Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

A Country Death

Simon Kurt Unsworth

The detective waited outside; he was, technically, a guest of the local force here and, although they had called for him, he would not enter without invitation. Whilst he waited, he looked around the place to which he had come. The building was set back from the road, both it and the gardens that embraced it small and neat. And what gardens! The edged beds full of flowers that blazed with colors, the smell of their perfume heavy, swollen. The lawns, green and dense, danced around both sides of the house, disappearing from sight in rich swathes that seemed to catch the light and feed upon it. The detective saw that his impression, gained on the journey here, was correct; this was a home designed for privacy. There were no other buildings nearby, and the roads that led to it were little more than tracks. Even the edgings of flowers gave the impression of a wall; beautiful, vibrant, but a wall nonetheless, a barrier between this place and the outside. Whoever lived here did not want intruders.

Whoever had lived here, of course. Although there were few details in the summoning telegram, the force was unlikely to have called upon him for anything less than an unexplained, unexplainable, death. The solving of these things was what had made his reputation, it was where his skills lay, and it was where his interests took him. It was what made him valuable.

“Sir?” The speaker was an old man, older even than the detective, probably brought out of retirement to act as constable. The war had depleted the manpower available to the force, despite its protected status, and as the conflict went on anyone with experience, no matter how minor or how long ago it was gained, was being called back to add substance to the ever-diminishing thin blue line. It should be a matter of national thanks, thought the detective sourly, that the same calling that has removed the men who had up ‘til that point defended the virtues of law and order has also removed most of those who strove hardest to attack them. Ah well, in all things balance. Aloud, to business now, he said, “What’s happened?”

“We don’t know,” replied the constable. “It’s awful, like nothing we’ve seen, any of us. The others, they left me here to wait for you. We wouldn’t have sent for you but we can’t … we don’t…” The man tailed off, and the detective saw that there were tears in his eyes. He was extremely old and his lined face had a sagging, waxen look. Taking another breath of the fine summer air, letting the sounds of bees and birds wash around him and clothe him in their freshness, the detective said simply, “Show me.”

The inside of the cottage was as neat as the garden, although considerably more cluttered. Bookshelves, crammed with books and journals and papers, piled two or three high in places, lined the already narrow hallway. An occasional table groaned under a mass of post and newspapers. More books and papers sat on most of the stairs. Here were the first signs of disarray, the detective saw, with piles disrupted and tilted and some of the papers scattered down the steps. There was no telephone, he saw, and no pictures on what little there was of free wall space. The constable led him upwards, stepping carefully over the scattered papers.

“Was it like this when you got here?” the detective asked.

“Yes, sir,” replied the constable. “I touched as little as possible and didn’t move anything. I know that’s important in this sort of thing. When there’s been a … when someone’s died.” He stopped at the top of the stairs. “It’s in the study,” he said, gesturing to the farthest door. “I can’t go back in, don’t make me, please sir.”

“The man doesn’t have a live-in,” said the constable, swallowing audibly as the detective pushed open the door. “He has a woman, Mrs. Roundhay, who comes daily. She came this morning, but he wasn’t up like he normally is.”

“When had she last seen him?”

“Yesterday, when she left. About four, she reckons. She came back this morning at about nine and couldn’t find him. The back door was open so she came in and looked around but he didn’t answer when she called. She checked all the downstairs rooms before she went upstairs and into the study and found him. Found his body.” There was another swallow, this one liquid and loose, and the detective called, “That’s fine, Constable. Go downstairs and get yourself some water, I’ll join you there soon. Many thanks.”

The study was, if possible, more cluttered than the hallway or stairs, with all the available space seemingly taken up with books, papers, journals and ornaments. The body was on the floor in front of the desk, twisted in a heap of loose sheets and spilled tobacco, and something that had been spilled from an overturned tin and which looked like old, dried grass. A chair had been knocked back and lay against the nearest bookcase. The room smelled of vomit, although the detective could see none, and something else, something sweet, sickly and sharp. The remains hardly looked human.

Whoever the man was, he had clearly died in agony. His flesh, what the detective could see of it, was distended and yellowing; pockmarked with tiny dots of blood. The face was bloated to the point where the skin looked as though it might split. It looked somehow poisonous, the wattle of the neck ballooning over the collar in angry ridges. His hands were also swollen, the knuckles lost in the tide of grotesque, puffy flesh. His mouth was open and his tongue protruded, and even that was swollen, covered in the tiny dots, black pores against the rich and fetid purple. One eye had swelled entirely shut; the other had managed to retain an opening on the world, and in the tiny arc the detective saw, against a reddened sclera, the blackened pitch of a pupil grown vast in terror and pain and death. It was like nothing he had seen before.

After noting his initial impressions, the detective went downstairs and spoke with the constable again. “It’s a strange one, to be sure,” he said. The constable nodded; a look of gratitude on his face. Strange or not, that expression said, it’s someone else’s responsibility now; not mine any more, but yours.

“I’m sure that there’s a rational explanation though,” the detective continued. “We simply need to apply ourselves and find it. Logic will prevail.” He paused, thinking, and then said, “It may take some time, though. Can you make arrangements for the coroner to collect the body, and tell him I’ll talk to him when he has completed his investigations?”

“Yes, sir. I called him, he’s on his way.”

“Excellent. In the meantime, we have work to do here. We shall have to inspect the premises fully, and talk in more detail with the housekeeper. We shall need to build a picture of the victim, of his last days, of his life. Oh, incidentally, what do we know about him?”

“He came from London originally, sir, and retired here about ten years ago. He kept himself to himself mostly, didn’t have many visitors but received lots of post. He almost never left this place.”

“And the day of his death, the days earlier? How was he? As normal?”

