Sherlock Holmes

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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FOREWORD

In the account known as “The Adventure of the Three Students” I wrote that in the spring of 1895 “a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns”.

I realise that, with those few words, I may have sounded entirely dismissive of the circumstances that brought us to that place, as though the matter were of minor consequence.

I also somewhat mendaciously described Holmes as “pursuing some laborious researches in early English charters” at this unnamed seat of learning. That was, I confess now, misdirection. He was doing anything but.

The truth is that, at the time, I felt obliged to skate over what was one of the most challenging and intriguing investigations my friend undertook, not to mention one of the most hazardous. The “Three Students” case was merely a light, diverting interlude in a much darker and stranger symphony whose nature I was not prepared to divulge when the story appeared in
The Strand
in 1904. Now, however, nearly a quarter of a century on from the story’s publication, I am ready to tackle the entirety of the affair in narrative form with as much frankness and honesty as I can muster. I am older, and the passage of years has given me perspective and distance.

Besides, I very much doubt I shall submit this account to my publishers and thus offer it for general consumption. It is likelier that it will add to the burgeoning number of manuscripts languishing in the tin dispatch box which I keep in the vaults at Cox & Co. Bank at Charing Cross.

The university town in question, then, was Oxford, and it is not without good reason that I was reticent about the month Holmes and I spent there during and after Hilary term of ’95. For what transpired in the City of Dreaming Spires (to borrow Matthew Arnold’s coinage from his poem “Thyrsis”) brought us face to face with one of the strangest and most singular manifestations of evil we have ever encountered, and the world is better off not knowing the full facts.

Not only that, but so strenuous and punishing were the events involved that my companion was driven to breaking point, and indeed very nearly was broken. The same goes for our friendship, which was tested to its limits. These are not events which it pleases me to recall.

Much has been written about Charles Babbage and his remarkable steam-powered mechanical computers and calculating machines. Somewhat less is known about Professor Malcolm Quantock and his Thinking Engine – a device that seemed to possess the soul and intellect of a man…

John H. Watson, MD (retd.), 1927

CHAPTER ONE
T
HE
R
UBENSTEIN
C
OLLECTION
M
UMMY

“Watson, old chap,” said Sherlock Holmes, as the mummy of a four-thousand-year-old pharaoh came shuffling towards us in the Archaic Room at the British Museum, “I am prepared to concede, in this one instance, that a belief in the resurrection of the dead may not be wholly unfounded.”

The mummy lurched across the darkened chamber with its arms outstretched. Loose ends of cerecloth dangled from wrist and elbow, twitching as it moved. Its feet dragged over the floorboards with a horrid, dry swishing sound reminiscent of old twigs and parchment. Its face had the very barest of features, shallow indentations for the eyes and mouth lurking beneath the brittle-looking bandages, which lent it a rudimentary, skull-like cast.

“I only said ‘may’, however,” Holmes added. “That which appears to be perturbingly uncommon could, in the event, be quite commonplace.”

My friend’s
sangfroid
when presented with this all too tangible manifestation of the supernatural was impressive. I myself was in a state of some shock. I was rooted to the spot. A chill was going down my spine. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. I was experiencing all the clichés of terror, which at that moment felt freshly minted, in no way banal or tired, just all too appallingly true.

We found ourselves at the museum, at an hour when all right-minded folk should be tucked up in bed, owing to a visit by the Egyptologist Mr John Vansittart Smith, FRS, who had called on us in our rooms at 221B Baker Street the previous afternoon. At the request of this man, one of the pre-eminent practitioners in his field, Holmes had agreed to investigate a series of bizarre occurrences which had accompanied the Wallace Rubenstein Antiquities Collection on its year-long tour of Europe.

It had been alleged that the collection, which comprised several dozen priceless artefacts from around the globe, was in a very specific manner “haunted”. Night watchmen at several of the venues where it halted on its peregrinations had reported hearing strange sounds emanating from the chamber in which it was exhibited. Some had even come face to face with an ambulatory creature that matched the description of the mummy of Pharaoh Djedhor – a 30th Dynasty monarch who had reigned during the 4th century BC – and had fled in fright from this apparition. Djedhor’s preserved remains were the centrepiece of the collection, in no small part thanks to the large, ornately carved and painted sarcophagus that held them, a thing of considerable craftsmanship and beauty.

Although the watchmen’s accounts of meeting the mummy while on their rounds were dismissed as nonsense by museum curators and directors, and on more than one occasion had resulted in a summary sacking, nonetheless the collection had begun to garner a reputation. Attendances had gone through the roof. Everywhere it went – the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, the
Ägyptisches
Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin – it drew crowds. People queued for hours to view it, lured by the glamour of otherworldly eeriness that now hung over it.

Several noted psychic mediums had declared that the Rubenstein Collection was the locus of genuine unearthly activity, and found evidence to back up their claims, ranging from cold spots in the exhibition area to traces of ectoplasm on the floor, although the former could be ascribed simply to draughts while the latter usually turned out to be spillages of a somewhat more innocuous substance such as resin or wax.

Those in possession of more rational, scientific brains were of the opinion that the living-mummy rumours were just so much hogwash. A two-thousand-year-old corpse, most of whose vital organs had been removed upon death and stowed separately in Canopic jars, could not spontaneously come to life. Any who had witnessed the phenomenon were either drunkards, liars, or afflicted with mental debility.

The aforementioned Egyptologist, John Vansittart Smith, though definitely of the rational persuasion, nonetheless had an open mind. He admitted to us that not many months earlier, in the principal Eastern chamber of the Louvre in Paris, he had come across a living being whose comportment and conversation had left him in no doubt that he was in the presence of someone who had enjoyed a lifespan far in excess of man’s usual allotted sum of years. This person, identifying himself as a priest of Osiris named Sosra who was born during the reign of Tuthmosis, had survived courtesy of an elixir of longevity he had concocted which vitiated disease and decay, thus all but conferring immortality on the user. Sosra, Smith said, had eventually perished in the arms of his beloved, a maiden called Atma who had been taken by plague and whose mummified remains he had pursued across the world over the course of many centuries with tragic doggedness. Ever since his unnerving encounter, the Egyptologist had been convinced that the ancient Egyptians could lay claim to scientific and medical knowledge that far exceeded our own.

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