Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard

to be its assailants?

    But there is something even more important than these doubts about the attack. An attentive rereading of Watson’s account
     shows how the fantasy of the murderer with the dog subtly influences the narration—and probably even the events themselves.
    Even before it appears, the dog is caught in the web of a tale that makes the most ordinary fact seem fantastical. This literary
     alchemy is particularly revealing in the scene in which Holmes,Watson, and Lestrade are keeping watch, waiting for Sir Henry
     to leave the house:
    “Hist!” cried Holmes, and I heard the sharp click of a cocking pistol. “Look out! It’s coming!”
      There was a thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank. The cloud was within fifty yards
     of where we lay, and we glared at it, all three, uncertain what horror was about to break from the heart of it. I was at Holmes’s
     elbow, and I glanced for an instant at his face. It was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight. But
     suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. 38
    Though they still haven’t seen anything, the three men are at the height of excitement (“we glared at [the fog],” “uncertain
     what horror was about to break from the heart of it”;Holmes’s face was “pale and exultant,” his eyes “shining brightly”).
     In this state of mind, steeped in a supernatural universe that colors or even determines their perceptions, anything that
     appears before them will naturally seem terrifying.
    In such a context it is not surprising that the dog seems to them like a monstrous creature:
    At the same instant Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downward upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my
     inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralyzed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the
     fog. 39
    The pressure of their terror is so great that the animal is transformed by Watson’s gaze into a kind of mythological creature
     risen from hell:
    A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open
     mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never
     in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that
     dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog. 40
    If we make the effort (unlike Watson) to avoid perceiving the animal through the prism of fantastical literature and mythological
     references, we have no choice but to note that what Holmes and Watson see is just a large black dog covered with phosphorus,
     running on the moor; this indeed merits some explanation, but it should not lead us to imagine ourselves at the very gates
     of hell.
    This fantastic transformation of the world, carried to its greatest height in the final scene, is already at work in the narrative
     of the dog’s other two “attacks.” It appears even in the descriptions Dr. Mortimer gives during his first meeting in London
     with Holmes and Watson; he tells them not of a large, scary dog, but of “a creature upon the moor which corresponds with this
     Baskerville demon, and which could not possibly be any animal known to science. [Several people] all agreed that it was a
     huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral.” 41
    And although the dog, with good reason, does not appear directly during Selden’s death, Holmes and Watson manage to imagine
     its presence from a noise heard on the moor—though there is no sign that the dog is its source. From this mysterious noise
     they extrapolate a terrifying representation of the animal:
    Again the agonized cry swept through the silent night, louder and much nearer than ever. And a new sound mingled with it,
     a deep, muttered rumble, musical and yet