“No, sir. Well, not on the day of his death, anyway. He was, well, distracted. Worried.”

“Sterling work, constable, sterling work! I see you are going to be an asset to this investigation. I presume you got this from the housekeeper?”

“Yes, sir, I’ve been chatting with her over tea while you’ve been upstairs with the … with him.”

“Good, good. So, to work! Perhaps we should start at the beginning, yes? Tell me, what was the victim’s name?”

“Holmes, sir. Sherlock Holmes.”

As Brabbins further questioned Swann, two morgue attendants arrived and took Holmes’ body away in a silent ambulance, the red cross on its gleaming white side a vivid scar against the verdant fields.

“He was either outside and came in, or the attack started in the kitchen. From there, he went along the hallway,” Brabbins said to Swann. “I’d imagine he was staggering by that point. Look, there are streaks of boot polish along the skirting where he’s kicked it, and on at least one of the shelves, the books are in disarray. More disarray,” he amended, looking at the masses of books that sat on each shelf. “See, these books here are damaged, knocked over, probably as he grasped at the shelf to keep himself upright. There are smears from his fingers here, and here, yes?”

“Yes,” said Swann, doubtfully. “How do you know that those marks weren’t there beforehand, sir?”

“Well, firstly the books themselves. There are many of them, to be sure, but they’re stacked neatly and well kept except for these few. And consider, are there other marks, Constable Swann? The shelves, the surfaces not covered in books are clean, dust-free. I’d say our Mrs. Roundhay—” gesturing towards the kitchen where the housekeeper was still crying and drinking tea, “—keeps this place gleaming, wouldn’t you? No other marks, and certainly not one so large. And look—” Brabbins put his hand onto the mark, letting Swann see how it matched the pattern of fingers slipping across the wood and into the damaged books.

“No, whatever happened to him, it happened quickly. There are no signs of disorder in the kitchen, no signs of a struggle of any kind. He fled his death along this hallway, but couldn’t move fast enough.” Brabbins went slowly down the hallway and onto the stairs.

“He went up the stairs, and he was careless, knocking over the piles of books and paper, but why? What was up here that he thought might help? Where was he going?”

“The study?”

“Yes, but why? Why there and not the bathroom or the bedroom? Why the study?” Their discussion had taken them to the room in question, and Brabbins stepped in, gesturing for Swann to follow. “Tell me what you see.” Swann followed, clearly reluctant.

Although the body had been removed the man, Holmes, was still a presence in the room. These were his papers and books, his curios on the shelves in front of the books, his tobacco and his pipe on the desk. This was his space, and Brabbins knew that he and Swann were intruders here.

“It’s a study,” said Swann.

“Good,” said Brabbins. “Tell me more. Tell me what you see.”

“It’s messy, like the hall. Lots of things. How a person could work here, I don’t know. How could you tell where things were? There’s piles of newspapers, the desk is covered in manuscript sheets with writing on, there are books open on the desk and magazines all over.”

“Very good. Go on.”

“There’s a picture on the desk, the only one I’ve seen in the house, of a man with a moustache. He’s got a doctor’s bag at his feet and a revolver in his hand. There’s a pipe on the desk and more papers on the floor. They’re crumpled, as though he pulled them to the floor when he fell. Some of them are bound together. There are matches loose on the desk and tobacco on the floor.”

“Did he decide to light a pipe for himself, one last smoke in his death throes, do you think?”

“No,” said Swann, his voice defensive, and for a moment Brabbins wondered if he had gone too far. No matter. “The tobacco’s fallen out of his pouch, or spilled when he went for the matches. There’s none in the pipe or near it.”

“Well done, Constable. Please, continue.”

“I don’t know what else to say,” said Swann. “I can’t see anything else, I don’t know what you’re looking for. There’s pine needles on the floor with the papers and tobacco, and some old wood and burlap. It looks like he tried to fill his smoker but dropped it before he could.”

“Smoker?” asked Brabbins, startled. “What’s that?”

“The tin,” said Swann in a tone that was somewhere between wary and disbelieving; it was either so obvious to him that he was worried he was wrong, or it was genuinely obvious and he couldn’t understand why Brabbins couldn’t see it. “It’s smoker fuel. Look, the smoker’s under the desk.”

“Smoker?” said Brabbins again. “You mean his pipe?”

“No, that,” said Swann, pointing to a thing that looked like a lantern with a kettle funnel welded to it, lying on its side under the desk. “It’s a smoker. You put needles and wood and burlap in and burn it, and it makes smoke.”

“Why?” asked Brabbins, mystified.

“You need the smoke,” said Swann, “to calm bees.”

The parlour was filled with piles of concertina files, three or four deep from the walls and to the height of perhaps five feet, tied with cord or ribbon, as though to stop them bursting. Some were old and some newer, the corners of the files less worn and the ribbons less dull. Experimentally, Brabbins opened one of them and withdrew sheets at random. The first one was a handwritten letter.

Dear Mr. Holmes

My brother has been vanished these past six months and I suspect he may have come to a terrible end at the hands of his wife, a selfish and unpleasant woman. I know you don’t do your investigations any more, but surely you can make an exception to help bring a vicious harridan to justice and give my family some peace?

I pray that I will hear from you soon.

Yours in God

Bernadette Murray (Mrs.)

There was a Cheam return address on the letter, and at the bottom in a different hand was written No. The other sheets Brabbins withdrew were similar: requests to help find missing family members, to solve robberies, to discover the whereabouts of missing wills. One even asked Holmes help in finding a missing pet, much loved and missed and Oh Mr. Holmes if you could see my child’s face you would surely be unable to resist our request for your assistance. The last one Brabbins looked at was typed, on paper headed with the insignia of the Manchester Constabulary. Dear Mr. Holmes, it read, We have a most difficult series of violent attacks and would request your assistance in solving them. Brabbins stared around the hundreds of files, thinking that if each contained the same as this file, then that was thousands upon thousands of requests, more and more arriving daily. What had Swann said? That he received a lot of post? And he read all of them; the repeated handwritten No told Brabbins that. My God, he thought, if this is what each day brought him, no wonder he tried to seal himself away.

