Chapter 384 Devil's Footsteps

There is such a story in Sherlock Holmes, on the morning of March 16, 1884, an amazing and strange thing was discovered in the small village of Wallace in the west of England: the night before, a family of two brothers and their sister were playing poker in the house cards, and the next morning, it was discovered that they still hadn't left the table. The two older brothers have gone mad. Their sister, a young and beautiful girl, sat dead in a chair. She was obviously scared to death. There were no injuries on the three of them, and the doors and windows were well closed, and no one had ever entered or exited.

It happened that Holmes and Watson were living in a nearby town at this time, so Mortimer, the third of their brothers, went to report the two detectives. He said that they were originally four people playing cards together that night, and he left at 10:15. When they left, they were having a good time, and there was nothing ominous about it.

Holmes asked him: "Do you remember anything special about last night?"

"I was facing the window, and my brother George was facing the window. Once I saw something moving in the bushes on the grass. As for whether it was a person or an animal, I can't say."

Holmes inspected the house carefully, only to see that the candles had long been lit and a fire had been lit in the house. According to Mortimer, it was because of the cold and damp last night that the fire was lit. Holmes checked the outside of the house and the window again, but found no suspicious trace.

When Holmes and Watson returned to their apartment, there was a burly young man with fierce eyes and a hooked nose waiting for them. Murakami called him Dr. Leon, a lion hunter and explorer who lived in Africa for a long time. He said that he was related to the family of the deceased and wanted to know if there was any progress in the investigation. Holmes told him that this was a difficult point to answer. After hearing this, he left angrily. Holmes quickly put on makeup and stared at it, and did not return to the house until evening, looking as if he had found nothing.

Early the next morning, the deceased's neighbor, Reverend Roundhay, reported to Holmes in horror, saying: "No, Mr. Holmes, we are haunted by the devil!" It turned out that Mortimer also died last night.

In the bedroom of the house where someone died on the first day, the atmosphere was horrible and gloomy, and it was very stuffy. The servant who entered the room first opened the window, which made the air in the room a little fresher.

A smoking lamp was still burning on a table in the middle of the room. Mortimer, dead, sat at the table, leaning back in his chair. His beard was bristling, his glasses were pushed up to his forehead, and his face was turned toward the window. His face, contorted out of shape by terror, resembled his dead sister's.

Holmes scraped some dust from the chimney of the fireplace and collected some brown powder from the lamp. He said to Watson: "There was something burning in the two rooms where the crime was committed, one was the fire, the other It is a lamp. This shows that it is probable that the same thing is burning in the two cases, and it will give off a gas after burning, which is poisonous. Now, let us make an experiment."

He opened the window, left the door ajar, and poured the brown powder scraped off the lamp from the envelope onto the lit lamp. After a while, they smelled a thick musky fragrance, subtle and sickening. At the first whiff of scent, their minds and imaginations are involuntary. There was only a thick black smoke in front of his eyes, and a group of indistinct devils were wandering in the smoke. Their hair stood on end, their tongues were stiff, and their faces had gradually become pale, stiff, and dull. Fortunately, both of them are very strong-willed. They embraced and staggered out onto the grass outside the door..

It took a long time for Holmes to say: "Watson, I didn't expect this powder to be so powerful. It almost killed us! Well, I have found the first murderer. No wonder he wants to lie and say that he Saw something moving outside the window.

Holmes found Dr. Leon and said: "Dr. Leon, we want to talk to you about Mortimer's death, and the brown powder

Leon's face suddenly changed color. He suddenly took out a photograph from his pocket and threw it in front of Holmes. This is a photo of Mortimer's sister.. It turned out that Leon had always loved Mortimer's sister, but he couldn't get married due to various reasons. He lived next to them so that he could see her.

There is a poison in Africa called "devil's foot". This medicine is very strange, anyone who smells it when it burns will go crazy if it is mild, and die immediately if it is severe. Leon got a bag and brought it back.

One day, Mortimer came to visit Leon, and Leon inadvertently talked about the usage and effect of this medicine. Soon, he found that his ideal lover and her two brothers had been victimized, and he found out when half of his medicine had been stolen.

Leon concluded that Mortimer did it, because the brothers were fighting over the family property, and he decided to avenge his lover.

Early this morning, Leon took the remaining half-pack of "Devil's Feet" and a pistol to Mortimer's house. When Mortimer opened the door to look, Leon pointed his pistol at him and forced him into the house to light the lamp and sprinkle the powder on it. Mo Tihei had done something wrong and had been terrified all the time, but now he didn't dare to resist in the face of the pistol, so he died like his sister.

This "devil's foot," as Holmes calls it, resembles Abyssinian shrunken figs, one of the ingredients in the hair-raising potion.

Ordinary figs grow in the tropics, where the temperature is too low to survive. Abyssinian shrunken figs have a very strong root system. Even if the leaves fall in autumn and only bare branches are left in winter, they can survive in the snow.

