BY JOHN DREWRY
If you are reading these words, it means I have been dead for at least forty years. I left instructions for this manuscript to be kept ‘under wraps’ after my death so that it would not see the light of day for several decades. For it contains a terrible secret. However, I am somewhat comforted by the belief that there is a rattling good story lurking amongst these pages. As always, that will be for you, the reader, to be the final judge. For it rather deviates from my canon of work. It is not a novel. It is a kind of autobiography, not of my life, but of my troubled mind. Troubled, or triggered, by an event in 1926 which changed me forever.
I received a letter from the eminent, nay legendary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of my childhood heroes. My mother used to read some of his stories to me, a most eager listener as you may imagine. Sherlock Holmes became embedded in the national psyche as one of the most famous fictional characters of all time. So much so that he was and is actually real and alive, domiciled at 221B Baker Street, surely the pinnacle of achievement for a creative writer. I doubt I ever quite achieved that status with Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple. Having said that, Hercule was the only fictional character to receive an obituary in the New York Times! But I digress. Sir Arthur wrote to me as an admirer. He’d read The Mysterious Affair at Styles and declared himself a fan. Could we meet? I should say so!
In those days, one would allow at least a couple of hours to drive from Sunningdale to Crowborough. It was a lovely journey on a nice day, but some of the roads were not so good. I loved driving, and there were stretches where I could put my foot down and make better time. So I arrived at the rather splendid Windlesham Manor ahead of my estimate, and early for lunch. Nevertheless, a tall, dapper man of 67 with a generous moustache, still bushy but which had doubtless seen blacker, more vigorous days, was waiting at the front door as I pulled up and, like a true gentleman, came forward to help me from my car. “What an honour to welcome such a famous author to my humble home”, he said disarmingly but with a twinkle in his eye, “you must call me plain Arthur right away and put aside all the formalities, I insist”. It was irony, given that he was then far more famous than me, and his home certainly wasn’t humble. Nevertheless, it was said with great charm and humour, and not a hint of sarcasm. Sir Arthur – plain Arthur – I learned immediately, had the knack of putting you at the centre of the universe. It reminded me of an anecdote about a woman who, having met both Gladstone and Disraeli, was questioned about the difference between them. “When I met Mr. Gladstone”, she said, “I believed he was the most important man in the world. But when I met Mr. Disraeli, I believed I was the most important woman in the world”. Arthur was definitely from the Disraeli camp.
“You’re a little early, but no matter”, he said, “are you ready for some lunch?” I tried to make some witty remark about always being ready for lunch, but he carried on anyway, as though I’d already replied, “it’s cook’s afternoon off, but she’s left something in the oven, all I have to do is to serve it”. He thoughtfully slipped a helping arm around my waist as he ushered me into the house. When I asked him where Lady Doyle was, he looked kindly into my eyes and muttered something about the family being away for a few days. I had a feeling I was probably alone in this big house with a man. Had he organised it this way on purpose? I was somewhat comforted by having seen a gardener on my way in. I could always scream loudly. Silly Agatha.
The danger of men who make you feel like the most important woman in the world is that you end up talking liberally about yourself. This is helped considerably by a glass or two of fine wine, and Arthur most certainly had an excellent cellar. I sang like a bird, as the saying goes. I told him about my misgivings over Archie as well as the workings of my mind when it came to planning a novel; how I favoured starting with the end in my head and working logically, step by step, back to the beginning. I had noticed early in my life how many stories start off well and peter out towards the end, leaving the reader disappointed. It seemed so obvious to me that the trick was to ensure a good, or surprising, ending, so the reader gives a satisfied sigh of contentment at the last page. They’ve had a good meal, and can’t wait to repeat the experience. All of this came pouring out, almost like a confession. Little did I realise at the lunch table that it would ultimately turn out to be the other way around; that it was Arthur who was desperate to confess something, and that was why I was there. Things started to change when we retired to the drawing room.