Naked, Holmes’ corpse lay on its back on the metal table in the morgue whilst Rivers, the coroner, talked and pointed. “It’s not technically poison because he didn’t ingest it,” he said, “so it’s venom, although I don’t suppose it makes much difference to him now, does it? It was administered mostly to the flesh of the face and hands, which explains the amount of swelling and tissue damage in those areas.”

Rivers was a GP, he had told Brabbins, called in to help in those rare incidents when there was a need for a medical opinion on a corpse. The morgue was tiny, little more than a cupboard, tiled a pale, sickly green that reflected the two men as they moved around the body, their images hovering like vapor at the corner of Brabbins’ eye. It smelled of harsh soap and embalming fluid and the loose, wavering scent of flesh that was rotting despite the chill. There was another odor emanating from the body, the one that Brabbins had first come across in Holmes’ study, bitter and cloying, yet oddly sweet.

Holmes must have been tall and imposing in life, thought Brabbins. Prostrate on the table, though, he was shrivelled and splayed, his belly a sliced and yawning cavity, his flesh sagging back from his bones like an ill-fitting suit. The swelling of his face and hands made him look clownish, a caricature of the aquiline man that he had been in life. The puffy flesh had deflated slightly, and in relaxing and dropping away, the skin had pulled back from both of the man’s eyes, leaving their bloodshot gaze focussed on a point somewhere beyond the ceiling of the mortuary in rapt, cold attention.

“I haven’t identified the poison yet,” said Rivers. “I may not be able to. If you want a theory, it was smeared on something, or it was in something, and then his assailant attacked him, stabbing at him. At his face and hands, mainly, although there are some punctures on his neck and some on his lower arms.” Rivers held up his hands, nodding at his cuffs as they pulled back from his wrists, and said, “Defensive wounds, I’d imagine. The weapon was thin and sharp, probably a needle. It may even have been a hypodermic, given the depth of some of the punctures in the flesh.”

“Thank you,” said Brabbins. He leaned in close to the corpse, looking at its stretched, sloughing skin. There were even wounds in the swept back, thinning hair, he saw, areas of scalp where the poison had caused the man’s head to bulge and swell. His tongue had collapsed back into his mouth, lay curled and dry in the shadowed depths. Brabbins thought of the room full of pleading letters, of the person that this man must have been, and felt a wave of sadness wash over him. This had been a human being, a good one by all accounts, and someone had hated him enough to murder him, to slaughter him. Brabbins sniffed deeply, trying to lock the smell of the dead man and the sight of his bruised, distorted face deep in his mind; then he rose to go.

Swann was gone when Brabbins arrived back at Holmes’ house. Evening was closing in, so Brabbins couldn’t blame the man. He had gone to … what? A Mrs. Swann? Some doughty housewife warming slippers and a meal in a tiny kitchen? Brabbins smiled at the image and wondered how the man would tell his wife of his day, of bodies and detectives and rooms full of papers and a study that was cluttered and claustrophobic and smelled like spoiled humanity. Perhaps the man was a widower, and would sit in a dark and lonely home, talking to no one but himself. Brabbins supposed he should have asked, had a conversation with the man, but had long ago realized that he wasn’t inclined to that sort of thing. Those things were distractions, getting in the way and watering down his attention. The case was all; the dead man and the cause of his death.

Before leaving, though, Swann had made a start on the papers from the parlour. Piles of them were out of the folders and on the floor, and more were on the table in the kitchen. The man hadn’t left a note, which Brabbins took to mean that he had found nothing of interest. Most of the piles in the parlour itself were more requests for help, from all over the world. Each had the word ‘No’ written at the bottom, solid and emphatic.

The pile in the kitchen looked to be more recent, invoices and household bills. Swann had weighted this pile down with an empty cup, Brabbins saw with distaste. It had left a tea ring on the uppermost paper, a pale circle blotted across the top of an invoice for comb replacement pieces from a company in Liverpool.

Actually, Brabbins saw, the paper on the kitchen table was in two piles, one face down and one face up. They gave the impression of a job half-done, something partway complete. The cup was almost like a bookmark, he thought, a place marker to ensure that the task could be taken up from the point at which it had been left. He leafed through the face up pile presumably the unchecked ones, finding them all handwritten sheets, covered in notes and drawings.

Was this the last thing that Swann had read? Had it sparked something in the man’s brain, or had he simply reached that point and thought, That’s it, time to go home. Somehow, Brabbins didn’t think so. It was the half-finished look of the piled papers that did it, the sense of something partly complete, not abandoned but simply interrupted. Swann was old, yes, had struck him as inexperienced, yes, but lazy and inefficient? No.

So, if something had flared in the man’s mind, what had he done next? And where was he now?

Brabbins stood and went walking, slowly pacing the length of the hallway, going into the parlour and the lounge and finally coming to the bottom of the stairs. Nothing had changed; at least, nothing that gave Brabbins pause. Upstairs? The papers on the steps had been placed back into their piles, he saw, but one had a sense of ruffledness, as though it had been sifted through and then placed down. Swann? Brabbins looked through the pile and found that it was mostly more correspondence. Why this pile above the others, he wondered. There was nothing in it of interest as far as he could see, nothing that would seem to tie into Holmes’ death. It seemed to be a set of letters between Holmes and a London publishing house, mostly about royalties. The last letter mentioned a ‘new project’, Brabbins saw, and his policeman’s instinct told him that this was the one that Swann had been interested in. It was more crumpled, placed more roughly back into the pile than the others, but why was it important? What had Swann been thinking?

