The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (8 page)

“Excellent!” Wilde beamed. “As it should be.” He joggled his hips from side to side, a frown on his face. “It is rather stiff, however—and heavy. I hope it will not cause me to appear less than graceful, or plodding. I could not abide it if people thought Oscar Wilde was a plodder.” He reached a decision. “I shall perambulate the train corridor to gauge the effect on our fellow passengers. Expect my return shortly.”

And with that, Wilde flung open the carriage door and plunged into the swaying corridor. He banged the door shut behind him and lumbered in the direction of the second-class carriages.

Conan Doyle breathed a sigh of relief. Oscar Wilde was a dear friend, but he welcomed an interlude of silence for his own thoughts to foment. He carefully folded the letters and slipped them into the leather portfolio open on the seat next to him. Then he drew out a slim volume, bound in distressed leather, with a flap and an integral strap that wrapped around the book and was secured by a lock. Above the strap, C
ASEBOOK
N
O.
1 was embossed in gilt lettering. Conan Doyle dug beneath his collar and drew out a key on a ribbon. It turned in the lock and the journal sprang open. The first few pages were covered in Conan Doyle’s neat handwriting—a description of his encounter with the mysterious medium in the darkened room, and all the subsequent events, including his trip with Wilde to the hastily abandoned residence in Mayfair, and his hallucinatory encounter with Sherlock Holmes. As he paged further, a short, squat envelope fell out. Conan Doyle picked up the letter and unfolded it. It was an answer to a query he had sent to a medical colleague—a specialist in rare diseases. He had written relating the symptoms the medium had described as her ailment. The response reaffirmed her claims:

Dear Dr. Doyle,

The symptoms of your patient correspond to a diagnosis of acute porphyria, an hereditary disease of the blood. Symptoms range from abdominal pain and acute sensitivity to sunlight (capable of causing blistering), to mental disturbances such as seizures, hallucinations, and paranoia. Unfortunately, there are no known therapies for the disease. If you require additional counseling, please don’t hesitate to refer your patient to me for a more complete diagnosis.

Best Regards,

Dr. Henry Everton.

P.S. When is your next Sherlock Holmes story due out? Looking forward anxiously.

Conan Doyle refolded the letter and returned it to its envelope. He had purposely waited until Wilde was absent before reading it again, and now he found himself greatly agitated. Although he was physically fearless, given his family history the faintest whiff of madness terrified him. In fact, the characters, images, and stories that flowed in a unstoppable stream from his imagination often led him to fear what would happen were he to let slip the leashes of his own mind.

He closed the cover of the Casebook, snapped shut the lock securing the strap, and tucked it back into his portfolio. Then he turned his gaze to the window. Outside, the English midlands blurred past: an endless expanse of hedgerows and flat green fields dotted with red-and-white Hereford cattle grazing the lush grass.

Whoomph!

The carriage swayed heavily, everything went black, and Conan Doyle’s ears popped as the train plunged into a tunnel. A tiny electric bulb glimmered bravely overhead, but was too feeble to push back the darkness. Out the windows, Conan Doyle caught only a vague impression of soot-blackened tunnel walls rushing past and his own dim reflection in the glass. But then he noticed there was something amiss with it. The figure in the reflection had his legs crossed and was smoking a cigarette. Conan Doyle blinked his eyes and looked again. It was not his reflection, but the image of Sherlock Holmes. The hawk-faced detective exhaled a lungful of smoke. As he drew the cigarette from his lips, he raised his hand in what might have been a mocking wave.

Whooooooosh!
The carriage swayed again as daylight burst in through the windows and the tunnel fell behind. At that moment, the carriage door bumped open and Oscar Wilde jostled in, muttering, “No, this simply shall not do. A poet must make an entrance looking like a poet.” He yanked off the hat and sailed it across the carriage, then snatched loose the buttons of his coat. “Maybe you are right after all. Perhaps an adventure in the rural territories calls for tweed—” Wilde halted mid-sentence, catching the look on his friend’s face. “Whatever’s the matter, Arthur? You look like you’ve seen Jacob Marley’s ghost!”

Conan Doyle pried his eyes from the window with difficulty. “Ah, er, no, just feeling a little homesick. Like you, Oscar.”

