Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon Page 3

  “Last December, in the wake of your mother’s death.”

  “Precisely. This year, it is hoped we may resume as before. Or rather, it was hoped. But before I get to that, Mr Holmes, I must furnish you with one last detail which may or may not be of relevance.”

  “Pray do.”

  “As you surmised, I am twenty years old. My twenty-first birthday falls this coming Wednesday.”

  “Christmas Eve,” I said.

  “That is right. I was born on Christmas Eve.”

  “Hence your first name.”

  “Again, that is right.”

  “Watson,” Holmes remarked to me superciliously, “never let it be said that your powers of deduction are not at least the equal of mine.”

  I rewarded him with a dusty stare.

  “When I turn twenty-one,” Miss Allerthorpe said, “I am in line for a sizeable inheritance. It is a legacy left me by my aunt Jocasta. She died when I was very young. I hardly remember her, beyond a few vague impressions. Mostly I recall a rather formidable woman, brusque but well-meaning, with a voice that could be heard several rooms away. Although she was my mother’s sister, her senior by just over a year, the two of them could scarcely have been less alike. Mama, as I have made clear, was anxious and neurotic. Aunt Jocasta was as down-to-earth and dependable as they come. In terms of physique, Mama was tall, thin and brittle-seeming; Jocasta was short and sturdily built, practically as wide as she was tall. Mama did not concern herself with matters beyond the domestic sphere, whereas Jocasta was engaged in politics and a staunch advocate of the rights of women. She believed that women should be educated as men are and given the vote, and she was not afraid to voice her opinions. I am told she once stormed a general election campaign meeting being held by her local Member of Parliament and chanted demands for universal suffrage. Her protest caused disarray and brought the proceedings to a premature halt, resulting in her forcible eviction and an arrest for breach of the peace. I cannot attest to the truth of that. It may just be a family fable. I do know that Jocasta was reviled as a troublemaker in some quarters, and in others considered a radical heroine.”

  “And you are the sole beneficiary of her will?”

  “Yes. Her husband was a prominent sugar plantation owner, Sir Cyril Keele, who died a few years into their marriage. He contracted typhus while visiting one of his estates in the Caribbean. Upon being widowed, Aunt Jocasta sold off his holdings and invested the capital in stocks, living very comfortably thereafter on the interest. She was childless, and her portfolio and cash savings have been held in trust for me since her death. Everything, minus a few small disbursements to charities, will become mine in just a few days’ time.”

  “It is unusual for a legacy to be passed down the distaff line,” said Holmes. “Yet, if your aunt was as favourable towards the advancement of her own sex as you say, then it makes sense. You, I imagine, are her nearest female kin, aside from her late sister.”

  Miss Allerthorpe nodded. “Jocasta, by all accounts, regarded my mother as sufficiently well-off already, for she had married into the Allerthorpe family. She knew, moreover, that my father, as husband, would gain control of the money if it went to Mama, and Mama herself might derive no direct benefit from it at all. She chose to confer it on me instead. You must appreciate that, as a daughter, I will profit in no way whatsoever from Papa’s estate. Upon his death, his money will be passed to my brother in its entirety, as will the title to the castle and Allerthorpe lands, which are extensive. Jocasta felt I ought to be of independent means, beholden to no one – no man – for my living. I believe there is an additional reason, too, why she did not regard my mother as a suitable recipient for the legacy. It is implied by a codicil in the will.”

  “Which stipulates…?”

  “That I am to receive the money only if, upon reaching the age of twenty-one, I am ‘sound in mind’. Otherwise, I do not see a single penny.”

  “She deemed your mother not ‘sound in mind’, then.”

  “With some justification. And it would seem she feared the possibility that I might follow in Mama’s footsteps. Madness is often hereditary, is it not?”

  Miss Allerthorpe aimed this question at me. I replied, “Current medical thinking has moved on from the belief that mental aberration arises from social background and ‘sinful’ behaviour. According to Henry Maudsley, the eminent psychiatrist, just as a propensity towards certain diseases may be passed on through the blood, so may a propensity towards certain abnormal mental traits. It is not axiomatically the case, however, that the child of a mad person will likewise become mad. The trait may stay dormant.”

