Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF

house on the Embankment, and the white-haired proprietor of a junk-yard at the end of Fetter Lane.
    It was Peter who came to me, for help in finding Holmes again.
    I was delighted to see him again. My illness weighed heavily on me just then, made worse by the fact that I knew John was nearly frantic, between the costs of caring for me, and fear that I wouldn’t pull out of it, and the sheer insanely mundane burden of running a house. I had dreamed more and more of the Neverlands, hearing in the distance the pounding of the surf on their shores, and the singing of the mermaids among the rocks, but this was the first time Peter appeared in one of the dreams. It wasn’t in the Neverlands, either, but in my own bedroom — John had taken to sleeping on the couch in his study, for fear of disturbing me — and when Peter swooped in through the window I could see he was almost incandescent with rage.
    “Mary, where’s Holmes?” he demanded, as if it hadn’t been decades since we’d parted. He grabbed my hand, and as he pulled me to my feet I was as we all are in dreams, perfectly healthy and much younger than in real life. “You have to show me where he lives. I need him.”
    He was as he had always been. I was as well, the long blonde hair that had been cut off with my illness (that’s how sick I was) now lying intact again in pigtails on the shoulders of my white nightgown, and my nails chewed off short. (I’d quit biting them the minute I left Mrs. Clegg’s).
    Of course I said yes immediately, and being Peter, he completely forgot about putting fairy-dust on me to fly until we were standing on the window-sill, and then Ten Stars had to remind him: Ten Stars was the fairy he flew with by that time, and much less jealous by nature than her predecessor. Tinker Bell would never have bothered to keep a human — dreaming or not — from crashing to the pavement. To do her justice I don’t think Tink ever really understood why it wasn’t funny.
    We flew over London, something I had always wanted to do. And it was as glorious as I had always known it would be.
    It was not so very late: Big Ben was striking eleven in the distance as we stepped through the window at 221B Baker Street. We entered through the bedroom that had been John’s, now crammed almost floor-to-ceiling with Mr. Holmes’ books and souvenirs. I could hear the strains of Mr. Holmes’ violin from the parlor, smell strong shag tobacco with an intensity I hadn’t experienced since I was a child. By the sudden chill on my bare ankles I knew that Peter and I had stepped from dream into reality, and panic filled me at this thought. Peter, still keeping a grip on my hand, barged through the parlor door saying “Holmes!” but I hung back in the shadows, suddenly shy of meeting, in my changed dream-state, a man I knew as an adult in the cold adult world.
    Holmes had already started up from his chair and the violin was out of his hands — I think he had a pistol tucked behind the chair-cushion — but he saw it was Peter and his eyebrows went up with astonished delight. The next second his glance went to me, still half-hid in the dark bedroom doorway, and his expression changed, but before he could speak, Peter jabbed a finger at him and snapped,
    “You have to help me, Holmes. I am being accused of kidnapping — kidnapping ! — and you must help me clear my name!”
    The boy’s name was Robert Lewensham and his father was the Earl of Wylcourt. Peter didn’t know these things, of course; Holmes looked them up while I poured us all out tea. Peter’s account was only that Bobbie had come with him to the Neverlands twice — “He’s a tremendous sport and the Black Knight of Ravensmire lives in terror of his blade,” — after first meeting him in the bleak fells of Yorkshire, where one of Ten Stars’s relatives had gotten lost and Peter went to find her.
    “This last time, he didn’t get back home,” Peter said. “It isn’t my fault. Bobbie knew