Seance for a Vampire

Six

In the next instant I was bumped violently from behind by Abraham Kirkaldy. No doubt the impact, heavy enough to send me staggering across the terrace, was entirely accidental. The young medium had come stumbling out through the broken window after me, and on recovering my balance I turned to see him groping slowly with outstretched arms, as if in a trance, in the general direction of the figure in white.

Again and again the youth, his head thrown back, cried out his warnings about a thing from hell. He gestured wildly, emphasizing his unheeded commands that the intruder should go back to the nether regions whence it had come.

The gaunt youth was still standing close beside me as he shouted, pointing with an outstretched arm, though not at the figure of Louisa Altamont, but rather into the darkness beyond it. Once more called out sharply, trying to banish from the house and terrace whatever entity it was that he alone, among us breathing folk, could see.

It was plain to me that the young man’s fear, his attempt to assert authority, were not directed at the vampire girl. but for a moment I thought that she seemed to hesitate, as if she were on the verge of trying to obey his orders.

Then something almost invisible sighed softly in the night beside me, and I belatedly became aware–by what senses I am still not sure–of a heavy and forbidding presence. I saw–trying to regain the memory, I can only assert that I thought I saw–the suggestion of a masculine, malignant face, of greenish glaring eyes, their gaze directed not at me but at the young medium.

The air around me sighed again, and sang. I heard a savage impact–I could distinguish no weapon, but perceived only a dim rushing movement in the air–and in that moment Abraham Kirkaldy collapsed upon the stones of the terrace without a groan, felled by a single blow that had torn his scalp and partially crushed his skull. Of Kirkaldy’s attacker I retained only the vague perception which I have already tried so inadequately to describe.

In the next few moments I beheld a sight which made my brain reel in new horror. Swiftly the figure of the girl in white swirled near the medium’s fallen body, and bent low over him as if to bestow a kiss. Then she looked up, and in the moonlight I saw, by the dark stains around her fresh young mouth, that she had tasted his blood before she fled–or before she was pulled away, by the same almost-invisible power that had struck him down.

In the press and urgency of these events, I had momentarily lost sight of Sherlock Holmes, but now I caught a glimpse of my friend again, still endeavoring to keep Altamont and Armstrong away from the figure in white.

And then, in the next moment, Holmes was gone.

Quite distinctly I beheld his lean, strong body, legs kicking helplessly, caught up like a child’s by some nearly invisible power, and whisked away in the departing rush of the malignant presence which had by now left my side. Let me repeat that at no time on the terrace had I been able to perceive this intruder as a distinctly human form. Rather I was aware only of a dim inhuman horror, that now vanished quickly into the depths of the nighttime garden, carrying Holmes with it.

Again I wished for my revolver, though even had I been armed I should hardly have dared to fire for fear of hitting Holmes himself. Running as quickly as I could toward the spot where I thought I had seen my friend and his kidnapper vanish, I caught one more glimpse of a shadowy figure– or possibly a pair of figures–darting on, some distance ahead of me.

Doing my best to keep my speeding quarry in sight, I carried on the chase for another forty yards or so, a distance that took me well down the slope into the lower garden. Running in the darkness, I stumbled through flower beds and at last came crashing to a halt in the middle of some thick shrubbery. At that point, I was forced to admit to myself I had lost the trail.

I had succeeded in extricating myself from the bushes, and had just regained the proper path, when from the direction of the terrace I had so recently left, a woman’s voice sounded, giving vent to a loud outcry of grief and desperation. Immediately I decided that I had better return to the house.

At a sound from behind me, I turned my head. My heart rose momentarily at sight of a dim figure walking uphill toward me, its feet crunching with a reassuring, solid hesitancy upon the gravel of the path. but it was only Martin Armstrong, who had left the group gathered just outside the house and followed me in my futile pursuit. Quickly overtaking me on his younger legs, the American had run some distance farther down into the garden, past the point where I had lost the path. but presently he, too, had lost sight of what he pursued and had decided to abandon the chase.

He came up to me now, out of breath but with an obscure triumph in his voice. “They’re gone, Watson. They were too fast for me in the darkness. What did you see?”

Vaguely I was now aware that I had somehow torn my sleeve and trouser leg, and that I was seriously out of breath. “No more than a dim figure,” I gasped. “but Holmes went with it. It carried him away.”

