Read The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for Free Online Page A

draught.”
    He nodded, choked down the sob in his throat with a forced smile, and left the room.
    The Scottish doctor retrieved his Gladstone bag from the entrance hall table and carried it into the kitchen. First he sifted some white powder into a glass, added water and then a few drops of laudanum. After a moment’s consideration, he took down another glass and mixed one for himself, a small one. Conan Doyle normally slept like a hibernating bear, but after the day’s events his thoughts were in turmoil. He downed his sleeping draught on the spot, and then took the second in to his wife.
    *   *   *
    When Conan Doyle entered his ground floor study, a lamp had been left burning on his writing desk as he had instructed his domestic staff. (One never knew when a bout of insomnia would turn into a new character or short story idea.) He paused on the way to his desk to touch some personal totems scattered about the room: a battle-worn cricket bat with the script Thunderer painted on the blade; a harpoon he kept as a souvenir of a youthful foray as ship’s doctor aboard a Greenland whaler; an African mask from a sweaty and miserable year on the Dark Continent.
    He flopped in his chair and undid several buttons of his waistcoat. The whirlwind day had left him enervated, but his nerves were too inflamed for sleep. His scalp prickled and it gradually occurred to him that he was being watched. He looked up at the portrait hanging on the wall beside his desk. It was one of Sidney Paget’s original drawings of Sherlock Holmes, commissioned for The Strand Magazine . In it, the hawk-nosed, gaunt-cheeked Holmes was drawing on a cigarette, peering suspiciously out at the viewer.
    Conan Doyle had never particularly cared for the illustration. Feeling the sting of reprimand in that stare, he got up, lifted the portrait from its hook, and set it against the bookshelves out of his immediate line of sight.
    Then he settled himself at his desk, snatched open a desk drawer, and took out his writing journal. Lying beneath the journal was his old service revolver. He lifted it from the drawer and hefted its steely mass in his hand. It had been many years since he’d last fired it. But even unloaded, the Webley .455 was a formidable weapon that exuded an aura of lethal potential. He set the pistol back into the drawer and pushed it shut.
    He flipped open his writing journal, drew the fountain pen from his jacket pocket, and unscrewed it. For a moment the pen nib hovered over the blank expanse of paper, and then a quiver of excitement ran through him as he began to jot down ideas, lines of dialogue, a few rough sketches of a new character that had been fulminating in his mind for some time—a character called Brigadier Gerard. By the time he had filled the first page with his tidy blue handwriting, fatigue settled upon his shoulders like a lead apron. He blinked, rubbed his straining eyes, and turned up the wick of the desk lamp.
    It was then he noticed a letter sitting in the middle of the desk blotter. Clearly one of the servants had placed it there for him to read. He could not imagine how he had failed to notice it sooner.
    The stationery was of the finest quality, and he felt a slight sense of déjà vu as he picked it up and ran the blade of a letter opener beneath the flap. He drew out and unfolded a sheet of vellum. The paper was printed with a header: S OCIETY FOR P SYCHICAL R ESEARCH .
    Dear Doctor Doyle,
    Your name has been proposed for membership of our newly formed Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Our organization has been founded to promote the scientific investigation of Spontaneous Phenomena such as hauntings, apparitions, mediumship, thought transference (or “telepathy”), and all forms of “psychic” manifestation. Our first meeting will take the form of a four-day retreat at Thraxton Hall in the County of Lancashire. In addition to some of Britain’s most respected psychics, many leading scientific and learned