Stories
OK, I’ve got this, well not quite a mountain, but at least a fair-sized mound of short stories. They’ve got no commercial value, because that’s just how things are in the year 2025. I’m not even sure it’s worth self-publishing them on Amazon given the amount of AI slop out there. So I’m just going to sling them up here for anybody who likes to take a look at them.
This first one is my best shot at Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. Sort of…
The Curious Case of the Skull in a Hat-Box
Holmes later related to me the circumstances of his unexpected encounter with his maker. In his own words:
It was a dark cold day in mid-November 1913 - one of those dank dreary days when the rain has set in and falls straight down like prison bars. I was lying athwart the divan in our rooms on Baker Street, suffering from one of my periodic bouts of abject lethargy, when the doorbell rang downstairs. It being a Saturday afternoon, and thus outside my usual hours as a consulting detective, Mrs. Hudson brought up a card. It announced my supplicant as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As I did not know the gentleman I thought to send him away. But on the back of the card was scrawled “On a matter of singular archaeological import.”
This stirred my curiosity. And I was in need of mental exercise, for I find that my mind, if it is not otherwise occupied, reflects in upon itself, as if trapped in a fairground hall of mirrors, until the endless repetitions of its own image diminish and vanish away, and all that is left is a bewildering paralysing void. Thus, hoping that the gentleman would provide me with sufficient stimulation to jolt me out of my despond, I asked Mrs. Hudson to send him up.
A few moments later Mrs. Hudson showed in my visitor. He was a prosperous and energetic gentleman of about fifty-five years of age, of Celtic extraction, florid of face, and sporting a bushy moustache. His body had run to fat, but I discerned that he had been a fine athlete in his day. His eyes were intelligent, observant, and full of humour, fantasy, and an easy credulity - here was a man whose company was to be savoured, even if it were unwise to entrust him with your life-savings. Under his arm he was carrying a cylindrical hat-box, of the sort that are used to keep top-hats.
Once we had exchanged the ritual greetings observed between two gentlemen on first acquaintance I played my usual parlour trick on him. I ventured, “I perceive, Sir Arthur, that you are a medical gentleman and that you write a good deal. I also discern that your considerable imaginative powers at times overpower your scientific education, and that you believe in spirits and what-not. Am I right or am I right?”
“By jeepers, Holmes,” Sir Arthur replied with an over-familiarity that bordered on rudeness, “How the blazes did you work that out? Is there a telltale scratch mark upon my shoe, or a smudge of fairy-dust on my nose?”
“Nothing so extraordinary,” I said. “As to you being a writer, I observed the deformity of the first two fingers of your right hand, caused by the constant pressure of holding a pen above a page whilst in deep thought. Also, despite your best attempts at scrubbing your hands, I noted the blueish ink-tinge on your fingertips. I can only regret I have not had the pleasure of reading your works. As regards your belief in the supernatural, there is a Rosicrucian Cross engraved on the case of your gold watch, which is the mark of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a society dedicated to the occult. Finally, as to you being a medical man, I note the winged ox charm on your watch chain, which is the symbol of St. Luke, the patron saint of doctors.” I glanced at his card in my hand and added, “And also, Sir Arthur, your handwriting is such an illegible scrawl that I believe only an experienced pharmacist could decipher it. I was only able to make out your message due to my familiarity with the equally abominable hand of Dr. Watson. Indeed your hand and his are much alike. If I did not know better, I would say they were one and the same.”
To my great surprise Sir Arthur returned that I should indeed know his writings, for Dr. Watson was, so to speak, his amanuensis or scribe, and that I was the leading character in many of his stories. Indeed, it was chiefly owing to my fame that he had been dubbed a knight of the realm.
This was a rum turn of events. The man standing before me was claiming to be my author!
I must say this displeased me. I confess if I must have an author, I would hope for more than this rather ordinary middle-aged gentleman. I can not pretend I felt in awe of his power, as if I was in the presence of my God. Also, I had many indelicate questions for the gentleman, such as why he had attempted to murder me by sending me over the Reisenbach Falls whilst struggling with Professor Moriarty. It was only due to pure serendipity that I had survived and, after a brief hiatus, I had resumed my detective career.
I inquired the reason of his visit with a certain froideur. Sir Arthur gestured to the hatbox he had placed on a side table. I perceived it contained an object of great mystery. However, before Sir Arthur would open the box he explained that the matter touched upon the honour of his friends and he swore me to secrecy. I gave him my word and, forgive me for my presumption, my dear Watson, but I also vouchsafed your discretion.
