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A BALLAD OF THE WHITE PLAGUE

An introduction to "A Ballad of the White Plague"

This story is an oddity: one of my rare, non-Jame pieces. I was challenged to write about Sherlock Holmes, so I did, although the result is less detective than gothic. Its genesis was a conversation at Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention, when friends linked tuberculosis (the so-called "White Plague"), vampirism, and a particularly gruesome nineteenth century folk song. I took it from there.

P. C.

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" 'Denn die Todten reiten schnell' " Holmes quoted in a sudden, mocking voice. " 'The dead travel fast.' My dear Watson, we are not dead yet, but that may soon be remedied if you overturn us in a ditch."

I was almost startled enough to do exactly that, so long had it been since last he had deigned to speak to me—as if our current plight were entirely my fault!

Lightning flared to the north, broken forks seen through a black canopy of oak leaves, and a moment later thunder rolled down on us like a run-away cart full of rocks. The pony's hooves clattered nervously on the rough stones of the old roman road. Our rented trap bounced and swayed. With nightfall, a cold wind had pushed aside the heat of the August day, and now we stood a good chance of being half drowned, if not pelted with hail or struck by lightning.

"My dear Holmes," I said, mimicking his tone to cover my own quite natural nervousness. "You must admit that our situation approaches the gothic, if not the ludicrous. Lost in the wilds of Surrey! What time is it?"

"The dead of night," he replied in a hollow voice. "The third watch. The witching hour."

"In other words," I said crossly, "about midnight. At this rate, we will never make Bagshot in time to catch the last express to London."

"It was your idea to drag me off for a drive in the country."

"And yours that we return through this wretched wilderness . . . oh really, this is too much!"

"The children of the night!" Holmes quoted again, listening to the distant howl. " 'What music they make!' "

The howl ended in a most unromantic yelp, some exasperated farmer probably having clouted the hound. We were, after all, only five or six miles from civilization, cutting across the woodland that surrounded Surrey Hill. Sandhurst lay to our southwest, Ascot to our north, and Bagshot to our east. If we followed the Roman road far enough, we would rejoin the world, but not in time to return our rented trap and catch the last train home or, it seemed, to escape a drenching. On top of that, Holmes was in a strange, wrangling mood that made me long to shake him.

"You may jeer at my romantic tastes and complain that I reduce your cases to mere sensationalism," I snapped, "but you yourself have just quoted from Burger's 'Lenore' and Dracula. Now, admit: sensational or not, Bram Stoker knows how to tell a tale."

Holmes snorted. "A tale of arrant nonsense. The living dead . . . ha! Some people will devour any story if it is sufficiently fantastic, as your readers have repeatedly proved. Sometimes I wonder how gullible you yourself are. Next, you will claim that, once upon a time, we really did confront a vampire in Sussex."

"I never thought so, anymore than you did. That was real life, not fiction."

"I am glad that you acknowledge the difference," said Holmes tartly.

"Nonetheless," I said, pursuing my own thought, "there are sometimes curious coincidences between the two. For example, take names: Carfax Abbey, where Stoker's undead monster lay hidden in his coffin by day, and Lady Francis Carfax, whom we plucked living from the tomb only a month ago."

When Holmes made no reply, I shot him a look askance. The brim of his hat was pulled down over his eyes, and his chin had sunk into the collar of his gray traveling-cloak, leaving only the predatory hook of his nose. He was ignoring me again.

I knew that the Carfax case still bothered my friend. At first, I thought that that was because he had so nearly failed to deduce Lady Francis's whereabouts in time to prevent the villainous Holy Peters and his female accomplice from burying her alive. As it was, we had barely removed her from the coffin in time to prevent her asphyxiation from the chloroform with which she had been drugged.

The Carfax case took place in July of this year [1902].

Soon after, I moved to my own rooms on Queen Anne Street and for a fortnight did not see my friend. When we met again, I was disturbed by his haggard appearance. He had not been sleeping well, he said, and muttered something about a recurrent dream. In it, his fear apparently was not that the lady would fail to escape her premature grave but, oddly, that she would succeed.

For the intensely rational Holmes to admit to any dream was rare. Far worse was his tacit admission that one was actually robbing him of his sleep. True, I had known him to stay awake for days on end when working on a case, but this case was over, successfully solved, if at the last minute.