The study door was open, and it had been shut when Brabbins left. He stepped inside and saw immediately that things had changed; some of the papers from the floor had gone and the others were in new piles, scattered differently. Swann read something downstairs, in the papers on the table, and it … what? Made him think? Caused some kind of realization? He came upstairs, stopped on the way and read more, read something else that confirmed his suspicions, or at least strengthened them into something more solid, and from there he came into the study and sorted through the papers on the floor. And on the desk, Brabbins saw more had gone from there, as had the smoker from the floor and some of the smoker fuel. The matches were still on the desk, though. He wanted some of the papers, others not, and then he left the study, left the house. But to where?

The garden was a frayed mess of shadows and night. The light escaping from the doorway around Brabbins lost its strength as it stretched away, soaking the lawn from a rich green to a torpid, heavy grey. The plants and bushes that lined the lawns were little more than blacker streaks in a night that was lightless and warm. There was a smell in the garden, a mingled scent of exhaling plants and clean earth.

And something burning, or burned.

Brabbins walked cautiously down to the edge of the lawn and started across it. As he moved deeper into the shadows, the smell of burned things became stronger and he heard a noise, a somnolent hum. He raised his lantern, letting the pale light dance across the ground ahead of him. More lawn. He had the sense of it widening around him, opening out to become a field; the grass felt longer under his feet, the ground rougher, less cultured. The smell had changed as well, shifting from the sweet breath of flowers to the denser, richer aroma of roots and soil and wood.

Brabbins felt exposed here, as though he had swum further out from shore than he realized, to where the water suddenly went cold and the waves were made of stone rather than cotton. He turned, looking back towards the building and the pale squares of light falling from the kitchen windows and doorway as he walked. The distance between him and Holmes’ house stretched, dark and sly, and then he realized that the sound had changed and that shapes were emerging from the gloom about him.

They were low and hard-edged, paler smears in the darkness revealed by his approach. The low sound had changed as well, had shifted and become less rested, more anticipatory, although anticipatory of what Brabbins could not tell. Whatever it was that was making the sound, he had the impression that it knew he was there, was watching him carefully, judging and gauging and waiting. It was a grating buzz, oddly metallic and sharp, and it scraped across his exposed skin like a toothache. He turned slowly back around, completing a full circle with the torchlight leaping ahead of him and about him like an inquisitive tongue. There were six of the shapes, solid white boxes on little legs, set at irregular intervals across a pasture of some kind. The noise came from all the shapes at once. He took a cautious step back, feeling his way with his heel because he suddenly, definitely, did not want to turn his back on the boxes.

They were hives. He was a city boy, true, but even he recognized the slatted shapes of beehives. There were no bees, at least none that he could see, but he assumed that it was the creatures making the sound inside the hives. He took another backwards step and the sound rose in pitch, cold and glitteringly alert. He had heard bees before, enjoyed their warm hum in the air around him in summer gardens, but this noise was something different. It was ferocious, a noise of warning and threat. Another step, and he was at the edge of the pasture, almost out from the hives. Their pallid shapes seemed to face him as he went, horridly observant and aware. Another step, another. Another and his questing heel bumped into something that rolled and gave under him, and his balance yawned wildly for a moment and then he fell. The torch bounced to the ground by his head, dancing and jittering before it settled and the beam came to rest on what he had fallen over, and Brabbins saw it and screamed.

It was Swann; or at least, it had been Swann.

The man’s face, caught in the beam of light, leered in black and swollen misery at Brabbins, the flesh darkened and gross. His head was massive, like a scarecrow’s made out of some misshapen, rotten vegetable; his eyes were bulged shut, the lids erupting and pressing together, and his mouth was open, but compressed to a dark, tiny O by lips that had blistered towards each other. The skin looked taught, ready to split, and it was covered in beads of blood, some of which had trickled and collected and slathered down the man’s cheeks like aged, dank tears. The swelling made his chin a shapeless ridge above a neck that bulged and strained against his uniform collar, where his police number glittered, silver and pitiless. It was Swann made into a caricature of himself, drawn by a hand that was both mocking and humourless. The smoker was lying by him in the centre of a scorched circle of grass.

All of this Brabbins saw even as his scream was newborn, still rising into the air in a great, whooping arc. Under it, the sound of the bees leapt in pitch, climbing with the scream to a sharp, inhuman shiver. Brabbins clambered to his feet, rolling against Swann as he did so and feeling the man’s flesh shift like water in a balloon. He grabbed, almost by instinct, the sheaf of partly charred papers that were still clutched in the dead man’s hand (also bloated and black, he saw) and then he was running. As he did so, he had the impression of the hives boiling, of a ragged cloud gathering in the air above them and starting towards him and then he was concentrating on the house, on Holmes’ house, on the faint yellow square of the doorway.

The bees were closer; he could hear them even over the pant of his own breathing. Their noise was constant, furious, mounting, itching in his ears and prickling his skin. He ran, moving swiftly from the meadow and onto the lawn, with its neat grass and sentinel plants, and as he went the bees were a cloud about him, almost invisible in the darkness, it was as though the night itself had come alive and had stretched out writhing arms to take hold of him. He ran, and the bees closed in.

Brabbins dashed through the doorway as the first bees started to land on him; one banged into his shoulder and span away, another flashed into his face and then was gone, more landed on his arms and dashed against his legs. Their buzz was a pitiless shriek that reminded him of drills and saws and factories full of sweat and dirt and poverty, and then he was into the house, slamming the door behind him. The swarm, for he could think of no other word for it, banged hard against the door behind him, a thousand or more tiny impacts making a noise like cloth being torn asunder, louder and louder as the tiny creatures battered themselves against the door. More struck the glass of the windows in a staccato beat, and then Brabbins’ hand flamed with pain.

