Shadows over Baker Street

The Drowned Geologist

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

10 MAY 1898

My Dear Dr. Watson,

At the urgent behest of a mutual acquaintance, Dr. Ogilvey, lately of the British Museum, I am writing you regarding a most singular occurrence which I experienced recently during an extended tour of the Scottish lowlands and the east English coast south on through north Yorkshire. The purpose of my tour was the acquisition of local geological specimens and stratigraphic data for the American Museum here in Manhattan, where I have held a post these last four years. As one man of science writing openly to another, I trust you will receive these words in the spirit in which they are intended; indeed, the only spirit in which I presently know how to couch them: as the truthful and objective testimony of a trained observer and investigator who has borne witness to a most peculiar series of events, which, even now, many months hence, I am yet at a loss to explain. I fear that I must expect you to question the veracity of my story, and no doubt my sanity as well, if you are even half the man of medicine and of science that your reputation has led me to believe. As to why Ogilvey has suggested that I should entrust these facts to you, sir, in particular, that will shortly become quite clear. Moreover, if my voice seems uncertain and strained at times, if my narration seems to falter, please understand that even though the better part of a year has passed since those strange days by the sea, only by the greatest force of will am I able to finally set this account down upon paper.

My travels in your country, which I have already mentioned, began last June with my arrival in Aberdeen after a rather uneventful and regrettably unproductive month spent studying in Germany. Moving overland by coach and locomotive, alone and availing myself always of the most convenient and inexpensive modes of transportation for my often unorthodox purposes, I wandered throughout the full length of June and July, on a course winding crookedly ever southward, across rugged bands of Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata, usually exposed best, as my luck would have it, along the most inaccessible coastal cliffs and beachheads. So it was that by mid-August, on the morning of the twelfth to be precise, I had worked my way down to Whitby and taken up residence in a small hotel overlooking the harbor.

After the long weeks I’d spent on the road and often on foot, making my way across the rugged countryside, even these modest accommodations seemed positively luxuriant, I can assure you. To have a hot bath at the ready and cooked meals, a roof to keep the rain off one’s head, such little things become an extravagance after only a little time without them. I settled into my single room on Drawbridge Road, excited at the prospect of exploring the ancient, saurian-bearing shales along the shoreline, but also relieved to be out of the dratted weather for a time. A fortnight earlier, I had cabled Sir Elijah Purdy, a fellow of the Geological Society of London and a man with great experience regarding the Liassic strata at Whitby and the fossil bones and mollusca found therein, and he was to meet me no later than the afternoon of the fourteenth, at which time we would begin our planned weeklong survey of the rocks. Meanwhile, I was to examine specimens in the small Whitby Museum on the Quayside, perusing what type specimens of ammonites and reptilia resided in that institution’s collection.

I will endeavor not to bore you with a travelogue, for I know from Ogilvey that you are familiar with the village of Whitby, with its quaint red roofs and whitewashed walls, the crumbling abbey ruins at East Cliff, & etc. And I had, by the time, I must confess, taken in more than my share of maritime scenery, and had little interest or patience remaining for anything save the fossil shells and bones, and fossiliferous strata, which I had come so many thousands of miles to see.

After a good night’s sleep, despite a terrible storm toward dawn, I dressed and went down to breakfast, where there was some considerable excitement and discussion among other guests and the proprietor regarding a Russian schooner, Demeter, which had run aground only a few days prior at Tate Hill Pier. As I have said, I was quite beyond caring about ships and scenery at this point, and paid little attention to the conversation, though I do recall that the circumstances of the ship’s grounding were somewhat mysterious and seemed the source of no small degree of anxiety. Regardless, my mind was almost entirely on my work. I finished my eggs and sausages, a pot of strong black coffee, and set off for the museum. The morning air was not especially warm nor cool, and it was an easy walk, during which I hardly noticed my surroundings, lost instead in my thoughts of all things paleontological.

