Chapter 3 ― The Disappearance of Rachel Musgrave (Part 5)

“Having made my name as a detective, I thought that the time was finally right,” said Irene Adler with a touch of chagrin. “I was convinced that I would return in triumph to Hurlstone and set things right.”

It had been Reginald Musgrave who had invited her to attend Madame Richborough’s spiritual investigation. For Irene the invitation could not have come at a better time.

Yet now the Musgrave mystery was more impenetrable than ever before. What had happened twelve years ago was a source of frustration not only for Irene Adler, but for Sherlock Holmes as well. In my mind the House of Musgrave was like a mysterious island surrounded by hidden rocks, irresistible to the well-known detective, for already two had been shipwrecked on its shoals.

“Holmes must be onto the trail of something. Don’t you think, doctor?”

When Irene asked her question I was turning over in my mind the last entry in Holmes’s journal: Whose was it? How had the mysterious catechism which appeared in the Musgraves’ copy of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter also come to be recorded in Holmes’s case notes twelve years ago? What did it signify?

“You overestimate that man, Irene.”

“Oh, Mary! Why must you be so cruel to Mr. Holmes?”

“That man is so embittered by his slump that he resents all who exceed him. Take the present instance: what he said, he said only to confuse you. You mustn’t be led astray by such idle insinuation, Irene, lest you fall into a slump yourself.”

“That is the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes you speak of!” snapped Irene Adler, with anguish in her voice. “He is the most formidable detective the world has ever seen. We cannot know even whether his slump is real. It may be that he is only affecting it for some unseen purpose. Yes, and behind that mask he observes as I struggle and flail about. What a fool I was! I never should have challenged him!” She buried her face in her hands.

“Must it be this way whenever I ask about Holmes?” sighed Mary.

Thankfully, there came another knock at the door to break the uncomfortable silence that had fallen. My bedchamber was certainly a popular haunt tonight.

This time I answered the door and found Professor Moriarty waiting outside. He claimed that he felt much better after a light sleep, though his face was still the wan hue of a wax figure.

“May I come in?”

“By all means. Mary and Miss Adler precede you.”

Professor Moriarty was taken aback when he saw Irene Adler’s downcast face.

“What’s the matter?” said he.

Adler looked up at him. “I owe you an apology,” she said, her voice listless. “At our first meeting I held you in contempt. Yet now I see that I was in the wrong to say those things to you.”

“Not at all. I too must apologize to you.” Moriarty sat himself down in a chair. “I admit that in the study I was enraged by your supercilious tone. Yet now at this remove, I see that your words were not without merit. Perhaps I was so angered because I, too, did not want to acknowledge what you openly pointed out. It is a deep fraternity which I share with Holmes, and yet secretly I worried whether that friendship was not in fact holding him back.”

“But Professor―”

“Please, allow me to finish,” said he. “What we witnessed in the Chamber of the East of the East was indeed disturbing. The sight of the ghost of Miss Rachel, not aged a day from her disappearance…it struck terror within me. It felt as if the foundations of the world were shaken, as if everything I had believed were crumbling to dust. If there is any mystery which a detective ought to solve, it is this one. And yet Holmes refused to face it.”

Here the professor’s tone softened, and he looked at Irene Adler.

“But you did not run. That is the kind of indomitable spirit which we need. The role of the detective is to uphold the order of the world. Anyone who does not fulfill that sacred duty is not fit to be called a detective. Holmes has lost the will to face the unknown; he has set aside that duty of his own accord. I recognize that I bear part of the responsibility in his actions. I am in no position to ask you anything, and yet I will ask that you solve the Musgrave mystery. There is no one we can turn to now but you.”

Professor Moriarty’s heartfelt plea had a rousing effect. Irene sat up, and her face tightened. A light had returned to her eyes. It was like seeing life being breathed into a discarded puppet.

Irene Adler took a moment to think.

