Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of Edgar Allan Poe by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belanger Books
Published: 2019-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

*****

I passed over the remainder of that meal. Sam managed to extract us from the room shortly after the dessert course, repeatedly explaining his exhaustion and promising to deliver his finest performance the following evening. Callisto led us back to our room. Sam settled behind the desk in the sitting room to attend to correspondence and I, feeling the effects of the long day more despite his greater years, retired immediately to bed.

I am generally a very sound sleeper, all the more so in so comfortable a nest. It was a great shock, then, to be suddenly woken at some point in the following hours by what sounded like a piercing scream of dismay, coming from somewhere in the building. I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding, unsure if the cry had simply been a dream until it was repeated. My first thought was that Legrand’s magnificent building was on fire. I leapt from the bed, wrapping a robe around myself as I ran to the sitting room, where I found Sam belting his own robe and looking about in confusion. The clock on the mantelpiece put it at just after five in the morning.

Before I could say anything, there was another cry from the hallway, and footsteps pounded along the corridor. “Death!” a voice cried. “Help! Help! The Colonel is dead!”

To my shame, I will confess that at this moment my impulse was to fly back to the bed, get under all the blankets and not emerge until compelled to do so. Sam, however, seized a pen and some paper from the desk and dashed to the door, running out into the hallway. When I asked him about this later, he blew a pensive puff of cigar smoke to the ceiling. “I’m still a reporter at heart, Mike,” he said, “and reporters are not sensible creatures, as a rule. We have a tendency to run in the direction everyone else is running from. It does keep the breed thin on the ground.”

Cursing under my breath, I ran after him, unwilling to answer the questions my employers would have if harm befell Mark Twain while he was theoretically in my charge. I found him in the hallway along with most of the other guests from our floor, confronting a young Negro boy in the Treasure Chest livery. “One more time, son, and slowly,” Sam said.

The boy pointed back down the hall behind him. “The Colonel, he’s dead,” he said. “In his rooms. Mister, I gotta go tell my boss.” He ran off. Sam looked at me, then went off in the direction the boy had indicated, followed closely by the Ellisons, Mr. Snyder, and Flynn. Looking up ahead, I could see Parson Brown already bustling down the hall.

Colonel Legrand’s private quarters were, as he had said, the mirror image of the Crown Suite, at the opposite end of the building. Arriving there, we found Legrand sitting at the desk, wearing a thin robe. His upper body was sprawled across the desk, and a fearsome wound had opened up much of his skull.

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