It was at this point that I, Dr. John H. Watson, returned to Baker Street from watching my old club, Blackheath, so I shall now take up the narration:
It had been a most entertaining game of rugger, though played in the pouring rain and of a decidedly violent nature. Indeed, it was only a little less restrained than the skirmish with the Pashtuns in which I received my wound. I had been pressed into service as a medical professional with alarming frequency, and the final score was a broken tibia and a gashed thigh against two concussions, a dislocated shoulder, and a raked cheek that required eleven stitches. It had been a bloodbath in a mudbath indeed! If England continues to produce such splendid young men, so careless of life and limb, her Empire can only prosper!
After I had been introduced to our visitor, Sir Arthur opened his hat-box and took out a human skull and jawbone, both clean of flesh. The skull had been assembled from many broken bits of bone and carefully glued and wired into an almost complete whole. It was evidently of great age, and the capacity of its cranium was markedly smaller than that of modern man, though still larger than that of the chimpanzee. As for the jawbone, it jutted forward from the face in a peculiar ape-like manner.
Holmes took the skull from Sir Arthur. He gazed deeply into its vacant eye sockets, after the manner of an actor playing Hamlet. “Is it not sobering to think the wonders of the human mind are enclosed in such a puny vessel as this?” he reflected. “As a species we have conquered the continents, traversed the oceans and lately taken to the skies. And yet all the marvels and miracles of Mankind, and all its rapacity and savagery, is encased in this fragile bubble of bone, and consists only of a quart or so of thinking chemicals.”
I perceived Holmes to be falling back into dejection. To distract him from his melancholy I exclaimed, “Surely, Holmes, do you not recognise the object in your hands?” - for I had recognised the skull instantly.
“Yes, my dear Watson?” Holmes invited me to explain.
“Why, this is the skull of Dawson’s Early Man, or Eoanthropus dawsoni, which was excavated from a flint quarry in Sussex, and whose discovery was in the newspapers so much a year ago.”
Holmes glanced at his guest for confirmation.
“Dr. Watson is correct,” Sir Arthur corroborated. “This is the skull of the so-called Piltdown Man. Mr. Smith Woodward, the keeper of the Natural History Museum, is an old friend of mine, and he has permitted me to borrow it. Please handle it with care, for it is a national treasure.”
In my enthusiasm I added, “It is supposed to be five hundred thousand years old, and to show an intermediate stage in the development of man from primitive ape to our current civilised state. Observe the ape-like jut of its jaw and yet the human-like cranium. The skull is said to prove that the origins of humanity are to be found where Mankind has since reached its apogee; that is, here, in England.”
“I take it that the purpose of your visit is to obtain my professional opinion of this object?” Holmes asked his visitor drily.
“Just so,” Sir Arthur replied. “Only I must beg the skull back of you at the same time tomorrow, for it must be returned to the Museum in time for its opening on Monday. It has pride of place in the main gallery and its absence would be remarked on.”
Holmes nodded his agreement and after a few more pleasantries, Sir Arthur took his leave. I heard the street door close downstairs, went to the bay window, and looked out.
“Well, there is one thing we should be glad of,” I remarked as I watched our author hail a hansom cab in the drenching rain.
“Yes? And what is that?” Holmes inquired.
“We have met our Maker and yet we are still alive,” I replied. “There are not so many men who can boast of that!”
Holmes smiled wanly at my feeble jest. Then he shook his head thoughtfully and went on, “Is it not passing strange that a man like Sir Arthur, so credulous that he trusts in ouija boards, seances, and such like hokum, could be the creator of such a dispassionate, rational and analytical mind as my own?”
“It is at once incredible and yet entirely human,” I ventured.
Holmes looked at me askance. I felt the lack of the human touch in my friend again. It was not so much that he did not forgive us mortals our inadequacies, our preposterous vanities, our contradictions, and our secret hurts in our broken places; rather that he - the great reasoning mind, the Babbage Engine of logical deduction - was oblivious of them.
“Do you not see, Holmes, you are Sir Arthur’s polar opposite,” I explained. “You are everything he is not but perhaps he wishes that he were. He believes instinctively and unconditionally; you require empirical proof.”