“We witnessed a number of astonishing phenomena in the Chamber of the East of the East: the unseen piano, the spirit of Miss Rachel, and that ghostly moon. The piano could have been located in another room, the sound carried into the chamber by a speaking-tube. Sir Musgrave mentioned that it was her favourite tune. That may have been to put a suggestion into our minds. When that girl appeared in the darkness, anyone would have assumed that she was Miss Rachel. And the moon might have been a scale model, fitted with electric lights and lowered through a hidden panel in the ceiling―”

“But that would have required a tremendous effort to contrive!” I objected. “How could Madame Richborough have done it on her own?”

“It was a mistake to assume that Madame Richborough was the only one involved,” replied Adler sharply. “She was not the one pulling the strings. Twelve years ago, Robert Musgrave sealed the Chamber of the East of the East out of some unknown horror. Following his death, Reginald opened the chamber and invited Madame Richborough to investigate it. It has been the Musgraves who have directed things all along.”

“You mean to accuse Reginald of being the mastermind?” I asked in amazement.

Adler nodded. “We must investigate the chamber once more: this time, without Reginald and his men.”

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After dispersing to our individual rooms to make ready, we assembled at the top of the stairs. I brought with me a lantern and matches, while Irene Adler was carrying a small leather knapsack, which contained her cherished detective’s kit.

“Brunton may be making his rounds,” whispered Irene. “We must be cautious.”

We descended the stairs before the watchful portraits of the former heads of the Musgraves, treading as lightly as we could. Beneath the pale moonlight which shone through the tall windows in the foyer, it felt as though we were submerged in the chilly depths of a gigantic aquarium. The displays which told the history of the Musgraves were cloaked in darkness. Luckily for us, the first floor was deserted; Brunton was nowhere to be found.

We traversed the hallways to reach the original wing. I led the way through the nearly pitch-black corridors and climbed the stairs to the second floor. But when I turned right at the corridor, I was astounded to see lamplight beneath the door to the Chamber of the East of the East.

Voices could be heard within the room, and by putting our ears to the door we discovered that they belonged to Madame Richborough and Cartwright. Irene Adler stepped forward and thrust the door open.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

The room was as drab as we had left it. A large lamp burned on the table around which we had sat during the seance. Cartwright was setting up measuring equipment on the table, while Madame Richborough stood behind him. A brief expression of shock crossed her face when she saw us, though she quickly composed it into a smile.

“Ah, how kind of you to join us.”

“What are you doing sneaking about at night, Cartwright?” demanded Professor Moriarty.

The young scientist hung his head guiltily.

“Madame Richborough proposed that we resume the investigation.”

“A likely tale! You’ve come to remove the evidence of your malfeasance.”

“You will find that there is no evidence or soundness to your accusation, professor,” smiled Madame Richborough. But when Mary strode to the table and picked up an old book which lay there, the smile vanished from her face like water being soaked up by a parched field.

“The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” said Mary. “It was supposed to be under lock and key in the library. How did it come into your possession?”

“I must go back twelve years to answer your question,” answered Madame Richborough frostily. “When Miss Rachel disappeared, inspectors from Shinchō Yard searched every inch of this mansion; they even dragged the bottom of the mere. The Chamber of the East of the East did not escape their notice, but they found no clues. But when Miss Rachel vanished, she left this storybook behind in the room. It was taken away before the police could discover it.”

“No doubt by Robert Musgrave,” interjected Irene Adler.

Madame Richborough smiled again, and when she continued her tone was eerie.

“We spiritualists have long known that there is an intimate link between the Chamber of the East of the East and the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. This very chamber contains a portal to the spiritual realm―represented by the moon in the fairy tale―and the key to opening that portal lies in the addendum at the end of the book. Each succeeding head of the Musgraves has recited it at his coming of age ceremony because it is their greatest treasure. Yet that fool Robert forsook his duty as the keeper of the key. And so it is for twelve years, we have waited for our chance to open the door once more.”

“You may dream up whatever delusions you please,” snorted Moriarty. “What would Sir Musgrave do if he were to learn what you have just said?”

“Still you do not see, professor? Everything that has happened, has happened at his pleasure. His Lordship is a believer in the spiritual.”