We shared a pot of coffee and I relaxed into a beautiful, Georgian, velvet armchair. Arthur’s eyes drilled into me. “Agatha”, he said, “we are both successful writers of crime. Does that make us criminally minded? Do we have the minds of criminals?” This question was an old chestnut, one I’d been asked a number of times and frequently speculated on myself. It can, of course, be applied to any subject. Is the writer of promiscuity promiscuous? Is the writer of philanthropy philanthropic? Arthur continued: “Surely you must at least acknowledge that somebody writing about the devious nature of the slow poisoner in intricate detail must of themselves have a devious mind and a morbid obsession with its ghastly effects. I will hesitate to say pleasure at this juncture.” This was a subject close to my heart, as any reader of my novels will know. I decided to be witty and replied that perhaps a writer of crime is a coward, somebody who, while fascinated with the ghastly, the murderous, even the satanic, doesn’t have the nerve to actually turn the thoughts and words into deeds. And that we shared our cowardice with the other cowards, our readers. He stared at me for what seemed an eternity, and I began to wish I hadn’t tried wit, because his genial countenance had altered. A dark shadow had fallen across his face, or so I seem to recall.
“What is the perfect crime?”, he suddenly fired at me. Before I could answer, he carried on: “The perfect crime is surely one that leaves no clues. Ostensibly, that is impossible. I say ostensibly because if it’s perfect we never hear about it”. Another old chestnut really, a well-known imponderable. I was a little surprised. This time he gave me space to respond. “Or leaves false clues”, I said. “Ah, how right that is”, he replied, “but I’m setting the scene for the question which really occupies me. I apologise if I began by stating the obvious, forgive me”. I had underestimated him, foolish me. “What fascinates me, Agatha, is the mind of the perfect criminal. Someone we never discover. Someone, however incongruous it may seem, who really does leave no clues. There’d be no story, would there? How tedious. We writers of crime live off the imperfections. It is the imperfections that make the story. But back to the perfect criminal. For the crime to be perfect, no-one else can know about it. The criminal cannot tell anybody. How lonely is the perfect criminal? Won’t he or she want to tell somebody about it, either as a boast or as a confession? Does this explain why some murderers cannot stand the tension, or perhaps the lack of attention, forgive the alliteration, and rush into the police station to confess? Imagine, for example, somebody murdering his wife, burying her in the garden, and then inviting people round for alfresco afternoon tea, directly over the grave. Would it give him perverse pleasure, a sense of power and superiority? Would he be constantly having to control himself so as not to give a clue, perhaps glancing almost unconsciously at the ground beneath them?” Before I could stop myself, I was gazing at my feet, wondering if Lady Doyle might be under the floorboards. When I looked up, I beheld a face full of anguish. “Would he be screaming to confess, and give himself some peace”, he muttered earnestly, “or would he be laughing inside and daring you to try and discover a clue to what he’d done? Or both? Could he be both personalities?”. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde immediately sprang to my mind. Written, of course, by one of Arthur’s close contemporaries in the last century. Was he trying to tell me something about Robert Louis Stevenson? The ideas around split personality, the man and the monster, the schizophrenic maniac inside us all, were prevalent around that time, made scientific, eventually, by Dr. Freud. But creative literature preceded the science. It jogged me into thinking about another of his contemporaries, Bram Stoker, who wrote that horrible vampire story. I found myself blurting it out: “Did you know Bram Stoker?” “Oh, I knew him well”, he replied, “the blood is the life”. I looked at him quizzically. “The blood is the life”, he repeated, “a biblical provenance, but Renfield, the subservient lunatic in Dracula, would rave ‘the blood is the life, the blood is the life’. Abraham was obsessed with blood. As was Holmes, of course”. He spoke the last sentence as though Holmes was a real person. “Poor old Abraham, died of syphilis, you know. Deeply resentful. Told me it almost certainly resulted from his clandestine visits to Whitechapel. Yes, the blood is the life. Until you contaminate it.”