Holmes nodded pensively and fell silent, as if pondering my words. Though I knew that my friend had made an exhaustive study of the mineralisation of bones in order to determine the length of time a cadaver had been buried, I had not known before that he was interested in palaeontology, and I remarked on this.
Holmes idly stabbed a glowing coal in the hearth with the poker. It popped loudly and a shower of sparks rose up the chimney. “Indeed I am, for I consider the study of fossils to be a species of the detective genus,” he replied. “In uncovering the distant past, as in the detection of crime, one must be scrupulously attentive to seemingly insignificant details. Then, on the basis of these minute details and small evidences, a whole castle of supposition must be erected until you arrive at your reconstruction of the past - that is, the truth. It is a perilous intellectual endeavour, for you must build upon such uncertain foundations that your castle is always, so to speak, teetering over the abyss of error and at risk of collapse.”
Holmes glanced at the skull of Piltdown Man and went on: “And if that were not difficult enough in itself, the field of fossil-hunting is not without its mountebanks and charlatans. Do you not recall the case of Flint Jack, or Fossil Willie, who faked flint tools of supposedly great age and peddled them to credulous antiquarians? Or, indeed, the forgery of the brontosaurus?”
“The brontosaurus!” I exclaimed. “But that’s the most famous of all the dinosaurs. What on earth is wrong with it?”
“Its first discoverer, a Mr. Marsh, lacked a head for the sauropod skeleton that he had excavated, so he attached the skull of a brachiosaurus, an entirely different species of sauropod, to its other bones, thus creating a chimera which never existed in nature. I warn you, Watson, the investigation of prehistory is a treacherous endeavour, and before coming to any conclusions we must examine our subject meticulously, proceeding carefully from evidence to inference, following the example of Mr. Darwin’s masterwork.”
I had not heard Holmes before on Evolution. So I asked the Great Calculating Mind his opinion of Mr. Darwin’s theory.
“When a theory is backed by such preponderance of evidence as is Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s and Mr. Charles Darwin’s (to give both its authors their due credit) then, in my opinion, it ceases to be a supposition and it becomes a proven truth,” Holmes commented.
I glanced at Holmes’s thin angular face with its high domed cranium, so different from the skull lying on the table before him. “So you admit that you are descended from an ape in the zoo?” I teased him.
“No, not from an ape in the zoological gardens,” Holmes replied. “But from an ape dead long ago, yes. And on both sides of my family. As are you, my friend. As are all men. And women. For all our intellectual vanity, the ape is inside us, and we are all equally cousins to the chimpanzee.”
“So you do not admit of a distinction between the races of man that elevates the white man over others, as mankind itself is elevated over the chimpanzee?” I asked him.
“No, I do not. Though I am of an unusually cerebral nature, I am a man like any other. No more, no less. And that ‘elevation’, that distinction between the races of which you speak, and which is so fashionable nowadays, has no basis in sound science.”
“So your opinion is that the negro race is as advanced as our own?” I blurted, incredulous that my friend was attacking the very foundation of our Empire - for by what right do we hold our colonies if our task is not to bring civilisation to the barbarous and the savage?
“The negro race is no less advanced than our own, certainly, Watson,” Holmes replied. “I could even argue more advanced.”
“How so?” I asked, astounded.
A mischievous smile lit up Holmes’ gaunt face, and he expounded: “Visit the zoological gardens in Regent’s Park and observe the chimpanzee in its cage without prejudice. You will notice its skin, though covered in a sparse, wiry fur, is pinkish-grey in colour, like our own. So you see the black skin of the African negro is an advancement from the original white; I suspect obtained because the chimpanzee is an animal of the rainforest, and it is naturally shaded by the jungle’s canopy, whilst our distant ancestors were creatures of the open savannah, and the darkness of their skins was necessary to protect them from the harsh African sun. So you see our pallid Northern complexion is simply a regression to the initial, more primitive, ape-like state.”
Though provoked by Holmes’ canard, I held my tongue, for minds as brilliant as my friend’s will sometimes fall into gross fallacy, for (in my humble opinion) occasional error is the inevitable consequence of great originality.
Holmes set to work. I can scarcely recount the intellectual frenzy of the next twenty-fours hours, during which time Holmes slept not a wink. Tables were hurriedly cleared of stacks of old journals and newspapers to make space for his labours. Then came the looking glass and the optical microscope, and a painstaking inspection of the skull, the jawbone, and the loose teeth of Eoanthropus dawsoni.
