Dr. Watson
I have had many adventures with Sherlock Holmes; most I have written down, some I have published but there are a few that I have never committed to paper. Events that are too dark or improbable to be believed, things that I wish I could dismiss as nightmares but I know are true. What I am about to recount is one such of these adventures. I do not know whether I shall publish it, or what I shall do with it when I am done but, even if nothing ever comes of it, I shall be glad I recorded it – if not for posterity then, at the very least, for my own sanity.
It all began on a November evening in 1892 as I returned to Baker to greet my old friend. I do not know whether I should call him a friend but that is how I thought of Holmes. I think he had some affection for me although, in his mind, my main purpose was to compliment him on his deduction skills and think of ideas that he had already decided not to use even before he'd heard them.
As I walked into the drawing room that day, Holmes looked up from a telegram which he had been studying intently.
He was muttering to himself: "Come as soon as you can – stop – There's something I want you to see..." His eyes glanced at me. "Something to see, Watson. I wonder what that could mean..."
"Who sent it?" I asked.
"Madame Vastra."
"Well then I suppose we ought to see what she's found."
Without saying a word, Sherlock stood up and we headed out into the London fog.
Madame Vastra had been in contact with Holmes for a while. He said that, although he disapproved of her race and sexuality, she was a good detective and they had solved a fair few cases together. It turned out that what Homes meant by race was slightly different from what I had thought and, when I first met here, I believe I passed out at the sight. She was similar to a human but her head was strangely shaped and her skin was scaly and of a green hue. Before she became a detective, she had spent a brief period of time on the freak show circuit purporting to be a 'lizard woman from the dawn of time' although I (like most people who knew her well) that she had some sort of dermatological disease. Rumour has it that her relationship with her maid Jenny was slightly more intimate than it seemed but I will not go into that as it does not affect the storyline in any particular way.
Eventually, we arrived and, almost instantaneously, the door was thrust open by Vastra herself with a grave look on her reptilian face. She beckoned us in and, as we walked, she explained to us what had happened. "Yesterday, I was given this by Scotland Yard. They said that they could not work out what had happened to it so they wondered if I help. Even I could not fathom what had happened or how it had occurred so if figured that, if anyone could work it out, it would be you."
We entered the next room in which a body lay under a blanket.
Holmes turned to Vastra. "A corpse!? Was this all that you brought me here for?"
Vastra removed the blanket, obscuring what lay underneath it from my view. "Take a closer look."
Holmes studied the body and then emitted something that sounded almost like a chuckle. "Well," he said "He certainly died happy".
As I peered over at the body, I saw that Holmes was right. It was definitely a child and definitely dead but thing that made me shudder most was the face that was looking up at me with a hideous, leering grin.