This trait is common in other plants that grow in temperate regions, and is rare in tropical plants. The hair erecting potion is also known as the fear potion. It can make the person who takes it see a very scary scene. If a person sees something scary, they will have the feeling of standing up. This hair erecting potion is not like a hair smoother. It is used for hair care. For Europeans who experienced the Black Death, the mouse tail can definitely make people's hair stand on end. There is a mouse tail in the hair vertical potion.

Unfortunately, however, the Chinese discovered that the Black Death was not spread by rats. This was the conclusion reached by a Chinese doctor in Harbin in 1910 who risked his life to dissect a dead body. A French doctor also went to China to study it. He disagreed with the Chinese, and unfortunately died in a foreign land, at the hands of a disease he thought he knew well.

Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time, seances were very popular in England, which was a mysterious ritual to communicate with the dead.

This kind of ceremony was passed down from Hong Kong, China, where there are many "witches" who claim to be able to communicate with the dead. After the Qing Dynasty ceded Hong Kong to Britain, many British people did business there, so they brought this kind of ceremony back to the mainland.

Like Hong Kong, seances are usually presided over by a psychic woman called a "guiling", and like the Chinese Die Xian, they put Ouija boards as a tool to communicate with ghosts. Most of them are fake Yes, Houdini, the magician at the end of the century, loved to expose the lies of these so-called seance charlatans.

After experiencing the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, Muggles are not as repulsive and fearful of magic and witchcraft as they were in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, they have become eager to contact a world that is completely different from the world they live in.

Some Muggles admire wizards so much that they are even proud to have a wizard in their family.

However, some people still reject magic for various reasons. Conan Doyle obviously belongs to the type of Muggles who do not reject "witchcraft". He even claimed that Houdini knew magic. activities, the magic world was in danger of being exposed at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, the main battlefield of the war in the wizarding world was in the United States. It was not until the 1930s that the main battlefield was transferred to Europe. Grindelwald’s secret weapon was Credence Barburn, a member of the Dumbledore family.

Dumbledore always said that woolen socks were not enough to wear, and woolen socks represented family affection, or it might simply be that his feet were cold. Boys' cold feet can be relieved by exercise, but Albus is also a "bookworm", unlike his dueling brother Aberforth, he can sit at the desk for a whole day. Girls have cold feet, which is complicated. It may be anemia, stress, insanity, or because they love beauty and wear less clothes (women are really complicated and difficult to understand). Chinese medicine is very good at regulating the body. Chinese medicine is in addition to Chinese food. The best-developed industry in the UK, the UK has become the second largest Chinese patent medicine market outside Asia, and the public’s recognition of acupuncture and Chinese medicine is also higher than other countries. In addition to the Chinese, there are also a small number of Singaporeans and Malaysians living in Chinatown in London. Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, many of them entered the country illegally. Before 1985, there was no formal administrative boundary for "Chinatown". and Chinese restaurants.

However, at the beginning of 2005, the big real estate developer Roswell decided to redevelop the eastern part of Chinatown. This plan was opposed by many Chinese businessmen, who organized a protest march.

Places with a lot of people are often places where werewolves like to hang out. Chinatown is full of dragons and snakes, and all kinds of weird people will appear. It is almost as chaotic as the Whitechapel area. There was a famous killer Ripper in that area in history. Jack.

What Pomona likes is the Jack Dawson who "jumps and I dance" with Rose on the Titanic, not the Jack of the Fog Murderer, and now the Potions Professor Snape has the kind of hair-raising With a crazy smile, he is about to become a super villain like Holmes' opponent, Professor Moriarty.

Robert Shaker loves a deerstalker hat like Sherlock Holmes. With Professor Snape's current mood, he should be happy to be a lion hunter. After leaving school, the aggressive Slytherin and Gryffindor Still fighting, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw sandwiched between them said "I'm so hard".

Hufflepuff spirit, do the right thing because it's right, Ernie MacMillan out of the Aurors in Hogsmeade as an out-of-school teacher teaching the Guardian of Gods, both supporting Kingsley Shacklebolt and Staying away from power struggles and at the same time accumulating his own fame, he stood in the right position at the critical moment, although his original intention of doing so was just to compete with Harry Potter who could teach more students who could summon the Patronus.

"The pub needs a good cleaning, can you lend me some house-elves, Dean?"

After regaining consciousness, Ernie said, staring at the centuries-old greasy floor he'd been lying on, while Pomona had taken Polyjuice Potion and was back to her pudgy figure again.

"You lucky bastard," Pomona resigned, some people are just so lucky.

How frustrating it was that Ernie got what Severus had worked so hard for but couldn't get!

"Luck? No, it's strength." Ernie said with a smug smile, "Which one is better, me or Justin? Dean."