An hour later I was dispatched to St. Barts and the London Zoological Society to ransack their libraries for treatises on the anatomy of both humans and apes, which I obtained only by using Holmes’s name and pleading the urgency of the case. I also retrieved from St. Barts a human skull and jawbone, for the purpose of comparison with the skull of Piltdown Man, which the surgeon-on-duty informed me were the mortal remains of Frederick Manning, the infamous perpetrator of the Bermondsey Massacre in 1849. I admit I felt a certain frisson of emotion in riding in a hansom cab through London in the dark and the pouring rain with the bones of a hanged man at my side.
When I returned to Baker Street the books I had brought were hurriedly consulted, and at one point a frown of displeasure crossed Holmes’ features, like a storm cloud across a sunlit landscape. However, Holmes spoke no words aloud, uttering only a series of quiet “humphs” and “ahas” under his breath.
Holmes advanced to testing the skull and jawbone with sundry vials of chemicals. Soon strange smells were wafting through our rooms, mixing with the smells of Mrs. Hudson’s cooking rising up from downstairs. Drops of chemicals were applied by swab and pipette to tiny areas of the bones, and their reactions minutely observed with stopwatch and microscope. This was followed by more “humphs” and “ahas”. Meanwhile, raindrops spattered on the window and stray droplets of chemicals burnt holes in the bearskin rug spread out before the fire.
Dinner was sent up but remained uneaten - at least, by Holmes. However a cup of tea was drunk and Turkish tobacco was fished from the toe-end of a Persian slipper and smoked in a pipe retrieved from the coal scuttle. Soon a thick haze of purplish fumes wavered beneath the chandelier.
Next Holmes prepared a complex test of his own devising which involved measuring the fluorine uptake of the separate bones to determine their relative ages. As he worked he hummed Wagner’s “Lohengrin” under his breath. I can not say he hummed the opera in its entirety, for the hour grew late, the fire was heaped up to a blaze, and I fell sound asleep in my armchair.
I awoke at five in the morning. Holmes was sitting bolt upright in his armchair opposite mine, staring fixedly and unblinkingly at a point somewhere over my left shoulder. I feared my friend had had an apoplectic fit due to his exertions, and that he had passed “beyond the veil.” I held my breath and watched him for all of three minutes, not daring to disturb him. Just as I had resolved to intrude upon his trance, come what may, he suddenly started up energetically, determined on a new course of investigation.
Holmes’s detective endeavours were now more social than scientific. He hunted through the piles of old newspapers and magazines which he had removed from our tables earlier, searching for articles on the discovery of Piltdown Man. Then, when the first grey light of dawn seeped into the leaden sky, he sent me out into the never-ending rain to collect clippings from the newspaper offices in Fleet Street, and to summon Langdale Pike, a failed actor turned gossip-monger for the gutter press.
When I returned to Baker Street breakfast had been left untouched but another cup of tea had been drunk. Whilst I had been about my errands I noticed that Sir Arthur’s card had been transfixed above the fireplace with Holmes’ jackknife. I approved of this knife-throwing praxis as being an considerable improvement over Holmes’ regrettable habit of practising his pistol shooting indoors when impatient, as now.
Langdale Pike arrived shortly after, reeking of strong spirits and as dishevelled and rat-like as always. For three hours he and Holmes engaged in a vulgar and scurrilous tittle-tattle concerning the characters of London’s scientific and literary communities; concerns that I had thought was beneath the Great Mind. I must confess I felt a pang of jealousy as Holmes conversed so freely with such a low sort of fellow, for I flatter myself to be his especial friend.
Finally, just after two in the afternoon, Holmes announced that he had reached his conclusion. He sent Langdale Pike away without ado and napped in his armchair for precisely forty minutes before the doorbell rang.
It was Sir Arthur again. Mrs. Hudson showed our visitor up. He was carrying a sizeable object wrapped in brown paper, which he placed carefully on a side table.
Once we had exchanged greetings, Holmes gestured to the skull and told his author bluntly, “Your Piltdown Man is a hoax, I tell you. A fraud.”
“Surely it is not a fraud,” I remonstrated with my friend, shocked by his abrupt speech. “At worst, it is merely a mistake.”
