Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex

Chapter XVII A SHOCKING SPECTACLE

THE following day the Capital’s newspapers were filled with villagers’ wildly exaggerated accounts of the bizarre murder, replete with wood-cuts of vampires and a painting by Burne-Jones. In an attempt to prevent the vampire moving across the Danube, the Patriarch of Rumania intended to offer a special Divine Liturgy in the Archiepiscopal Cathedral of Galati to invoke St. Andrew, patron of wolves and donor of garlic. In Sofia the three men at the glade gave evidence at a quickly convened deposition. They affirmed on oath that when they arrived at the glade a crescent moon above them grew full in seconds and turned blood red. They swore that before the two strangers came and took the dead body away it had twice jumped eight feet off the ground and flown at their throats in a desperate effort to replace its lost blood. In flight little points of light floated in the air around it. Its eyes had emitted a yellow glow.

Bulgaria’s high society was agog. The custom among the wealthy of riding for pleasure in the Mount Vitosh foot-hills in the cool of the morning fell dramatically from favour. Mass hysteria infected the countryside. Mustard seed was sprinkled on every roof-top. Sales of apotropaics, traditionally high, soared even higher. Merchants ran out of garlic by mid-day. As during previous vampire outbreaks, villagers fled their houses and slept clumped together in one building, rubbing garlic on every door and window. Even though a post-mortem had quickly concluded she was still a virgin, there was lurid speculation on whether the vampire had inseminated the corpse which might then - even after burial - give birth to a dzhadadzhiya, the child of a vampire and human mother.

Fearing the woman’s death heralded the return of a vampire epidemic, regional groups were forming, prepared to fight a long-running battle against further undead who, galvanised by the events in the Mount Vitosh forest, even now would be sharpening their teeth and twisting and turning and stretching in their graves like fledging corvids.

In an effort to reassure and calm the public, the Prince ordered a coffin decked in silk crape. The corpse was to await identification under twenty-four-hour armed guard in the Coburg family mausoleum in Sofia. If no one came forward it would be taken to a crematorium and burnt to cinders over a cleansing bonfire of wild rose and hawthorn plants. At the Prince’s suggestion, the ashes would be taken to Philippopolis, the city founded by the father of Alexander the Great, and provided with a final resting place in the Church of St. Louis, thus held captive for ever in holy ground.

In the late afternoon a smart landau and pair of greys sent by the British Legation arrived at the Panachoff to take us to the Royal Command performance of Salomé. As we clambered aboard, Holmes cocked a quizzical eye at me. ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘What’s the matter? You’re not looking quite yourself. The woman’s murder has upset you?’

‘To tell the truth, it has,’ I confirmed. ‘It reminds me of the dark incidents in A Study In Scarlet and makes me just as uneasy. I ought to be more case-hardened after my Afghan experiences with so many stinking dead. I saw my own comrades hacked to pieces at Maiwand. I felt no touch of fear upon those occasions.

‘I can understand,’ came the sympathetic reply. ‘There is a mystery about this case which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.’

When the carriage pulled away I asked, ‘Holmes, more to the point, what do you think has happened to Captain Barrington? Not a hint of his whereabouts has been reported. With your wonderful capacity to reason, I am confident you will soon arrive at the truth.’

‘I am coming to the conclusion,’ Holmes replied soberly, ‘that some unforeseen catastrophe has occurred to him. As to the truth - I wonder. We must always consider that the purpose of human reason may not be to find truth but simply to persuade other people that we’re right.’

Sir Penderel was waiting for us at the theatre, a Moorish style edifice with lavish fenestration, two towers and a dome, of a solemnity and luxury already going from fashion in the rest of Europe. He led us up wide stairs to the Legation box immediately adjacent to one packed to the gunnels with the Prince’s camarilla, including Colonel Kalchoff and two or three young Army officers. At their side sat several women aglitter with necklaces, brooches, bracelets and trinkets, crowned by the curls and loops in which they dressed their hair. The provocative smell of carnation perfume drifted across to our seats. Soldiers like flying ants combed the ceiling and proscenium for explosives. A small orchestra was tuning up, consisting mainly of the Gypsy musicians from the Sherlock Holmes competition.