It had crossed my mind that Lady Francis might have stirred a latent taphephobia in Holmes. By 1900, the fear of premature internment had grown to epidemic proportions. Recently, an elderly female patient had presented me with a first edition of Tebb and Vollum's Premature Burial and How It May be Prevented. If she died while in my care, so great was her fear of waking in the grave that she strictly charged me to cut her throat before allowing her to be buried. Glancing through the book's bibliography, I had counted no less than 120 works in five languages on the subject, in addition to 135 articles, 41 university theses, and 17 pamphlets published by the "London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial." By God, that gave me nightmares, before I ever heard of Lady Francis Carfax.

But Holmes had never shown any such weakness, nor did it seem likely with his cool, almost clinical approach to any case. In short, I was at a loss to know why the Carfax affair still haunted my friend, and I was worried. Hence my ill-fated attempt to divert him with a country drive.

"Turn here," said Holmes suddenly.

I could see no crossroads, but to the right there was a dark break in the trees. At a tug of the reins, the pony swung down off the causeway, the trap lurching after him. We would end in the ditch after all, I thought, but then the wheels crunched on unseen gravel. We were following a hidden drive through a tree-lined tunnel of darkness. High grass swished around the pony's legs. Branches scraped the trap's sides. The first fat drops of rain began to tap imperiously against the over-arching leaves.

"Holmes, I don't think that this is the road to Bagshot."

"No. It is, however, the road to shelter, if you don't mind a ghost or two."

I was about to demand what he meant when we emerged from the trees. Ahead, indistinct against the dark flank of Surrey Hill, sprawled an enormous building. Then a lightning flash revealed my mistake: the house itself was fairly small, a country manor in the Georgian fashion. Surrounding it, however, like a series of broken eggshells set one inside another, were the ruins of at least three far older structures. Then the darkness fell again like a thunderclap, and again the house seemed huge and misshapen, devoid of light or life, yet watching, waiting.

The wind swooped and rain came spattering down, mixed with a handful of stinging hail. As I secured the pony in the lee of the house, Holmes disappeared inside. Following, I hesitated in an entry way as black as the bowels of the earth, stinking of wet wood and rot.

"Holmes? Holmes! Where are you?"

His voice came hollowly from within: "Welcome to Morthill Manor."

As I groped toward him, the storm breathing loudly down the hall at my back, his words reached me in snatches:

"The name or some variation of it . . . said to date back to Neolithic times, designating the huge barrow mound which itself is the hill. Druids . . . circle of standing stones within the oak grove on its summit . . . 60 A.D., human sacrifice there to ensure Boadicea victory in her revolt against the Romans . . . Following her defeat, Roman soldiers slaughtered the priests, overthrew the stones, and cut down the sacred oaks to build a country villa . . . said to have sealed Celtic infants alive under the floor as foundation sacrifices . . . Watson, you spoke?"

"No," I snapped. I had run my thigh hard against a table and sworn, as much at Holmes and his ill-timed games as at the pain to my old war injury, already aching with the change of weather.

My left hand lost contact with the wall. I stood in the doorway of a long dining room, its dimensions briefly defined by a flash of lightning outside tall, broken windows. Holmes was moving about at the room's far end, apparently in search of something, still lecturing like some infernal cicerone:

"Many structures have risen on this site since then, each built with the bones . . . I mean, the stones of its predecessor, each with its foundation sunk deep into the same thirsty darkness. In the Middle Ages, a convent rose on the villa ruins, but was abandoned because of 'strange noises under-ground.' Later, it was learned that the abbess had ordered thirteen young novices to be walled up alive for 'consorting with the dead of the mound.' During Elizabeth's reign, the house was rebuilt, but again abandoned after tainted water from a new well shaft killed nine children. In 1645, Roundheads burned it to the ground under the impression that the wife and children of a Royalist supporter were hiding inside. Unfortunately, they were. Ah."

A candle flared. The light flickered across Holmes's sharp-boned face, and then across that of the young woman behind him. I could not suppress a cry, even as I realized what I was seeing. Holmes turned and looked at the portrait over the fireplace. I believe that its sudden, spectral appearance startled him too, though the only sign was a quiver, instantly controlled, in the hand which held the candle.

"The current structure dates from 1725," he said. "Its last owner, to my mind, was its worst. There, if you please, is the portrait of a true vampire."

The light called her forth from the shadows, ghostly in her pallor, yet strangely, avidly alive. The pose and style were reminiscent of da Vinci's "Mona Lisa." Her hair, the shade of anemic strawberry, was pulled back from a broad, white brow to tumble luxuriously down below her waist. Her eyes were a pale, almost luminous green. White teeth—the incisors, not the canines—showed between unexpectedly full, red lips. She was smiling. I thought, despite myself, that she looked hungry, and Walter Pater's description of that famous painting came unbidden to my mind:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.

No. This would not do.

"Really, Holmes. Next you'll claim to have known this lady."

