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

the way. Only now his father’s hired men — wizards, some of them quite wicked — to find him, and the King of Dreams is saying, that this kind of thing can not be tolerated, and that if need be he will shut the Gates of Horn and Ivory that lie between this world and the Neverlands, so that no one may cross. He’s always saying things like that,” Peter added sulkily. It was the first time I’d ever heard him mention the King of Dreams. “And it isn’t fair.”
    “It isn’t,” I added, a little timidly. “What about all those children who’ve never gone to the Neverlands, Mr. Holmes? What becomes of them?”
    Holmes glanced across at me, the line between his brows telegraphing his uncertainty. In the shadows he had thought he’d recognized me, but sitting on his sofa before the fire — where so many times I’d sat in my adult life, all dressed up in proper gray delaine with a corset, bustle and husband — I could see he didn’t know why he’d thought so, or who he’d imagined I might be.
    “What indeed?” Holmes remarked dryly, and turned back to Peter, who was devouring biscuits left over — like the contents of the teapot — from Holmes’ own tea earlier that evening. “Might your friend have been seized by something that haunts the space between the worlds, like the Gallipoot? There are other things as well—”
    Peter waved impatiently with a biscuit. “ We can get away from them,” he boasted — by we , I assume he meant, himself and his Lost Boys. “The Gallipoot only eats people like pirates and Red Indians and black knights.”
    “Does it, indeed?” Holmes had crossed the room to the most recent of his scrapbooks, and the newspapers piled on top of it, sorting through the headlines of the past week with swift sureness, as if he knew exactly what he sought, which indeed he did. “I thought this sounded familiar,” he remarked in a moment, and extricated the York Evening Star from three-quarters of the way down the stack. “Robert Lewensham, Viscount Mure — h’rm — heir to the Earl of Wylcourt — born 1885 — police are seeking gypsies — believed to have vanished on the Yorkshire fells three miles from the village of Kethmure — bird-watching — blue jacket, blue cap — A shocking paucity of detail.” He plucked out another newspaper, handed it to me, got another for himself.
    I’d worked with John enough to know what Holmes sought, and located the follow-on article without trouble. “They add little,” I ventured, after scanning the columns. “They do say, Bobbie disappeared on the ninth—” I looked at the date of the paper in my hands, then turned, shocked, to Holmes. “Is the paper you have the day before this one?”
    Holmes nodded, regarding me again with that questing speculation in his eyes. “So the papers — and presumably, the police — didn’t learn of it until the twelfth. Either the boy’s guardians are singularly neglectful, or they had some reason to believe him safely elsewhere for two days. This last time, did Bobbie say he’d been visiting anywhere?”
    “Bobbie never visits anywhere,” replied Peter promptly. “He goes to school in the city, and when he’s at his home he’s alone.” For the first time since I’d known him, Peter’s voice had a note of real distress in it, of concern, not that he, Peter, was being accused of kidnapping children from the real world, but that his friend was somewhere in trouble. And that his friend lived the sort of life that he, Peter, had all his existence fled.
    When he’s at home he’s alone . There was a dismal world of Mrs. Cleggery in those six words.
    “Most interesting.” Holmes pulled another scrap-book from the overflowing shelves. “Do the fairies often get lost on the fells?”
    Peter nodded. “Mostly they find their way back at dawn. Ten Stars’s cousin Cloverberry’s just a little fairy, though, barely more than a bud, and you know how fairies are. Ow—!” he added, because