Sherlock Holmes and The Return of The Whitechapel Vampire

P. Turnbloom Dean

Description

Bodies washing up along the eastern coast of New England and the mysterious grounding of a "ghost ship" near Manhattan combine to bring Sherlock Holmes out of retirement to resume his pursuit of the villainous Baron Antonio Barlucci-the Whitechapel Vampire. But when he arrives in London to enlist the assistance of Dr. Watson, the good doctor has reservations.It's been twenty-five years since Holmes and Watson hunted Barlucci, twenty-five years since they learned the baron was buried beneath a mountain of ice and snow.Has Holmes' preoccupation with Barlucci driven him to see connections where none exist? Have his powers of deduction gone stale while in retirement? Has Watson's worst fear, that Holmes' obsession with the baron has unbalanced his finely tuned psyche, come true?Sherlock Holmes and the Return of the Whitechapel Vampire is the exciting finale to the Whitechapel Vampire Trilogy. In this final chapter, Holmes must face more than evil. He must face his own mortality-the only certainty in an uncertain world.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 29 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780928197
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
Sherlock Holmes
and the
Return of the Whitechapel Vampire
Dean P. Turnbloom



Publisher Information
First edition published in 2015
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor
Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.co.uk
This digital edition
converted and distributed in 2016 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2015, 2016 Dean P. Turnbloom
The right of Dean P. Turnbloom 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. The opinions expressed herein belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MX Publishing or Andrews UK Limited.
Cover design by www.staunch.com



Dedication
For Esther



Acknowledgements
Writing the Whitechapel Vampire trilogy was truly a labor of love for me. My first exposure to Sherlock Holmes was watching Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce on Saturday afternoons with my mother when I was a young boy. I found the characters fascinating from the start and began to read the original stories. Somewhere along the line I wondered why it was that Doyle never penned a story about Holmes investigating the most notorious crime of his era, the Ripper murders. When I was a bit older I became enthralled with the vampire legends and especially the film adaptions from the Hammer studios in London starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. This combination of influences lay dormant for many years and finally bubbled up to become the genesis of Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel Vampire and the two succeeding novels that complete the trilogy. Thus I begin, in this last edition of the trilogy, to acknowledge those I owe my thanks, beginning with my mother, for introducing me to Sherlock Holmes. I also thank Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing for giving me hours of entertainment and forming unknown the nuggets that became this trilogy. I also want to thank my wife, Nanette, who’s always been my biggest fan, and Theresa and Adrienne, my beta-readers. I owe a special thanks to Bob Gibson of Staunch Design for creating three of the most amazing book covers ever. Lastly, thanks to Steve Emecz and everyone associated with MX Publishing.



