Sherlock's Secret War -- File X

(From The Air-Gun, Vol. 2, No. 5-6/December 1986)

by Brad Keefauver

(The following manuscript, entitled "A Public Figure Revealled," by one Burton Georges Swinlough, was among the manuscripts in the slush piles of unsolicited articles sent to The Great Beyond magazine just before its offices closed in 1902. How it came into the files of Sherlock's Secret War is a story as long and tedious as the article itself, so we shall not include it here.)

"We were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life, and to recognize the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like Untamed beasts in a cage."

--Watson, from that Pips nonsense

To set us off on the right footing, let me say this: I am a poet, sir or madame reader. The sensational narratives that pave the way of the common writer are not to my taste, to read or write, and I am only compelled to do so here because this infernal publication will not pay for verse. That fact alone should be enough to convince you that the following account is made up of true facts. Were it otherwise, I would not waste the time writing this up, even for the miserable pittance this magazine pays for its articles.

My garrett room off Baker Street has, for many years, served as an oft-time inspiration for my poetic works. The view of mankind's daily affairs that its windows allow have given me many an insight into the very nature of that sad, strangely-sparked homunculus we call human. The shockingly depraved, the tenderly heart-warming, and the damnably curious all have wandered into my field of vision at one time or another, and of those, none has ever been so damnably curious as the horrific hour I spent out along the guttering one night near the very end of September in 1887.

One of those great congresses of fume and vapour that Londoners call "fog" had converged upon the city as evening drew in, and I was settling well in with my composition book and meditating upon the word "dynastic," feeling as though one of my better poems was about to spring forth at any moment. As that glorious moment approached, my linking of thought was irrevocably snapped by a plaintive cry from Sir Galladsdrake somewhere outside my window. The situation was not an unfamiliar one to me, and I silently cursed Sir Galladsdrake for getting stuck up by the chimney-crook again. A cat, however, is a most impossible animal to stay angry with. By the time I had crawled out along the guttering of the roof of my garrett and seen his woeful shining eyes, all anger left me. I quickly rescued him from the chimney-crook, and together we started back toward my garrett window.

All at once, Sir Galladsdrake pressed up against me and hissed out at the dark and fog. I stared out into the night and released the feline; he bolted through the window and into the relative safety of the garrett. As my eyes strained to pierce the fog and darkness, I made out what could have been the only thing Sir Galladsdrake was hissing at: there was a man on the roof of the house next door!

Galladsdrake had never been this unfriendly to strangers before, so I stared hard at the man to see what was so peculiar about him. He was tall, and not quite thin, and I soon realized that I was watching that local "celebrity" my landlady was always chattering of: the detective Sherlock Holmes. His "powers of observation" must not have been especially keen that late evening, as he seemed not to see me at all. He scrambled with the determination of an eager hound up to a prominent point on the roof, stood erect, and cupped his hands to his mouth.

What issued forth from those cupped hands was a sound the like of which I had never heard before. Like the cry of a wolf or dog, it was at times, with a mewling sort of warble to it. In other moments, it sounded for all the world as though someone had forced their bawling infant into a chimney, an echoing, sobbing squall.

As I looked on, entranced at this display of madness by a man of such reputed intellect, my ears eventually became aware of a distinct flapping sound in the air as well, at first seeming to come from a great distance. As I turned my head this way and that for a keener listen, I soon determined that the flapping was coming from the same direction which Sherlock Holmes had been directing his howls: straight up.

At this point in my narrative, I must pause to admit my one great failing in life. Though honestly gifted in many areas, I am forced to admit that bravery is not among those gifts. As the flapping grew nearer, sounding more and more like three or four very, very large bird-things, I simply closed my eyes. In the minutes that followed, the great wings sounded as though they were almost on top of me, and I am sure I felt an icy wind being beat down upon me on at least one occasion, yet I kept my eyes closed tightly and prayed for the everyday world to return. Across the rooftops I heard an enlivened whispering, an animated conversation between human and devil. Words, if they spoke in words, were not easy to make out, especially as I made no effort to hear them. The frosty non-smell of arctic winds came unwanted to my nostrils, and once more I prayed a most sincere prayer for my nightmare to end.

Eventually, the nightmare did end. Just when, I cannot say. After a time, I opened my eyes and found myself looking out upon barren rooftops, breathing the wonderfully malodorous city air, and hearing a distant horse’s hooves clattering on the pavement below. In the years that followed, on certain vapour-cloaked nights, I did hear that weird cry of detective Sherlock Holmes again, from the false security of my heavily blanketed bed. Each time I was again striken with a paralyzing fear for hours at a time, yet none of those occasions can match the sudden shock of an innocent discovery I later made on a fine spring day, long after I had moved out of my Baker Street garrett.

Some odd quirk of fate drove me to such that I actually found myself reading popular a point of boredom and desperation that year prose in some outdated magazine. One of these pieces, I was quick to discover, was "The Five Orange Pips" which concerned my old neighbor. The tale began in September of '87, a fact of which I thought nothing, at first. As I read the story, however, a sort of creeping horror spread through me as I remembered my only sight of the detective Sherlock Holmes, until finally I read the words "Very long and very severe were the equinoctial gales that year." Something in that phrase caused the smell of arctic breezes to return to my nostrils. And as I continued in my reading: "We did at last hear that somewhere far out in the Atlantic a shattered stern-post of the boat was seen swinging in the trough of a wave, with the letters ‘L.S.' carved upon it, and that is all we shall ever know of the fate of the Lone Star."

In my mind the sounds of large, beating wings and shattering ship's timbers combined to tell an awful story, one of vengeance called down from the very sky. I suppose there may have been some justice in it, but after my night on that rooftop, I know that no man deserves such a fate. Just who is Sherlock Holmes? What is his purpose upon this earth?

I don't think we really wish to know.