"Of course I did," he snapped, turning. "Her name was Blanche Vernet. She was my cousin."

Then a strange expression flickered across his face. He was staring at something above my head. Hastily, I crossed the threshold and turned to look up. Over the doorway, chained to the lintel, hung a giant, skeletal branch of mistletoe. It moved slightly in the unaccustomed draft rushing in from the hall, its leafless fingers scraping on stone.

" 'The mistletoe hung in the castle hall.' " Holmes quoted the old ballad in an odd tone, as if surprised to remember it. " 'The holly branch shone on the old oak wall . . . ' "

His voice faltered. For a moment, he looked . . . "haunted" is the only word—but that moment quickly passed.

"You have heard me mention my maternal great-grandfather, the French painter Carle Vernet," he resumed briskly. "Besides his son Horace, also an artist, he had another son, Charles, who became a doctor."

"Your great-uncle," I said, working this out.

"Yes. For a doctor, he seems to have been singularly unfortunate: his first wife, a French woman, did not survive Blanche's birth. His second wife, the daughter of a minor Wallachian diplomat, died some twelve years later under similar circumstances, leaving behind the twin infant girls Alice and Alyse. That was in 1853, I believe, after the family had moved to London . . . Watson, am I boring you?"

"What?" I jerked my attention back to him, away from a second face that stared grimly from the end wall opposite Blanche out of the heavy gold of a mock Byzantine icon. "Holmes, who is that?"

"Irisa," he said curtly, noting the direction of my gaze. "The second wife's sister and the twins' aunt. She descended suddenly from some aerie in the Carpathians and stayed to tend house after her brother-in-law removed his family here in the summer of'62."

Severe, black clothing, an ornate Greek cross on her breast, black brows drawn together over inimical black eyes . . . she was like the shadow cast by Blanche's hectic light, watching her niece down the length of the dining room with the unfathomable stare of a death's-head.

Sodden branches lashed the windows. Atop Surrey Hill, the druids' desecrated grove seemed to pull lightning down from the sky.

Flash. CRACK.

I blinked in the after-glare, seeing not the room but its image burned into my mind, stark black and white. Instead of portraits, the family themselves stood silent and watchful against the walls: black-browed Irisa, pale Blanche, and two little girls in white, side by side in a corner, regarding us solemnly . . . but then my sight cleared and again they were only paint on canvas with dust-blurred eyes. Of the two girls, however, there was no sign.

I cleared my throat. "Dr. Vernet painted these?"

"He did," said Holmes. "Art in the blood will out, one way or another. His last portrait was that which you see over the mantel, but his true masterpiece was its original: his eldest daughter, Blanche."

" 'The baron beheld with a father's pride,/ His beautiful child, young Lovell's bride,' " I quoted the ballad's next verses sarcastically, still half-convinced that Holmes was pulling my leg, not wanting to prove myself as gullible as he thought or as I had just been given reason to fear.

"Oh, yes," he said, ignoring my tone. "He doted on Blanche, for whom nothing was good enough. My father, on business in London, wrote home that Blanche's coming-out ball was the hit of the season and she the nonpareil, upstaging even that other 'Pocket Venus,' the notorious Florence Paget. Oh, my lovely cousin had many admirers, but, as women will, she fixed her wild heart on the least suitable and seduced him."

This was blunt, even for Holmes, surprising bluntness from me in return. "Who?"

He ignored my question.

"In the midst of her triumph, she contracted a cough which proved to be consumption. At that time, Dr. Vernet sold his London practice, bought Morthill, and moved his family here in a desperate attempt to find a cure."

In this, Dr. Vernet had my sympathy. The only "cure" for tuberculosis is fresh air and sunlight, but most victims die anyway, usually from inanition, sometimes from drowning as bodily fluids flood into their destroyed lungs—a far cry from the romantic image of the disease in Dumas's Lady of the Camillias or La Bohème. In the mid-nineteenth-century, the disease which we now call the White Plague killed millions, if not tens of millions, with no end in sight even today.

"I fear," I said, "that Dr. Vernet's effort was gallant, but doomed."

"Call it rather his obsession, matched only by his daughter's ferocious will to live. Tiny as Blanche was—hardly taller than a child—she proved remarkably tenacious of life. Summer passed, and then fall. In the last, bleak days of the year, a black-edged envelope finally arrived—sent by Blanche to announce her father's death."

"Of consumption?"

"Yes. Remember, this was before Villemin proved tuberculosis to be contagious, although it had already been noted that while the disease dawdled with some victims like a fond lover, it galloped off pell-mell with others. This had been Dr. Vernet's fate. Moreover, Blanche informed us that she had inherited all her father's assets, including a large debt owed by my father to hers. She asked—no, demanded—that Father immediately attend her here at Morthill to discuss terms. And so, perforce, he came, bringing me with him."

