Sherlock Holmes 01: The Breath of God by Guy Adams

Author:Guy Adams [Adams, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Mystery, British Detectives, Private Investigators
ISBN: 0857682822
Amazon: B004N636KI
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2011-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EMERGENCY STOP

I need hardly say that Carnacki’s tale had captured all our attentions. Even Holmes, a man not disposed towards the pleasures of an eerie tale told by firelight, had listened intently after his initial, aggressively rebutted, interruption. Of course, in Holmes’ case, I had little doubt that his analytical mind had been attempting to explain away every apparently supernatural element to Carnacki’s story, beating each and every moment of terror with a stick of logic. Perhaps he was right to do so. Certainly, before tonight, I would have done the same.

Now, however, my faith in the logical and rational had been almost entirely stripped away. I no longer knew what I could believe in, and I can honestly say that that, in itself, was one of the most terrible experiences of my life. We are quite unaware how much we rely on our fragile prisons of belief, whether those prisons are forged of Gods, science, or elements of both, they are what protect us and they are also the filter through which we experience life. We read a tragic story in the newspaper, we see a child die, we hear the sabre-rattling of war... all these things are factored and related to via our beliefs. And without that simple structure, that rigidity, that arrogant assumption that we understand the world and our place in it... well, without that, we are utterly exposed.

“Of course,” said Carnacki, “once I was back beneath the hazy sun of a London afternoon I began to wonder just what it had all meant. It seemed to me that a great deal of effort had gone into unnerving me. In itself this was not unusual in matters where the supernatural plays a hand. In fact, as you are no doubt aware, Dr Silence, many manifestations of a supernatural nature rely on the fear they create in others in order to survive. It is that mental energy that makes them strong. Still, I wondered what the purpose of it all had been, and whether my mysterious informant was victim or perpetrator.

“Settling my nerves with a brandy in the Fitzroy Tavern just off Great Russell Street, I came to the conclusion that, whatever the ultimate intent behind that afternoon’s horror show, I had little choice but to make an investigation into the small amount that I had been told. I made an anonymous phone call to the police to inform them of Newman’s demise (having no wish to find myself sat in front of an interview desk all afternoon) and returned to the British Museum in order to make some more notes on the so-called Breath of God. I didn’t learn a great deal more than I had already known, it seemed to me to be a general catch-all for those more imaginative religious authors wanting to put the shivers into their readers.

“We are all only too familiar, I am sure, of the distinct shift in holy attitude throughout the books of the Bible. God grows from

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