“No, Watson,” Holmes replied assuredly. “A mistake is when a palaeontologist erroneously attaches a dinosaur’s skull to the tip of its tail instead of to its neck and produces a most peculiar monstrosity. Yes, that mistake happened: look it up, the unhappy beast was named Elasmosaurus. But a fraud is a conscious attempt to deceive and to mislead others, and that is what this skull is.”
“Dammit, Holmes, are you certain?” Sir Arthur replied testily. “Our best experts at the Natural History Museum have certified Piltdown Man to be genuine. If this gets out, it’ll turn the accepted truths of archaeology upside down.”
“Nonetheless, it is a hoax,” Holmes pronounced without a scintilla of doubt. “As regards the skull it is indeed old, in the usual meaning of that word. But I estimate it to be around five hundred years old, give or take a century, and not five hundred thousand years of age. Whoever this skull belonged to lived in Medieval Britain, and not in prehistoric times. Furthermore, I am not convinced that their brain pan was any smaller than our own. It has been reported that the workers in the flint quarry who made the discovery at first thought the skull was a fossilised coconut and smashed it deliberately. I do not know if this tale be true, but I believe the skull’s surviving fragments could be assembled into a modern cranium equally as easily as it has been assembled into this smaller, supposedly ancient one. Finally, and to my mind conclusively, the skull’s fragments have been artificially aged with iron solution and chromic acid.”
Holmes then turned to the jawbone and its loose teeth. “As regards the jaw of this so-called Piltdown Man, it would indeed be extraordinary if it had ever belonged to any human, ancient or modern. It is the jawbone of an orang-u-tan, the so-called Man of the Forest of the East Indies. See here where it has been altered with a file to make a fit with the human skull. As for these teeth, which were found separately, they are from an adult chimpanzee. They have also been filed down to create a more human appearance. In conclusion, Eoanthropus dawsoni is an elaborate deception practised upon the scientific community by a person or persons unknown. Such pranks appeal to a certain type of frivolous, fanciful mind, which takes pleasure in outwitting and misleading the forces of science.”
I glanced at Sir Arthur. He did not flinch.
“Oh, do not look at our visitor for surprise, my dear Watson,” Holmes exclaimed. “He knew full well that the skull was a hoax before he climbed our stairs.”
“Then who perpetrated this deception?” I wondered.
“That is indeed an apposite question,” Holmes said. “To my mind there are three suspects who had the means, motive, and opportunity to wreak this mischief - for we can safely exclude the workers at the flint quarry where the finds were made as they would hardly know a fossil from a dog bone. The first suspect is Mr. Charles Dawson, the discoverer of the skull and jawbone. This Dawson is a small-time dealer in antiquities of questionable provenance and an ambitious and unscrupulous social climber. I believe him to be a part of the conspiracy, for his presence at the quarry during each of the finds is damning evidence against him. However, I believe he lacks the audacity of mind to conceive of this business. In my judgment he was only a tool in the hands of a greater intellect.”
“So who else do you suspect?” Sir Arthur asked uneasily.
“My next suspect,” Holmes replied, “is Father Teilhard du Chardin, a young Jesuit priest who assisted Dawson on the dig. This Jesuit, of undoubted brilliance of mind, has the most peculiar notions. For instance, he seeks to reconcile science and religion, and to make evolution an argument for Christianity.”
“But did not Charles Darwin fear that he had murdered God?” I recalled hazily.
“Indeed Mr. Darwin did lose his faith,” Holmes said. “But this Catholic Father affirms that God works through evolution to create beings capable of consciousness who in turn will fill the universe with divine energy. To my mind it is a clever argument but a specious one. For one thing, it fails to account for nature being red in tooth and claw, and for our own cruelty and indifference to the suffering of others. To be frank, I fear for the young man. Though he may not be burnt at the stake for heresy, like Giordano Bruno, I do not think the Roman Church will make his life an easy one. Nonetheless, I acquit Father du Chardin of this hoax. He abandoned the dig immediately after he had discovered a supposed canine tooth of this supposed Piltdown Man, in fact a chimpanzee’s tooth, and he has not spoken of it since. To my mind he suspects the fraud but he cannot prove it, and so he remains silent.”
I could not hold back a moment longer. “So you suppose Mr. Smith Woodward of the Museum to be the architect of this fraud?” I preempted Holmes. “For did he not verify the skull of Piltdown Man as genuine and introduce it to the world?”
“Indeed he did,” Holmes replied. “But I accuse him of nothing. He is merely a hapless dupe; a careless scientist who saw what he wanted to see because it fitted in with his foolish preconceived ideas about the racial superiority of the English.”