Armstrong’s vague outline beside me nodded. “That’s very much what it looked like to me. They went in this direction–but there must have been more than one man, wouldn’t you say? To abduct Sherlock Holmes in such a fashion?”

I murmured something.

During this brief exchange both of us had been trudging steadily uphill, and within a minute or so of our departure we were back on the terrace, where confusion and excitement reigned. Armstrong and I rejoined an uncertain number of dim figures that were still moving about in almost complete bewilderment, though now in relative quiet. Realizing that under the circumstances very little could be accomplished without more light, I re-entered the library through the broken window and went immediately to switch on the electric chandelier.

Inside the house, the impact of servants’ fists could now be heard through both of the library’s locked doors, as well as their muffled voices demanding to be answered, pleading for reassurance against the overwhelming evidence that something had gone terribly wrong.

Again, as in my earlier attempt, my progress toward the electric switch was impeded by disarranged furniture, and by collisions with one or more other people who were still moving about at cross-purposes in the darkened room.

When at last my fingers closed on the switch, and the lights in the library chandelier came on again, the sudden glare revealed Louisa’s mother, sitting near the library table in one of the few chairs which remained upright, the flowers on her gay dress now sadly crushed and torn. With the impact of the dazzling light, Mrs. Altamont screamed. Her outcry was promptly repeated, became a dirge of renewed loss that went on and on. It was echoed by a fresh scream from out on the terrace, in the voice of young Sarah Kirkaldy.

Meanwhile both the father and the fiancé of Louisa Altamont had followed me back into the house. The older man and the younger alike were joyfully stunned–but the two of them were not, as I was soon to discover, rejoicing for exactly the same reason.

It was Altamont who spoke to me first. “She came back... I touched her, Dr. Watson. Twice I touched her hand, her arm.” Extending his own trembling fingers, Louisa’s father went on to tell me, in a halting, altered voice, of how he had held his daughter’s hand, and had been able to see her at very close range in the darkness. They had exchanged some words of mutual recognition. “She came back!” he repeated, softly marveling.

We now drew back the draperies from all the windows, so that the electric light fell out strongly through the glass upon the terrace just outside. Asking a pale-faced Rebecca Altamont to see that my medical bag was brought down to me at once, I went out on the terrace again. My chief concern was for Abraham Kirkaldy. He was still lying almost exactly where I had seen him fall, although his sister, adding her lamentations to the noise, had lifted the young man’s gory head into her lap.

Both of the elder Altamonts, as well as Martin Armstrong, had suffered minor injuries from broken glass and collisions in the dark, but none requiring my immediate attention. Hurrying to the side of the fallen youth, I bent over him and made an examination with the aid of the glaring electric chandelier inside. Immediately it was obvious that young Kirkaldy had suffered a severely torn scalp, and almost certainly serious injury to the skull beneath. The wound had the appearance of having been made by a hard blow with some sharp and heavy weapon. As usual with a serious laceration of the scalp, there was considerable bleeding. but at the moment the victim still breathed.

While I was examining the young man, someone else, I believe it was Armstrong, at last went to unbolt and open the room’s interior doors, admitting the servants who had been pounding on them and demanding to know whether their master and mistress were all right.

Altamont now had a joyous answer for the clamoring servants, who now poured into the library bearing lights and a variety of improvised weapons. “She came to us! To her old parents–and I had doubted, but I shall never doubt again!” He went to try to comfort his wife, who, rather than rejoicing in Louisa’s return, was bemoaning her renewed loss. Neither had really taken any notice as yet of the new tragedy on the terrace–or of the kidnapping which had seemingly just occurred.

Looking around in the confusion, the fact struck me again, with even more ominous force than before, that Sherlock Holmes was still nowhere to be seen.

One of the servants had now brought my bag. Having done my best to stanch the bleeding of young Kirkaldy’s scalp wound–there was nothing else I could do for him at the moment–I quickly descended once more into the garden a few yards west of the terrace, and shouted Holmes’s name repeatedly. but there was no reply. It seemed to me that he had been made to vanish into a darkness whose ominous silence swallowed violence and death alike.

Now I had a few moments in which to look about the library. Perhaps Louisa had dropped something, left some actual trace of her presence in the house? but in the general disarrangement and confusion I could discover nothing.