He seemed to go deep inside himself, lost in thought, almost as though he was witnessing some kind of spectacle or event. Then quite suddenly he snapped out of his dreaming and was back with me: “I’m sorry, Agatha, let us bring a little levity into the conversation. Do you get fan letters? I’m sure you do. I get almost none. Holmes gets nearly all of them. And gifts, look”. He walked over to a cupboard and brought out several Gladstone bags. From them he pulled deerstalker caps, meerschaum pipes, capes, magnifying glasses, syringes and a couple of violins. Syringes? I learned the significance of those in my later researches. “Look, see how I change”, he chortled, and in front of me he started to dress himself as Sherlock Holmes, muttering incoherently in a state of excitement. Then he grabbed a magnifying glass and started examining the room minutely, all the time with this incoherent, excited muttering. It was bizarre, to say the least. Finally, he sat back in his chair, having picked up one of the violins and a bow, and started scraping tunelessly on it. It was quite excruciating. “You see”, he cried, “I can’t play it. Neither could Holmes”. He stopped, took the stuff off, and apologised, saying: “I confess, I’ve always loved dressing up. So did Holmes, you know, several times he’d fool Watson with his disguises”. The man was clearly possessed, by his own creation.
“Some cake, Agatha?”, he asked, but he was busy cutting it anyway, so I got a slice of cake whether or not I wanted it. I decided to take control of the conversation. Or so I thought. I asked him about the fairies. “Ah”, he responded, “the Cottingley Fairies. Well, the jury’s still out, though I do wonder whether I was fooled. The problem always is, when people want to believe in something, they can fall victim to simple persuasion and ignore inconvenient facts. It is a weakness. One we exploit constantly with our readers, of course. That is why literary characters become real. But I am preaching. What I do know exist are demons. They’re inside all of us. They appear to us in our dreams. Tell me about your demons, Agatha”. I was already regretting having raised the subject of the supernatural. “I really don’t have any”, I replied rather curtly. This was a lie. There was The Gunman. He’d haunted me in my dreams since I was a tiny girl. He had no voice. He just appeared. A French soldier with powdered hair, a pigtail and a tricorn hat. And though he said nothing, there was the most awful feeling of abject terror before he appeared. I’m forced to look in the direction I know he will be, and there he is, staring straight at me.
“I do”, came the enthusiastic response, “but I’ve learned how to deal with them. I use my invention, Dream Therapy, have I told you about it?” He hadn’t, of course, but clearly he was going to. “Yes, Dream Therapy, a simple technique I first taught myself when I was a boy. I was haunted by a terrifying monster with sharp, pointed teeth, a witch doctor called Mayumba. He would advance slowly towards me, uttering the single word Mayumba in a slow, deep, menacing voice. I was rooted to the spot as he came closer, and just as his claws encompassed my throat, I would wake up screaming. I was frightened to go back to sleep. I began to think about Mayumba during the day, and dreaded bedtime. And then I worked it out. What was really frightening was that in the middle of my nightmare there was no escape, I couldn’t wake up, I was trapped. So I reasoned, could I wake up in my dream? Could I become an active, conscious participant in my own dream? Could I dominate my dream? What is more, being a dream, anything was possible, there were no limitations, so could I not have unlimited strength? Could I not be a more terrifying monster than Mayumba?
“Sure enough, a few nights later, Mayumba appeared. I was ready for him. I was awake in my own dream. I grew enormous, towering menacingly over Mayumba. I saw the look of terror in his eyes. This excited me.” Sir Arthur at this point had grabbed the cake knife. “In my hand was the sharpest, the most deadly of knives. This demon was going to die and never bother me again. I slashed at him. Over and over again.” I watched with mounting incredulity as he flailed the air with his cake knife like a demented, frothing lunatic, thrusting upwards, plunging downwards, slashing crossways, over and over again until, quite exhausted, he stood in front of me with his head bowed, breathless and muttering in the same incomprehensible way I had witnessed earlier. I had had enough. I rose and said I had a long journey back, thanking him for a most entertaining afternoon, and praying my car would start without any trouble.