Holmes looked up again at the leafless branch chained and creaking over the lintel.

"Forty years ago on Christmas Eve, when I was a boy of eight and that bough was fresh . . . "

* * *

Viscum album, the boy Sherlock thought, regarding the spiky greenery over the door. The traditional kissing bough. How seasonal.

He tried to keep his thoughts on this subject—parasitical, sacred to the Druids . . .—but unease gnawed at him, as it had all that long, dark day on the increasingly silent drive to his cousin's house.

Looking back, it seemed that none of their household had been easy since Father's return from London the previous spring. That was when the letters had started to arrive. At first, awkwardly joking about some "damned importunate suitor" in a civil case, he had carried them away to read in private.

Finally, in a stony voice, Mother had said, "Burn them."

From then on, self-consciously, he had—unopened, in full sight of the family—until they had slowed and stopped at summer's end. Intrigued, the boy had slipped back into the breakfast room to rescue the last one from the grate. All that remained was a piece of red paper, ripped on one side and charred on the other, overlaid with a filigree of light ash.

Then, that morning, another envelope addressed in that same impetuous hand, edged in black, lay beside Father's plate.

"Open it," Mother said, and he had.

As he read, his face had blanched. "My God. So much money. This will ruin us." He had looked at Mother, turning paler still. "I must go."

Mother had been silent for a moment and then had suddenly said, "Take Mycroft with you."

Mycroft had looked grim at this. At fifteen, seven years his brother's senior, he took their mother's side in whatever-it-was that had upset her since the previous spring. Father had glanced at him and then quickly away.

"No. I will take Sherlock. A child may soften her."

Now here they stood in their cousin's cold, disordered dining room, beside a long table laden with dirty dishes. Their pony and rig were tied at the outer door; no one had come to take charge of them, the servants having all fled.

"A plague house declares itself," that grim woman in black (Aunt Irisa?) had said as she let them in. Then she had seen Sherlock, and drawn her breath in sharply. "You fool, to bring a child here! Do you know what happens to children in this house?"

The boy wondered about his two little cousins, Alice and Alyse. As he entered the dining room, he thought he had seen the white hem of a child's dress flick out by the far door. Girls are timid, he reminded himself, clutching for the warmth of superiority. Cold as the room was, Mycroft would laugh at him if he shivered: What are emotions to the superior mind? What is physical weakness?

Father hid his emotions poorly. He was pacing now, shooting glances at the door.

Quick footsteps out in the hall, a flurry of white—Blanche stood there, breathless, under the bough, corsaged with holly and crowned with mistletoe. Once she had been as tiny and perfect as a porcelain doll. Now her unbound hair, thinned by illness, floated up about her in the draft from the hall and her eyes glistened. When she looked at Father, the tip of her pale tongue slid as if with a life of its own across the bruised ripeness of her lips. Then she saw the boy, and the smile froze on her face like ice mantling over a corpse.

"What a dear little chap, Siger!" she cried with feigned delight. "My cousin Sherlock, is it not?"

She embraced him as if she would gladly have broken him in two. There was strength there yet, though he felt the rack of her bones beneath the white shroud of her gown and smelled the sweet rot of her flesh, mingled obscenely with attar of roses. Then she began to cough and pushed him away. Flecks of her blood speckled his face.

"How shall we . . . entertain you?" she cried, collapsing into a chair, struggling to catch her breath. "I know . . . a treasure hunt! There is a paper . . . a promise in writing to repay my dear dead father . . . oh, such a great amount of money! Find it, and perhaps you may keep it." She clasped her hands against her wasted breast, gazing at his father. "Look for it . . . under a broken heart."

The boy left the room by the far door, forcing himself not to run. A stair led upward to the second floor. He climbed.

The window at the far end of the upper hallway was small and round, silvery with twilight. It seemed a great distance away, and yet Morthill was not large. After all, it only had two central corridors, one on each floor, with rooms opening off to either side. It should be easy to find his cousin's bedroom. Women liked to keep their secrets hidden close. He hesitated a moment, uncertain, and then turned to the first door on the left, which stood half open.

His boots crunched on broken glass as he stepped inside. The door closed behind him. He edged forward in utter darkness, his feet now rustling as if through fallen leaves. He ran into something, hard. A table edge. More glass fell and broke. Now he could see the vague outline of a window. Advancing on it, he pulled down the black velvet which muffled its long, narrow frame.

