Free Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes by Jeff Campbell, Charles Prepolec Page B

arrow from his chest. The ichor that flowed from the wound and down his shirt-front, was no longer red, but was changing even as I watched, turning as black as his eyes. Finally, only one hand tugged uselessly at the arrow imbedded in his body. The other began to scratch the floorboards, effortlessly digging deep furrows in the hard, smooth surface. It was clear there was terrific strength in that form, but thankfully it could do nothing against the enchantment of the arrow.
    Then, Holmes began to spasm and twitch; the heels of his shoes beating an awful tattoo on the floor. He began to weep but only briefly, soon he was silent, simply twisting and jerking like a landed fish breathing its last.
    He looked at me. I shuddered, for the hatred I saw in those coal-black eyes was incalculable; it was the fierce burning hatred of one natural enemy for another.
    Then, Holmes finally died. His body began to change, to warp and take on a different hue, his hands knotting and twisting as if suddenly desiccated by years of age. What he became was a creature that only resembled a man in base configuration, but this was no man, of any kind. Blue-skinned, blue as a corpse, its skin was more a lumped and pitted hide. The limbs were much, much longer than Holmes’ had been and now stuck out in an ungainly fashion from the sleeves and trousers of the clothes it had adopted. The hands were six-fingered, without nails and like the roots of plants, long and gnarled; the feet seemed equally distended, lying slack within Holmes’ boots.
    The thing’s face was just as abnormal. A large, narrow head with a gigantic jawbone and a cranium that extended backwards, the creature looked like some nightmare version of a primitive man, heavy brow-ridge and bulging eyes combined with an over-sized mouth, full of protruding, tusk-like, teeth … the face on the triangular stone.
    I collapsed on to a chair and waited in that room for hours, too horror-struck, too filled with shame and loathing, to do anything. Finally, the sun’s rays began to creep into the chamber, and I took to my feet. The natural light, the friend of we who can only pretend to have made this planet our kingdom, gave me courage, and the spell that had afflicted me for so many years was completely lifted from my weary shoulders.
    I remembered all. I recalled how I had lain in a ditch in Afghanistan, my body afire with the wounds I had sustained, begging, screaming for Death to come, and crying out to the gods of that strange land to grant me mercy. Death had not come, but instead this djinn appeared, this awful, parasitic creature of antiquity. When it had leant over me and whispered to me in a language I ought not to have understood, I had no will to deny it. It reached into my mind and plucked out my most naïve and childish desires, fuelled by the discontent I had at being a failed medical practitioner, and had asked me whether I would like to have not only my life saved, but my fondest wishes fulfilled, to forever be known as man of courage and heroism, who would be renowned through my homeland as a vanquisher of evil, I said yes! In that moment I would have agreed to far worse. The demon smiled a ghastly smile, pressed an odd triangular piece of carved stone into my upturned palm, and then disappeared as suddenly as he had come.
    And so it was that I found myself miraculously rescued by Murray and, with my health broken, returned to England. Once there, young Stamford, in some weird trance, had come to my flea-ridden hovel and taken me to Bart’s hospital where I had descended, as if in a dream, to the morgue, where Holmes appeared like some spectre amongst the cadavers — an event I later glamorized when I wrote of it. I was to change many a weird event in the next several years as the foul thing performed its work. I suspect the creature had actually created its body, its form, from the cadaver of some poor lost soul lying in Bart’s, some nameless, hapless victim of disease or