  “Aunt Jocasta would certainly seem to have made provision for the possibility that, in me, the trait is not dormant,” said Miss Allerthorpe. “I imagine she felt that if I ended up like my mother, I would be incapable of properly handling my newfound wealth and thus lay myself open to criticism and exploitation. It would set a bad example if a woman were seen to lack the wherewithal to manage large sums of money. It would undermine all that Jocasta strove to prove during her life.”

  “What would happen to the legacy if, heaven forfend, you were to be certified unsound in mind?” said Holmes.

  “In that instance, the totality is to be apportioned equally amongst family members of my generation. That comprises a number of my cousins and, of course, Erasmus. Each would receive currency and shares worth in the region of four thousand pounds.”

  Holmes gave a low whistle. “A tidy sum. Yet, with just five days remaining, it does not strike me as likely that you will be considered unfit to receive your legacy, Miss Allerthorpe. Although at the coffee house you implied that your sanity is imperilled, I see scant sign of it myself. You are anxious and agitated, yes. But mad? Hardly.”

  “Little do you realise, Mr Holmes, how close I am to losing my wits,” said the young woman, her hand fluttering to her throat. “There have been times over the past few days when I have truly doubted the evidence of my own eyes, and on one occasion I have been visited by such terror that I can barely bring myself to think about it, let alone talk about it.”

  “Yet you must talk about it, if I am to help you.”

  “I know. Dr Watson, would you be so kind as to recharge my glass?”

  I helped Miss Allerthorpe to more brandy, which she drank almost to the bottom before carrying on.

  “When I relate to you now, gentlemen, the series of incidents that have lately befallen me,” she said, “you will perhaps be incredulous and dismiss it all as nonsense. If, on the other hand, you believe me, then you could be forgiven for thinking that I have indeed taken leave of my senses. I am being haunted, you see. Doubly haunted.”

  “By a ghost?” said Holmes.

  “By a ghost, and by a creature from nightmares.”

  Chapter Three

  THE BLACK THURRICK

  I could see Holmes doing his best to mask his scepticism. In his view, ghosts did not exist, nor any other form of paranormal phenomenon. He was adamant that that which purported to be otherworldly would, when subjected to proper analysis, invariably be exposed as a misapprehension of the data, a hitherto undiscovered natural occurrence, or a downright falsehood. As far as he was concerned, the bright, hard light of empiricism could disperse all shadows.

  I myself was less confident when it came to such matters. To me there seemed plenty of room in this world for mysteries that science and logic could not explain. Human understanding only reached so far before it ran up against the ineffable and the irrational, and without that extra, unknown dimension, life would truly be a poor, drab affair.

  At any rate, where Miss Allerthorpe’s words served to have no effect upon Holmes other than to cause him to purse his lips, they sent a small chill up my spine.

  “With regard to the ghost,” she said, “perhaps I overstated when I said I am being haunted by it. I have not personally experienced any of the various manifestations that might lead one to conclude that a revenant walks the corri
dors of Fellscar Keep. There have been reports from several of the servants, however, concerning inexplicable noises in the castle’s east wing at night. Thuds, bangs and suchlike. Strange breezes, too, that extinguish candle flames like a puff of breath. I do not frequent that part of the building, so cannot attest to any of this first-hand.”

  “The east wing is where your mother took her own life,” said Holmes. “I imagine it holds negative associations for you.”

  “Exactly. There is little call for me to go there anyway. It is a somewhat remote corner, far from the usually inhabited sections of the castle. Only during the Christmas family get-together, when we are overrun by houseguests, are its rooms occupied. For most of the year it lies, as it were, fallow.”

  “The question, I suppose, is whose ghost it might be. How long have these manifestations, as you call them, been occurring?”

  “For several months now. Since spring at least, if not earlier.”

  “I am hesitant to suggest this, but might the spectral shade conceivably be that of your late mother?”

  Miss Allerthorpe nodded. It was apparent that this unhappy thought had already occurred to her. “Hence it is fair to say that I am being haunted by it, even if I have not seen it with my own eyes. What if it is my mother? What if Mama’s restless departed spirit has returned to the very place where she drew her last breath?”