Professor Moriarty’s eyes went round. “Impossible!”

Madame Richborough continued on triumphantly.

“You men of science believe that you alone can explain the secrets of the universe; you hide yourselves in your laboratories and worship the material as sacred. But it is a foundation of sand that you have built your temples upon. One day, the boundary between this world and the next shall be stripped away, and the supernatural will be unbound once more. Then all shall be as it truly is meant to be.”

A tide of apprehension swept over the room. It felt as though there was someone hiding in the shadows, watching us quietly. I lifted my lamp up, but the corners of the room were bare.

“You must all be still,” breathed Madame Richborough; and she began to solemnly recite that catechism.

Whose was it?

Theirs who are gone.

Who shall have it?

They who will come.

What shall we give?

All that is ours.

Why should we give it?

For the sake of the great awakening.

The very moment the last word had left her lips, a great staircase appeared on the other side of the table. There was no doubt that it was the same staircase which Mary and Irene had observed twelve years prior: it was a Gothic structure with an elegant balustrade which rose high into the air before ending abruptly at the ceiling. Even supposing that one had been able to tamper with the room beforehand, I could not fathom what trickery could conjure a massive staircase out of thin air.

“At last!” Madame Richborough yelled in triumph, and she began to walk up the staircase. Irene Adler and Professor Moriarty simply looked on; I took Mary’s hand, and she squeezed mine back.

A warm breeze came up, as though we were standing upon a windswept moor. It did not seem to be of this world.

When Madame Richborough came to the top of the stairs, she reached out and touched the ceiling. At once she was engulfed by a blinding light, bright as midday, and for a few moments none of us could see anything. As our eyes adjusted, we realized that the ceiling had vanished. In fact so had the walls, and all around us we could see the vast bamboo grove which surrounded the mansion.

The light emanated from an enormous full moon, larger than any I had ever seen, which was descending through the heavens down to earth. It took up nearly half of the night sky, and it seemed as though I could simply reach out and touch the craters and crags upon its surface. That extraordinary staircase extended upwards past where it had met the ceiling to the moon. Against the radiant backdrop, the figure of Madame Richborough looked like a puppet in a shadow play.

Professor Moriarty slumped in his seat.

“I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it.”

“So this is the secret of the Musgraves,” I murmured.

This must have been the bridge which the princess had crossed back to the moon in the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter―the bridge which Miss Rachel must have taken. No wonder that Sherlock Holmes had failed to solve the case twelve years ago. This was not the kind of mystery which appeared in detective novels, or the kind which any detective could handle at all.

Abruptly everything went dark. The brilliant moon was suddenly swathed in shadow. The strange happening had perplexed Madame Richborough as well, for she paused her ascent and was staring in disbelief. Before our eyes the light drained from the moon, beginning from its circumference and moving towards the center; leaving only a cadaverous husk.

I rushed to the bottom of the staircase.

“Come back!” I shouted, but Madame Richborough did not move. As I took a step forward Mary caught my arm desperately.

“No, John! You won’t make it!”

A vast, echoing sigh trembled across the scene, and Madame Richborough was lost into the darkness. I stared up into the black sky, transfixed. Where once the moon had been there gaped now a yawning void, blacker than the blackest pits of night. I felt as though the world would turn upside down and hurl itself and all of us down into its bottomless depths.

From somewhere far away, Madame Richborough screamed.

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When we came to, all was quiet. The lamp and my lantern quietly burned as before on the round table. Mary was clinging to my arm, while Irene Adler stared at the ceiling; Cartwright was sprawled forward upon the table, and Professor Moriarty was stooped down on the ground.

I took the lantern and went all around the room. Madame Richborough was gone.

If what we had just witnessed had been an illusion, it had been exceedingly convincing. But if it had been real, then it defied all explanation. I looked at Irene Adler, hoping that she might shed some light, but she appeared to be struck dumb, as did Professor Moriarty. Only Cartwright seemed to still have his wits about him.

“Do you think that Madame Richborough has crossed over to the spiritual realm?” he inquired.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I doubt it.”

