The Angel of the Opera Read online

  AVAILABLE NOW FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES SERIES:

  THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN

  Daniel Stashower

  THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

  Manley Wade Wellman & Wade Wellman

  THE SCROLL OF THE DEAD

  David Stuart Davies

  THE STALWART COMPANIONS

  H. Paul Jeffers

  THE VEILED DETECTIVE

  David Stuart Davies

  THE MAN FROM HELL

  Barrie Roberts

  SÉANCE FOR A VAMPIRE

  Fred Saberhagen

  THE SEVENTH BULLET

  Daniel D. Victor

  THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS

  Edward B. Hanna

  DR JEKYLL AND MR HOLMES

  Loren D. Estleman

  THE GIANT RAT OF SUMATRA

  Richard L. Boyer

  COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE PEERLESS PEER

  Philip José Farmer

  THE STAR OF INDIA

  Carole Buggé

  THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA

  SAM SICILIANO

  TITAN BOOKS

  THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES:

  THE ANGEL OF THE OPERA

  ISBN: 9780857685391

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St

  London

  SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2011

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 1994, 2011 Sam Siciliano

  Visit our website:

  www.titanbooks.com

  What did you think of this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at: [email protected], or write to us at the above address. To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive Titan offers online, please register as a member by clicking the ‘sign up’ button on our website: www.titanbooks.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Printed in the USA.

  To my mother, for introducing me to Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan of the Apes, and the Land of Oz. She tolerated my youthful vampire novel, but this is the book she would have been proud of.

  Contents

  Dear Reader

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Afterword

  Dear Reader,

  The following manuscript was written in the summer of 1891, shortly after the events recounted herein. My purpose at the time was to reveal the real Sherlock Holmes as corrective to the ridiculous fictional creation of John Watson. Holmes was my truest friend and my cousin, his mother, Violet Sherrinford, being my mother’s sister. However, when in 1892 I showed Sherlock this account of our adventures in Paris, he asked me, quite sternly, not to publish it. Watson’s writings he thought bad enough; far worse to have his true character revealed, his soul bared to the masses! He was also concerned about the privacy of others.

  With regret I yielded to his wishes, and over the years, as yet another of Watson’s foolish stories appeared, I gritted my teeth and tried to master patience. Now that Sherlock, God rest his soul, and John Watson are both dead, I can finally publish what was truly Holmes’s strangest case. The devil’s foot business cannot possibly compare with this.

  Sherlock Holmes was a much more interesting, a much deeper, man than Watson rendered him. Watson had little imagination and was extremely conventional in the stuffiest British sense. His accounts transfer that same conventionality to my cousin, including the typical British imperialistic sentiments of the day. Nothing could be more false! Sherlock was also extremely cynical about contemporary religiosity. When Watson has him declaiming that the beauty of a rose reflects the Creator or lecturing a maimed woman against suicide, he was creating pure fiction. Sherlock was an agnostic, and he despised smugness and cant.

  Watson could be quite obtuse about Holmes. For instance, he took my cousin’s disdain for the fair sex at face value, never wondering if perhaps “the lady doth protest too much.”

  Watson was accurate in his physical description of Holmes, but Sydney Paget’s drawings were highly idealized. My cousin was not so handsome, nor did he resemble the actor Basil Rathbone! His hawkish nose threw his face off balance; his hair began to recede in his late thirties; his lips were thin; and he had a weak chin. All in all, he had a certain grotesque quality, his skeletal frame, his blazing eyes, pale complexion, and large nose all contributing to the impression. My frankness here may seem unkind, but his heart and his mind were what made Sherlock Holmes great.

  He could be a difficult man to live with. As even Watson notes, he alternated between periods of frantic activity and black depression. During the latter, thoughts of death, evil, and his own failings tormented him, but to his dying day, he was not one to confide in others. Watson and he were temperamentally poles apart, and their relationship was nowhere near so rosy as in the stories. In fact, a major row separated them for several years. Watson was so angry that he promptly invented Moriarty and killed off my cousin (much to Sherlock’s relief) at Reichenbach Falls. The events I recount took place shortly after that falling out.

  It is probably rather obvious by now that Watson and I never much cared for one another. I cannot forgive him for parading so distorted, so petty a rendering of my cousin before the public for all those years. Since I, too, was trained in medicine, I can state that his failings as a physician were even greater than those as a writer. I encountered several examples of his incompetence firsthand!

  But I must be charitable to the dead. Even after all these years, Watson still warms my old blood! This book is about Sherlock Holmes, not John Watson, and I hope the reader will not be displeased to discover Holmes, “warts and all.” Despite his faults, he was a great and generous man, the finest I have ever known. My wife and I named a son after him, and we who loved him still miss him deeply.