Wilde pulled the shirt over his head and stood there bare-chested, his skin the color of putty, his ample podge spilling over the front of his trousers. “That has passed. I am no longer homesick. My moods are as mercurial as my wit. Indeed, I am looking forward to conquering the rustic dominions.”

Conan Doyle shifted in his seat. Was he beginning to imagine things? And, more terrifyingly, given his family history, was he losing his mind? He had quite clearly seen the image of his consulting detective in the window glass. Either way, he was starting to believe that what his mother had said in her last letter was true: it was easy to kill Sherlock Holmes with the stroke of a pen. However, his ghost was proving considerably more difficult to lay.

CHAPTER 7

A DREAD AND UNWELCOMING VISTA

The station they arrived at was tiny: the waiting area a wrought-iron pergola scarcely large enough for two people to shelter beneath, the booking office a tiny wooden box with a glass ticket window. Even the platform was short—barely longer than the painted station sign that read S
LATTENMERE
.

Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde debarked and stood on the platform surrounded by the heap of Wilde’s luggage. Then the train, the station, and the world around them vanished as the railway engine released a cloud of steam with a
whhiiiiiissssshhhh
like a punctured dragon. The cloud rose, swirled, dissipated, and the station reappeared as the train began to roll away.

Wilde took a deep breath in through his generously proportioned nose and coughed. “Ah,” he fretted, “as I feared, the country air is overly oxygenated. I am quite giddy. Honestly, Arthur, how am I to breathe without a pound of London soot in my lungs?”

“You’ll acclimatize, Oscar.”

“Perhaps a cigarette to soothe the bronchioles,” Wilde said, fumbling in a breast pocket for his silver cigarette case.

The train was chuffing into the distance when they heard the approaching clop-clop of hooves, and soon a pony and trap drew up on the platform. The driver was a broad-backed young man in a laborer’s cloth cap, worn shirt, and braces. He looked down from his seat at the waiting Londoners and said, “Does tha’ be the gents what are fer th’all?”

Wilde threw a nonplussed look at Conan Doyle, who nodded at the fellow and said, “Yes. That’s right.”

The young man leapt down from his cart and tugged the peak of his cap in respect. “Me name’s Frank—Frank Carter. Carter be me name and carter be me trade.” The young man paused, raised his head and made a show of scenting the air, then nodded toward the line of black clouds crowding the far horizon. “Oh, it’s gunna rain, awreet. Tha’ can smell inth’air.”

Wilde threw a baffled look at his companion. He could speak five European languages fluently and translate Greek and Latin, but had no ear for English regional dialects. “What on earth did the fellow just yammer?” he whispered to Conan Doyle.

“He said it’s going to rain. I think he’s quite confident in his prediction.”

Wilde bit his lip, his eyes wide with distress. “Oh, bother,” he said. “I do hope my bags shan’t get wet.”

The young driver piled case after case into the back of the cart, turning and twisting each bag like puzzle pieces. Conan Doyle noted that the overloaded cart soon had a decidedly backward list, the cart stays threatening to hoist the small pony off its feet.

“Job’s a good ’un,” the cart driver said, patting the final bag as he slipped it into place like the capstone atop a pyramid. “We got ’em all, I reckon.”

“Whatever do you mean—all?” Wilde asked. “That is just the baggage that carries my most immediate necessities.” He pointed to the place thirty feet away where the rest of his baggage had been unloaded from the baggage car and stacked on the platform.

The carter’s face fell. “Bloody hell!” he exclaimed. “No way can we fetch that lot.” He pushed the cap back on his head and looked at Wilde. “It’ll tek me a few trips, I reckon.”

Wilde looked from the young man to Conan Doyle for interpretation. “Your extra baggage will be brought up to the Hall later, Oscar.”

Wilde’s face collapsed at the news. “We really are in the country, are we not? I fear my homesickness is returning.” He clambered up onto the wagon and took his place on the seat. “Oh well. We are in the provinces. I suppose I’m expected to rough it.”

With three large men and a cart overloaded with luggage, the small pony strained and trembled, unable to overcome the sheer inertia. The carter was obliged to jump down, put his shoulder to the back of the cart and heave with all his might to get things rolling, and then hop back up and snatch the reins from Conan Doyle.