Several rows of seats in the Stalls had been removed to make way for gilded armchairs sent from the Palace. Ferdinand and a large retinue made an entrance. The Prince bowed to the invited audience, turning his head upwards to nod in friendly fashion at Sir Penderel, with a further, more solemn nod to us. The theatre hushed. A short delay ensued while the soldiers came down from the proscenium stage to probe the padding of the armchairs for bombs or other murderous engines. The Knyaz took his seat.

At the faint sound of flute and zither rising up from the pit, the curtain rose on an exotic scene outside Herod’s palace. Copper bowls and ewers and enormous silver cups lay scattered around the stage. Salomé appeared, pale-faced, almost immaterial, with appealing, wild black eyes and scarlet lips. She stood as though frozen in ice, an iridescent mass of silks and ostrich feathers. Her train gleamed like stained glass in the moonlight, adorned with countless blue foil and velvet butterflies. Now with the slow, formal gestures of a sorceress, now with the cuffing movement of a cat playing with a doomed mouse, Salomé began to taunt a roped John The Baptist, her eyes fixed on the lower half of his agonised face.

‘Iokanaan, it is thy mouth that I desire. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets that herald the approach of kings, and make afraid the enemy, are not so red - ’

Her head leaned forward towards him like a heron about to strike. ‘There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth. Suffer me to kiss thy mouth.’ She reared back. ‘What! You have nothing to say! You reject me! Yet I say, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I - will - kiss - thy - mouth.’

The curtain fell.

When it rose, the shockingly young Salomé stood alone on the stage. A servant came in, bearing the Baptist’s head on a silver platter. Blood dripped profusely from it. Salomé seized the severed head by the black matted hair and dangled it in front of her, addressing the sightless eyes.

‘Ah! Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth.’

As she uttered the words a spurt of blood burst from the severed neck and spattered down to the floorboards. She twisted and turned, kneading the blood into the stage as though pressing grapes. The crimson smeared into a circle hardly wider than her small feet.

‘I said it; did I not say it?’ Salomé remonstrated. ‘I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now. But wherefore dost thou not look at me? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids!’

I began to feel in need of air, overcome by the same nausea I experienced on the choppy sea-crossing to France. I started to rise, whispering an apology to an entranced Sir Penderel. Holmes’s hand restrained me.

‘Hold hard, Watson, there is something here - ’ he cautioned in an urgent whisper.

I returned my eyes to the stage. The slight, beautiful Salomé with her tea-rose skin stood there motionless. She brought the still-bleeding head closer and closer to her face, the gap narrowing inch by inch until suddenly, unbelievably, the two mouths met. A shocked silence engulfed the theatre. Seconds passed while she held the Baptist’s mouth hard against hers as though her young lips were wrestling a spirit from it. After an age, the pairs of lips pulled slowly apart.

‘Ah!’ she called out wildly to the severed head. ‘John, I have kissed thy mouth, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love. They say that love hath a bitter taste. But what matter? What matter? I have kissed thy mouth.’

The curtain fell. Applause led by the Prince began. Holmes grabbed my arm, his voice cutting through the sound.

‘Watson! Now we must go - and faster than the wind. Sir Penderel, forgive us, for we must leave you.’

I caught a glimpse of Colonel Kalchoff leaning forward, his expression startled as he observed our precipitate exit. We rattled down the long flight of stairs, my comrade’s eyes shining, his cheeks tinged with colour. Only at a crisis have I seen those battle-signals flying.

‘What is it, Holmes?’ I called out as I puffed after him in great confusion.

He called back, ‘I deserve to be kicked from here to Charing Cross. Salomé has given us the very answer we have been seeking!