Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge by Andrew Lane

Author:Andrew Lane [Lane, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: YA, Mystery & Crime, Historic Fiction
ISBN: 9780230766396
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2013-09-12T05:59:31.120000+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Before anyone could stop him, and before Albano could dispose of the fake ectoplasm, Sherlock leaned forward and snatched it from the air above the table. The light material was almost weightless in his hands, but he could feel it against his skin. The invisible threads snapped, one by one, and the material floated down and came to rest on the table.

‘Turn the gas lamps up,’ he said, but as the words were leaving his mouth the light in the room suddenly flared into brightness. Glancing over, Sherlock saw that Amyus Crowe was moving from gas lamp to gas lamp, turning them up to full strength.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Quintillan shouted. His face was livid. ‘You are a guest in my home. This is an intolerable abuse of my hospitality!’

‘The intolerable thing here,’ Sherlock said loudly, ‘is the way you and this man –’ he indicated Ambrose Albano – ‘are using trickery to try to convince us that you can communicate with the dead, and you are doing it just so you can make money from governments who should know better!’ He gathered up the white material on the table and held it out. ‘This is not ectoplasm. It has not been produced by spirits, and it did not appear out of nowhere. It’s just a magical trick.’

Holtzbrinck and von Webenau were staring at him, open-mouthed. Count Shuvalov was less emotional, but he was still paying rapt attention to Sherlock’s words. ‘But – the face?’ he asked.

‘A projection.’ Sherlock pointed to the far side of the room, where he knew the light projector had to be, based on the way the light had shone on the cloth. ‘You’ll find it up there, hidden behind the wall. There will be a hole for the light to shine through.’

‘But . . . where did the ectoplasm . . . the material . . . come from?’ von Webenau stammered.

Sherlock said nothing, but instead wadded the material up, tighter and tighter, until it was a small knot the size of a walnut. ‘Easily hidden,’ he said. He ran his hand across the table until he found the black threads. Letting the material expand out again into a fluffy cloud, he laid the threads across it. They were stark: black against white. ‘Manipulated from outside the room to take a particular shape.’

‘The shape of a woman,’ Holtzbrinck said.

‘A shape which you believed was a woman.’ Sherlock shrugged. ‘Have you ever looked at a cloud in the sky and thought it looked like a dragon? The mind can play tricks.’

‘You accuse me of trickery?’ Albano protested in his high-pitched voice. ‘Ectoplasm, when touched by human hands, becomes manifest as an ordinary substance. Every psychic knows that! You have proved nothing!’ He stared defiantly around the table, his white false eye seeming to stare at everyone at once. ‘I will not listen to these accusations any more!’

He turned to go, but found Amyus Crowe standing directly behind him.

‘Oh, you will stay,’ Crowe said genially.

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