Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon by James Lovegrove

Author:James Lovegrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

Chapter Fifteen

LEAPING TO A CONCLUSION

It was a female scream, and my first instinct was that it had come from Eve’s room. I flung open the door, but the girl remained exactly as she had been when I had looked in a few minutes earlier: snoring softly, her eyes closed. My sudden, precipitate intrusion did not disturb her.

I shut the door and stood in the corridor for several moments, ears pricked. The scream, though brief, had been full of panic and terror, and had come as such a shock that the hairs on my body had stood erect and were only just now wilting again. I waited for it to be repeated, but that did not happen.

Where had it come from? Close by, I thought, but not too close. This narrowed down my options somewhat, but in a place as vast and maze-like as Fellscar Keep, pinpointing the origin of the sound was still going to be a challenge.

“Think, Watson,” I said to myself out loud. “Apply Holmes’s methods, if you can.”

Concentrating, I replayed the scream in my head. What had been my immediate thought upon hearing it? That it had emanated from Eve. Eve, however, was patently not its source.

Then, if it had not come from her room, but had seemed to, might the scream have come from beyond the room?

Now I was getting somewhere. Yes. The scream had been outdoors.

Eve’s bedroom was situated at the tip of the north wing, occupying the entirety of the far end of its third floor, with windows on three sides looking out to the east and west as well as to the north. The scream could have come from any of those three directions.

I re-entered the room, more circumspectly this time. I padded across the rug and peered out between the curtains of each set of windows in turn.

Moonlight shone down upon the lake. A part of me was loath to gaze out over that frozen expanse of water in case, as Eve had done, I should spy a hunched, sack-carrying figure loping across the ice. Absurd though I knew this notion to be, the trepidation I felt was real enough. It was a genuine relief to see nothing out there but blank, empty whiteness.

From the west-facing window, I could make out the portion of the castle on that side. From the east-facing window, the view was much the same. There was the east wing, looming like some craggy cliff against the star-strewn sky. Of the two wings, the east was the wilder looking, its architecture somehow more disorderly, replete with more excrescences than the west, as though its design had been inspired by nightmares. Or was my imagination imbuing it with such a phantasmagorical aspect simply because I knew that Perdita Allerthorpe had committed suicide there and that a ghost, possibly hers, was reputed to walk its halls? Was I, as Holmes had said, bending reality to conform to expectation? No, I did not think so. Regardless of its notoriety, Fellscar’s east wing outdid the rest of the castle in presenting a crazed, menacing aspect to the world.

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