  “Strictly speaking, your mother drew her last breath in the lake, not in the east wing.”

  “Holmes!” I rebuked him.

  “I apologise, Miss Allerthorpe,” my friend said with a small bow. “I am a stickler for accuracy, but I appreciate that in this instance my comment may have seemed poorly judged.”

  The young woman tendered a forgiving nod. “In any case, I have no desire to meet the ghost. Would you, in my shoes?”

  “What about this ‘creature from nightmares’, then? Have you had an encounter with that?”

  “Yes,” Miss Allerthorpe said firmly. “Let me ask you, sirs, has either of you heard of the Black Thurrick?”

  I shook my head. Holmes did likewise.

  “There is no reason why you should have, I suppose,” Miss Allerthorpe said. “London lies many miles from Yorkshire, and what I am talking about is very much a regional thing, confined principally to the East Riding. The Black Thurrick is, one might say, the dark antithesis of Father Christmas. It is an entity that appears only at yuletide, but unlike Father Christmas, the Black Thurrick is evil.”

  “What has it done to earn such a reputation?” said Holmes.

  “According to the tales Mama used to tell, the Black Thurrick punishes children who have behaved badly during the course of the year. It replaces the presents they were due to receive from Father Christmas with clusters of birch twigs.”

  “That is hardly evil. Mischievous, perhaps, but not evil.”

  “It is the least of it. Legend also says that the Black Thurrick steals infants from their homes. If parents do not leave out food for it on their front doorstep on Christmas Eve – a loaf of bread, perhaps, or a handful of vegetables – they will wake up to find their children gone the next morning, never to be seen again. The Black Thurrick will have shinned down the chimney and stolen the babes from their beds while they slept. It stuffs them into the sack it carries on its back and scurries off to its underground lair, where it eats them at its leisure.”

  “I stand corrected. An anthropophagous, child-abducting monster is, indeed, very much the epitome of evil.” The hint of facetiousness in Holmes’s voice was perceptible to me but not, I thought, to Miss Allerthorpe.

  “On many a dark winter’s night, Erasmus and I would sit by the hearth while my mother told us about the Black Thurrick,” she said. “She was a Yorkshirewoman born and bred and had been raised on a diet of local folklore. The county abounds with it, the East Riding most of all. There is the Gypsey Race river, whose waters are said to flow only when calamity is about to strike the nation. There is the Rudston Monolith, a mysterious ancient standing stone reckoned by some to be a portal to the fairy realm. There are numerous reports of werewolves, dragons and phantom hounds, and once, almost a century ago, a meteorite fell to earth near Wold Newton during a thunderstorm.”

  “Nothing too preternatural about that last example,” said Holmes.

  “Yes, but the meteorite’s glowing journey through the sky had a queer effect upon the passengers of a stagecoach below, who fell into a swoon and came round afterward with no recollection at all of anything that had happened. The Black Thurrick is yet another of these legends from the area, and is the one that has left the strongest impression upon me. Mama would portray the creature in such vivid terms. Its long, gangling limbs. Its bright white eyes. Its coal-black skin, darkened by chimney soot. Its sinister, loping gait. The sack upon its back, which writhes as its living contents fight vainly to break free.”

  Miss Allerthorpe’s descriptive powers seemed every bit on a par with her mother’s. I was easily able to conjure up an image of this horrid demonic being in my mind’s eye, and although I was safe in the confines of Baker Street, in the heart of the greatest city in all the world, bulwarked by modern civilisation for ten miles in every direction, I could not suppress a small shiver.

  “Whenever Mama told us about the Black Thurrick,” she went on, “I would experience a thrill of fear and reaffirm my resolve to be well-behaved. Sometimes, during Advent, as Christmas loomed, I would have nightmares about it. I would dream that the creature was slithering down the chimney to kidnap me, and would awaken in a cold sweat, panic-stricken. I took to placing an offering of food outside the castle for the Thurrick every Christmas Eve, to ward it off. In this endeavour my mother assisted me. I doubt she believed the Black Thurrick was real, but she encouraged my fancies. Mama was all in favour of her children developing their imaginations, and read to us extensively from the classics when she was not filling our heads with folklore. It is to her that I owe my love of literature and in particular of poetry.”

