Shadows over Baker Street - Hardcover

 
9780345455284: Shadows over Baker Street
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345455282 ISBN 13: 9780345455284
Verlag: Ballantine Books Inc., 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Master detective Sherlock Holmes enters the macabre and nightmarish world of H. P. Lovecraft to solve a series of bizarre cases in a collection of short fiction by twenty leading authors, including Neil Gaimna, Steve Perry, Brian Stableford, Poppy Z. Brite, Barbara Hambly, and Caitlin Kiernan, among others.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Reaves is a renowned screenwriter who has written, edited, and/or produced more than three hundred teleplays for various television series, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Twilight Zone, Sliders, and Monsters. He was also a story editor and writer on Batman: The Animated Series, for which he won an Emmy Award for writing in 1993. He has worked for Spielberg’s DreamWorks, among other studios, and is the author of several fantasy novels and supernatural thrillers, including Hell on Earth and the New York Times bestselling Star Wars novel, Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter. Reaves lives in Los Angeles.

John Pelan is an acclaimed author whose fiction includes the Lovecraftian novella The Colour out of Darkness. He is the editor of such groundbreaking anthologies as Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium, The Devil Is Not Mocked, and The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique. His solo stories have appeared in publications such as The Urbanite, Gothic.net, Enigmatic Tales, and Carpe Noctem. He is the founder of the publishing house Darkside Press, and cofounder of Midnight House. He lives in Seattle.

Aus dem Klappentext

Arthur Conan Doyle s Sherlock Holmes is among the most famous literary figures of all time. For more than a hundred years, his adventures have stood as imperishable monuments to the ability of human reason to penetrate every mystery, solve every puzzle, and punish every crime.

For nearly as long, the macabre tales of H. P. Lovecraft have haunted readers with their nightmarish glimpses into realms of cosmic chaos and undying evil. But what would happen if Conan Doyle s peerless detective and his allies were to find themselves faced with mysteries whose solutions lay not only beyond the grasp of logic, but of sanity itself.

In this collection of all-new, all-original tales, twenty of today s most cutting edge writers provide their answers to that burning question.

 A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman: A gruesome murder exposes a plot against the Crown, a seditious conspiracy so cunningly wrought that only one man in all London could have planned it and only one man can hope to stop it.

A Case of Royal Blood by Steven-Elliot Altman: Sherlock Holmes and H. G. Wells join forces to protect a princess stalked by a ghost or perhaps something far worse than a ghost.

Art in the Blood by Brian Stableford: One man s horrific affliction leads Sherlock Holmes to an ancient curse that threatens to awaken the crawling chaos slumbering in the blood of all humankind.

The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone by Poppy Z. Brite and David Ferguson: A girl who has not eaten in more than three years teaches Holmes and Watson that sometimes the impossible cannot be eliminated.

The Horror of the Many Faces by Tim Lebbon: Dr. Watson witnesses a maniacal murder in London and recognizes the villain as none other than his friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

With these and fourteen other dark tales of madness, horror, and deduction, a new and terrible game is afoot.

The terrifyingly surreal universe of horror master H. P. Lovecraft bleeds into the logical world of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle s champion of rational deduction in these brand-new stories by twenty of today s top horror, mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writers, including:

Steven-Elliot Altman
Elizabeth Bear
Poppy Z. Brite
Simon Clark
David Ferguson
Paul Finch
Neil Gaiman
Barbara Hambly
Caitlin R. Kiernan
Tim Lebbon
James Lowder
Richard A. Lupoff
F. Gwynplaine McIntyre
John Pelan
Steve Perry
Michael Reaves
Brian Stableford
John P. Vourlis
David Niall Wilson & Patricia Lee Macomber

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman

1. THE NEW FRIEND

Fresh from Their Stupendous European Tour, where they performed before several of the CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE, garnering their plaudits and praise with magnificent dramatic performances, combining both COMEDY and TRAGEDY, the Strand Players wish to make it known that they shall be appearing at the Royal Court Theatre, Drury Lane, for a LIMITED ENGAGEMENT in April, at which they will present “My Look-Alike Brother Tom!” “The Littlest Violet-Seller” and “The Great Old Ones Come” (this last an Historical Epic of Pageantry and Delight); each an entire play in one act! Tickets are available now from the Box Office.


It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.

But I am wool-gathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.

I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive”; that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.

“Astonishing,” I said.

“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab coat who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave folk, tortured.”

Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.

The gods and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the ––th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness, then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.

I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.

That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leechlike mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog white, into the skin of my now-withered shoulder. I had once been a crack shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world-beneath-the-world akin to panic, which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a hansom cab rather than a penny to travel underground.

Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.

“I scream in the night,” I told him.

“I have been told that I snore,” he said. “Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private, and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”

I smiled and shook my head and extended my hand. We shook on it.

The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveler, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors; many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied.

He was a mystery to me.

We were partaking of one of our landlady’s magnificent breakfasts one morning when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. “There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes,” he said. “We will need another place at table.”

“Very good,” she said, “I’ll put more sausages under the grill.”

My friend returned to perusing his morning paper. I waited for an explanation with growing impatience. Finally, I could stand it no longer. “I don’t understand. How could you know that in four minutes we would be receiving a visitor? There was no telegram, no message of any kind.”

He smiled thinly. “You did not hear the clatter of a brougham several minutes ago? It slowed as it passed us—obviously as the driver identified our door—then it sped up and went past, up into the Marylebone Road. There is a crush of carriages and taxicabs letting off passengers at the railway station and at the waxworks, and it is in that crush that anyone wishing to alight without being observed will go. The walk from there to here is but four minutes . . .”

He glanced at his pocket watch, and as he did so I heard a tread on the stairs outside.

“Come in, Lestrade,” he called. “The door is ajar, and your sausages are just coming out from under the grill.”

A man I took to be Lestrade opened the door, then closed it carefully behind him. “I should not,” he said. “But truth to tell, I have not had a chance to break my fast this morning. And I could certainly do justice to a few of those sausages.” He was the small man I had observed on several occasions previously, whose demeanor was that of a traveler in rubber novelties or pat- ent nostrums.

My friend waited until our landlady had left the room before he said, “Obviously, I take it this is a matter of national importance.”

“My stars,” said Lestrade, and he paled. “Surely the word cannot be out already. Tell me it is not.” He began to pile his plate high with sausages, kipper fillets, kedgeree, and toast, but his hands shook a little.

“Of course not,” said my friend. “I know the squeak of your brougham wheels, though, after all this time: an oscillating G-sharp above high C. And if Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard cannot publicly be seen to come into the parlor of London’s only consulting detective, yet comes anyway, and without having had his breakfast, then I know that this is not a routine case. Ergo, it involves those above us and is a matter of national importance.”



Lestrade dabbed egg yolk from his chin with his napkin. I stared at him. He did not look like my idea of a police inspector, but then, my friend looked little enough like my idea of a consulting detective—whatever that might be.

“Perhaps we should discuss the matter privately,” Lestrade said, glancing at me.

My friend began to smile impishly, and his head moved on his shoulders as it did when he was enjoying a private joke. “Nonsense,” he said. “Two heads are better than one. And what is said to one of us is said to us both.”

“If I am intruding—” I said gruffly, but he motioned me to silence.

Lestrade shrugged. “It’s all the same to me,” he said, after a moment. “If you solve the case, then I...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books Inc.
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345455282
ISBN 13 
9780345455284
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
446
Herausgeber
Reaves Michael, Pelan John
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Del Rey
https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/cornerstone/del-rey-uk

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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