It was like nothing he had ever felt, a burning, roaring sensation that swept rapidly across the back of his hand and clutched at his knuckles and wrist. Looking down, Brabbins saw a fat bee crawling across his hand. He shook his hand, trying to dislodge it, but it clung on and stung him again, causing another wave of pain to coruscate in his palm and fingers. He used his other hand to knock the creature off, sending it to the floor, and then stepped on it before it could right itself and lift into the air. More crawled over his arms and legs, and he knocked them off with the papers, swatting at them and stepping on them until they were all dead. The bees outside seemed to redouble their efforts to gain entry, as though they knew of their fallen comrades.

Brabbins thrust his hand under the tap, letting the cold water play across his flaming skin. It was already swelling, he saw, rising around twin punctures. He scratched at them, half-remembering advice about getting out beestings, but all that emerged was his own blood, somehow paler and with a yellow tinge. Is that poison? Is that what killed Swann? And Holmes? he thought, and suspected that it was.

When his hand felt marginally better, although it remained reddened and swollen and painful to move, Brabbins picked up the papers from where he had dropped them, and then went through the house. The lounge and parlour had open fireplaces, piled with logs and kindling, so he shut the doors to both rooms, thankful that they fitted snug in their frames. He also shut the kitchen door, closing off the noise of the bees to a lesser degree. Already, tiny dark shapes were gathering on the outside of the small glass pane in the front door, their indistinct forms filling the available space. From behind both of the doors he had closed came the faint sound of something striking the wood, not hard but repeatedly. Brabbins went upstairs, checking all the windows as he went. None were open; the house was sealed.

Finally, Brabbins took the papers into the study, righting the chair and sitting down, noticing as he did so that he was shaking, nauseous. The poison? he wondered. The fear?

The Bees.

For a moment, he tried to put the bees out of his mind; they had him penned in the house, and he had no idea why they were acting so aggressively, but his policeman’s instincts, honed by years of sifting through humanity’s mud and detritus, of making sense from the senseless, told him the answers lay in the sheets of paper that Swann had been holding.

They were bound, he saw, neatly written and tied at the top and bottom left corners with loops of thick twine. He recognized the writing as Holmes’ from the repeated ‘No’ on the letters, the words firm and decisive. The paper was thick and heavy, expensive, and the writing was interrupted here and there with illustrations and tables. Is this what Swann died for? Brabbins thought as he looked at them. Holmes? Two men, dead because of this?

Yes, he thought, and began to read.

It is my belief that British bees can be improved, Brabbins read on the first page, by the introduction of new queens from other breeds which possess the correct, desired, and beneficial traits. Having achieved some success in the breeding, and becoming familiar with the habits, strengths, and weaknesses of the more usual Western Honey Bee, in this paper I shall describe the initial attempts to improve upon this breed and outline any results that are obtained.

Whilst the Western Honey Bee is currently the universal breed hived in Britain, and is ideally suited to both the climate and the geography of this land, increasing industrialization and the spread of towns and concurrent population growth may require, in future, a bee that can travel further in search of pollen, or which has a longer breeding and production season and from which increased amounts of honey and wax can be harvested. Accordingly, looking overseas for hardier breeds to increase the value and usefulness of our stock is the only logical thing to do.

Initially, of course, a suitable breed must be identified and procured. Clearly, not all breeds will be suitable for husbandry because of differences in temperament or physiology. However, many come from the same root stock and so may prove to be viable partners. I shall endeavour to explain here why various breeds were dismissed and to show how the ultimate decision was made.

Brabbins stopped reading and leafed through the next few pages, seeing little of interest other than detailed descriptions of breeds and their failings. Names such as Buckfast Bee, Midnite Bee, European Dark Bee, and Carnolian Bee jostled alongside phrases like movable comb hives, Langstroth spaces and Dadant design. English, but still another language.

Eventually, Brabbins came to a new paragraph that read, After exhaustive study, it is clear that we must look further afield for the required breeding partner. Records of the earliest beekeepers, although scant, identify several species cultivated in more isolated regions, often by monks or other closed communities. These are the rarest of breeds and ones about whom little but the briefest of facts are known, except those which were written down by their original keepers. Of these, most can be dismissed immediately as variants on the breeds already discussed. However, one would seem to be an ideal candidate: the Northern Wild Bee, occasionally called the Volk’s or Wolf Bee. Almost unknown outside of a tiny area of Russia, this animal may be the perfect partner in this experiment.

Below this were a series of diagrams, close up of bee parts that Brabbins only partly recognized; a segmented eye, a rounded body with measurement details alongside it, a wing. Further down were tables, each annotated with phrases like queen breeding pattern and season lengths and gestation and hatching cycles. Below each table was a short explanation of the way in which the Northern Wild Bee was an improvement on the Western Honey Bee. Finally, a longer paragraph ended the section: The Northern Wild Bee has a larger body and can travel further in a day than Britain’s indigenous bee population, giving the capacity for greater range and for greater honey and wax yield. It is physically stronger and has evolved to live in the harsher climes of northern Europe. It was transported to Germany in the early nineteenth century but proved a difficult creature to manage and did not last long, leaving only a few wild colonies scattered across the northern countries, their spread controlled by the depredations of the harshest of winter climates and the landscape. Despite problems sourcing the Northern Wild Bee as a result of the current world political situation, eggs were gathered from the remaining wild colonies and the experiment is now ready to begin. What follows is a record of its progress.

