Warlock Holmes--A Study in Brimstone Read Free Page B

myself upon its excellent bed. I had meant only to test it, but before I realized what was happening, I was fast asleep.

2

    THOSE FIRST DAYS IN BAKER STREET WERE A PROFOUND comfort to me. It seemed as if all the perils that assailed me had dissolved into luxuries overnight. They hadn’t, of course. In point of fact, I had just moved in with one of the most dangerous creatures ever to walk the face of the earth—perhaps
the
most dangerous. Still, the threat that Holmes represented was slow to reveal itself.
    His peculiarity, on the other hand, was apparent right from the start. Though he was kind almost to a fault, there were a thousand social niceties Holmes stood ignorant of. His every meal consisted of toast and soup. I never saw him eat anything else. I couldn’t even be certain the man slept. I never caught him at it.
    He packed his tiny room with the most extraordinary quantity of books. He had a desk in the corner, upon which he kept a kit that resembled nothing so much as a sixteenth-century alchemical workshop (which, indeed, it was). He also had a bed. That was all. The remainder of his floor was covered in books. He had gigantic tomes and single-sheet leaflets. Some were ancient and some contemporary, but they were present in such numbers as to fill his room from floor to ceiling. Such was their weight that the floorboards frequently groaned when anybody stepped in Holmes’s room, or even in the hallway before it. They groaned with a strangely human voice—one might almost discern words. The only area not covered by these books was a cramped path that led from his door to the bed, with a minor spur that diverted to his desk.
    This setup granted the impression that Holmes was living in an overfilled storage shed. I several times enjoined him to trade rooms with me, as my own possessions were few, but he refused. He loved his little hideaway. He was like a hermit crab that had found the perfect little seashell for itself. Often he would retreat there when he felt threatened or solitary. When his mood was foul, I could hear him in there, holding whispered debates with… well… with the walls, or nobody, I presumed.
    Just as common as his depressions were periods of ecstatic mania, during which he would leap about the sitting room with strange vigor, stopping now and then to say how happy he was of my company. In these moments, he was apt to scoop up the battered accordion he kept on the mantelpiece and launch into some antique war shanty or other, singing along with such abandon that you would have thought he, himself, had won the battle in question.
    One morning I woke to find him leaning over my bed.
    “Watson,” he cried, “if anyone calls and says they are the physical embodiment of Amon-Ra, I am
not in
!” He then disappeared into the confines of his bedroom and slammed the door. I was sure I could hear him barricading himself in there, piling his innumerable books against the door. We had no callers.
    Then again, on days when we
did
have visitors, they were strange ones. Holmes would often beg use of the sitting room, preferring to send me to a teashop or Regent’s Park, rather than allow me to sequester myself in my room. I would not have minded so much if these visits had not come at all hours and without warning. There was a little old lady from Dorset who came with the dawn one Saturday. A few dock workers stopped by over the next days. We had numerous visits from a peculiar little man named Lestrade—a Romanian fellow, judging by his accent. He was in his mid-fifties, beady of eye, pale and hunched. He was one of those who had a complaint for every occasion and seemed even less able to abide sunlight than Holmes.
    My first overt clue as to Holmes’s true nature came two weeks after we’d moved in, the day he sprang from his room, interrupting me in the middle of my luncheon.
    “Watson! What a fine day, don’t you think?”
    I agreed that it was, despite the drizzle I could see through the