The road outside the station turned instantly from cobblestone into a rutted dirt track cratered with potholes puddled with water. The cart swayed alarmingly as it jounced through them, Wilde’s leather bags and portmanteaus creaking symphonically. After only twenty yards, the main road turned sharp left and passed straight through a farmyard. Geese honked and scattered. Chickens continued pecking obstinately, the cart wheels scything dangerously close. In the middle of the cobblestone yard a huddle of figures armed with glinting pitchforks assaulted a heap of straw—grimy children and rumpled farmhands, their patched clothes so stiffened with filth they could have stood up without their owners. As the cart rattled past, the farmhands gawped at the two well-dressed gentlemen as if they had descended from the moon. Wilde raised his straw boater to them and shouted: “You’re all welcome to see my play when you come down to London. Tell them at the box office that Oscar Wilde grants you all the tickets you require.” The farmworkers stared gormlessly after them as the cart turned out of the farmyard and rumbled along a lane bounded by tall hedgerows on either side.

Wilde took a deep, chest-expanding breath and let it out. “Ah, the country air is bracing if somewhat dungy. I must have my photograph taken posing in front of a hay wain wearing a rustic smock and a battered straw hat, a stalk of corn in my mouth.”

“Really, Oscar?”

Wilde goggled his eyes in horror. “No, of course not. I should not allow myself even to be buried in such attire!”

The day brightened, and even though it was early April, the temperature rose to a comfortable degree, the air soft and balmy. They passed through a small wood glorious with birdsong and drunk with the scent of bluebells carpeting the forest floor. Gradually, the trees thinned and the wood fell behind as they passed through more farm fields, the lane ascending toward a crossroads where a dead and leafless tree crowded the verge, its gnarled roots clutching a faced stone slab inscribed with lettering worn blurred and indecipherable by centuries of rain.

“What does the writing on that stone say?” Conan Doyle asked the driver, pointing.

“
Gallows Way
,” the young man answered. “They used to hang criminals, witches, and other badduns from that very tree.”

“I’m sure it draws tourists in droves,” Wilde drily observed.

“It used to,” Frank replied. “Five hundred or more folk would turn out for a good hangin’.”

“Really?” Wilde said, eyes widening. “Five hundred people?” He turned to his friend and said, “Remind me to add a hanging scene to my next drawing room comedy.”

As the cart passed the dead tree, a ragged-tailed crow dropped from its perch on the topmost branch and swooped low over their heads, cawing outrage as it flapped into the distance. The cart trundled onward to the crossroads where a hand-painted sign reading S
LATTENMERE
1 M
ILE
pointed straight ahead. A sign pointing at ninety degrees read T
ROUGH OF
B
LACKHEATH
. The cart turned left without slowing.

“I thought we were going to Slattenmere?” Wilde asked.

Conan Doyle shook his head. “I consulted a map before we left London. Slattenmere is merely the largest town, after which the train station is named. We are heading for Thraxton Hall, which is somewhere up there.” He pointed to a series of low green hills rising in the distance.

“Oh my!” Wilde said, biting his lip. “I have vertigo already.”

“Those hills are just the beginning of the climb. There are even higher ones beyond. Better find your cloak. It’s going to get chilly.”

The pleasant farm fields soon fell behind. And then so did the trees and the hedgerows as they began to ascend into bleak moorland, treeless and carpeted with purple heather. The terrain became steeper and more spectacular, with waterfalls splashing into rocky pools and granite crags rising from green moorland that swooped into deep crevasses, their shadowy bottoms littered with the bleaching bones of sheep that had grazed too close and tumbled to their deaths.

“Forbidding and yet fabulous,” Wilde said. He had produced a fur-lined cape from one of his voluminous suitcases and now huddled inside it, his long face framed by a wolf-fur hood. “It’s like the Swiss Alps in miniature. I would not have guessed I was still in England.”

They reached another, even steeper climb, which slowed the cart to a crawl and obliged the men to dismount and walk alongside. The wheezing pony slogged to the top of the final rise, where the carter yanked the reins to stop the cart and allow the beast to rest.

Conan Doyle and Wilde both marveled at the view. From this height, the road plunged downhill in a series of dizzying switchbacks into a small valley where a tree line grew along a riverbank—the sound of water tumbling over stones could be heard. In the distance stood the towering hulk of a great house.