A thorough inspection of the room confirmed that the madame was no longer present. Neither was she in the hallway. But a different figure did present itself there: Brunton. He held a lantern aloft and looked at us in astonishment.

“What’s going on here?”

“Madame Richborough has vanished,” I explained. “The details must wait. Where is the nearest exit?”

Brunton brought us around to the back of the manor, where we saw a black copse of oak trees. We lifted our lanterns high in the air and yelled out for Madame Richborough, and were answered by a feeble voice crying for help above us.

“There!” shouted Irene Adler, pointing at the oaks.

We could just make out what appeared to be the madame’s legs poking out from among the branches; apparently she was holding on for dear life. Brunton hurriedly brought a ladder and after a great effort brought her down, but the experience had left her gaunt and haggard, a shadow of her former self. That she came away with only scrapes and scratches was nothing short of a miracle.

“Wait!” demanded Irene as Brunton began to help her hobble back to the mansion. “There is something I must unriddle, Brunton.”

“Yes, Miss Adler?” he blinked.

“What were you doing there in the hallway?”

“I was passing by on my nightly rounds.”

“That is a lie. You were the one who let Madame Richborough into the Chamber of the East of the East.”

Immediately Brunton’s visage became stone. It really was the only explanation, for it was the butler who held all the keys of Hurlstone. Unless Madame Richborough had become a master locksmith, she must have had help from Brunton.

“You have betrayed your master, Brunton.”

Yet Brunton’s expression did not change.

“I am not at liberty to speak of the matter.”

“You mean to say you acted on Sir Musgrave’s orders?” pressed Irene, a gleam in her eye.

Now the butler looked away. “I can say nothing of the matter,” he repeated. “I ask your pardon.”

“Then we must ask your master directly.”

“Master Reginald has gone out.”

“Where?”

“He is visiting Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

Brunton’s hesitating manner made it clear that Reginald was hiding something of great import from us. I was not going to sit and wait until the morning light to pursue the mystery. But Madame Richborough was obviously not in a state to go marching down into the bamboo; neither was Professor Moriarty, who was sitting in the shadow of the oaks. Cartwright and Mary assured us that they would stay behind to look after the frail duo.

Irene Adler hoisted her lantern into the air.

“Then let us be off, Doctor!”

We left Hurlstone behind and walked into the garden. Beneath the moonlight, the lawn undulated like waves, and the bare shrubs which dotted it reminded me of shipwrecked icebreakers. The very air seemed frozen, and above us the sky was radiant with stars. As we tread through the midnight stillness, I felt as if I were in a place very far from home. I longed for the familiarity of my practice in Shimogamo, and for 221B Teramachi Street. Of the many cases which Holmes and I had tackled together, none was as strange as this one. It was as if the mystery itself had come to life and was seeking to devour the world.

Was the Musgrave mystery beyond our powers to solve, after all? As I pondered over that question, I glanced to my side at Irene Adler. Judging from her taut expression, she too must have felt that same uncertainty as keenly as I did.

“What do you make of it all?” I inquired.

“I must confide in you that I haven’t the faintest idea,” said she. “Let us restrict ourselves to what we may be certain of. Musgrave is hiding something. And Brunton is his accomplice. But where does that get us? The things we have witnessed defy explanation.”

She shivered, her white breath pouring out into the cold.

“You saw the black hole, doctor?”

“I did.”

“I have never seen anything which frightened me more. I can hardly master myself still.”

“You must, Miss Adler. You are the only one we can rely on.”

The words had hardly left my lips when I began to feel ashamed. Was I so pathetic that I could only rely on the charity of others? I heard Holmes’s voice in my head, chiding me: Think for yourself for once.

A sinister air pervaded the bamboo grove. Our lanterns revealed only innumerable stalks of pale, glinting bamboo in every direction, beyond which lay only impenetrable darkness. Painstakingly following the red threads which the stable-boy had tied to the bamboo, we arrived at the hollow in which Holmes’s hut lay. But the hut was a deserted shell. The fire was out, though the pungent scent of mutton curry still lingered in the pot.

