The Sherlockian by Graham Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

smoothed into soft focus by the darkness.
    Harold looked down for a moment and steadied his nerves before taking his next step. Coming to a stop behind Sarah as he turned, he subconsciously crouched down an inch. He peeked over Sarah’s shoulder—she suddenly seemed so tall.
    His gaze started at the unmade bed and the pillows unsheathed from their cases. It moved to the nightstand and the khaki-colored hotel phone, the receiver off the hook, the red message light blinking in a long rhythm, roughly at the pace of Harold’s breath. Then to the lounge chair and matching ottoman, soiled with more scattered paper, a pair of work pants, and a few books. And finally, then, to the floor, and the dead body of Alex Cale.

C HAPTER 7
    The Bloodsucker
    “[He is] a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman,”
    said Holmes, holding up a restraining hand.
    “Let that now and forever be enough for us.”
    —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
    “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”
    December 18,1893, cont.
    London had become an alien land for Arthur, full of strange people going about their strange ways. He felt like Captain Nemo, adrift from civilization and surrounded by monsters. As he tumbled through the rest of this perverse day, eyes seemed to trail him all the way down the Strand, even into Simpson’s, where he stopped for his dinner. Inside, they flicked at him from every dim corner as he ate his kidney pie and read the papers. He flipped through the Times’ back pages to find that even London’s cartoonists had drawn their share of blood. A crudely rendered image showed a young boy reading the final Holmes tale, his face contorted in grief and disillusion. Arthur was now accused of shattering a generation’s childhood.
    He sputtered at the drawing and spilled a droplet of kidney juice onto the paper. The hot beefy broth blotted out the face of the young boy, smudging the ink and distorting his features. The child’s skin turned brown. Curiously, Arthur took his spoon, scooped up another helping, and after pushing two peas and a mushy carrot sliver back onto the plate, he dribbled a few more drops of hearty brown juice onto the newspaper. And then a few more. And then a whole spoonful, until the cheap, soggy paper wrinkled and tore from the liquid.
    Arthur glanced around Simpson’s to see if anyone had witnessed his petulant antics. No one had. Or everyone had, and they were presently gossiping in angry whispers about him. It was impossible to tell.
    On the streets, Arthur wobbled through his errands. His solicitor. The pharmacy. There was some vital shop he knew he’d intended just hours before to visit but whose identity he could no longer seem to recall.
    A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place— that was loneliness. Of course there had been in his years long bouts of solitary hours. In the first—very well, the only—years of Arthur’s medical practice, he logged interminable afternoon after interminable afternoon in his bright, empty office. He would sit at his cheap desk, waiting in vain for patients to arrive on his doorstep. So he made use of the time by writing stories: a long novel called The White Company and a handful of short tales that marked the first appearance of a certain consulting detective. They were such pleasant trifles then—his brooding, cantankerous detective and the oblivious, dim-witted assistant. Holmes was too cold-blooded, too remote for Arthur to become attached to him. But Watson! Well, Watson one could come to love. He was Arthur’s stand-in, not Holmes; it was Watson who shared the author’s biography, the author’s voice, the author’s hotheaded romantic afflictions. Watson was the one he would miss now. But hunched over that desk with his stories, Arthur had never, in all that time he spent patiently hoping to hear the sound of the visitor’s bell, been this