I reached the quayside shortly before eleven o’clock and was met, as planned, by the Reverend Henry Swales, who has acted now for many years in a curatorial capacity, caring for the museum’s growing cabinet. Though established originally as a repository for fossils, in the last several decades the museum’s mission has been significantly expanded to encompass the general natural history of the region, including large assemblages of beetles, botanical materials, lepidoptera, and preserved fishes. Reverend Swales, a tall, good-natured fellow with a thick gray mustache and the eyebrows to match, eagerly directed his Yankee guest to the unpretentious gallery where many wall-mounted saurians and other fossils are kept on display for the public. I listened attentively as he related the stories of each specimen, as a man might relate another man’s biography, the circumstances of their individual discoveries and conservation. I was taken almost at once with a certain large plesiosaur which had preserved within its rib cage the complete skeleton of a smaller plesiosaur, and much of the afternoon was passed studying this remarkable artifact, making my sketches, and losing myself ever deeper in my fancies of a lost, antediluvian world of monstrous sea dragons.

Eventually, the Reverend Swales returned and reminded me that the museum would be closing for the day at four, but I was welcome to stay later if I wished. I did, as I’d only just begun to scratch the surface of this marvelous collection, but didn’t wish to abuse the reverend’s hospitality. After all, I had many more days to pore over these relics, and my eyes were beginning to smart from so many hours scrutinizing the plesiosaurs and ichthyosauria.

“Thank you,” said I. “But that really won’t be necessary. I’ll return early tomorrow morning.” He reminded me that the museum did not open until eight, which I assured him was entirely agreeable. I tidied my notes and left Reverend Swales to lock up for the night.

Leaving the quayside behind, I decided to take a leisurely stroll toward the seaside, as it was still early, the weather was fine, and I’d little else to occupy my time except my books and notes. My route took me north along Pier Road, with the dark brown waters of the narrow River Esk flowing swiftly along on my right-hand side. High above the river, of course, rose East Cliff and the venerable ruins of the old abbey.

Though earlier it had interested me not even in the least, I found myself gazing, fascinated, at the distant, disintegrating walls, the lancet archways, perhaps somewhat more disposed to appreciate “local color” now that some small fraction of my desire to examine Whitby’s famous saurians had been sated by the day’s work. I knew little of the site’s history, only that the original abbey had been erected on the cliffside in A.D. 657, destroyed two centuries later by Viking raiders, and that the ruins of the present structure were the remains of a Norman abbey built on the same spot at some later date. I thought perhaps there had been some saint or another associated with the abbey, that I had read that somewhere, but could not recollect the details. However, as I proceeded along the Pier Road, those towering ruins began to elicit from me strange feelings of dread, which I was, then and now, sir, completely at a loss to explain, and I decided it was best to occupy myself with other, less foreboding sights. So it was that in short order, I came to West Cliff, there above the beach, where the old cobbles of Pier Road turn sharply back to the south again toward the village, forming something like the crooked head of a shepherd’s staff.

I must apologize if I have drifted into the sort of tedious travelogue I earlier promised to avoid, but it is important to impress upon you, at this point in my account, my state of mind, the odd and disquieting effect the abbey had elicited from me. I am not someone accustomed to such emotions and generally regard myself as a man not the least bit dogged by superstition. I told myself that whatever I felt was no more than the cumulative product of light and shadow, compounded by some exhaustion from my long day, and was only what most any other rational man might feel gazing upon those ruins.

At West Cliff, I was at once distracted from my intended goal, the Liassic shales themselves, by the extraordinary sight of a schooner run aground on the eastern side of the quay, across the Esk, and quickly realized that I was, in fact, seeing the very schooner, the Demeter, which I’d heard discussed with such excitement and foreboding over breakfast. I assure you, Dr. Watson, that the dead Russian ship cut a peculiar and lonely spectacle, cast up as she was on the jagged shingle of Tate Hill Pier, at the foot of East Cliff and the old graveyard. Her pathetic, shattered masts and bowsprit at once put me in mind of the tall spines of some pre-Adamite monster, not an odd association, of course, for someone in my profession. The tangled rigging and torn canvas hung loose, sagging like some lifeless mass of rawhide and sinew, flapping in the ocean’s breeze.