  I have made few alterations in the manuscript, leaving my youthful enthusiasm intact. Those were gentler, more innocent times, when mankind could still look to the future with wonder and hope instead of despair. Often have I wished that I could leave this dark, wretched twentieth century and return to the 1890s to again walk the streets of Paris with Sherlock Holmes.

  Doctor Henry Vernier

  London, July 1939

  Prologue

  Sherlock Holmes stared at the goddess of death, the incarnation of evil, while I, being of a less melancholic nature, mused upon the young woman playing the piano.

  Wales in January–the large hall of the ancient castle cold and empty, a major blizzard raging outside. Susan Lowell’s music, more than the coal glowing in the fireplace, lightened the darkness and warmed us. Her powers as a musician were extraordinary, but I lack my cousin’s technical understanding of music and his perfect pitch. Harmonic theory, sonata allegro form, and fugues are mysteries to me. I enjoy serious m
usic, but it takes a clumsy player indeed to deviate so much from the rhythm or pitch that my ear (clumsier still) can detect the variance. The woman’s physiognomy and her beauty were what drew my attention.

  Her face displayed both her Indian and her Anglo-Saxon heritage. She had the large, almond-shaped eyes, the long, straight nose and narrow face, the combination of delicacy and dignity, so often found in the women of India. Sadly, the trachoma which had left her nearly blind had thickened and disfigured her eyelids and cast a film over her stunning black eyes. The effects of the disease were only too familiar; I had seen them everywhere in the Orient. Her hair was not pure black, but had a brownish cast inherited from her father, and her skin, too, was paler than that of a pure-blooded Indian. Her dress, however, had nothing of the exotic: her hair was bound up in conventional British or French fashion, and she wore a dark skirt and a white shirtwaist made of silk. Her long brown fingers stretched with ease to strike Chopin’s chords.

  I could not help but reflect upon the two absurd blows fate had struck her. Still in her early thirties, Susan Lowell was beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, and wealthy; but no family of even modest pretense would allow their son to marry a half-caste. Some simpering blonde with the intelligence of a spaniel, gladly–but never one such as she! Nature had also treated her unkindly, afflicting her at an early age with a disease virtually nonexistent in the temperate climate of England. Had her father returned sooner to his native land, she would still possess her sight.

  Although she was slender and of moderate stature, there was nothing meek or mild in the thunderous conclusion to Chopin’s piece. She let the final chords fade slowly until silence had once again claimed the massive chamber. At last she sighed, and the flush on her cheeks also faded.

  Sherlock turned from the statue. “Bravo.” He clapped his hands. “Really most excellent, Miss Lowell. I have not heard Chopin played better.”

  “I am no music critic,” I said, “but it was beautiful.”

  She smiled, turning her head toward me, but her eyes stared vacantly into space. “Thank you, gentlemen. It is vain, I know, but I enjoy having an audience. However, it is very late, and I am weary.”

  I stood. “It was boorish of us to let you continue for so long, but your playing was utterly captivating.”

  She smiled again. “You are very gracious, Doctor Vernier. Catherine.” Her maid took her arm, but she needed little guidance in so familiar a room. “Until tomorrow, and I hope, Mr. Holmes, that you will again join me on the violin.”

  “You have my promise, Miss Lowell. You know the Kreutzer?”

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “I shall look forward to it.”

  Sherlock stood rather stiffly. I reached out and gave her arm a squeeze. It felt soft under the smooth silk. “Thank you again, Miss Lowell.”

  The smile she gave me made me wish briefly that my affections had not been pledged elsewhere. How I missed Michelle! Sherlock waited until she had left, then withdrew his pipe, lit it, and soon exhaled a cloud of smoke.

  I coughed once, and he gave me a twisted, sardonic smile that seemed completely unrelated to Miss Lowell’s radiant expression. He wore his customary black frock coat and gray striped trousers; his face was pale and tired. “A foul habit, Doctor, but one of a very fixed and determined nature. You seem rather taken with the young lady.”

  “She is not only beautiful, but has a quick mind and a generous nature.”

  “I see you have noticed her interior qualities as well.”

  I smiled. “It required no great powers of deduction.”

  “Indeed? Then it is surprising there is not a crowd of fine young fellows courting the lady.”

  “That is because the world is filled with fools.”

  “The same thought had occurred to me.”

  “I noticed you seemed more occupied with another lady, one of a more bloodthirsty disposition.”

  Holmes nodded. “She is indeed a woman of a different stripe.” Slowly he approached the statue, then stood with folded arms, his pipe in one hand. “She is ghastly, is she not? Kali Ma, the Black Mother, the goddess of murderers and assassins, the goddess of blood and death.”

  “It is strangely beautiful.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes,” I said, “in a perverse sort of way. Certainly Major Lowell must think so to have kept it all these years.”

  Sherlock gave me another brief, crooked smile, but his gray eyes had an odd glint. “I think she is the most truly ugly thing I have ever seen or am likely to see.” He put the stem of his pipe between his lips.