It upset me at the time, but perhaps it is not really to be wondered at that in the circumstances, confronted by marvels and by violent injury, no one else seemed much concerned about the fact that Holmes was missing. I believe it was generally assumed that he had gone in pursuit of some intruder, despite my denials that that had been the case. Even though I was sure that my old friend had been in distress when I last saw him, I was still able to hope that he would soon return.

Despite my attempts to give myself such reassurances my worry grew.

Meanwhile, the various minor injuries suffered in the outbreak of violence kept me busy for a time in my professional capacity. At intervals I went outside again and looked and listened, but neither my borrowed electric torch nor my ears gave me the slightest encouragement regarding the success of any renewed search.

The screams uttered by Louisa’s mother had by this time declined into low exhausted moans. Obviously the woman remained for the moment inconsolable. In a low voice she had begun lamenting, over and over, the fact that her beloved Louisa had been here, within reach, and then had been somehow driven away again.

Mrs. Altamont, evidently in some forlorn hope of tempting her lost daughter back, asked that the electric lights be once more turned off. Of course the request had to be refused, and I invoked my medical authority firmly enough that the servants obeyed me. Meanwhile young Rebecca Altamont was trying, in a broken voice, to comfort her mother, even while struggling to suppress her own sobs.

Louisa’s father, obviously shaken to the depths of his being by the experience through which he had just passed, sympathized with his wife’s grief, but the main focus of his attention remained elsewhere. The man kept wandering in and out of the house, from the terrace to the library and back again, looking about him hopefully at every step, as if he thought his daughter might appear again. At length he came inside, let himself down in one of the chairs turned sideways from the table, and sat there staring into space, his mouth open, his expression vacant, as if unaware that his hand was still bleeding from a piece of broken glass. A servant who came to help him was ordered absently away, so that the blood continued to drip, unnoticed by the victim, upon the carpet.

On approaching him with my professional manner I had better success, and soon succeeded in getting his hand bandaged. Still Altamont, though yielding to my ministrations, seemed scarcely aware of his injury. Gradually I understood that the man had undergone something approximating a religious conversion, during the last few minutes of darkness following the appearance of his daughter–the image, the figure he had seen, had very probably touched, had been genuinely that of his little girl.

As I tied the knot securing the bandage on his hand, he roused himself from this ecstatic trance to become aware of who I was and what I was doing. His manner turned grim. “I was wrong, Watson, I was terribly wrong. Oh, forgive me, Louisa–the blessed spirits will forgive me, I know they will!”

“The blessed spirits?” I asked hollowly–my thoughts were still full of that shadowed horror which had hung near me in the darkness, and had struck twice at members of our group.

Martin Armstrong, who had now collapsed into another chair nearby, was also overjoyed, but while listening to Louisa’s father, kept shaking his head in obvious disagreement. “No,” the young man interjected at one point. “No, sir, you don’t understand. Oh, she came back, she did indeed! but the blessed spirits had nothing to do with it!”

The father, however, ignored this comment, and springing up suddenly from his chair, began clutching at one person after another, weeping in his growing joy and his continuing amazement.

Repeatedly he told us how Louisa, in the brief interval when she had been present, had spoken to her father of things no one else could possibly have known. Though stunned with astonishment, he was certain of her identity.

“And then... and then... certain things happened. There was a dreadful interference... which drove her away again.” Once more a sterner expression came into his face, and he looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time since the lights had been restored. “Where,” he demanded, “is Mr. Holmes?”

Armstrong, in the background, was still in smiling disagreement, but made no further argument.

Tersely I explained, as best I could, the situation with regard to Holmes.

As he heard me out, Ambrose Altamont, his clothing disheveled, his hair standing on end, assumed a new expression. Presently he began to speak in a much harder voice. In a few moments I understood–he now blamed Holmes and me for his daughter’s untimely flight, and the accompanying violence.

“Sir,” I protested, “it was neither Holmes nor I who struck down the young man lying on your terrace!”

Energetically he waved off my protests. “No, of course not. Not with your own hands. but it was the interference, you see, which caused the trouble–it must have been.”