And once again, that unaccustomed sense of dread assailed me, though even stronger than it had before, and I admit to you that I considered turning at once back toward the comfort of the inn. However, as I have said, I count my freedom from baser beliefs and superstitions as a particular point of pride, and knowing there was nothing here to fear and determined to have a look at the alum beds, not to be deterred by such childish thoughts or emotions, I began searching for some easy access to the beach below me, where I might better examine the rocks.

Within only a very few minutes I’d located a spiral, wooden stairway affixed to the cliff near the wall of the quay. However, the years and ravages of the sea had done much damage to the structure and it swayed most alarmingly as I carefully descended the slick steps to the sands below. Having finally reached the bottom, I paused briefly and stared back at the rickety stairway, sincerely hoping that I might find an alternate means of reaching the top again. The tide was out, revealing a broad swath of clean sand and the usual bits of flotsam, and I rightly supposed that I still had a good hour or so to look about the foot of West Cliff before setting out to discover such an alternative became a pressing concern.

Almost at once, then, I came across the perfectly preserved test of a rather large example of spiny echinodermata, or sea urchin, weathered all but entirely free of the alum shales which had imprisoned it for so many epochs, and deposited on the sand. I brushed it off and examined it more closely in the sunlight, unable to place either its genus or species, and suspecting that it might perhaps be of a form hitherto unrecognized by paleontologists; I deposited my prize in my right coat pocket and continued to scan the steep rocks for any other such excellent fossils. But, as the evening wore on, I failed to spot anything else quite as interesting, all my additional finds consisting in the main of broken pieces of ammonoid and mussel shells embedded in hard limestone nodules, a few fish bones, and what I hoped might prove to be a small fragment from one of the characteristic hourglass-shaped flipper bones of an ichthyosaur. I glanced out to sea, and then back to the dark gray rocks, trying to envision, as I had so often done before, the unimaginable expanse of time which had transpired since the stones before me were only slime and ooze at the bottom of an earlier and infinitely more alien sea.

“You are a geologist?” someone asked at that point, a man’s voice, giving me a start, and I turned to see a very tall, gaunt man with a narrow, aquiline nose watching me from only a few feet away. He was smiling very slightly, in a manner that I thought oddly knowing at the time. For all I guessed, he might well have been standing there for an hour, as I have a habit of becoming so intent upon my collecting that I often neglect to glance about me for long stretches.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “A paleontologist, to be more precise.”

“Ah,” he said. “Of course you are. I would have seen that for myself, but I’m afraid the wreck has had me distracted,” and the man motioned in the direction of the quay, the Esk, and the stranded Demeter beyond. “You are an American, too, and a New Yorker, unless I miss my guess.”

“I am,” I replied, though by this point I confess that the stranger was beginning to annoy me somewhat with his questions. “Dr. Tobias Logan, of the American Museum of Natural History,” I introduced myself, holding out a hand which he only stared at curiously and smiled that knowing smile at me again.

“You’re hunting the sea monsters of Whitby,” he said, “and, I gather, having blasted little luck at it.”

“Well,” I said, taking the urchin from my pocket and passing it to the man, “I admit I’ve had better days in the field.”

“Extraordinary,” the tall man said, carefully inspecting the fossil, turning it over and over in his hand.

“Quite so,” replied I, relaxing a bit, as I’m not unaccustomed to explaining myself to curious passersby. “But, still, not precisely the quarry I had in mind.”

“Better the luck of Chapman, heh?” he asked, and winked.

I realized at once that he was referring to the discovery of William Chapman in 1758 of a marine crocodile on the Yorkshire coast, not far from where we were standing.

“You surprise me, sir,” I said. “Are you a collector?”

“Oh no,” he assured me, returning the urchin. “Nothing of the sort. But I read a great deal, you see, and I’m afraid few subjects have managed to escape my attention.”