Brabbins stopped reading and leafed through the remaining papers. They were written as diary entries, some with illustrations, each dated. The earliest contained repeating phrases like breeding rates and cross-breed production and, once, reproduction characteristics and techniques which made Brabbins rub his face in wonderment. What had this man, Holmes, done? Played with his bees while the letters piled up in his parlour, while the war raged in fields black with torn earth and death, and while tiny individual tragedies happened in back-alleys and homes across the country? For what? Wax and honey? And what had he done?

The next entry Brabbins read started with the word Success! and another picture, this one a delicately drawn picture of a bee. To Brabbins, it looked like any other bee; furred, with a bulbous body and head, and wings covered in the tracery of veins. Holmes had clearly seen differences to it, though. He had arrowed parts of the diagram, each arrow neatly labelled, 31% average increased mass, larger wingspan/distance for flying, slightly increased brain capacity. There was more, but Brabbins stopped reading and flicked on to the next entries.

April 2nd: I have set up a single hive of the Northern Wild Bee crossbreed, alongside my existing Western Honey Bee hives; by doing so, I hope to show scientifically how much greater the productivity of the new strain is in comparison with our existing breeds. Already, the bees seem to be travelling farther and wider than the drones from the other hives. The pollen they collect is a different color, as though it includes content from plants that the other bees cannot reach or find. The first yields of honey have been promising in amount, although its flavour is slightly bitter and leaves a strange taste in the mouth after it is swallowed. The comb that contains it certainly seems sturdier, and the wax that can be harvested of a very high quality. One unexpected thing about the new breed is that its size gives it some increased ability to stave off the soporific effects of the smoker, requiring an increased level of caution from the keeper to avoid stings.

Brabbins flicked back through the paper and found the picture of the bee, so neatly drawn and dissected upon the page. Even now, he could hear the bees battering themselves against the windows of the kitchen and front door and the wood of the two room doors, their angry buzz and the timpani of their impacts like the stuttering of some distant machine. They haven’t given up, he thought, and turned back to the sheaf of paper.

April 23rd: The experiment goes tolerably well. The honey and comb yields are noticeably greater from the new hive than from my existing hives, leading me to believe that my original conjecture was correct — yields can be substantially increased by the application of scientific principle to bee-rearing. However, further unexpected elements have arisen that need consideration. The increased size of the bees, and their wilder nature, has led to an increased aggression and a greater preparedness to sting. The stings themselves are extremely painful, far more so than those of the Western Honey Bee or any of the other common breeds, and cause high levels of swelling. The venom of the bee would appear to be more powerful than that of its more usual cousins, and longer acting. Unusually, the crossbreed bee does itself no damage when it uses its sting, meaning it can sting repeatedly without experiencing harm, and each sting seems capable of delivering a venom load.

Looking at his still aching hand, Brabbins smiled in humourless agreement. What had Holmes said the bee was sometimes called? The Wolf Bee? That fitted; it was fast and vicious and worked in a pack, overwhelming by sheer weight of numbers and tenacity. Even now, the sound of them was filling the house, bleeding in through glass that felt increasingly thin and fragile. Although a heavy curtain covered the study’s small casement window, Brabbins could hear noises coming from behind it; the solid impacts of things repeatedly banging against the glass, and the fierce hum of the bees. Somehow, they had found this window, knew he was behind it. Was it the light? No, there were lights on in the other rooms. Could they hear him? Smell him? He didn’t know enough about bees to be sure. Perhaps it was just a coincidence? No. No, the bees were targeting him, he didn’t know how he knew but he knew it, was sure of it. They were chasing him.

Hunting him.

May 1st: The breeding cycle is faster, and the queen produces more eggs than the Western Honey Bee queen. The hive is already full, leaving no space for new combs, and the larvae are already larger than would be normal at this stage of their development. The workers are bringing in more nectar (by my estimation) than the bees of the other hives. As a consequence, the social structure of the hive is showing some unusual developments. Chief among these is that, each morning, there are a number of bees and larvae on the ground under the hive, some barely alive, but most dead. Observations of the hive at night have shown that the bees and larvae are placed there by other bees, pushed out of the hive entrance in a constant stream through the hours of darkness. I can only assume that some kind of cull is occurring each night, with those found to be imperfect or underdeveloped or underperforming in some way being removed to make way for new workers. There seems little other explanation, although what imperfections the dead creatures may have exhibited is hard to fathom. Certainly, investigations of the bodies have revealed no obvious flaws or deficiencies.

May 3rd: The hive is proving increasingly difficult to manage, even under optimal daytime conditions. The bees are extremely aggressive and defensive, and although they eventually calm under the influence of the smoker, their activity in the period before the soporific takes effect is somewhat unnerving. The bees begin, as would be expected, by trying to sting me, but seem to learn extremely rapidly that their primary weapon is of little use and cannot pierce my protective clothing. Then, they begin to cluster around the seams of the clothing, especially at the wrists and neck, and also across the facial netting of the helmet. It is almost as though the bees know to block my vision by gathering thickly across the material. Sometimes, the weight of the bees on the net is so great that it is forced close to my face and my vision is filled with naught but brown fur and stings and I have to shake the net clear of the creatures before I can carry on. In higher animals their clustering around the seams of my clothing might be taken to indicate an understanding of how it is designed and where its weak points exist, but in bees this is, of course, illogical. They almost certainly gather there simply because they are the areas that offer them the greatest purchase. Still; it is a strange coincidence.

Another strange thing: the hive seems ready to produce another swarm. There are definite signs that a second queen is being matured by one group of the drones, and she is already bigger than the larvae in the surrounding cells. This is, of course, extremely early for a second queen to be developing, and must indicate further evidence (if it were needed) that the Northern Wild Bee is ideal to introduce into the ecosystem of Britain. Such speed in new swarm development will allow for a greatly increased production of honey and wax, and shows that already this experiment is proving to be successful.