Twilight glimmered into the ruins of Dr. Vernet's laboratory. Here was the squat hulk of an alchemist's athenor; there, rows of shattered retorts like jagged, crystal teeth; everywhere, the pages of books ripped out and strewn in drifts about the floor. Chemical formulae, astrological symbols, and Celtic runes tangled in black charcoal across the whitewashed walls.

Eon sang nepeut mentir, read one notation. Le sang c'est la vie, proclaimed another—and a third, simpler and more raggedly written: Sangsue. Leech. Bloodsucker.

Scrawled over it all, in letters almost too large to read, was a single, repeated word: NON, NON, NON . . .

There were secrets here, but they belonged to the doctor, not the daughter. He must look elsewhere.

The boy dragged the door open again, grating over shards of glass. Beyond, however, lay not the hall but another, smaller room. He must have lost his bearings in the dark, he thought. Thin light showed him two iron cots, bolted together side by side. One was draped with leather straps. The floor beneath it was dark, and greasy, and there was a smell.

The boy paused, thinking that he heard the distant voices of children, singing. Alice and Alyse must have come upstairs before him. This was a cold, lonely place. He would find his little cousins and ask for their help.

But each door only led to another room, never to the hall.

As night fell, the boy wandered on, deeper and deeper into the house. How cold it was and how silent, except for a chill winter's rain stealthily tapping on the windows. Where were his cousins? Where was he? Maybe he was no longer even in the same house which he had entered—oh, such a long time ago, it seemed. What if tonight all the Morthill manors down through the ages had come back, stone, and oak, and human bone?

("Do you know what happens to children in this house?")

What if, even now, black-robed monks were walling the little novices up alive? In the dark, gagged and bound, they beat their heads against the newly set stones: Ta-thump, ta-thump . . . and from within the mound came the slow, heavy answer: THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

What if, even now, Roman soldiers were bending the limbs of a child to fit into an oak-lined cavity under the floor? "The earth is still hungry," the centurion in charge would say—in Latin, of course—and they would come tramping through the house, looking for another child to bury alive . . .

Then, to the boy's relief, he heard the singing again, closer now, almost clear enough to understand the words. They were playing hide and seek with him. He hurried on through door after door, room after room, following the thread of song, until at last he entered a chamber which reeked of roses.

At the foot of an unmade bed was an oblong chest, the size of a child's coffin. Was this what his little cousins had wanted him to find? He listened for them, but only heard the rain, tapping on the windowpanes. The box was oak, black with age, bound with iron. He traced the crude carving on its lid—a spray of mistletoe, split by a finger-wide crack. Then, gingerly, he opened it.

Within lay a welter of Blanche's under-garments.

At first the boy thought that the bosom of the negligee uppermost was soaked with blood, but then he saw that the red was the backing of a lace paper valentine, ripped down the middle. He had found Blanche's broken heart, whose other half his father had burned almost but not quite to ashes.

The boy looked on, detached, as his hands shredded the paper. (What are emotions to the superior mind?) Crimson fragments fell into the chest like a sprinkling of blood.

Then he knelt to burrow beneath the shattered "heart," through layers of not-very-clean linen. The smell made his head swim. Breathing through his mouth, he clambered inside the chest so as to be done searching as quickly as possible. Camisoles, chemises, drawers, petticoats, no, no, no . . . yes! Here was a legal document: his father's promissory note, tucked into the bodice of a peignoir.

Then the chest's heavy lid crashed down on his head.

Darkness. Pain. Confusion. Fear.

The reek of sweat and perfume clotted his lungs. He . . . couldn't . . . breathe. Her arms were wrapped around his neck, tightening as he struggled . . .

Don't struggle. Listen. The children are singing:

 
The mistletoe hung in the castle hall,
The holly branch shone on the old oak wall,
The baron's retainers were blithe and gay,
Keeping the Christmas holiday . . .

Mistletoe. He was inside the mistletoe chest, tangled up in his cousin's clothing. There was a crack in the chest's lid. He was not going to suffocate.

Be calm, he told himself, still more than half dazed. Breathe deeply. Never mind the woman smell. My croft says women will kill you if you are weak . . . if you feel . . .

Then, when his heart finally stopped hammering and he had caught his breathe, he tried to lift the lid. At first it resisted and he thought ( . . . be calm . . . ) that someone was sitting on it, but it was only stuck. At last he was out of the chest, of the room, down the stair, into the hall . . .