On the drive home, I realised I had become Dr. Watson. In other words, I was morbidly fascinated by an eccentric character and had the urge to learn his secrets and to comment on them. In Dr. Watson’s case, his subject was Sherlock Holmes. In mine, it was the creator of both those men. A key to that creator’s mind would be found in studying them both, I suspected. I was looking for clues, to what I wasn’t quite sure, but I became obsessed with Arthur’s concept of the perfect crime and the perverse compulsion for the perfect criminal to leave hidden, cryptic evidence. Had I been selected to do this? Was I being manipulated? I resolved to learn as much about him as I could from the public domain, contemporary and literary history, and coinciding dates. This could help set the context. But evidence of the cryptic could surely be found in at least one particular place: the Sherlock Holmes novels. I had them in an old bookcase. Back home, once I’d settled back in, I blew the dust off them and began to read. Like any researcher, I would mark, categorise and classify any prominent passages that chimed with my investigatory headings.
It didn’t take me long to find a reference to syringes: “Sherlock Holmes took the hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction”. ‘Which is it today?’, I asked, ‘Morphine or cocaine?’ He raised his eyes languidly. ‘It is cocaine. A seven per cent solution. Would you care to try it?’”
“I don’t ever remember you reading that passage to me, Mummy”, I remonstrated silently with my absent mother. Sherlock Holmes, a serial drug addict. But what about his creator? It was just as easy to locate the obsession with dressing up. Here’s Doctor Watson narrating a scene: “He came across sullenly enough and seated himself with his face resting on his hands. Jones and I resumed our cigars and our talk. Suddenly, however, Holmes’s voice broke in on us: ‘I think you might offer me a cigar too!’ We both started in our chairs. There was Holmes sitting close to us with an air of quiet amusement. ‘Holmes’, I exclaimed, ‘You here! But where is the old man?’ ‘Here is the old man’, he replied, ‘here he is – wig, whiskers, eyebrows, and all. I thought my disguise was pretty good. I fooled you completely, I think’. A wicked thought did occur to me that perhaps Watson was patronising Holmes, pretending to be fooled, rather as we do when children dress up to show us. After all, here we have Holmes’s intimate friend and confidant not seeing through a pantomime disguise. It is the stuff of music hall. On the other hand, perhaps it is Holmes, OR HIS CREATOR, crowing over how stupid we all are compared to him. Much of the dialogue between them is structured with Holmes berating Watson for not seeing the obvious, enabling the author thereby to explain his methods.
The scene reminded me of that famous Victorian melodrama, East Lynne, when the disgraced Lady Isabel, wife of Archibald (an unfortunate name, but there we are) returns disguised as a housekeeper in loco parents to their offspring, and no-one, including the husband, recognises her. The child dying in her arms gave birth to the famous subtitle “Never Called Me Mother”. In melodrama, we accept the incongruity and suspend our disbelief, laughing and crying at the same time. The Holmes novels are peppered with these ludicrous disguises, suggesting an obsession with dressing up to hide who you really are. I know you will jump in here and remind me that I used the same technique in Witness for the Prosecution, but at least it was a barrister being fooled, not an intimate. Nevertheless, I have to confess that I couldn’t watch the film without squirming uncomfortably at what was obviously Marlene Dietrich with a bogus accent.
The more I looked, the more I discovered. Little clues, hidden messages, pointers, confessions. Arthur Conan Doyle was speaking to me directly from the pages. Here are some short examples, so you can see how my investigation developed:
“Some facts should be suppressed.”
“Yet his powers of observation continued to astound me. He could tell at a glance different sails from each other – after walks, some of which are long and stretch through the night, taking him into the lowest portions of the City, he shows me splashes upon his trousers, and tells me by their colour and consistency in what part of London he has received them.”
“So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries”.
“So swift and furtive were his movements that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law”.
“The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny. There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible. When a doctor goes wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge”.
Arthur Conan Doyle was a trained physician. He had a practice in Southsea and, for a short while, in Wimpole Street where, it is said, he never saw a single patient. He was previously a ship’s surgeon on a whaling boat. As I read about his exploits in the Arctic, the ghastly images, and their undoubted effect upon him, jumped off the page: “After skinning a seal today I walked away with the two hind flippers in my hand. It is bloody work dashing out the poor little beggars’ brains while they look up with their big dark eyes into your face”.
His other nautical employment, I discovered, was as a medical officer on board a boat from Liverpool to Africa, the SS MAYUMBA. This pulled me up short. Had he been jesting with me? Was his own past muddled in his mind? Or was it a horrible coincidence that the same unusual name as the monster in his childhood should come back to haunt him in his adult life? Had Mayumba found a way to get him back? Would he have to confront him again in his dreams? Or in his waking hours?
