Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) Read Free

table of bragging salts.  He received several salutes and snaggle-toothed grins from those whose own funds for drinking were running low.  None of these men would have met with his brother’s approval, anymore than Sir Reginald would have approved of the establishment itself.  Nor would he have approved of his brother drinking common ale, or doing anything at all not dictated the his own standards of decorum, wealth and breeding.  But Sir Reginald never visited the ships himself, and he was too preoccupied with clubbing in Pall Mall and seeking the acquaintances of all the right people  to keep track of his younger brother’s questionable activities; so, young William Dunning thought, quaffing his heady mug of ale, what Sir Reginald thought about anything mattered not a battered farthing!
    The men told stories of the mysteries of the sea, of which a few might have actually been true, especially that Marlowe fellow who spun his yarns in such oblique and roundabout ways.  And they spoke of the London, the city of lights and shadows, of illuminations and mysteries.
    “A Chinky mate o’ mine heard a demon howl in the river.”
    “Seen a drowned man crawl up at the Copenhagen Dock.”
    “They’s been passing strange things seen in the sewers,” declared one old hand.
    “You gots to watch what you pass in the sewers!” another quipped, laughing at his own cleverness.
    “White shapes in the darkness been seen,” insisted the first man.  “Me brother seen such in the dark what can’t be called human.”
    “Maybe ghosts,” offered another.  “London’s an ancient town, it is.  Think what of all the people dead and buried here.  Digging down in such fleshy soil, you got to be caring ‘bout what you disturb.”
    “Like the Ghosts of the East End,” Dunning said, thinking  not only of some wild stories he had read in the back pages of some of the less discerning newspapers, but of the quickening of his own heart during his sojourn through the mist.  “They say people have reported such pale ghostly figures floating through the fog, and have been seen vanishing into the ground.”
    “The Vanishments,” a man whispered.  “People taken in the night by no human hand, what are never seen again.”
    “Yes, I’m sure they all have something to do with each other!” Dunning exclaimed, his voice loud with excitement and ale.  “The East End Ghosts, and people being spirited away – there must be a connection of some kind.”
    “Sure there are spirits in the East End,” quipped the joker.  “Gin!”
    Dunning joined in on the resulting guffaws and snorts of derision, but he did so uneasily.  The papers, even the respectable ones, the ones his brother read at his clubs as he smoked Havanas and sipped ancient Frankish brandy, carried stories of the so-called Vanishments.  Although the mysterious disappearances had occurred mostly in the poorer sections of London, those regions of the East End, such as Whitechapel and Spitalfields, where were also reported outbreaks of ghosts or demons, some were rumoured to have happened in other less desperate boroughs about London, such as Kensington and Holborn.  Dunning suspected there were many more cases occurring than were being reported in the news, that their true scope was being hushed to prevent a public panic.
    He did not press the subject with these men when it was obvious they wanted to leave it alone, to abandon the terrors of the land for the mysteries of the sea.  In their eyes was a certain desperation he had not before noticed, and they laughed too loudly, and lingered even after their coppers had vanished, accepting, almost begging, the generosity of others, not for the sake of the free drinks but because it meant a delay in slipping back into the night’s embrace and the noxious vapours shrouding the City.  Dunning shuddered at the thought of what madness might lie hidden and unsuspected beneath the greyish pall, but he hid well his revulsion