Sideroads

(From The Baker Street Chronicle, Volume 2, Number 5, September-October 1982)

By Brad Keefauver

May 4, 1891

Rate of descent for a falling body was minus 32 feet divided by the square of the number of seconds passed, be the body human or otherwise. Not that it did the one falling any good to know.

His ears were filled with the sound of a scream. The screamer clung tightly to his wrist, and he tried to shake the annoyance away. His revulsion at the pathetic creature gave energy to his attempt, but the screamer would not be separated from him. Swinging his legs round, he stamped hard at the thing, scraping its fingers from his wrist.

The screamer made a desperate grab for his pants leg but failed, the force of the kick carrying the mindless once-human away into the mist. The mist! He was in it now; the end would come soon.

Cold shot upwards through his body. This was it. Pervasive cold, blotting all warmth from even his soul. His mind spun out fibers of extrapolation, searching, searching . . . finding!

As he slipped sideways through that which friend Doyle might call ether, he mused upon the late screamer. Curious that such a fine, intricate mind gave way to panic so quickly. But there was no time for commentary on the past now. The future had to be looked to immediately, if indeed there was to be any future.

October 3, 1731

Thomas Cabell pulled his collar close around his ears. The cold damp of a Dartmoor night was a poor companion for a man’s walk home.Brook manor was stillmore than a mile away,and Cabell stepped a little quicker at the thought of the warm bed waiting for him.

If only held gone home in the cart with Carolyn after dinner, he lamented. Then held be in that warm bed already. But Thomas hated to miss his after dinner cigar and brandy, especially after dinner at George Sander’s. George got his brandy from a cousin in London, and rare fine stuff it was. Too bad its warmth didn’t last.

Just past the Buckfastleigh Road crossing, a wisp of moor mist began to thicken. As Thomas Cabell passed the spot, the moor mist growled.

His insides went numb when he saw what had taken shape in the fog.

"Tolliver," he silently mouthed.

The monstrous black dog that faced him, with fiery eyes and awful fangs, would’ve terrified any grown man. But Thomas Cabell knew true horror when he saw the beast, a deep-rooted horror that came straight from his past. With a final low snarl, the apparition suddenly turned and bounded into the moor mist. Long minutes passed as Cabell heard the cries of the hound receding into the distance.

He wanted to run, but was too frightened, afraid Tolliver might see his fear and return for him.

Slowly, he resumed his walk home.

December 27, 1868

Two days had passed since Christmas, and the children had yet to set- tle down.

"Come along now, my little mice," Mother Robinson told her brood. "You know how late it is."

The children protested with an energy far from sleepiness.

"No, no, let’s go now. Move along."

As the young ones began their last attempt to dissuade their mother, another voice entered the fray:

"What these squeaky little mice need is a story," Father Robinson laughed.

"Thwee bears!"came a shout.

"The ugly goose story!" came another.

Not far from the hearth, old Bobby the spaniel felt a warm touch, though no one was near the dog. The touch warmed and comforted him, then all at once it was gone. Loneliness was all he felt now, and as was his way, he expressed it in a mournful howl.

Father Robinson was inspired.

"I think I shall tell the story of the Cabell hound," he said.

"They’re too young, Richard!" Mother Robinson interrupted.

"It’s only a good goblin story, dear."

"No, Richard. Tell the three bears again. Please."

Father Robinson gave in to his wife’s gentle, pleading look as usual. The three bears would be the children’s story for this night.

But the "good goblin story" was not going to get away so easily. Now that the children knew it existed, the unknown tale would be asked for at bed- times to come. Until one night, at long last . . .

March 16, 1901

Settling himself deep in the well stuffed wingback chair, Fletcher Robinson stretched his legs near the warm blaze in the hearth. The day had been too blustery for golf, but it was not without benefits. A renewed appreciation for a well-tended fireplace was one of them. Good company was another.

The day reminded him of another held spent by the fire of an inn in Dartmoor, and he said as much to his friend in the chair opposite him. Robinson’s eyes stayed on the fire, some- thing there caught his attention. For a split second the flames formed an image of sorts.

His celebrated friend had been speaking of things supernatural, and the image gave Robinson a familiar spinal tingle of just that kind, an almost friendly feeling of ghostly scariness.

The good goblin story of his childhood eased into the back of his mind, ready to be retold. At a suitable point in the conversation, he told his story-telling friend that he now had a story to tell. And it was far from his friend’s re- knowned detective stories.

As the fire made quick, hypnotic gestures before his eyes, Robinson began to spin the tale in a grand dramatic manner that his father would have been proud of. His first words layed out the feel of the Dartmoor countryside at night; the mists on the moors, the ancient stone huts, and the isolated estates. He moved on to speak of one of the estates in particular, Brook Manor, and of the reign of terror the master of the house inflicted upon his family. His name was Richard Cabell, and when drunk, he was a fearsome blackguard, bullying everyone around him. His low behaviour grew worse as time went by, causing his wife to develop protective habits, such as hurrying the children off to bed when she saw his watched-for approach, or shutting the family dog in an out-building.