“Licensed to Kill”. No, not James Bond, this is the caption Arthur wrote under a humorous sketch of himself receiving his medical diploma. Sorry Ian Fleming (or perhaps you knew). Arthur Conan Doyle created the first forensic detective. Readers simply couldn’t get enough of Sherlock Holmes’s labyrinthine mind and his ability to discover clues in seemingly innocuous or invisible fragments. Any crime writer who doesn’t acknowledge his influence is being disingenuous. We owe him much. And in terms of a writer’s work being autobiographical, it most surely has to be so in his case, as in all of ours. For how could anything other than a thoroughly devious mind construct the tortuous jungle through which the reader has to journey to get to the truth? This passage much sums it up: “My mind is like a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stowed away therein. From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. Let the detective, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for, by a man’s finger nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. In short, it is difficult for a man to have any object in daily use without leaving the impress of his individuality upon it in such a way that a trained observer might read it.”
“There’s a scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it”. This is from A Study in Scarlet, his first Holmes novel, appearing in 1887 in Beecham’s Christmas Annual and then published as a book in 1888.
1887 and 1888 were years of unique creativity and invention. Gottlieb Daimler produced his first automobile. Emile Berliner invented the gramophone. Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetism. Adolf Flick invented the contact lens. Pneumatic tyres, revolving doors and the ballpoint pen appeared. Celluloid photographic film and Kodak began the cinematic revolution. Rowell Lodge patented barbed wire, and Van Gogh cut off his left ear. I have a feeling Arthur was prolific, too. His next novel, The Sign of the Four, was published in 1890, and it was set in 1888. This book presented Holmes’s drug habit. It also introduced Dr. Watson’s future wife, Mary.
I am in Spitalfields, in the spirit. It is 1888. Mary is her name, poor girl. There is a gentleman she has brought back to her shabby dwelling, a fine gentleman dressed in black, with a Gladstone bag. Looks like a doctor. She has struck lucky tonight, she thinks to herself, as she leads him up the rickety stairs into her room. She turns to face him with her best Irish colleen smile. “Now, what’s your pleasure”, she asks. “Surgery”, he replies, “I need surgery”. “Why, what’s wrong with you?”, she asks with a chuckle, “you look healthy enough to me, what do you need surgery for?” “Not me, it is you who needs surgery, my angel”, he replies. “Here”, she says, “you’ve come to the wrong girl, the wrong address, I’m not aborting or nothing, I don’t need that”. He tut tuts “You girls, you’re all the same” as he reaches in the Gladstone and pulls out a whaling knife. “Oh Jesus, you’re him!”, she just manages to croak out via her fear-constricted throat, and he is at her with his left hand over her mouth, pushing her against the wall with superhuman strength, and thrusting upwards ferociously with the knife. Her big dark eyes look up into his face with the same innocent incredulity as a baby seal, before fading, closing and passing into eternity. Then the frenetic slashing, up, down, crossways, until quite exhausted with all the effort. Recovering his breath, the next task is the skinning and the butchery. He goes to work, expertly slicing and gouging, muttering incoherently with groans, whistles and little cries. Eventually there are pieces of her everywhere, occupying the room like bloody bric-a-brac. There he stands, covered from head to toe in her blood. And here has always been one of the perennial questions around this mystery – how on earth did the blood-soaked creature escape attention out on the streets? His arrival would have passed muster – a respectable looking gentleman, not a lurking monster – Dr. Jekyll. He might have been on a Gladstonian walk, after all, seeking to redeem ‘fallen women’. But how did no-one see Mr. Hyde? Oh reader, it was so simple. That fondness for dressing up had its serious side.
He wipes his face and hands on a blanket. He takes off his topcoat. He opens the Gladstone bag and pulls out a black dress which he puts on over his head. The dress reaches to the floor, entirely hiding his male attire. He puts on a grey wig, black gloves and a veiled hat. He stoops, and has become an old lady. He takes a large linen bag from the Gladstone. He puts the knife and the topcoat into the Gladstone. He collapses the topper and puts the hat and the Gladstone itself into the linen bag. He slings the linen bag over his shoulder and clasps it to his side. He shuffles off slowly into the night, muttering incoherently to himself, just like some old ladies do.