  “Did they disappear?” I enquired. “The offerings you left for the Black Thurrick?”

  “A valid question,” remarked Holmes.

  “They did indeed, Doctor. At the time, this seemed to me concrete proof of the Black Thurrick’s existence. With hindsight, I am inclined to think that my mother simply retrieved the food and returned it to the kitchen once I had gone to bed.”

  “A no less valid answer,” said Holmes. “I am to take it, then, Miss Allerthorpe, that the Black Thurrick has now incontrovertibly graced Fellscar Keep with its presence.”

  “One morning a little over a week ago, I went out for a walk. It was a fine, clear day and I felt the urge to stretch my legs. There is a paved causeway some twenty yards long, connecting the castle to the lake shore. It serves as a drive, and at its shore end stands a gateway. As I passed through this, with the intent of taking a stroll through the woods nearby, I noticed an object lying in the snow at the foot of one of the gateposts. It was a small bundle of twigs.”

  “Birch twigs?”

  “I did not identify them as such immediately. At first glance, they were just twigs to me. They were bound with string, and clearly had been left there by someone. Curious, I picked them up to examine them. When I realised which species of tree they came from, that was when I made the connection in my head.”

  “The Black Thurrick.”

  “The Black Thurrick,” she confirmed. “Well, Mr Holmes, I dropped that bundle as though it were suddenly red hot. My heart started racing. I looked around, feeling both fearful and foolish. I half expected to see the Thurrick, perhaps peering out at me from the woods. At the same time I kept reminding myself the creature was merely a figment of fantasy. ‘You are a grown woman, Eve,’ I chided myself. ‘Such things as the Black Thurrick do not exist.’ Suffice to say, there were no eyes upon me. No sinister being lurked close by. There were just the trees, the whisper of the wind through the bare branches, the cawing of rooks – nothing out of the ordinary. I nerved myself to pi
ck up the bundle of twigs again and hurled it as far as I could into the woods.”

  “Who do you think might have put the twigs there?” I asked.

  “I decided it must have been local children,” Miss Allerthorpe replied. “There are a number of scallywags in Yardley Cross, semi-feral little tykes born to inattentive parents. Yardley is the nearest town to Fellscar, only three miles distant – I say town, but it is barely more than a village – and I sometimes see those children out by the lakeside, in a gaggle. The castle seems to hold a fascination for them. They are on our land and know they should not be there, and they dare one another to approach as close to the causeway as possible before running away. Their antics are harmless, and all I could think was that the birch twigs were a prank perpetrated by them. They, like me, will have heard of the Black Thurrick. Perhaps they were sending a message. Perhaps they consider us Allerthorpes to be undeserving of Christmas gifts, for some reason.”

  “Your conclusion strikes me as eminently logical,” Holmes said. “A childish prank seems the most plausible explanation. Tell me, were there footprints in the snow around the gatepost?”

  “Several sets, as I recall.”

  “Had snow fallen recently?”

  “Not for three or four days.”

  “And in that time, I presume a number of people must have passed to and fro through the gate.”

  “Servants make the journey into Yardley Cross at least once a day, to fetch groceries and other supplies. My father and my uncle often go out shooting, too.”

  “A pity. Footprints in snow can speak volumes, but in this case, in the absence of a single set of distinctive tracks, they would seem to have little to tell us.”

  “I curtailed my walk anyway, and returned indoors,” said Miss Allerthorpe. “I had rather lost my enthusiasm for exercise. Then, the very next morning, Erasmus came down to breakfast with a bundle of birch twigs in his hand. He brandished them irritably and demanded to know who had left them on the window ledge outside his bedroom. My father replied that nobody could have, because Erasmus’s bedroom is on the first floor. ‘Are you proposing that one of us scaled the wall to deposit a bunch of twigs outside your window?’ Papa scoffed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, boy!’ I, for my part, was dumbfounded.”