“Your accent isn’t Yorkshire,” I said, and he shook his head.

“No, Dr. Logan, it isn’t,” he replied, and then he winked at me once again. The man turned and peered out at the sea, and it was at this point that I realized that the tide was beginning to rise, the beach being appreciably more constricted than it was the last time I’d noticed.

“I fear that we shall certainly be getting our feet wet if we don’t start back,” I said, but he only nodded his head and continued to stare at the restless, gray expanse of the sea.

“We should talk at greater length sometime,” he said. “There is a matter, concerning an object of great antiquity, and uncertain provenance, that I should very much appreciate hearing your trained opinion on.”

“Indeed,” I said, eyeing the rising tide. “A fossil?”

“No, a stone tablet. It appears to have been graven with hieroglyphics resembling those of the ancient Egyptians.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but you’d surely be better off showing it to an archaeologist, instead. I wouldn’t be able to tell you much.”

“Wouldn’t you?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow and looking thoughtfully back at me. “I pried it from those very strata which you’ve spent the last hour examining. It’s really quite an amazing object, Dr. Logan.”

I believe I must have stared at the man for some time then without speaking, for I am sure I was too stunned and incredulous to find the words. He shrugged, then picked up a pebble and tossed it at the advancing sea.

“Forgive me,” I said, or something of the sort. “But either you’re having me on or you yourself have been the victim of someone else’s joke. You’re obviously an educated man, so—”

“So,” he said, interrupting me, “I know that these strata are too old by many millions of years to contain the artifact I’ve told you I found buried in them. Obviously.”

“Then you are joking?”

“No, my good man,” he said, selecting another pebble to fling at the tide. “Quite the contrary, I assure you. I was as skeptical as you when first I laid eyes upon the thing, but now I am fairly convinced of its authenticity.”

“Poppycock,” I said to him, though I had many far more vulgar expressions in mind by this point. “What you’re proposing is so entirely absurd—”

“That it doesn’t even warrant the most casual consideration of learned men,” he said, interrupting me for the second time.

“Well, yes,” I replied, somewhat impatiently, I’m afraid, and then returned the urchin to its place in my coat pocket. “The whole idea is perfectly absurd, man, right there on the face of it. It runs contrary to everything we’ve discovered in the last one hundred years about the evolution and development of life and the rise of humanity.”

“I suspected,” he said, as though I’d not even spoken, “at first, that someone might have planted the artifact, you see, that perhaps I had stumbled upon a prank aimed at someone else. Someone who, unlike me, makes a habit of collecting shells and rocks and old bones on the seashore.

“But I was able to identify—oh, what is it that you geologist fellows say? The positive and negative impressions—yes, that’s it. The positive and negative impressions of the tablet were pressed quite clearly, unmistakably, into the layers of shale immediately above and below it. I have succeeded in recovering them as well.”

“I’m sure you did,” I said doubtfully.

“But, even more curiously, this isn’t the first such inappropriate artifact, Dr. Logan. Two years ago, a very similar stone was found by a miner up the coast at Staithes, where, as you surely know, these same shales are mined for their alum. I have seen it myself, in a private cabinet in Glasgow. And there was a third, discovered in 1865, I think, or 1866, down at Frylingdales. But it seems to have vanished and, regrettably, only a drawing remains.”

The man stopped talking then, for a moment, and gazed toward the walls of the quay. From where we were standing, one could just make out the splintered foremast of the ill-fated Demeter and he presently motioned toward it.

“There are dark entities afoot here in Whitby, Dr. Logan. Ay, darker things than even I’m accustomed to facing down, and I assure you I’m no coward, if I do say so myself.”

“The tide, sir,” I said, for now each wave carried the sea within mere feet of where we stood.

“Indeed, the tide,” he said in a distracted, annoyed way, and nodded his head again. “But perhaps we can talk of this another time, before you leave Whitby. I will be glad for the chance to show you the tablet. I will be here another week, myself. I would rather prefer, though, if you kept this matter between us.”