After our one meeting, I never met Arthur Conan Doyle again. 1926 was a transformative year for me, full of tragedy. My mother died, Archibald effectively died by confessing that he loved another woman, and at the end of the year I lost my bearings completely. I was told that Arthur joined the search party when I disappeared. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad chap after all. In any case, my obsession with him vanished after my breakdown. He died in 1930, and I paid him and his Hound a vicarious tribute in 1931 in The Sittaford Mystery. And that was an end to it all. Except that it wasn’t.
As I write this now, it is 1976. I dozed off at my desk one evening and suddenly that old feeling of a ghastly, terrifying presence came into the room. I dreaded looking round but knew that I had to. I knew it was The Gunman, and sure enough, there he was in his 18th century soldier’s uniform, powdered wig, pigtail and tricorn hat. But this time he spoke. For the person in the uniform was Arthur Conan Doyle. He wasn’t looking so good, mind you, because he was a corpse. A living corpse, an undead. His green, phosphorescent face had half rotted away. Considering all this, he was in a surprisingly jocular frame of mind. I have recorded what he said to me, as best I remember it.
“Well, Agatha, it’s been exactly fifty years. So whodunnit, eh? Have you worked it out yet? Was it the doctor? And if so, which doctor? No, not the witch-doctor, which doctor? Doctor Watson, Doctor Jekyll or Doctor Doyle? Well two of them are fictional characters, aren’t they? So that rather limits the choice, does it not? Ah, not necessarily, you think? Well in that case, perhaps it was Sherlock Holmes himself? Perhaps it was Dracula? Or his creator, who certainly had some cause, poor man. The dates fit, do they? Clever girl. Except that, as you know all too well, you can make anything fit. It’s how you wrote your books. You told me so. Start with the ending, the denouement, and then work backwards to make it all fit. It is all very well to invent forensic characters like we have, but we can’t really behave like them. All we can do is to hide inside them. That is why we invented them. To get away from the reality of life, to shun responsibility wherever we can, to make it their fault. You’re like me, Agatha, we’re two peas in a pod. You have spent your life disguising who you really are. Of course you have! Your autobiography is pure fiction, you old fraud. You’ve admitted as much. You have chosen what you want to tell people. We wallow in a sea of imagination, you and I. Except that it isn’t exactly what you would call a clean sea. How could it be? The imagination knows no bounds. It is all the Jekylls and Hydes in the world. We cannot control it. What we do as writers is to act as censor on behalf of the reader. We decide what is best to show them. So the rich, truly dark side of your imagination you have kept to yourself. Who can fault that? It’s made you the most published, the most translated author second only to the Christian Bible. Second only to the Bible! Well done! So, you will never sort it out, Agatha. It comes to this. Have I really appeared as a spirit talking to you? I would like to think I have, because it would confirm my own faith in spiritualism. Or is this simply you imagining me? Indeed, has the whole affair been the product of your imagination? I’m here as The Gunman, originally the product of your own imagination. But then you know my preponderance, my passion, for dressing up! One thing is for sure. Arthur and The Gunman have been merged into one. One demon, after all, is enough for anyone to cope with. And you are dreaming. Except that you appear, at last, to have taken my advice, and woken up inside your dream. So you are in control. And at last, you can rid yourself of The Gunman. You know what to do.”
I did indeed know what to do. I picked up the paper knife, which grew in my hand to a fearsome weapon, and struck him full in his rotten face. He grinned grotesquely, almost with relief, and I struck him again and again, slashing upwards, downwards and crossways, and the creature came to pieces in front of me until it was utterly dead. The demon was no more. I was finally purged.
This is one of five short stories published on Amazon under the omnibus title ‘REASON IN MADNESS’ by John Drewry.
MISS CHRISTIE’S FINAL CASE by John Drewry
© John Stephen Drewry 2021 All rights reserved