The Speckled Band (Adapted)

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One chilly April morning in 1883, Dr. Watson was woken by Holmes, who had an early visitor. She was a young woman in a black veil, pale and exhausted, and she could hardly hold still. "I am not shaking from the cold," she said. "I am afraid." Her name was Helen Stoner, and she lived with her stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, in an old manor house in Surrey, where the last member of a once-rich family now lived on a ruined estate.

Two years earlier, she explained, her twin sister Julia had died in that house, a fortnight before she was to be married. On the last night of her life, Julia had been woken by a low whistle, and she had rushed out into the corridor, pale with terror. Her last words, spoken to Helen, were "the speckled band." Her door had been locked from the inside, and the doctors had found no cause of death. Now Helen was engaged herself, and for the past few nights she, too, had heard that whistle.

Holmes listened with closed eyes. Helen added that her stepfather, a violent man who had once been a doctor in India, had recently ordered repairs on the walls of her bedroom, forcing her to sleep in Julia's old room. He kept a cheetah and a baboon that roamed freely in the grounds. Holmes thanked her, and that afternoon he and Watson visited the house while Roylott was away.

In Julia's room, Holmes examined everything with extraordinary care. The bed was clamped to the floor, so that it could not be moved. Above it hung a bell-rope that, to his surprise, was not attached to any bell. Near the ceiling, there was a small ventilator opening, not onto the open air, but into the adjoining room, where Roylott slept. In that room, Holmes noticed three things: a safe, a saucer of milk, and a dog lash with a loop at one end.

That night, Holmes and Watson waited in the dark in Julia's room. The hours passed slowly. At about three o'clock, a thin beam of light appeared in the ventilator and then disappeared, and a faint smell of burning oil drifted in. Then there was a soft, gentle hiss, like steam escaping from a kettle. Holmes struck a match and lashed the bell-rope with his cane, shouting, "You see it, Watson? You see it?"

What happened next was terrible and swift. From the adjoining room came a horrible scream, which echoed through the whole house. Holmes opened Roylott's door, and there, in the light of a lantern, sat the doctor in his dressing gown, dead. Around his head was tied a strange yellow band with brown speckles, and it slowly uncoiled itself from his hair: a snake, the deadliest in India.

Afterward, on the train back to London, Holmes explained. Roylott had trained the snake to come through the ventilator, down the rope, and onto the bed, calling it back with the whistle and the milk. He had wanted his stepdaughters dead, because when they married, he would lose part of the income. "I had no doubt that the ventilator and the rope could have only one purpose," said Holmes. "When the whistle and the metallic clang reminded me of the safe, I knew." He was silent for a moment. "In a way, I am responsible for his death. But I cannot pretend that it troubles my conscience. Cruelty has a way of recoiling upon the cruel."