J. Campbell - Gaslight Arcanum - Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

Watson shuddered, repressing memories of similar atrocities seen years ago and a world away. Afghan mountains meshed with Canadian ice in his imagination: slaughter was slaughter whenever, wherever; the vividness could not be unseen. He shifted the weight of the Lee Enfield .303 on his shoulder and cast his gaze out into the bleak blue-white horizon. Here and there, a body dotted the landscape. Dark piles of fur stark against the white.

Holmes stood, his tall frame given impressive bulk by the Caribou-skin parka and breeches supplied by the North West Mounted Police. His aquiline nose protruded just past the edges of the hood, betraying his lean lines. If not for that angular, fine-boned face, Sherlock Holmes would have seemed a bear of a man with the weight of kit upon him.

“Not for food, nor materials,” Holmes said, boots grinding on snow as he made his way through the hunting settlement. Stopping at a smaller imploded igloo, he regarded the huddled occupants. “Raiding is a poor strategy in the north, Watson, one rarely sees it. Not slavers…” he paused in mid thought. “Hold on.” He circled the igloo, eyeing the tracks all round.

“Here, Watson! Signs of a struggle … one of these unfortunates being led away. Yes! This was it — this was the prize they sought. Confident beggars — they’ve made no effort to conceal their tracks!”

“We follow, then?” Watson said, shivering at the thought.

“Definitely,” Holmes smiled. “The game, dear Watson, is most assuredly afoot!”

Watson caught the look in Holmes’ eye — that look so often described as a cocaine-induced glaze in the written accounts, but which in truth was of a far different nature altogether.

“Holmes,” Watson said, lowering his voice, “do you really see these clues in the snow, or have you divined them? Are you certain a captive was taken?”

Holmes grinned. “One way or the other, I have seen it, and it is true. Come!”

With urgent energy, Holmes marched back to the dog sled. Two junior constables stood waiting, faces white as the snow they stood upon, anxious eyes peering out from fur-lined hoods like the eyes of wolf-spooked sheep.

“We’re going on,” Holmes informed the men. The man on the left — Ryan — hugged himself in an unconscious gesture of self-preservation. “We’re close now,” Holmes continued, “maybe a few hours behind, and these savages are in no hurry.”

“But our orders sir…” the man on the right — Culloden — began.

“You will follow them. Make camp close by. We’ve two good hours of sunlight left. Let us make use of them. Keep a close watch. These bodies will attract company sooner rather than later.”

“You should’na go just the two of you sir,” Culloden said.

Holmes smiled almost parentally. “You’re good lads, and fine policemen, but you are not up to this. Make camp; get some food together. We’ll be wanting dinner when we return.”

Watson turned from the men, did his own calculations. Going back to Dawson and mustering a force was out of the question. The seal hunting season was drawing to a close and ice would be breaking up soon. Holmes was right: the chance was now, or never.

Two thoughts occurred to Dr. Watson: There is nothing here to indicate that anyone has survived this massacre, or been taken from the scene and Holmes doesn’t want witnesses where we are going.

Anernerk stared at the chains which bound her to the sled, her manacled hands heavy in her lap, and thought: These are too big for me. The iron was old, rusted, foreign. She sat with her legs tucked up underneath her, staying quiet, staying still, as dogs pulled, and a man pushed at the handles just behind her. They need not have bound her. Their precautions were ridiculous. Where would she run? To whom would she go, now that her family had been extinguished?

She tried not to see the details. The moonlight punching through the roof of the igloo as the men bludgeoned their way in. The screams; the dull squish and thud of the killing strokes. She had screamed too, but had been stopped short by a gonging voice in her head — a voice not her own — and images that crowded out her own shrill thoughts of terror.

Stars. The voice had shown her stars, made her see a particular pattern, made her focus upon it. At first, the voice had spoken gibberish to her, but had changed in tone and articulation, almost as though sifting through sounds to find her language, and when it did, it said: “It is time. It is near equinox. You will come to me. You will come to me now.”

She had closed her eyes then, listening to the distant screams, knowing there was nothing she could do. She had kicked out in reflex, fighting in futility as she was bundled out through the shattered ceiling of the igloo by strong, silent attackers. They had made no sound throughout the massacre — no war cries, no exultant shouts of triumph. They had killed with cold ferocity, like an Arctic blizzard unleashed. She was theirs now; she belonged to them even as they belonged to the voice. She did not weep, or wail, or bargain, for that was not the Nunamiut way.

Now, in an effort to repress the memories of slaughter, she recalled her father’s voice singing a traditional lament in his husky, warbling tone:

Hard times, dearth times

Plague us every one

Stomachs are shrunken

Dishes are empty

Over and over she recited the words to herself and stared without expression at her lap. No tears fell, for a hard life had shaped her early for the acceptance of things. Sometimes, the caribou did not come in the spring. Sometimes, the seal holes could not be found. Her only hope was that it would be quick and painless, whatever they had in mind for her.

The sun had crept up on its low trajectory, and the sled had come to a stop at the crest of a shallow rise. Anernerk looked up then, and her mouth gaped open in astonishment for two reasons. The first was for the structure in the distance, immense and dark and utterly beyond her ability to comprehend.

The second was because one of the men had put back his hood to reveal his face. She knew him, had once shed the tears for him that she had yet to shed for her slain kinfolk. It was her grandfather, who had been left to die three winters ago on pack ice, unable at the last to walk on used up legs. He stood strong and straight now, though his hair blew whale-bone white in the slight northerly breeze.

He turned his face to look upon her without recognition, without pity.

His eyes were the washed out blue of a pack dog’s, strange and horrifying and cold.

The jagged majesty of the ice filled Watson with primordial awe. He’d seen a fair piece of the world — been to every corner of the empire either with or without Holmes — but he had never quite seen anything to rival the vast bleak Canadian north. Walls of ivory jutting into the clear blue sky, and drifting, susurrant serpents of windblown snow. Cool pools of blue shadow in the lees of icy rises. Water so clear and clean it looked like glass. And treachery amidst the breathtaking beauty, lying in wait to pounce upon the slightest mistake.

“I quite honestly don’t know what to make of it,” Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Reed had said back at camp in Dawson. He was a priggish man, but resolute enough, with a back straight as a mainmast, and a neck thick as a kilderkin. Before him, on his desk, lay the papers from Whitehall, complete with parliamentary seal, outlining the terms of Holmes’ special service. “They are … well, that is to say … attacks, of some kind, as it were.”

“Attacks.” Holmes repeated. “Implying the imposition of main force? Warfare, I am given to believe, does not exist here, in the sense that we employ it.”