Sherlock Holmes and the Ghoul of Glastonbury

Allan Mitchell

Description

Emotion-filled memories come cascading from the mind of Britain's foremost investigator as a troubled Glastonbury sends its emissaries to beg help in solving a series of poisonings besetting a region Holmes had experienced and explored as a young lad.Somerset, battleground of successive invaders over the centuries, has a secret which forms a bond between all those born under the mantle of Britannia, a secret trying to break free but which, in doing so, might destroy the very fabric of Britain's hard-won but still tenuous unity.Sherlock Holmes, summoned to solve a murder threatening ruin to greater Glastonbury's commercial prosperity, finds that there are deeper motives behind his summons and that one secret hides a great many more and forces the Great Sleuth to make a decidedly deadly decision to taunt the grim and ghastly Ghoul of Glastonbury.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 23 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781787052284
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sherlock Holmes
and the
Ghoul of Glastonbury
Reports of foul occurrences in Somerset have recalled long-buried, uncharacteristic and emotion-filled memories for the great sleuth and drawn him to confront an evil plaguing the idyllic countryside he knew in his youth and which fostered his unique gifts.
Allan Mitchell




2018 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
First edition published in 2018
© Copyright 2018 Allan Mitchell
The right of Allan Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of MX Publishing.
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.co.uk
Cover design by Brian Belanger



Introduction
To think of Sherlock Holmes, the man and his times, is to engage with late Victorian and Edwardian London, the centre of a global empire extending beyond all others and the hub of a worldwide financial wheel whose telegraphic spokes were as nerves transmitting signals to stimulate or thwart the flow of capital, the life blood of that and the coming century, to distant enterprises and carry back reports of financial success or failure, reports of life or death for ventures in sterling.
To that London flowed the wealth of much of a world now disappeared, a world reinvented as the old empires fell, some to their knees, some to oblivion, all to the juggernauts of local power struggles and the suicidal effects of world-war. Britain had been the powerhouse, the dynamo producing the force by which the world and the world’s view of itself was forced to change forever, though, for a while, Britain was itself a victim of that forced change, a victim of its own success.
To find that London of more than a century ago is generally thought impossible, yet a pilgrim come to walk that maze of streets known to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson can still detect, in essence, a hazy sense of place and time despite the coming of blanket nocturnal street illuminations and the absence of the sights and sounds and smells of the attendant horse. The atmosphere of old London was thick with the smoke and the smells and the shouts which kept the metropolis alive and functioning and a full spectrum of humanity could be found in its streets, a spectrum wider in its extent and more intense in its enterprise than in any other city on the face of the Earth.
That life of London, however and despite the dissipation of the Empire, massively destructive waves of aerial attack and predatory usurpation of economic rank and power, is as strong and as vibrant as ever, in many ways more than ever. While many other great cities of the world exist as splendidly orchestrated showpieces of their inhabitants’ cultures and tastes and capabilities, one can feel the sprawling living hotch-potch of London working and breathing as its busy arteries pulse with a throb heard right around the world, a throb not so very different from that of a century past though perhaps louder and somewhat faster, a throb from a heart fully two-thousand years old and determined to beat on.
This is the London which begat and continues to nurture Sherlock Holmes; he is as much a part of that metropolis as it is of him as he battles the forces which threaten any and all of its denizens, from those sitting high in the glittering palace to those walking the lonely lanes of murky Whitechapel. London, though, in many ways, is not Britain and Britain is not London and one must leave the metropolis to discover another Britain, the Britain of the provincial city, the city with its own character, history and heartbeat, the city which may well have vied with London for the seat of government and power, for the abode of King and Parliament, but watched that dream dissolve as so much wealth and power gravitated to London, larger, more diverse and better situated strategically. One may recall York and Sheffield, Bristol and Exeter, Liverpool and Manchester and a hundred more, each important, each with its own historical flavour, each varying through time in its allegiance to the Crown, each unique in its strengths but none quite able to topple London on its rise to its preeminent position.
Yet, between these two Britains exists another, the Britain of the picturesque village and the ripening barley field, of the gurgling rippling brook and the ancient atmospheric battlefield, of the brooding castle and the ruined church and, from more recent times, the Britain of the redundant canal and the relict railway, all combining to weave the fabric of that land of legends into a mystical cloak beneath which can be found the Britannia of myth, the living soul of a land and its people.
There were times when the great sleuth had to forego London and venture out into one of these other Britains, where inhabitants spoke a little differently, had customs somewhat at variance with those he was used to, had ambitions and expectations inconsistent with those of the metropolis and, more often than not, did not like Londoners coming to interrupt their settled ways of doing things. Such a place, though, found it necessary to call upon the special talents of Sherlock Holmes when confronted with a spate of crimes which the local authorities found impossible to solve and stop. The London man was approached in desperation by a consortium of town dignitaries intent on persuading him to travel westward to help stop the predations of what had been dubbed, in classic hyperbole and unashamed sensationalism by a profit-driven and sensation-seeking press, the Ghoul of Glastonbury.
Sherlock Holmes
and the
Ghoul of Glastonbury
“I had seen the boy; and in that boy I had seen the man he would become.”
- Aunt Jane