There followed several pages of diagrams showing the bees, or parts of them, from a variety of angles. One picture caught Brabbins’ eye and he sat for a moment staring at it. In it, Holmes had carefully illustrated a dissected bee, using arrows to neatly label particular pieces of it. By one thing (which looked to Brabbins like a twisted balloon), Holmes had written, Poison sacs. Beneath this were a series of figures, the most noticeable of which was third in the list: 23% larger. 23% more venom, the ability to sting repeatedly, increased aggressiveness; Christ, what had Holmes done here? thought Brabbins, and then, because he had no other option, he read on.

May 9th: It is not a second queen. Since hatching, it has remained in the hive and shows no inclination to either challenge the current queen or to form its own swarm and seek to establish its own colony. Rather, it seems to have removed some of the duties that were previously carried out by the existing queen, who seems to have been relegated to a simple breed production role. Whilst it is impossible to know how bees communicate within the hive, by observing the new social hierarchies developing it has been possible to ascertain that the new creature appears to be in control. It spends far longer than the queen engaged in complex interplays of movement and touch with the drones and warriors, whereas the old queen is rarely approached now apart from feeding rituals.

May 11th: The new creature continues to grow, and although it is not as large as the queen, it is now considerably larger than the other inhabitants of the hive. The queen continues to be a presence and have a role in the hive, producing egg after egg, but she is clearly no longer the driving force behind the hive’s activities. She is fed and her occasional needs are attended too, but that is all.

May 14th: I have come to a startling conclusion: the new creature is not a queen, but a king. Long thought a myth, the Northern Wild Bee appears to allow the development of a king bee as well as a queen in its society. The king, slightly physically smaller than the queen, takes charge of the day to day running of the activities and of the work undertaken, controlling the actions of the workers and guards in a way that previously had been the responsibility of the queen. This will bear watching carefully, as it may indicate the advent of a new stage in the rearing and cultivating of bee societies.

May 19th: The bees have killed a dog. I would scarcely have believed it if I had been simply told, but I watched the incident occur, and I trust the judgement of my own eyes. The animal, a local farm dog, I believe, was in the field when I went to make my morning observations of the hives. As I checked my Western Honey Bee hives, it played around my feet, obviously hoping for reward. Upon my approach to the new hive, however, the bees started to gather in a black cloud in the air above us. At first, I thought this might be the emergence of a swarm, and that I had been wrong about the king; that it was simply a queen and that what I had observed was simply an unusual, more complex, process by which new queens are hatched and become independent. However, I was wrong.

The bees fell onto the dog with a noise like the shriek of a saw stuck in wet wood. One minute, it was at my feet, happy and panting and canine, and the next there was simply a mass of bees, so many that the shape of the dog was lost below. It howled, once, a terrible sound of pain and confusion that rose in pitch before it was cut off. The animal had its mouth open, its tongue covered in bees, all thrusting down with their stings, their abdomens clenched and pulsing. I used the smoker, to no avail; the bees seemed to have achieved some kind of blood lust, a rage that allowed them to shake off any effect from the smoke. When I tried to knock the bees off the dog, to give it a chance to run, they performed their usual activity of clustering in my visor, blocking my vision. They were so thick about my arms and head that, although I could not feel their stings through my clothing, the weight of them was obstructive, preventing me from moving my arms effectively, and causing in me a claustrophobia, as though I was under water with no hope of surfacing.

The bees, once the attack on the dog was over, left me. That the dog was dead was obvious when the bees rose, as though to one command, and flew back into the hive. The corpse they left behind was terrible. They had managed to puncture the dog’s eyes, blood and ocular fluid had spattered down the sides of its snout, glistening and staining its fur in dark streaks. Its tongue had swelled to the size of a bull’s so that the sides of its face were pushed out, and pink flesh emerged from between its teeth. What I saw of the gums showed that they had stung it there and, although its fur may have offered it some protection, its flanks bulged with poison. It had voided its bowels in the extremities of its fear and pain and the smell of it was strong and foul. Over that smell, however, was another, the olfactory equivalent of the strange, bitter aftertaste of the honey produced by the hive. When I went to move towards the hive, the cloud of bees reappeared and although they did not attack, the threat was clear. I left my field in a state, for the first time in my life, of terror.

May 20th: Following the attack on the dog, I have found myself carefully considering the facts of this most curious of cases, and the fears that it has raised in me. The dog posed no threat to the bees, yet they attacked anyway. The assault was swift, unforgiving, unprovoked, and merciless, and whilst it may have only been a stray farm dog that took the brunt of the savagery on this occasion, I cannot guarantee that this will always be the case. I am beset by images of a child from the village, or a farmhand, or Mrs. Roundhay one day straying too close to the hive and raising the bees’ ire. Without the benefit of protective clothing, they would be killed as surely as the dog was, and I am tormented by visions of a person, the bees clustered about them as he lies in the field by the hives, his flesh swollen and blackened, and the smell of venom hanging in the air around them.

The vision does not end there. Past the dead on the ground, in the distant fields and in the woods and eaves where bees make their homes, I saw new hives being constructed, some by man and some by the bees themselves, their ordered waxen combs containing worker after worker, each equipped with a savage and pitiless sting and with venom that burned. I saw, somewhere deep in these hives, the gestation and birth of new kings, each as violent and aggressive as the other, and I heard an inhuman buzz fill the air. It is not just the regrettable incident with the dog that has caused these visions, however, but another thing. In my tending to the other hives over the past weeks, I have noticed an increased aggressiveness in the bees and, this morning, I found in two of them the larval stage of the king bee.