“Gladly,” I assured him. “I have no particular wish to be thought a madman.”

“Even so,” he said, and with that enigmatic pronouncement at once began the perilous ascent up the rickety stairs to the Pier Road. I stood there a bit longer, watching as he climbed, expecting those slippery and infirm planks to give way at any second, dashing him onto the rocks and sand at my feet. But they held, and seeing that the sea had already entirely engulfed the beach to the west of me, and having only the high and inaccessible quay wall to the east, I summoned my courage and followed him. By no small stroke of luck, I also survived the climb, though the structure swayed and creaked and I was quite certain that my every footfall would be my last.

By now, Dr. Watson, I have but little doubt that you must have begun to understand why Ogilvey has urged me to write you. I have read in the press several accounts of the extraordinary Mr. Holmes’s death in Switzerland, and I hope that the remarkable possibility, which I will not explicitly suggest here, but rather let stand as an unstated question for your consideration, will bring you no further pain. I have been made well aware of the great friendship that existed between you and Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and had not my reason been so vexed and controverted by the bizarre events at Whitby last August, I would have preferred to keep the encounter forever to myself. I would never have been led to reflect at such length on the identity of the man on the beach, a man whose appearance and demeanor I think you might recognize.

But I should continue my story now, and must continue to hope that you see here anything more than the ravings of an overtaxed mind and an overindulged imagination.

By the time I had at last finished my climb and regained secure footing at the crumbling summit of West Cliff, storm clouds were moving swiftly in from the southwest, darkening the murmuring waters of the Esk and creating an ominous backdrop for the abbey ruins. Fearing that I might lose my way among the unfamiliar streets should I attempt to discover a shorter route back to the hotel, I hurried instead along Pier Road, retracing my steps to the inn on Drawbridge Road. But I’d gone only a little way when the wind and thunder began and, in short order, a heavy, chilling downpour. I had neglected to bring an umbrella with me, thinking that the day would remain pleasant and clear, and not having planned on the walk down to the beach beforehand. As a result, I was now treated to a most thorough and proper soaking. I must have made for a dreary and pitiful sight, indeed, slogging my way down those narrow, rain-swept avenues.

When at last I reached the hotel, I was offered a hot cup of tea and a seat at the hearthside. As tempting as the latter was, I told the innkeeper that I preferred instead to retire at once to my room and acquire some dry clothes and rest until dinner. As I started up the stairs, he called me back, having forgotten a message that had been left for me that afternoon. It was written on a small, plain sheet of stationery and read, as best I can recall:

Toby, will call again first thing in the morning. Please await my arrival. Reached Whitby earlier than expected. I have much to relate re: unusual fossils found in Devon Lias and now in my care. Are you familiar with Phoenician (?) god Dagon or Irish Daoine Domhain? Until the morrow,

Yrs., E. P.

Though rightly intrigued and excited at the prospect of the new Devon fossils which Purdy had mentioned, I was quite completely baffled by his query regarding Phoenician gods and those two words of unpronounceable Gaelic. Deciding that any mysteries would readily resolve themselves in the morning, I retired to my room, where I at once changed clothes and then busied myself until dinner with some brief notes on the urchin and other specimens from West Cliff.

I slept fitfully that night while the storm raged and banged at the shutters. I am not given to nightmares, but I recall odd scraps of dream where I stood on the shore at West Cliff, watching as the Demeter sailed majestically into the harbor. The tall man stood somewhere close behind me, though I don’t think I ever saw his face, and spoke of my wife and child. I finally awoke for the last time shortly after dawn, to the smell of coffee brewing and breakfast cooking downstairs, and the comforting sound of rain dripping from the eaves. The storm had passed, and despite my rather poor sleep, I recall feeling very rested and ready for a long day prospecting the seaside outcrops with Purdy. I dressed quickly, and armed with my ash plant and knapsack, my hammer and cold chisels, I went down to await my colleague’s arrival.

