“Touie didn’t approve of my interest in spiritualism.”
“But now your first wife would know that you’re right. She ought to be happy to tell you so. What about your father? Was he one of the loved ones who visited you from the afterlife?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? At one time, didn’t your father say that he received messages from the unseen world?”
Conan Doyle didn’t reply.
“The sketches that your father drew. What was their subject?” Holmes asked.
“What are you up to?”
“I’m merely attempting to solve a mystery. What was the subject of your father’s sketches?”
They regarded each other, neither of them speaking for at least a minute.
“Faeries,” Conan Doyle finally said.
“Faeries and phantoms. One of your father’s drawings is a self-portrait in which demons swirl around him.”
“Alcohol made my father insane. He sketched what his poisoned mind caused him to see.”
“Or perhaps . . .”
“Every time you say ‘perhaps’ . . .”
“Perhaps your father actually did see faeries, demons, and phantoms, so horrifying that he used alcohol to try to stop the visions. Perhaps alcohol didn’t cause the visions. It might have been the other way around. Could your father’s visions have caused his need for alcohol?”
“But that would mean . . .” Abrupt understanding made Conan Doyle stop.
“I’m only considering every possibility,” Holmes explained.
“I want you to leave.”
“We haven’t finished our conversation.”
“Leave. Now. If you don’t respect my wishes, we might indeed have the physical altercation that almost happened earlier.”
Holmes considered him and nodded. “Very well. The mystery might be better solved by you instead of me. But the clues are all before you.”
Holmes stood, put on the deerstalker cap, and walked toward the archway.
“Good night, Sir Arthur.”
He climbed the stairs, his tall, thin figure disappearing, the creak of his footsteps becoming fainter.
Silence settled over the museum.
Conan Doyle stared toward the shadowy stairs for a long time. At last he turned toward the photograph of the three faeries next to a waterfall. When he’d last looked at it, he’d been reminded of a sketch that his father had drawn in which faeries lay among blades of grass in a field.
Somehow that recollection had made him imagine a visit from Sherlock Holmes. The intense chill Conan Doyle felt told him that he was in fact here in this basement and not in his bed still enduring a nightmare.
The power of imagination never failed to astonish him: wide-awake trances possessing him, prompting him to envision a lost world of dinosaurs, the White Company of the Hundred Years’ War, and . . .
Sherlock Holmes.
“The clues are all before you,” Holmes had told him.
Or rather, something in my mind made me imagine that he told me, Conan Doyle thought.
Although he would never have admitted it, his characters often spoke to him. It didn’t seem strange to him, but he knew what others would think if he admitted he heard voices. His father had heard voices. “Voices from the unseen world,” his father had told people.
And look where his father had ended.
“Perhaps your father actually did see faeries and demons,” Holmes had suggested. “Could your father’s visions have caused his need for alcohol?”
“But that would mean . . .” Conan Doyle hadn’t dared to finish his thought.
What would it mean? he asked himself. That my father was insane? Did my father consume massive quantities of alcohol to drown the faeries and demons he saw?
Conan Doyle leaned close to the photograph of the faeries. Holmes had said that the photograph consisted of two images combined in a double exposure. It wasn’t the first time Conan Doyle had heard that criticism. Skeptics were quick to offer objections that they couldn’t prove.
“You see, but you do not observe,” Holmes had said.
Conan Doyle leaned even closer toward the photograph. Was there possibly a blur around the fairies? Did they resemble children made to look extremely small?
But if that photograph was fraudulent, then he would need to consider that the photograph of the ghost hovering above the man in the doorway was fraudulent also, and then he would need to consider that the Syrian vase, the Babylonian clay tablet, and the pile of Turkish pennies that had dropped onto a séance table were fraudulent—and the pages of automatic writing, and the ornate drawing of flowers that a medium had somehow completed in seventeen seconds. Certainly Holmes had implied that the wax gloves of a spirit and the photograph of ectoplasm weren’t authentic.
But Holmes hadn’t been here to imply anything, Conan Doyle forcefully reminded himself. No one had actually been in this basement, sitting in that chair. To believe differently would truly be a sign of madness.