But her measures were good for all but herself, for every night Mrs. Cabell’s forced to face her husband’s drunken rages alone. She withstood both verbal and physical abuse with little else but a patient and forgiving nature. Until the night her torment ended.

She had braced herself for the usual violent home- coming of her husband, but could not expect the new addition to his repertoire. Somewhere he had picked up the idea she was sleeping with a greengrocer from a nearby town. He had been jealous before, but this time he had to be utterly mad with it. Cabell beat his wife terribly, and when she fled the house, he grabbed a large hunting knife and pursued her.

Locked in its shed, the family dog barked angrily upon hearing the screams of its threatened mistress. It tried furiously to escape its prison, but could not. Time and again, the dog threw itself at the door, its fury Increasing with the frustrated attempts.

Outside, young fingers worked the door latch and on its next attempt, the dog was loose. The dog, a large, black hound, raced into the darkness toward its mistress’s screams. Beside the shed’s door, a blank-eyed Tom Cabell, not yet twelve, took a deep breath and headed back toward the house, where his younger brother and sister awaited in fear.

After a time, the screams from the moor died away. The children spent a long, silent night huddled together in the back recesses of a closet In the manor. When dawn came, and no one had returned to the house, Tom led the other two to a neighbor’s house and told what had happened.

The scene the neighbor and the local authorities found on the moor not far from Brook Manor was a horrible one. Richard Cabell had finally caught his wife and stabbed her to death. The dog came upon him in the act and ripped fatally into his throat, the dog itself taking fatal stab-wounds in the process.

Young Thomas Cabell never saw the grisly scene, yet his memories of that night were deeply imbedded in his mind and would haunt him for the rest of his life. How much they would haunt him he was not to know until a lonely walk home one October night. The hound he had loosed an his father appeared to him that night, with fiery eyes. He took the vision as a personal spectre from his awful past, for indeed it was.

Yet the spectre would not end with him. The dark hound reappeared to Cabells for generations afterward, just as Thomas Cabell first saw it. To many, it would be the herald of an approaching death.

Fletcher Robinson gave the details of one such incident, then was silent. Hadn’t the flames in the fireplace died down rather suddenly, he thought, slightly perplexed. Something had certainly gone out of the flames.

His thoughts were swiftly interrupted by an expression of enthusiasm from his friend Conan Doyle. Doyle had loved the tale and began to ask questions about it. Fletcher Robinson, still surprised at his own storytelling skill, forgot about the strangely dancing flames.

May 4, 1891

On a cliff, high above Reichenbach Falls, two figures sat side by side, dangling their legs off the precipice.

"A splendid job, I must say, Holmes," one of them, a wizened oriental, congratulated the other.

"Nothing really . . . Sherlock Holmes replied with a slight smile, "the boundless perceptions and abilities this form of being gives one are what turned the trick. Without them, I could hardly have done so well."

"But the embellishment of your hound appearance, the subtle way you worked the mild hypnotism of the flames, no one I’ve ever had the pleasure of guiding before used their possibilities so skillfully Even myself, and I was far from an ordinary fellow when I began. . . "

"Come now, Tzu," Holmes stopped the elder one. "You’re worse than Watson."

Barrymore Tzu laughed.

"This whole form of existence is so fascinating, so exhilarating," the master detective spoke excitedly. "The way the 738 dimensions influence each other, being the same, yet totally different.

"Who would have thought there would be a world where Watson’s literary agent wrote Watson’s stories? And that the doctor and myself would only exist there on paper alone? Fictional characters! I’ll be reading fiction with a new respect when I resume my life, that’s for certain.

"And the idea of being able to resurrect myself in this world simply by causing Doyle to write more stories in that world! The wrongs that could be righted with such methods. The . . ."

"Now you’re the one getting carried away, my friend," Barrymore Tzu told him. "It’s time, I think, for you to return to the land of the living. To carry on the legend."

"I suppose so," Holmes sighed, getting to his feet. "I’d better go now. Watson will return down there soon, and I’d rather not see his reaction to my ‘demise’, the poor fellow. He will be all right until my return, won’t he?"

Tzu nodded.

"There are a few wise ones among the living you might wish to speak with during your sabbatical," the elder said, "to make clearer your experience here."

"Ah," Holmes returned knowingly, "in Tibet, Mecca . . . These extended perceptions are going to be something I miss."

"There are compensations, you will find."

Sherlock Holmes began to walk away from the cliff. As he did he began to notice the sound of loose gravel under his feet. Looking back, he saw his companion’s form grow hazy. Holmes waved and the other was gone. Turning away from the cliff once more, he breathed deeply and felt the reality of his body.

"I wonder how I will explain this to Watson," he wondered as he walked onward.

"Tell him that you know Barry Tzu," a voice whispered in his head.