Blanche sat on the dining room hearth, beneath her portrait. Father bent over her. She had looped her long, pale hair around his neck and he was staring down at her like a rabbit at a snake. The boy's eyes were dazzled—by the firelight, he groggily supposed—but it seemed to him that a darkness loomed over them both, as if the house itself stood there, watching, waiting. Then Blanche drew his father down. They kissed. And the darkness smiled with Irisa's thin, cruel lips.

The boy heard a strange sound, then realized that he himself had made it.

Father broke away from Blanche, as glad of the interruption as of a rescue. He fussed over his son, brushing fragments of red paper out of the boy's hair, staring when his fingers came away stained with blood. The chest lid had struck hard. The boy looked blankly down at his own hand, at the stiff legal paper which he still clutched.

He heard singing. No, he was singing:

 
The baron beheld with a father's pride,
His beautiful child, young Lovell's bride,
While she, with her bright eyes, seemed to be
The star of that goodly company,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!

Blanche stood rigid, glaring like a Gorgon at father and son. "Siger, why did you bring this brat? Was it to remind me how false you are, what other bed you have shared?"

Darkness moved. For a moment, the boy stared directly into Irisa's black eyes, inches from his own, and then she had retreated, taking the promissory note with her.

"Go," she murmured in Blanche's ear in her heavily accented English. "Take this. Lure him to your narrow bed. The song guides you."

Blanche looked blankly at the paper which her aunt had thrust into her hands. Her full lips framed the song's next line. Then she caught her breath in a gasp of laughter and began raggedly to sing:

 
I'm weary of dancing now, she cried:
Here tarry a moment, I'll hide, I'll hide,
And Lovell, be sure thou'rt the first to trace
The clue to my secret lurking place.

"The clue, 'Lovell,' the clue!" she cried, waving the note in Father's face as he stood as if turned to stone. "Find me and—perhaps, perhaps—you may keep it!" Then she thrust the paper into her bosom and ran from the room, her aunt following like her shadow. And again the boy sang, as if possessed:

 
Away she ran and her friends began
Each tower to search and each nook to scan,
And young Lovell cried, oh where dost thou hide?
I'm lonesome without thee, my own dear bride,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!

But the boy was singing to himself. Siger Holmes had left the room. Trailing after him, Sherlock found his father standing irresolute at the foot of the stair, listening to the voices above—the aunt's low and intense, her niece's shrill with rising anger.

"Leave me alone!" Blanche suddenly cried out-loud. "Why do you prattle of the dead? The dead are nothing! Only life matters. I am alive, and I will live, do you hear? Arrêtez N'y touchez pas . . . "

A hollow thud cut off her words.

Father ran up the stairs. The boy stumbled after him. Irisa stood in the upper hall before the closed bedroom door, stern as Fate, implacable as Nemesis.

"Leave," she said. "She is my business now and none of yours, nor should she ever have been. Leave, and the debt which you owe this house is buried forever."

"What have you done with her?"

"Can you not guess? Sing, boy!"

And the boy sang:

 
They sought her that night, they sought her next day,
They sought her in vain when a week passed away,
In the highest, the lowest, the loneliest spot
Young Lovell sought wildly, but found her not . . .

"Stop!" cried Father. "I cannot . . . I will not understand! Why are you doing this?"

"In my homeland, we know how to deal with such heartless stregoica as she, who must feed their lust at whatever cost to others, who prey upon those whom they should first protect."

"You think her a vampyre, like Polidori's Lord Ruthven or Prest's Varney?" Father tried to laugh. The boy could see that he thought her mad, and that she frightened him. "Come, the pallor of her cheek and the blood upon her lips are the curses of her illness, nothing more. You are an educated woman. Surely you cannot believe such wild tales!"

She smiled, and her smile was a terrible thing.

"I believe in evil. I believe that no place on earth is immune, including your oh-so-civilized England. Do you think that only nosferatu prey upon the innocent? Shall I tell you why this woman still lives while her little sisters lie side by side in the grave? Because that hero of science, their father, stole the blood from his infant children's veins to transfuse into hers. There."

A black-gloved finger stabbed like a lance at the laboratory's closed door across the hall.

"He took and took and so did she until there was nothing left to give. Too late did I understand those devils' marks scrawled across the wall, those iron beds of pain. Too late, his remorse, too late. Oh, my dear little nieces, my sweet Alice and Alyse . . ."

For a moment, grief cracked the dark mask of her face and something darker still glared through, beyond reason, beyond mercy. Then by ruthless will alone she pulled herself back together.

"Leave," she said again to Father, with such awful, cold scorn. "You weak, foolish man. Once you willingly embraced her corruption and now she has breathed death into your mouth. I know. I saw. Leave. Soon enough, you will join her in the grave's narrow bed. Listen: already she calls to you."