I have a moon gazing appointment with William and a bottle of libations, Holmes had said after the seance.

Our encounter with William swam into my head: those curiously limpid eyes, and the voice which had seemed to rustle the bamboo. Supposedly he lived somewhere within the grove; I assumed that Holmes and Sir Musgrave must have gone directly to his dwelling place.

Irene Adler suddenly looked up into the trees, casting the light of her lantern into the trees.

“Did you hear Holmes’s laughter just now?”

“No, perhaps it was the wind.”

“Let us go deeper, Dr. Watson.”

“Not so fast, Miss Adler. Do you remember how many people have gone missing in this very grove? Never mind finding Holmes, we will be lucky to find our way out before dawn!”

At my words Irene Adler removed from the knapsack slung from her shoulders what appeared to be a small tape measure: another of her trusty detective tools, no doubt. From it she unspooled a sheer thread and tied it around a nearby stalk of bamboo.

“I invented this for use in tracking down criminals. It will show us the way back.”

And so we made our way into the forest, trailing the thread behind us over leaf-strewn hillocks and through dales. Yet our lanterns illuminated only endless stalks of bamboo, extending as far as the eye could see.

“I hope Professor Moriarty is all right,” murmured Adler anxiously. “He seemed pretty feeble when we left him.”

The professor had not said a word since we left the Chamber of the East of the East. He had not shown the slightest sign of emotion either during the dramatic rescue of Madame Richborough or our ensuing interrogation of Brunton. It was as though he had retreated deep into a shell to be alone with his thoughts.

“It’s my fault,” sighed Irene. “He turned to me, in fear and distress. It was my duty as a detective to help him. And yet I could do nothing.”

“There’s no need to blame yourself.”

“We are lost in the fog,” said she, and there was a frustrated tone in her voice as she continued to speak. “Thus far I have been able to clarify nothing. Nothing has changed since twelve years ago. In fact I understand less, much less, than I did before. I have solved my share of intractable cases; I would not be ashamed to put my career against Holmes’s. Yet what use is all that experience? None, absolutely none at all!”

I felt a gap of loneliness and isolation around her, the same gap which I had often felt around Sherlock Holmes. I had accompanied the great detective on many adventures, and with him at my side I always felt completely secure; never once had I doubted that he would solve the case. From time to time I would dabble in a little deduction of my own, but I cannot remember ever having proposed to take over the reins when Holmes was a little perturbed by the facts of a case. I only looked on idly as he struggled on alone, supposing that any mystery he could not solve was certainly out of my own reach: for I was but John Watson, the humble recorder of these adventures. It is a pretty thing to say that I believed in the genius of Sherlock Holmes, but what it really meant was that I thrust all the responsibility onto Holmes and Holmes alone.

“I believe I understand the cause of Holmes’s slump”, said I. “I have depended too much on him. I expected him to solve everything. Whatever mystery imperiled our world, I never once doubted that he would set things right.”

“But that is the role of a detective,” observed Irene Adler.

“I think that he grew tired of having that responsibility foisted upon him,” I replied, looking off into the bamboo. “As hard as it may be to believe, Miss Adler, Holmes has a heart too. He is not a calculating machine, or a god. I should have realized that.”

Irene Adler was silent for a time.

“And yet I still believe in him,” she said at last, with great effort. “Mr. Holmes will rise again. He is too great of a detective not to.”

We had walked quite a ways, and yet the scenery remained unchanged; it was hard to tell whether we were making any progress or merely going around in circles. All around us the bamboo rose up like innumerable pillars in a weird shrine, and the leaves rustled and shivered in the wind. We had lost our bearing entirely.

“Where are you, Holmes?” shouted Adler into the darkness. Straining our ears, we heard an answering, “Hullo!” somewhere off in the darkness. Adler’s face flushed with excitement in the lantern light.

“Holmes! Can you hear us?”

I added my voice and was rewarded with another faraway response, in an incongruously carefree tone.

“Here we are!”

“This way! Come on!” cried Irene Adler, bounding forward into the trees.