Holmes then turned and glared at Sir Arthur. I knew that look well from past investigations.
“Surely, Holmes, you can not be accusing your own author?” I exclaimed.
“Indeed I am. You are a freemason I think, Sir Arthur?
Sir Arthur remained silent.
“Exactly. A man may not say so outside the brotherhood. But your handshake gives it away.”
Sir Arthur nodded imperceptibly, as if conceding the point.
“And this Mr. Dawson is a freemason as well?”
Sir Arthur did not reply.
“Come, come, Sir. You hail from the same part of Sussex. You are friends. You are known to have driven him to the dig site in your motor car. Where did you make his acquaintance if not at your Lodge? And what is the Lodge for if it is not for men like you to become friends?”
Sir Arthur nodded imperceptibly again. Holmes was warming to the chase now.
“To speak freely, as a man may with his author, you are a man of strong and ungoverned imaginative powers. Such is their force that you believe in communication with the spirits of the dead, and in the existence of fairies, and in such like superstitious claptrap. You have even quarrelled with Mr. Houdini, asserting that he has supernatural powers and refusing to believe that he has not, even when he has explained to you how he performs his escapes. As Mark Twain once observed, it is often far easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled!”
Rarely had I seen my friend speak with such ill-concealed contempt for any man. And the man he was addressing was his own Maker!
“I believe you proposed this hoax to Mr. Dawson after a dinner at your Lodge, when full of wine and in high spirits,” Holmes accused Sir Arthur. “The planning of it was an intellectual game for you, an exercise of your over-active imagination. But Dawson, eager for any kind of fame, took it upon himself to realise your conceit. Then, with or without your knowledge, Dawson took this skull and jawbone to Smith Woodward and convinced him that it was genuine. And you have watched in alarm as your prank has gotten out of hand, and now has the makings of a full-blown scandal. And you are embarrassed and caught, so to speak, not between two stools but between two fools, this Dawson and this Smith Woodward. Am I right or am I right?”
“Of course you are right,” Sir Arthur begrudged Holmes sourly. “You are always right. Do you not find it tedious? Do you not wish to be wrong once in a while?”
“What boneheaded idiocy this whole farce has been!” Holmes exclaimed suddenly, slamming his hand down upon a table. I confess I was amazed by his passion. He looked his creator levelly in the eye, and went on, “Now tell me why you are really here. Because, if my suspicion is correct, there is more to this affair than just this skull. And no more deceptions, Sir Arthur,” he warned him sternly, “or else I will wash my hands of you.”
Breathing heavily, Sir Arthur unwrapped the object he had brought with him from its brown paper. It consisted of two large pieces of bone, evidently once joined together.
“Dr. Watson, you were in India, perhaps you would care to examine this gimcrack,” Holmes invited me.
I needed no second invitation. The two pieces were made of elephant bone, or perhaps mammoth bone, and had the appearance of great age. Their surface had been crudely scored over with a flint tool. In size and shape the two pieces, when joined together, strongly resembled a cricket bat. I could not help but exclaim that, if I did not know better, it was evidence that the first Englishman played that most English of games half a million years ago.
“Exactly, Dr. Watson. But we do know better, do we not? As the skull is a fake we may conclude it that this object is likely a fake as well.” Holmes turned to Sir Arthur. “I surmise, Sir Arthur, that this object was discovered lately in the same flint quarry as Piltdown Man’s skull?”
Sir Arthur nodded.
“And that it was discovered not by you, or Mr. Dawson, or Father Teilhard du Chardin, but by somebody outside your narrow circle?”
Sir Arthur nodded again. I noted how he shuffled awkwardly on his feet, and his brick-red face had acquired an even redder shade than usual. The man was embarrassed!
Holmes exclaimed almost joyfully, “Then this is quite the most elegant blackmail note I have ever beheld!”
“Blackmail?” I echoed.
“Perhaps that is too strong a word, Watson. But the hoax has been discovered and this absurdity, this cricket bat of antiquity, is the discoverer’s way of informing its perpetrator that the game is up.”
“But why a cricket bat?” I asked.