And they heard. Inside the bedroom. Muffled. Raging. Thuds. Long, scraping sounds. Fists beating again the coffin lid. Nails scratching . . . Father made a choking sound. Then he snatched up his son and fled. Behind them, Irisa laughed and laughed. No one ever saw Blanche again.

* * *

 
And years flew by, and their grief at last
Was told as a sorrowful tale long past,
And when Lovell appeared the children cried,
See the old man weep for his fairy bride,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!

The echo of Holmes's voice died in the room, swallowed by its dank decay. The storm was muttering off into the distance, leaving the melancholy drip of water outside the manor and in.

"Curiously enough," he said, with a shaky return to his normal, dry manner, "that ballad is based upon a tragedy which befell a family in Rutland named Noel. We cannot seem to escape it or the Christmas theme—or can we? Gone she was, but my father did not weep. He died within four months, coughing blood. I nearly followed him. As I lay ill, I overheard that Irisa was also dead, of self-inflicted starvation. A refusal to consume, if you will. Nonetheless, some curses are . . . very persistent. Even now, in my dreams, I hear it: fists beating against the coffin lid, nails clawing . . . "

I stared at him, speechless, then blurted out the first question that came into my mind. "B-but what about the two little girls?"

Holmes drew a thin hand over his face. "How can I have forgotten? Of course, they were already dead. I saw their gravestones among the trees as we drove away."

This was too much for me. "And they, I suppose, are the 'ghost or two' which you promised me before we entered this foul place, not to mention a Wallachian madwoman, an evil scientist, and a vampire in the linen chest. Oh, well done, Holmes. Bravo! And you call me romantic!"

His attention sharpened and he threw up a hand for silence. I, well trained, instantly obeyed.

We listened. Water dripped, the wind soughed, the old house creaked . . . and then it came again, from above us somewhere on the second floor: a faint rasp, a muffled thump.

"Oh, really!" I exclaimed.

Snatching the candle from his hand, I limped hastily down the hall to the far door. There was the stair, with water cascading down the steps. The decayed remains of a carpet made them as slippery as moss in a riverbed as I climbed, clinging to the banister.

I did not want to believe my friend's story. It frightened me the way he had groped after details, not as if making them up but as if drawing their memory out of a half-forgotten childhood nightmare like splinters from a long neglected wound. And such details! Was I really to believe that . . . no, I would not.

But I had to be sure.

Here was the upper hall as Holmes had described it, eerily long, lined with doors. I hesitated on the upper landing, suddenly unsure. After all, here I was, with a guttering candle, in the upper storey of an abandoned house miles from anywhere, on a dark and stormy night, hunting ghosts. For all I knew, we might instead be sharing Morthill with an escaped ax-murderer—which, at that moment, I would almost have preferred.

The first door to the left stood half open. From the darkness within came a furtive rustle, as if of shifting paper.

A hand closed like a vise on my arm. "Don't go in there," snapped Holmes.

I was startled, so quickly and quietly had he come up the stair on my heels, and I was annoyed to find myself whispering. "Why not?"

"Because the way in may not be the way out. And besides," he added, somewhat lamely, "the floor may be unsound."

"A fine time to think of that. Very well, then; if not this door, which?"

He would not answer me, but his eyes betrayed him, sliding involuntarily to the first door on the right. When he made no move to open it, I pushed past him and gripped the knob. It came off in my hand.

I glanced back at Holmes, suddenly as reluctant as he. Candlelight flickered across his face, shadows pooling in the hollows beneath cheekbones and eyes. He stood as if rooted before the door from which his father had fled.

There was no way forward but one.

I set my shoulder to the warped panels and pushed. The lock broke in a shower of rust and the door squealed open on clutching hinges. Mindful of the house's tricks, I reached blindly inside, fished out a high-backed chair, and wedged the door open with it. Holmes stared into the darkness, then entered, as if drawn. I followed.

Candle light flickered on moldering clutter: a disordered bed whose canopy long since had fallen down across its foot, rags of once-elegant clothing strewn about the floor, a pair of long, dingy gloves draped like flayed skin over the back of a chair. More confusion littered the dressing table—age-dull bottles, lotions, notions, and trinkets tumbled together.

One of Carle Vernet's lithographs hung on the nearby wall, depicting an extravagantly dressed eighteenth-century belle seated at her dressing table, admiring herself in its large mirror.

"The picture is called Vanity," said Holmes, behind me, "not that Blanche probably understood why. She had a certain imitative cleverness—like a monkey—but no real imagination."