  The statue had been carved from black marble, and the smooth polish of the stone clashed with the roughness of execution and the hideousness of the subject. Kali, the Black Mother, stood nearly three feet tall. A corpse carved with exquisite detail hung from each earlobe. An equally elaborate necklace of skulls hung about her neck, falling below the pointed breasts, and at her waist was a girdle made up of a double row of severed hands. One of her four arms held the head of a giant, another a sword with a curved blade, another a terrified man. Her free hand was raised in an upright gesture. She stood upon the crouching form of another god, one leg raised and bent. Her tongue thrust grotesquely from her mouth, and her eyes were two blood-colored rubies. Unlike the dusky marble, the gems had the trick of catching any stray light so that they had a faint, disconcertingly life-like glow.

  “The jewels are beautiful,” I said. “They must be worth a fortune.”

  “In themselves they might be beautiful, if you could remove them from so polluted a context. However, I think they will always remain the eyes of the goddess of death.”

  “You are keeping something from me. In your best consulting detective manner.”

  “Nothing which should not be rather obvious. By the way, I received this note today forwarded from London. Read it.”

  My eyes widened. Written in French, it was a solicitation from L’Opéra de Paris, signed by Messieurs Richard and Moncharmin, asking for his aid in clearing up the matter of an “opera ghost” who had been disrupting things. “This sounds like the very case for you. It appears to have everything.”

  “Would you care to accompany me, Henry? I shall want to be there in a fortnight. I could use your services.”

  “You’re joking. You know I have absolutely no skill at detection.”

  “True, but your command of the language would be helpful.”

  “Sherlock, you speak excellent French.”

  “But I have had no practice for some time, and I do have an accent.”

  “A very slight one.”

  “Perhaps, but enough to give me away. That accent will limit where I can go and what I can discover. You would have no such limitations. Besides, we shall stay in an excellent hotel, dine like royalty, and no doubt attend several performances gratis. Only the French can do Faust justice, and there are rumors of some new sensation doing Marguerite.”

  I laughed. “You know I am no great opera enthusiast, but the hotel and the cuisine are very appealing. I would be glad to come. I have not been to Paris for two years now, and any excuse would suffice–not that I do not enjoy sharing your adventures. Michelle will cover our practice for me. Oh, she will not want me to rush away again so soon, but I shall persuade her. I shall have a week to shower her with my attentions.”

  Holmes nodded. “Good. It’s settled then.” He drew in deeply on his pipe, his eyes drawn again to the statue. “We are almost finished here.”

  “Almost? Have you not captured the last of the thugs? The threat to Major Lowell and his daughter is gone.”

  A cloud of white smoke drifted from his lips, but his eyes remained fixed. “Perhaps. There remain a few... details.”

  “That statue certainly fascinates you.”

  “Evil has always fascinated me, Henry, and I doubt I have ever seen a case of purer, more unrefined evil than this.”

  “But the thugs, in the end, did not amount to much. Life is very si
mple for them. Their mission is to strangle as many of their fellow creatures as possible for their goddess there. They were out of their sunny Indian element here in the cold wastes of Wales. I almost felt sorry for them, having to deal with the English winter and the net Sherlock Holmes had laid for them. Major Lowell should not have shot them, you know. Murderers many times over they may be, but they deserved their chance before a court of law and an English jury.”

  “Major Lowell had an excellent reason for shooting them.”

  “Indeed?” I said.

  He took his pipe from between his lips, but said nothing.

  “Sherlock, will you stop staring at that cursed statue and explain yourself.”

  Another cloud of smoke came from between his lips, then he turned to look at me. “You will understand soon enough.”

  “Ah, my friends, still admiring my statue, yes?”

  Major Lowell was in excellent humor. He wore a crimson velvet dressing gown and held a large cigar, which my physician’s instincts made me wish to pluck from his lips. From his accounts of his involvement in India during the thirties, I knew he must be well into his seventies. His color was never good, and I could tell from being around him for the past few days that he suffered from shortness of breath and angina. His hair was quite white, the bushy sideburns connected to a large white mustache, but his chin and jaw were smooth shaven. The style had been the rage decades ago. His face was flushed, probably from drink, but the skin about his eyes had a sickly grayish cast.

  Holmes nodded. “In many ways I consider her the key to the entire case.”

  The hint of a frown clouded Lowell’s brow. “You do?”

  Sherlock stared at the statue. “You contacted me shortly after Colonels Davidson and Broderick were found dead. You recounted your shared experiences in India more than fifty years past when you were part of British efforts to suppress the ‘thugs,’ ritual murderers and assassins who killed thousands in the name of their goddess Kali. Both Davidson and Broderick appeared to have been strangled by thugs, intruders from the past seeking vengeance. You feared you were next.”