“That is the elegant part of it. Sir Arthur, you were a proficient sportsman in your day, were you not?” Holmes asked, revealing the fruits of his gossiping with Langdale Pike. Then the Great Mind turned to me and remarked, “Our author here played rugger for Blackheath, your club, Watson. And he was an excellent cricketer. He even once dismissed the great W.G. Grace and wrote a poem about it. I believe this cricket bat is the blackmailer’s artful way of alluding to that feat.” Holmes turned back to Sir Arthur and concluded, “Naturally, the questions you seek the answers to are, who has discovered your hoax, and how they are to be silenced. Is that not so?”
“Silenced!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, silenced. I’m afraid the mischief that Sir Arthur and this Dawson have perpetrated has spun out of control. Piltdown Man’s skull has been accepted by the keeper of the National History Museum as authentic. A dozen scientific papers have been written on it. Were it to be exposed now, Mr. Smith Woodward’s reputation would be ruined. He would have to resign. The reputations of many other scientific gentlemen would also suffer grievous harm. As for our author, the scandal would destroy his career. Even his knighthood would be in question. And Mr. Dawson would be ostracised. And do not forget, Watson, that these men have wives and children who would suffer with them. The devastation would ripple outwards like a stone dropped in still water and take in many innocent lives.”
“See here, Sherlock! It is your reputation as well as mine in peril,” Sir Arthur retorted brusquely, blustering in the way that men do when they are both anxious and ashamed. Then he continued, “I may call you Sherlock, mayn’t I, considering how we’re family, so to speak? If I am disgraced in public, doubt will be cast upon your achievements as a detective as well. It’s never clever for family to wash their dirty linen in public, you know.”
“But surely we must reveal the skull is a hoax. Science demands it!” I urged. “Is not the truth sacred?”
“No, unfortunately that discovery must be left to others, Watson,” Holmes reluctantly decided. “I have sworn us to secrecy and we must keep our word.” Holmes turned to his author and bargained: “If I hush up this scandal for you, will you set me free? I have grown tired of London. And of people. And I have reached that age when a man must think of his death as something natural and inevitable. Whilst I still have time I wish to retire, I think to a cottage in the country, maybe in Sussex. I fancy keeping bees as a hobby; they will not trouble me with their petty affairs. Well, Sir Arthur, do I have my liberty? Do you swear to henceforth keep my name out of print?”
“Dammit, Sherlock, you are my best source of inco…” Sir Arthur protested. But then he thought better of his objection, and he conceded reluctantly, “Yes, I will leave you in peace. You have my word.” He paused, and then added sourly, “Whatever you think that is worth.”
Holmes nodded gravely, accepting his author’s pledge.
“So what do we do now? Should I look up the train times for Piltdown in Sussex?” I asked, eager for one final adventure with my friend.
“Perhaps that will not be necessary,” Holmes replied. “May I examine the cricket bat?”
I handed it to him. Holmes examined it cursorily, pointing out some faint marks where the bone had been worked with an iron chisel. Then he drew the curtains, inserted a special bulb in a table-lamp (for electricity had recently been installed in Baker Street), and asked for the room light to be extinguished.
I did so. The room went dark except for a faint violet light emitted by the table-lamp. The “cricket bat” phosphoresced in the eerie light, and Holmes commented that we were looking at that part of the optical spectrum that bees can see and we can not. Each mark that had been made on the face of the “cricket bat” now appeared as a dark scar, and amongst them I made out the scratched initials “S.W.”
The cricket bat’s maker had had the impudence to sign his handiwork!
Holmes “harrumphed” loudly and remarked it was time to take the skull and bat back to the Museum.
Outside the rain had finally stopped and a gas lighter was lighting the lamps. We travelled across London in two hansom cabs, Holmes choosing to ride on his own with the skull in its hat-box. It was a dark chilly evening and the streets were deserted. A clammy greenish-tinted fog, what the cockneys call “a pea-souper”, was rolling in from the Thames, muffling the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves.
My ride with Sir Arthur was an awkward one. He was a man of considerable pride, and he was embarrassed to have been found out by his own creation, much as a man might feel awkward to be accused of some inadequacy by his own son. I did my best to alleviate his discomfort, for I was grateful to him for my existence, and to ease his discomfort I talked rugby with him.
When we arrived at Kensington it seemed as if the doorman had been expecting us, for despite the Museum being unlit and closed up, he readily granted us admission to the main hall. I gazed up at the gigantic skeleton of the diplodocus mounted there, amazed that a creature so huge could have once walked the earth.