However, at eleven o’clock I was still waiting, sipping at my second pot of coffee and beginning to feel the first faint twinges of annoyance that so much of the day was being squandered when my time in Whitby was to be so short. I am almost puritanical in my work habits and despise the wasting of perfectly good daylight, and could not imagine what was taking Purdy so long to show.

The terrible things that soon followed, I must tell you, occurred with not the slightest hint of the lurid or sensational air that is usually attached to the macabre and uncanny in the penny dreadfuls and gothic romances. There was not even the previous day’s vague sense of foreboding. They simply happened, sir, and somehow that made them all the worse. It would be long weeks before I would begin to associate with the events the singular trepidation, indeed the genuine horror, which would gradually come to so consume my thoughts.

I was reading, for the second time, a long article in an Edinburgh paper (the paper’s name escapes me now, as does the precise subject of the article), when a young boy, possibly eight years of age, came in and announced that he’d been sent to retrieve me. A man, he said, had paid him sixpence to bring me to West Cliff, where there had been a drowning in the night.

“I’m sorry, but I am not a medical doctor,” I told him, thinking this must surely be a simple case of mistaken identity, but no, he assured me at once, he’d been instructed to bring the American Dr. Tobias Logan to the beach at West Cliff, with all possible haste. As I sat there scratching my head, the boy grew impatient and protested that we should hurry. Before I left the hotel on Drawbridge Road, however, I scribbled a quick note to Purdy and left it with the proprietor, in case he should come in my absence. Then I quickly gathered my belongings and followed the excited boy, who told me his name was Edward and that his father was a cobbler, through the narrow, winding streets of Whitby and once again down to West Cliff.

The body of the drowned man lay on the sand and clearly the gulls had been at him for some considerable time before he was discovered by a beachcomber. Yet, despite the damage done by the cruel beaks of the birds, I had no trouble in recognizing the face of Elijah Purdy right off. Several men had crowded about, including the constable and harbormaster, none of whom, I quickly gathered, had paid the boy sixpence to bring me to West Cliff.

“First that damned Russian ghost ship,” the constable grumbled, lighting his pipe. “Now this.”

“A foul week, to be sure,” the harbormaster muttered back.

I introduced myself at once and then kneeled down beside the tattered earthly remains of the man whom I had known and of whom I’d been so fond. The constable coughed and exhaled a great, gray cloud of pipe smoke.

“Here,” he said. “Did you know this poor fellow?”

“Very well,” I replied. “I was to meet him this very morning. I was waiting for him when the boy there fetched me from the inn on Drawbridge Road.”

“Is that so now?” the constable said. “What boy is that?”

I looked up and there was, to be sure, no sign of the boy who had led me to the grisly scene.

“The cobbler’s son,” I said, and looked back down at the ruined face of Purdy. “He said that he was paid to summon me here. I assumed you’d sent for me, sir, though I’m not at all sure how you could have known to do so.”

At that, the harbormaster and constable exchanged perplexed stares and the latter went back to puffing at his pipe.

“This man was an associate of yours, then?” the harbormaster asked me.

“Indeed,” said I. “He is Sir Elijah Purdy, a geologist from London. He arrived in Whitby only yesterday. I believe he may have taken a room at the Morrow House on Hudson Street.”

The two men looked at me and then the constable whispered something to his companion and the two nodded their heads in unison.

“You’re an American,” the constable said, raising an eyebrow and chewing at the stem of his pipe.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m an American.”

“Well, Dr. Logan, you may be certain that we’ll get straight to the bottom of this,” he assured me.

“Thank you,” I said, and it was at that moment that I noticed something odd, about the diameter of a silver dollar, clutched in the drowned man’s hand.

“Murders here in Whitby do not go unsolved.”

“What makes you think he was murdered?” I asked the constable, prying the curious, iridescent object from Elijah Purdy’s grasp.

“Well, for one, the man’s pockets were filled with stones to weight the body down. See there for yourself.”

