Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes by Jeff Campbell, Charles Prepolec Read Free Book Online

remember the way. Mr. Holmes!” I called, as loudly as I dared. “Mr. Holmes, just close your eyes! Walk forward!”
    We stood for what felt like an eternity — what could have been eternity, I was well aware, for this realm was neither in the real world nor the Neverlands themselves, like a pocket of darkness in the curtain that separates them. An old pocket, filled with the smell of things that belong in no child’s dreams.
    “Holmes!” Peter cried, a little louder, and somewhere in the dark behind us, I heard the soft, deadly whisper of metal on metal, the distant clicking of machinery, like a dozen vile clocks.
    I kept my voice steady with an effort. “Mr. Holmes,” I said. “Mr. Holmes, if you can hear me… What was the first song you learned to play?”
    I listened hard in the darkness, in my mind and my heart, but heard nothing from him.
    Peter whispered, “It was this one.” He took from his pocket (the only pocket he had, hanging from the belt where he carried his knife) his pipes, and played: it was an Irish tune that I’d heard Mr. Holmes weave into fantasias of melody on his violin. Yet it was very simple, the kind of thing a boy might whistle, when he’s been locked in his room for seeing too clearly, and for making deductions about his elders from what he sees.
    Behind us the clicking grew louder, and by the glow of Ten Stars’ fairy-light I could see them, at the far end of the corridor. Four Black Knights, towering and identical. Faceless, as Holmes had said, only through their helmets’ visors I could see the cold glitter of something moving steadily, mechanically. Peter’s eyes widened, but he kept playing, playing as he and I slowly backed from them, until we reached the wall at the end of the corridor, trapped by that pocket of blackness. The lead knight raised its hand, and I could see that instead of a hand it had glittering steel blades coming straight out of its wrist, blades that whacked back and forth like saw-toothed scissors.
    In panic, in despair, my adult self somewhere in dreaming cried, John —!
    Then Holmes was beside us, stepping out of what looked like a pocket of still-deeper blackness by the wall. Ten Stars flickered, dove about him as he dropped the heavy carpetbag, dug from it a second electromagnetic rod. “We’ll only have current for a moment,” he warned as he handed it to Peter. “Mary, when I yell Now —”
    “—throw the switch,” I finished, because there was a switch among the neat maze of wires and batteries visible in the bag. “Is it a magnet?” I called after them, as they went striding, gray-clothed man and green-clothed boy, trailing wires down the corridor toward those faceless dark shapes, those whirling blades. The corridor was narrow, the Black Knights crowded one another, jostling, two behind two as they lifted their deadly slashing hands.
    Holmes said, “Absolutely,” and lunged like d’Artagnan, thrusting the rod into the center of the metal attacker’s breastplate at the same instant that Peter thrust his. “ Now !”
    There was a blazing shower of white sparks, a flash of lightning when whatever was still trying to power the clockwork mechanism of the attacking knights imploded as metal fused to metal. The second pair of knights, running into the first pair, magnetized from them and also froze in a shower of blue sparks.
    Peter’s eyes shone blue and wild, brighter than the lightning with delight. “Super!” he breathed.
    The Black Knights completely blocked the corridor, so Peter put his shoulder to the nearest one, sending all four crashing. “That tears it,” said Holmes, kneeling to wrap up his electrical rods and batteries. “We must find Bobbie and flee, for Nightcrow will come, and he won’t make the mistake again, of using the technology of the real world in this realm.”
    Peter whispered confidently, “This way.”
    We found the boy Bobbie Lewensham in a stone cell, its barred door standing open to the dank