That night we went back to the house. When we saw
Helen Stoner's light, Holmes and I got in quietly
through the window. Then we waited silently in the
middle bedroom in the dark. We waited for three
hours and did not move. Suddenly we saw a light and
heard a sound from Dr Roylott's room. But nothing
happened, and again we waited in the dark. Then there
was another sound, a very quiet sound . . . Immediately
Holmes jumped up and hit the bell-rope hard.
'Can you see it, Watson?' he shouted. But I saw
nothing. There was a quiet whistle. We both looked up
at the air-vent, and suddenly we heard a terrible cry in
the next room. Then the house was silent again. 'What does it mean?' I asked. My voice was shaking.
'It's finished,' answered Holmes. 'Let's go and see.'
We went into Dr Roylott's room. The metal box was
open. Roylott was sitting on a chair, and his eyes were
fixed on the air-vent. Round his head was a strange,
yellow speckled band. He was dead.
'The band! The speckled band!' said Holmes very
quietly. The band moved and began to turn its head.
'Be careful, Watson! It's a snake, an Indian snake -
and its poison can kill very quickly,' Holmes cried.
'Roylott died immediately. We must put the snake
back in its box.' Very, very carefully, Holmes took the
snake and threw it into the metal box. 'But how did you know about the snake, Holmes?' I
asked.
'At first, Watson, I thought that it was the gipsies.
But then I understood. I thought that perhaps something
came through the air-vent, down the bell-rope
and on to the bed. Then there was the milk - and of
course, snakes drink milk. It was easy for the Doctor to
get Indian animals. And because he was a doctor, he
knew that this snake's poison is difficult to find in a
dead body. So every night he put the snake through the
air-vent, and it went down the bell-rope on to the bed.
Of course, nobody must see the snake, so every night
he whistled to call it back. The sound of metal falling
was the door of the metal box, which was the snake's
home. Perhaps the snake came through the air-vent
many times before it killed Julia. But in the end it killed
her. And Helen, too, nearly died because of this snake.
'But tonight, when I hit the snake on the rope, it was
angry and went back through the air-vent. And so it
killed the Doctor. I'm not sorry about that.'
Soon after this Helen Stoner married her young man
and tried to forget the terrible deaths of her sister and
stepfather. But she never really forgot the speckled
band.