Indeed, the pockets of his wool overcoat were bulging with shale, but on quick inspection I saw that they all contained fossils and explained to the man that in all likelihood, Elijah Purdy himself had placed the stones there. One of his vest pockets was likewise filled.

“Ah,” the constable said thoughtfully, and rubbed at his mustache. “Well, no matter. We’ll find the chap what did this, I promise you.”

In no mood to argue the point, I answered a few more questions, told the constable that I would be available at the inquest, and made my way back up the rickety stairway to Pier Road. I stood there for a short time, surveying the scene below, the men arranged in a ring around the drowned man’s corpse, the dark sea lapping tirelessly at the shore, the wide North Sea sky above. After a bit I remembered the object I’d taken from Purdy’s hand and held it up for a closer inspection. But there was no doubt of what it was, a small ammonite of the genus Dactylioceras, a form quite common in sections of the English Liassic. Nothing extraordinary, except that this specimen, though deceased, was not fossilized, and the squidlike head of the cephalopod stared back at me with silvery eyes, its ten tentacles drooping limply across my fingers.

I fear that there is little else to tell, Dr. Watson, and glancing back over these few pages, I can see that there is not nearly so much sense in what I’ve written as I’d hoped for. I returned to the hotel, where I would spend the next three days, making one more visit to the Reverend Swales’s museum, only to discover my enthusiasm for work had dissolved. After the inquest, during which it was determined that Sir Elijah Purdy’s drowning was accidental, having occurred while he collected fossils along the beach and that no foul play was involved, I packed up my things and returned home to Manhattan. I delivered the very recently dead Dactylioceras, preserved in alcohol, to the curator of fossil invertebrates, who greeted the find with much fanfare and promised to name the surprising new species for the man from whose grip I had pried it. One final detail, which will be of interest to you, and which forms the primary reason of this writing, is a letter which I received some weeks after coming back to the States.

Posted from Whitby on the twelfth of September, one month to the day after my arrival there, it carried no return address and had been composed upon a typewriter. I will duplicate the text below:

Dear Dr. Logan,

I trust that your trip home will have passed without incident. I have written to offer my sincerest apologies for not having attended to the matter of your friend’s untimely death, and for not having found the time to continue our earlier conversation. But I must implore you to forget the odd matter of which I spoke, the three tablets from Whitby, Staithes, and Frylingdales. All are now lost, I fear, and I have come to see how that outcome is surely for the best. Dark and ancient powers, the whim of inhuman beings of inconceivable antiquity and malignancy, may be at work here and, I suspect, may have played a direct role in the death of Sir Elijah. Take my words to heart and forget these things. To worry at them further will profit you not. Perhaps we will meet again someday, under more congenial circumstances.

S. H.

Whether or not the letter’s author was, in fact, your own associate, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and if that was the man I spoke with at West Cliff, I cannot say. Any more than I can explain the presence in the waters off Whitby of a mollusk believed vanished from the face of the earth for so many millions of years or the death of Elijah Purdy, an excellent swimmer, I have been told. Having never seen the tablets firsthand, I can profess no reliable opinion regarding them, and feel I am better off not trying to do so. I have never been a nervous man, but I have taken to hearing strange sounds and voices in the night, and my sleep and, I am very much afraid, peace of mind are beginning to suffer. I dream of—no, I will not speak here of the dreams.

Before I close, I should say that on Friday last there was a burglary at the museum here, which the police have yet to solve. The Whitby ammonite and all written records of it were the only things stolen, though some considerable vandalism was done to a number of the paleontology and geology offices and to the locked cabinet where the specimen was being kept.

I thank you for your time, Dr. Watson, and, if you are ever in New York, hope to have the pleasure of meeting you.

Dr. Tobias H. Logan

Department of Vertebrate Paleontology

American Museum of Natural History

New York City, New York

(Unposted letter discovered among the effects of Dr. Tobias Logan, subsequent to his suicide by hanging, 11 May 1898.)