I have little choice now. I shall study the hives carefully for the next day to ascertain when activity in them is at a minimum and the risk at its least, and then I shall burn them and all of their inhabitants. My experiment has been, in the strangest way, too successful, and is at an end.

Brabbins put the papers down. The last of them was dated the day before Holmes’ death, and he wondered how it had happened; had the man approached the hive without his protective clothing? No, he was clearly not stupid. Had he underestimated the bees? Brabbins thought that perhaps he had, and had paid for that underestimation with his life. He had treated them as something limited, mere insignificances to remove but not to regard warily, neither intelligent nor able to plan. They had known what was coming, somehow, and had attacked Holmes pre-emptively. Had they swooped down out of the sky as he took a last turn around his garden before bed? The night had been warm, Brabbins remembered; maybe he was in the house with the back door open and the bees had come in, a last, awful visitor for the man who had helped so many others in his life. He would never know, of course, but it nagged at him, leaving a hole in the picture he had painted for himself of what had happened.

“Solved,” he said quietly to himself, not liking the way his voice trembled. “The dead man was killed by bees of his own breeding because he trusted to the logic of the situation rather than the reality of it. It is impossible for bees to plan, and so they cannot have plans to act upon. They cannot predict or assume or pre-empt, for they are bees. Only, these bees can, and they did, and the impossible became possible.” He stopped; his voice sounded like it came from someone else’s throat, distant and scared. And Swann? Had he understood? No, he thought not. He had known the bees were a part of it, but not how. How could he? Wandering out there, blithely approaching his own death. Brabbins swore, his fear giving way to anger. They were bees.

Bees.

Brabbins hand throbbed, the fingers aching as he flexed them into a tight fist. Standing, he drew back the curtain from the window. Even if it had been daylight outside, he would not have been able to see; the glass was covered, filling the small space with ever-moving brown shapes. They crawled over one another, lifting away and then battering back into the pane in waves, as though seeking some synchronisation in their attacks. The glass was smeared with pale fluid, he saw, dribbles of it coming from the stings that banged against the window with sharp little clicks. It gathered in little puddles against the bottom of the wooden frame. The window shook as the creatures banged into it. How long before they manage to break through? he thought. How long before they find another way in, something that I’ve missed?

Brabbins went down the stairs. He wondered briefly about trying to distract the bees somehow, getting them to gather against one part of the house whilst he ran from some other exit but dismissed the idea immediately. Holmes’ house was miles from anywhere, and the bees would catch him before he got far. Fire? No. He would never stop the bees getting to him, and he could hardly burn them off the windows without burning the house down. He was trapped.

No, he suddenly realized, he was not. A search of the downstairs of the house turned up Holmes’ beekeeping clothing in a cloakroom. Hurriedly, he shrugged it on; trousers and a white smock. Holmes had been taller and the legs and sleeves gathered in bunches around his ankles and wrists, but he tied the cuffs as tight as he could round his wrists and ankles. Before pulling on the gauntlets and net helmet, he put Holmes’ papers on the kitchen table, weighting them with the mug that Swann had used for the same purpose earlier in the day, and next to them he scrawled a note that said simply: These are genuine and their contents should be treated with the utmost seriousness. Look for my body and tell my wife I love her. Insp. W. M. Brabbins. At least that way, if something did happen to him, there was some record of what had happened. His body, and Swann’s in the garden, would add weight to the evidence. They’d have to believe it.

Brabbins pulled on the helmet and gloves, tying them as tightly as he could, trying to ensure that he left no gaps between them and the other garments. Had he put them on correctly? He had no idea. Only time would tell. Finally, he went to the front door. The bees against the other side of the small porthole window in the centre of the door, as if they sensed his intention, began to beat themselves against the glass even more furiously. Perhaps they do know what I’m planning. I don’t suppose it would surprise me if they did; nothing would at this point, he thought. He readied himself but, before he could open the door, there was a crack from behind him.

Undecided, Brabbins paused, and there was another crack. It came from the kitchen, he realized, was audible even through the closed door. In spite of himself, he went down the hallway and opened the door slightly, peering cautiously inside the room. At first, he thought that what he saw was a shadow, or the way the netting draped across his face moved in front of his eyes, but then he realized that it was bees. One of the panes of glass had cracked and a piece of glass fallen away, and bees were crawling in through the tiny hole, tumbling over themselves in their desperation to get in. Once in, they rose into the air like burned paper drifting above a fire, circling in odd, elliptical patterns. Instead of coming towards the door, however, towards him, they flew to the centre of the room and clustered around the manuscript on the table, burying it in an undulating, shifting blanket. The mug weighing the paper down toppled over and rolled until it stopped, prevented by its handle from turning further. Its inside contained bees, he saw, so many of them that they filled it like viscid liquid. Under their hum, the bees were making another sound, a moist, mulching noise that made him think of tiny jaws chewing and tearing. Pieces of paper began to flutter out of the mass and then he realized what they were doing to the manuscript and he turned and ran.

As though his movement had caught their attention, the bees coming in through the window shifted, arrowing out of the kitchen and gathered around him as he ran, the first of them landing on him, crawling across his visor and interrupting his vision with dark shapes the color of fury. He crashed into the front door, his gloved fingers pulling clumsily at the latch as more bees swarmed in the air around his head and shoulders and their companions on the other side of the glass became even more agitated. He had no choice now. Yanking open the door, he started to run.

With a hum that was more like a shriek, the bees were about him in seconds.

* * * * *

SIMON KURT UNSWORTH’s story ‘The Church on the Island’ was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His short story collection Lost Places was recently released by Ash Tree Press. Simon’s work has also appeared in the anthologies Shades of Darkness, Lovecraft Unbound, Exotic Gothic 3, At Ease with the Dead and Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes.