by which he bridged the gap between his supposition that Viscount
Delapore was engaged in kidnapping children for the purposes of
some vile cult centered in Depewatch Priory, and evidence
sufficient to make that evil man flee the country. If he and
Carnaki found such evidence at the Priory – which I assume was the
reason he had asked the young antiquarian to accompany us to
Shropshire – he did not speak to me of it. Indeed, he showed a
great reluctance to refer to the case at all.
    For this I was grateful. The effects of the
fever I had caught were slow to leave me, and even as much as three
years later I found myself prey to the sense that I had learned –
and mercifully forgotten – something that would utterly destroy all
my sense of what the world is and should be; that would make either
life or sanity impossible, if it should turn out to be true.
    Only once did Holmes mention the affair, some
years later, during a conversation on Freud's theories of insanity,
when he spoke in passing of the old Viscount Delapore's conviction
– evidently held by others in what is now termed a folie a
deux – that the old man had in fact been the reincarnated

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