Mr. Smith Woodward appeared at the top of the hall’s stairs. Holmes gestured to Sir Arthur and I to stay back. Mr. Smith Woodward descended the stairs. Holmes met him at their foot and handed him back the skull in its hat-box and the “cricket-bat” in its brown wrapping-paper.
The two men talked awhile in a low voice whilst Sir Arthur and I gazed nervously at two pterodactyl skeletons suspended from the rafters of the great hall. The museum was silent except for our footsteps and it was easy to imagine these terrible monsters coming back to life and filling the shadowy hall with their shrieking cries and their deafening wing-beats. I glanced at Sir Arthur. He had already forgotten his embarrassment, and there was a strange gleam in his eye. I fancy he was imagining a Lost World where dinosaurs still roam.
At last Holmes and Smith Woodward came to some agreement. They shook hands, and Smith Woodward took his treasures and went back up the stairs without acknowledging our presence.
Holmes returned to us.
“We have botched up this matter as best we can,” Holmes explained. “Though, of course, it would have been better had it never happened. Science is hard enough without deliberate fakes and hoaxes. And I am afraid you have lost a friend in Smith Woodward, Sir Arthur. You introduced Dawson to him and vouched for him; he trusted you.”
Sir Arthur bit his lip in mortification, realising his error.
“This is what we have agreed upon,” Holmes continued. “The skull of Piltdown Man will remain on public display. It must wait to take its place in history’s dustbin. To expose it as a forgery now would ruin too many reputations and destroy too many livelihoods. You, Dr. Watson, may write this story with your usual Boswellian flourishes, but its publication will be forbidden until ninety-nine years after its players’ deaths. And you, Sir Arthur, must speak privately with Mr. Dawson and forbid him from making any more “finds”. He is to retire from the field, do you hear? You have been rumbled and paid back in kind. Any more such forgeries and deceptions and you will be exposed and your reputation ruined. Stick to fairies, Sir Arthur, and leave science well alone. You have had your warning.”
Holmes spoke sharply, and I could hear Smith Woodward’s anger at being made a fool of in his voice. Sir Arthur stood with head bowed down and nodded his agreement. At length he breathed out heavily, and I sensed his relief at escaping from this scare with his knighthood and reputation intact.
We parted without ceremony outside the Museum, and Holmes and I rode back to Baker Street together.
I was concerned for my friend’s health after his exertions, for we are no longer young men. I persuaded him to take a sleeping draught containing chloral hydrate and St. John’s Wort. While he waited for it to take effect he improvised contemplatively upon the violin. Music seemed to flow through him. There were snatches of melody that a lesser man would have hurried to scribble down, but Holmes played on with his eyes closed.
Suddenly, he broke off and remarked out of the blue, “Is it not strange that a story can be more powerful than the truth? Who now remembers the Mary Celeste?”
“Surely you mean the Marie Celeste?” I corrected him. “And who does not know the story of the ghost-ship found afloat and in full sail with all her boats on deck but without her crew?”
“No, I meant the Mary Celeste,” Holmes insisted, placing his violin back in its case and settling his angular frame into his armchair. “That was the correct name of the vessel. She was found foundering and her longboat was missing along with her crew. You see, the cold hard facts of the matter are forgotten, whilst her imagined story, as first recounted by our own author, is remembered. Such is the power of myth! - I know that you disapprove of my use of cocaine. Do not deny it, my dear fellow. But I tell you that imagination is a far more dangerous drug than that stimulant. A man imagines discovering an apeman in darkest Sussex as an after dinner jest, but then he finds his fancy turning into reality, and he ends up in a scrape like this.”
Holmes shook his head, almost like a father disheartened by the misbehaviour of his offspring. Then he went on, “Our author has a remarkable capacity for belief. Both for believing things himself and for making others believe what he believes, even if it is arrant nonsense.” The great detective yawned, and continued sleepily, “But perhaps we should be grateful it is so, Watson, for he believed us into being, and he made others believe in us so entirely that now we, who were never mortal, are immortal. I wish him well.”
I was surprised to hear my friend talk in this most un-Holmes like manner, and I told him so. But no answer came back. And when I glanced at him, he was sound asleep in his armchair.
I built the fire up to a blaze for him. A faint smile played upon his thin lips as he slept. I fancy he was dreaming of the warm summer sun, and of lilac bushes in bloom, and of dripping combs of golden honey, and of the endless hum of bees.