“...Barlucci is On the Loose Again...”
The adventure to follow originated, as have most others, from the unexpected call of a visitor. I remember it was in the late afternoon on a sunny July day. I’d just returned from a long walk in the park. The previous two weeks had been cloudy and unusually cool for the middle of July and this was the first day conducive to a leisurely stroll and I took advantage of it.
My leg, still sensitive to changes in weather thanks to the wound I’d received in Afghanistan so many years ago, portended change still to come. That the change would be more than mere climate had yet to be revealed.
As I arrived home I placed my walking stick, a gift from Sherlock Holmes when he retired from London to Sussex, in the umbrella rack just inside the door. That’s when I noticed a letter waiting for me in the basket beneath the mail slot. I picked up the plain yellow envelope and was very much surprised to see it was from Holmes. It had been some months since I’d last corresponded with him, when I received a thank you note for a signed copy of the book titled, “Body Snatchers - A Sherlock Holmes Adventure”, it being a retelling of the curious circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the remains of Miss Abigail Drake. I put a kettle on and sat at my kitchen table to read the letter while I waited for the water to boil.
A letter from Holmes was certainly a sign of the times. I recall when we shared our rooms at Baker Street, and indeed after when the game was afoot, he rarely resorted to the post, and then only when there was some purpose in so doing, much preferring the immediacy of a telegram. This signaled to me the object of the letter must be quite mundane and I found myself somewhat wistful for that exhilarating era of excitement at 221B - wistful and nostalgic. I owed much to Holmes and the adventures we shared. It was in an early episode that I met my Mary, the first Mrs. Watson, but even before that, it was our association and those adventures that pulled me out of the deep melancholy in which I found myself after my tour of duty with the 66 th Berkshire Regiment.
As I sat there at my kitchen table, I remembered how meeting Holmes had really been the beginning of a new life for me, one that I could never have imagined while I lay recovering in the base hospital at Peshawar from the wounds I’d received at the hands of an Afghan with a Jezzail rifle. My association with Holmes acted as the scalpel that excised the cancer of depression from which I suffered. During those heady years at Baker Street and indeed for many years thereafter, my friend involved me in such a strange and varied series of cases that I scarcely had time to build my practice, let alone allow myself to fall victim to any depression of spirit. In point of fact I would say that the lowest ebbs of my spirit appear as bookends at either side of our long association.
The first bookend was, as I’ve alluded, the period of physical recovery just prior to our meeting and the second was after the passing of my third wife. Both times it was Holmes who saved me from my despondent disposition, the first time unwittingly but the second most purposefully. A finer friend no man could know.
Using a butter knife I opened the envelope and removed the letter. In it, Holmes wrote about the weather, its effect on his bees, and how he was planning soon to visit London. All of this idle chit-chat seemed to me to be most uncharacteristic and as I read I began to speculate where this might be leading. And then, in the last paragraph, was the second shoe for which I’d unconsciously been waiting to fall. He wrote of an article in the Sussex Agricultural Express in which had been reported a number of bodies washing ashore on the eastern coast of Newfoundland. The item further mentioned there’d been no reported ship wrecks or debris that might account for the bodies. Holmes wrote that he’d not given the piece more than a passing glance until near the end it noted that one of the bodies appeared to be completely drained of blood.
I thought to myself, so that’s it, he’s still haunted by the baron, and felt a pang of guilt. Had I realized all those months ago the effect that dredging up the Barlucci murders, or as the press knew them, the Ripper murders, would have on Holmes, I’m quite certain I would have left my notes wrapped in twine, along with the leather journal of Inspector Walter Andrews, unopened at the bottom of my old steamer trunk, foregoing recording the account of our adventures in America. Had I known the dangers that lie ahead, I’m quite certain I would never have written a word about Abigail Drake and our adventure with the Body Snatchers.
But it was at Holmes’ own prodding that I wrote the story that had its beginnings with Barlucci. Besides, how was I to know that retelling this adventure would stir in him such an obsession? After all, it had been twenty-five years since we’d last heard anything of Barlucci and his name had come up only sparingly in the time that intervened. I could hardly be expected to know how the escape of Barlucci bore on Holmes’ mind.
It wasn’t that Holmes had never been bested before of course. There was the matter of the Paradol Chamber, the Candlewood Papers in which John Clay had a hand, the matter of the Coptic Patriarchs controversy, and of course there was Irene Adler. But none of these had quite the impact on Holmes that the Barlucci affair had had. Something about the baron was eating away at Holmes, and yet I couldn’t quite diagnose the cause of the cancer.
Perhaps it was the cold-bloodedness of Barlucci. But he’d met cold-blooded men before, Moriarty for one. But then again, he’d beaten Moriarty in the end. Could it be that was it? Could it be that having such a fiend as Barlucci elude him not once, but twice was finally taking its toll on his psyche, his ego? Even though the baron’s second escape ended beneath a mountain of ice and snow?
It was a certainty that we’d never faced a more grizzly murderer, though from what Holmes had told me about his stay as Barlucci’s ‘guest’, the scoundrel thought he was doing both society as a whole and his victims in particular a service by ending their dire existence and ridding the East End of such creatures. In addition, there was the baron’s assertion that he could be no more blamed for taking victims than a wolf can be denounced for hunting sheep, the pronouncement being made with no more emotion than if those women in Whitechapel had indeed been sheep.
It was just at that moment when the kettle began to whistle. I got up to fetch it for my tea and when I turned around again, in the seat I’d so recently vacated sat Sherlock Holmes.
“I’ll take mine with just a drop of milk, if you don’t mind, Watson?” he said as though I’d known he was there the entire time.
So stunned was I that it took a moment before I could ask, “Where the devil d