Read Warlock Holmes--A Study in Brimstone for Free Online Page B

should a constable break his leg, it’s considered poor form to take him out behind the station house and shoot him. Instead, the force finds desk jobs for its physically unsound members. If they haven’t offered you sedentary employment already, they soon shall. Accept it. Now, I feel I must reclaim my friend and address the matter of the day, if you please.”
    “Very well, Doctor,” he replied. “And here’s some hadvice in payment: you need to consider more carefully the comp’ny you keep.”
    I found Warlock crouching over a patch of mud by the garden path, absorbed in the examination of some characters scrawled in the dirt. Some of it was in our Roman alphabet, but in pseudo-Latin phrases that made no particular sense. Much of it was symbolic in nature—drawings of little stick-figure constables with daggers stuck in them.
    “Look, Watson!” Warlock enthused. “
Someone
has inscribed symbols of ancient power, right here, beside the crime scene!”
    “Have they?” I inquired, observing his muddy index finger. “What is the meaning of it, do you think?”
    “Who can say, Watson; who can say?” he piped, springing to his feet. “Well, I suppose we ought to examine the scene, eh?”
    “Let’s,” I agreed and we strode past the angry constable at the door and into the house.
    We found ourselves in a gloomy hallway, which led us to an equally dank sitting room. There was a dead man, lying face up with eyes wide and a rolled piece of paper jutting from his mouth. Disconcerting to some, perhaps, but I had seen dead men before. There was blood on the floor, but a doctor is no stranger to such sights.
    No, the thing that stopped me cold in my tracks was Detective Inspector Torg Grogsson. The room seemed barely able to contain him and his clothes had an even harder job of it. He stood at least seven feet tall. I could not swear to the exact measurement, for at that moment he was bunched up against the ceiling, unable to straighten to his full height. His shoulders were broader than most men are tall and every seam of his brown tweed suit stretched and groaned to contain the muscles that bulged against them. Through many of these belabored seams jutted tufts of spiky brown hair, which I suppose must have covered most of him, in the fashion of an ape. The stubble on his chin looked as if it would serve as sandpaper and he scraped at it constantly with a silver-plated straight razor. His fists were wrapped in cloth as a prizefighter’s and upon his head was perched a battered bowler. When we first met I could not imagine what might work such ruin upon an innocent hat, but I soon discovered the source of the damage. In spite of his height, Grogsson had a habit of failing to duck under doorways. The lack of care he took with his own head was alarming.
    When he saw my companion, his jutting brow relaxed and he grumbled, “Warlock! Good! You’re come!”
    “Good afternoon, Inspector,” Warlock said, then turned to the shadowy corner behind us and added, “Inspector Lestrade.”
    I hadn’t noticed at first, but there was our queer little Romanian visitor. He lurked in the darkest corner over one of the pools of blood that dotted the floor. He had traces of that blood on his fingers and on his lips. He was entirely silent. I would have been prepared to swear he was not even breathing, until he drew air to say, “What is this, Holmes? Have you brought your fellow lodger?”
    “I have, Vladislav. You may trust him. He is sympathetic to peculiar individuals,” said Holmes, then grinned at me and added, “Surprisingly sympathetic, I must say.”
    I smiled, wanly. Lestrade smiled back. I nearly cried out. His lips drew back much further and higher than a normal person’s ought, revealing a maw of overlapping fangs. As I watched, they grew, sliding from his gums until each of his teeth, from the front to the very rear, was a curved white knife. At least I understood why he had always been so tight-lipped when he