I looked again, and recoiled. The mirror's rounded shape was that of a naked skull, the twin images of the woman's head and her reflection its hollow eyes, the cosmetic bottles her teeth bared in a cryptic smile. This print, not the Mona Lisa, was the original of Blanche's portrait in the hall below.

"Sangsue" her dying father had scrawled in horror over his meticulous notations. Bloodsucker. Non, non, non . . .

A long, scraping sound made me start. It came from the window. Outside, the fingers of a dead oak again drew restlessly across the glass and tapped against the pane.

I turned to Holmes in triumph, just as he threw back the collapsed canopy. At the foot of the bed was a chest, no bigger than a child's coffin. A crude spray of mistletoe was carved into the age-blackened oak of its lid. At its farther end, caught in the crack, were several long strands of pale hair.

Holmes hesitated a moment. Then he gripped the lid and, with a sudden effort, attempted to lift it. It rose a quarter inch and stopped with a jar that dislodged his fingers. Belatedly, he looked at the key, still turned in the lock. For a long moment we stood there, he staring at the key, I at him. It had grown very quiet outside. Inside, all I heard was the distant, forlorn drip of water. Then Holmes sighed.

"No ghosts need apply," he murmured, turned, and walked past me out of the room.

I suppose I stood with my mouth open a good ten seconds, and then I swallowed. There was the chest; there, the key. Stealthy moonlight pooled about it on the floor, and a breath of air sighed through the broken window. The strands of pale hair stirred . . .

I ran down the treacherous stair after my friend, in danger of adding one more ghost to the house by slipping.

Below, the dining hall had filled with shifting moonlight and shadow. I paused in the hall doorway, searching the walls not for the painted smile of a "da Vinci" or an icon's baleful glare, but for those two white blurs in the corner, forever side by side. They were not there. Something outside the window caught my attention. There they stood, white frocks glimmering among the moon-silvered birch, watching, waiting . . . for what, or whom? Their pale, unblinking eyes gazed upward, as though toward the window of a second story bedroom.

Cold water dripped on my head. I started and looked up. Above me hung the mistletoe, that filthy parasite, each bare twig glistening with a drop of condensation like so many sparkling poison berries.

When I looked out the window again, and cursed my gullibility. Not children but two small, white gravestones leaned toward each other in the family plot, almost touching.

We reached Bagshot in time to catch the last train. Holmes slept all the way to London.

* * *

We have never spoken of that evening again.

Was the whole adventure a practical joke—Holmes's attempt to cure me by surfeit of my foolish romanticism? I want to think so, but I cannot shrug off the story. It haunts me. In my dreams, I wander through endless, dusty rooms, sometimes hearing distant song, sometimes distant laughter. Last night, all too close, there was a muffled voice crying and the sound of nails breaking against wood as hard as iron . . .

Let me out, let me out, let me out . . .

Thus, I have felt compelled on this Christmas Eve to make what sense I can of that strange night four months ago. Perhaps I have read more into my friend's words and especially into his silences than he ever intended. Perhaps he is waiting for me to publish this fantastic tale to have the last laugh. Perhaps, in the beginning, that was his only goal.

I believe, however, that he found himself telling a deeper story than he intended, digging up the buried horror that poisoned his sleep. What he cannot endure is the inexplicable, the irrational. Mere ghosts will never bother him, for he does not believe in them. For him, the mystery is solved. That is enough.

In that, he is more the detective than I have proved the storyteller. Before that sullen, silent chest, my courage faltered, and the story's end remains untold.

[1902]

ADDENDUM

Storytellers die, but do stories ever really end? If you are reading this, then I too am dead, and the guardianship of these hitherto unpublished accounts passes to you.

Whatever my other failings, I have found myself too much both the storyteller and the detective to destroy evidence. At the bottom of this old, tin dispatch-box is the last stanza of "The Mistletoe Bough," wrapped around a key—two keys, as it were, to a single mystery. The dispatch-box itself sits upon a oblong chest made of age-blackened oak, bound with iron, with a crude mistletoe carved into its cracked lid. Without telling Holmes, I had carters convey it unopened from Morthill Manor to the vaults of Cox and Company Bank.

Here, then, are the ballad and the key; there is the chest. As my dear, late friend once said of another case, "It can't hurt now." We all sleep as quietly as our several lives allow beyond, at least, any earthly harm. Do what you will.

 
At length an oak chest that had long laid hid
Was found in the castle, they raised the lid
When a skeleton form lay moldering there
In the bridal wreath of that lady fair.
Oh sad was her fate, when in sportive jest
She hid from her lord in the old oak chest,
It closed with a spring and a dreadful doom
And the bride lay clasped in a living tomb,
Oh, the mistletoe bough!

[1929]

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