I would have protested, but fiercely he waved me to silence. “There are dark powers as well as light. I was warned about such things, but I would not listen. I did not believe, because I had not seen.” Then Altamont paused, seeming to reconsider. “Not that it is entirely–perhaps not even chiefly–your fault. I must share fully in the blame, Dr. Watson. I must curse the day when I brought you two here to interfere.”

Our client–now evidently our former client–went on to express great concern over the fate of Abraham Kirkaldy, which he at last seemed to realize, and to issue me a stern warning that all further harassment–by which he evidently meant all investigation–of the mediums must cease. Obviously the spirits were angry at our hostile intrusion, and with some justification.

Yes, Altamont was saying in effect, it was certainly too bad if something terrible had happened to Holmes, and if something even worse had happened to the poor young man–yes, he, Louisa’s father, blamed himself for bringing in the detectives.

He fixed me with the eye of a fanatic, even as he attempted to comfort his wife. “Can you understand now, Doctor, that we are dealing here with powers that must not be mocked? I tell you sir, my worst fear now is that tonight’s interference might have driven our little girl away from us for good!” And Madeline Altamont screamed again.

Meanwhile Martin Armstrong and I had begun to insist that the police must be called in–some unknown person had committed an act of violence which was almost certain to prove fatal. And–a servant discovered the fact while we were arguing–a robbery had taken place as well. A safe in Ambrose Altamont’s study was found open, and some items of jewelry it had contained, all fairly common things of no enormous value, had been taken.

Fortunately, Norberton House was equipped with a telephone.

The local constabulary were on the scene within twenty minutes following my call. A quarter of an hour after their arrival, they were in agreement with me that the help of Scotland Yard would, in this case, be very desirable if not absolutely essential. Holmes was still missing. No trace could be found of the weapon which had struck down Abraham Kirkaldy, while it was obvious that his injury must be due to something more than an accident.

Four more hours passed, and full daylight had broken over the scene before Scotland Yard’s help arrived, in the person of Inspector Merivale, whom I was heartily glad to see.

Merivale was a tallish man with keen blue eyes, dark hair, and a small mustache of which he was rather vain, frequently stroking or smoothing it with a finger. He was, I knew, regarded by Holmes as one of the best of the younger detectives at Scotland Yard. On his arrival he justified this opinion, as I thought, by temporarily setting aside the clamor of other witnesses wanting to be heard, to listen very seriously to my testimony regarding the disappearance of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. To my disappointment, it soon became apparent to me that the representative of the Yard more than half-believed that Holmes had vanished of his own volition, and would reappear in the same way when he was ready.

Needless to say, I made no mention to anyone, including Merivale, of Holmes’s earlier suspicions regarding vampires, and how they had been confirmed. Whatever help my old friend might need from me, I would be unable to provide it while confined in an asylum.

An energetic search of the immediate vicinity revealed no trace of any skulking strangers–or of Holmes. At the direction of Scotland Yard, plans were made to bring in a dog to follow the trail. Within an hour of Merivale’s arrival, the animal and its handler were on the scene, and I provided them with some items of clothing Holmes had brought with him from London and which were now in his room. but after following what seemed to be the right trail through the garden for twenty yards or so, the brute came to a sudden stop, howled pitifully, and absolutely refused to go on.

Despite what had happened to young Kirkaldy, Merivale professed himself doubtful that Holmes faced any immediate peril; fraudulent mediums were not, as a rule, violent. Then he added: “You know, Dr. Watson, better than anyone else, what he’s like. The tricks he’s played on all of us down through the years.”

I shook my head wearily. “Nothing that happened last night was a trick, inspector. Not on our part, at any rate.”

All the police were willing to do whatever they could for Sherlock Holmes; but after the most thorough search possible of the house and grounds, they had no trail to follow.

I thought, but carefully did not say, that a powerful vampire, even when put to the inconvenience of carrying a breathing victim, was unlikely to leave any discernable trail, particularly after dark.

It was at that point that I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in one of the dark old mirrors still hanging on the library wall. Taking note of my own eyes red-rimmed and sleepless, my torn sleeve, the blood of Abraham Kirkaldy which had dried upon my hands and clothes, I was forced to admit to myself that I could do nothing more. And that there was only one person in the world to whom it was now possible for me to turn for effective help.

Being forced to the admission made it no easier to accept.