Sherlock’s Maps
Map 1


Sherlock’s Map of Glastonbury and Street
Map 2


Sherlock’s Wider Wanderings in Somerset



Somerset Unsettled
The Deputation
Sherlock Holmes was, despite his long and close friendship with John Watson, very much the lone wolf seeking out its prey and disdainful of the pack mentality which he observed in so many official investigators. On so many occasions, however, he had been forced to cooperate with or beg the assistance of others who had talents which he did not possess in sufficient quantity. Patience, he felt, was one of the virtues which a detective should possess but not to the extent that it retarded an investigation’s progress. There was a time to wait and a time to act, and Holmes felt that the official agents leaned too much to the former while those same agents thought the sleuth’s rashness bordered on and often overstepped the bounds of common sense and good judgment. This was a situation which was never to find a wholly satisfactory solution but another situation with a need for both contemplation and action was coming his way. The great sleuth would find his special talents challenged as they rarely had been before as his mind was taken back to where and when those very talents had begun to bud, much later to blossom into the special gifts of a very remarkable man.
To take time after a case to relax both body and mind was essential for the great sleuth, for his body to recover its vigour and for his mind to sort the facts it had gathered into those worthy of being retained for future use and those able to be discarded. It is quite likely that Sherlock Holmes had never actually forgotten a single gathered fact or formulated thought but was able to put up mental walls behind which he could drag and hide the trivia of past cases. In a sense they would be out of mind, but not completely. The situation coming his way, however, would rally the stored-away memories of the sounds and smells and images of a region he had experienced as a boy, one given the freedom to roam the countryside unhindered, and then send those memories crashing through that mental wall while brushing against the long unused emotional parts of his brain as they emerged.
A mingle of muffled voices getting ever nearer should have alerted Sherlock Holmes to the fact that the front door of 221B Baker Street had been breached and that invaders were ascending the stairway to his abode intent upon stealing away his peace, a peace he had found only one hour before in a state of nicotine-fed drowsiness after the successful completion of a difficult and galling case involving blackmail and murder. The great sleuth, however, was oblivious to all and uncharacteristically unaware of the coming disturbance until a tight row of knuckles came into sharp and repeated contact with his door to demand both immediate entry and his full attention.
“What!” shouted a startled Holmes, his now-extinguished pipe falling to the floor and spilling ash all over the rug, “Who is that?”
“Visitors, Mr. Holmes,” came the oft-expressed phrase from Mrs. Hudson pushing her way through the crowded space, though her determined Scots brogue did betray a hint of concern, “Gentlemen, surely, but there are lots