Read Online And Then There Was No One by Gilbert Adair - Free Book Online Page A

docked at Southampton and the specimens I had had crated in Padang were forwarded to Aylesbury by the railway and then brought to the house by my man Jerrold in the dog-cart.
    ‘It was on that morning that was set in motion the inexplicable train of events which prompted me to seek outside assistance. We were in the kitchen – my two boys and I, along with one or two members of the staff – watching Jerrold screw open the crates with a crowbar. And it was when we were starting to lay the fronds out on the fine tissue paper which I purchase and store for just that purpose that, with a frightful scream, Jerrold suddenly withdrew his bare arm from within one of the crates. Gathering about him, we wereall aghast to find him bleeding copiously from a profound and horribly corrugated gash in his wrist. Although he has always been of a robust constitution, I own I was quite afraid for him: he had in a trice turned white, there was terror in his eyes and my foremost anxiety was that he was about to faint. However, the thing appeared so abruptly I had no more time to think about him.’
    ‘The thing?’ echoed Holmes, rousing himself at last from the apathy into which he had sunk and fixing Gable with a penetrating eye. ‘What nature of thing?’
    ‘The rat!’ cried Gable.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Holmes, now bolt upright.
    ‘A rat, a giant rat!’ Gable went on breathlessly. ‘Oh, when I call it a giant, you must not infer from the term that there was anything supernatural about its size – I make this distinction now that you may better understand the import of what is to follow – but by the standard of our common-or-garden English rodents it certainly was disagreeably large. It darted from the crate, scurried across the kitchen floor and vanished out of the door leading to the main hallway.’
    ‘But this rat,’ I asked: ‘where could it have sprung from?’
    ‘Well, Dr. Watson,’ Gable replied, ‘when you collect and study fronds, you learn to expect the discovery of all kinds of living creatures, spiders, beetles and a few rather more outlandish insects, which have crept unnoticed inside the packing crates. But a rat, and of such a dimension! I can only suppose that the native bearers, who are lazy at the bestof times, had been especially dilatory. The point, Mr. Holmes, is that this … this rat has poisoned my whole existence! Although I myself am persuaded that it must have made its way into the grounds, where it would soon have perished for want of its natural sources of nourishment, it has not ceased to cast an evil shadow over my house.’
    ‘You interest me extremely,’ said Holmes, refilling his pipe. ‘Continue, do.’
    ‘I know not if it is the animal itself or its legend that has since grown to monstrous proportions, but we have all, for a month now, heard queer nocturnal patterings under the floorboards as of some huge, restless beast on the prowl. Meat has been found, half-devoured and spat out in a corner of the pantry. And if these manifestations already had the servants quivering with dread, just above a week ago one of the scullery maids, on her way upstairs to bed, saw what she swears was an enormous rat, with bright yellow phosphorescent eyes and a head the size of a full-grown otter’s, slithering across the first-floor landing! On that same night, too, as the first excitement was subsiding at last, there was a further alarum when Edward awoke to find the creature lurking in his bedroom.’
    ‘And Jerrold?’ Holmes asked. ‘How has he fared?’
    ‘Jerrold?’ said Gable, seeming distracted by the question. ‘Oh, he lay in a bad fever for several days but is now quite recovered. My worry is not with Jerrold. It is with servants who daily threaten to hand in their notice, with tradesmenwho will no longer deliver their wares – the atmosphere in the household has become, as I say, poisonous, quite unbreathable. As a man of science, I refuse to lend credence to old wives’ tales