Associates of Sherlock Holmes Page 7

  “I turned my head, and there it was, not ten yards away. A figure standing at least nine feet tall, with long arms, covered all over in thick hair, watching me. After a long moment it darted out of sight, faster than I could credit. At first, I feared it was circling to attack me, but soon the birds began their song again, and I knew it was gone.” Fraser shrugged. “What had been mere curiosity became my singular passion after that encounter. Still, I’m not without a sense of proportion. I don’t wish to become Ahab, pursuing my obsession even to death.”

  “Eh? Ahab?”

  “From an American novel, written, oh, forty years ago, about a sea captain obsessed with a great white whale.”

  I grunted. I’d never hunted whales. Seemed like too much mucking around with boats, though there were no heavier game, I supposed. “I don’t read Americans.”

  Fraser chuckled. “I have missed you, Colonel. This expedition will either see my passion satisfied or disappointed, and either way, after this I am done pursuing the oh-mah. I’ll return to London either way, be it empty-handed or covered in glory.”

  I was glad to hear he hadn’t lost all his sense. Only most of it. “Let’s hope for the latter, then.”

  The sun was well up by the time he stopped the cart, at the end of a grassy track that didn’t merit being called a road. We were surrounded on all sides by evergreen forest, dense and damp and scented with the astringency of pines.

  Newman unhooked the horse from the cart and hung packs on it, then took the animal’s tether and nodded his readiness. “Lay on,” Fraser said cheerfully, and we set off through the trees. I had one of my favourite long guns (a four-bore that had once taken down a charging elephant) slung over my back, a revolver at my hip, and a walking stick made of stout black wood (among other things) in my hand.

  “Newman scouted ahead and found a suitable campsite,” Fraser said, and the truth of that was revealed in due time. We settled in the lee of a house-sized heap of mossy boulders, on a level stretch of ground still relatively bare from the depredation of some past fire. It was hard to imagine a forest as sopping as this one could ever burn, but ashes do not lie. We set up our tents and secured our food in the branches of a nearby tree to stymie any bears attracted by the scent. After that, we checked our weapons, and declared ourselves ready to begin.

  Newman lifted a coarsely woven sack from the back of the packhorse – and the sack whimpered audibly. The man froze, staring at me, and in turn I looked at Fraser.

  He cleared his throat. “I haven’t been entirely forthcoming about my plans for the hunt, Colonel, for fear you’d disapprove, I suppose. The particular oh-mah we’re hunting has shown an interest in children. As I mentioned, three have been stolen away in recent months, and in all cases a huge, hairy figure was sighted in the vicinity shortly before the disappearance. With that in mind, I sent Newman to secure… bait.”

  I looked at the sack, judging its size. “You’ve stolen a child.”

  “We’ll set him free when we’re done,” Fraser assured me. “We’ll fill his pockets with money, too, to dissuade his parents from making any complaint. He’s only four – it’s unlikely he’ll even remember this excursion, particularly given the dose of laudanum Newman administered to him last night.”

  “You intend to tether the child, as we used to tether goats beneath a tree to lure tigers, is that it?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Then we’ll lie in wait, rifles at the ready, as the boy’s cries attract the oh-mah.”

  I could tell Newman was waiting for either my approbation or censure, but I merely shrugged. The discomfort of some American child, doubtless at least half-savage just by dint of living in this benighted place, hardly concerned me. “Let’s prepare, then.”

  Newman shouldered his burden and led us through the forest to the spot he and Fraser had chosen. I had to admit, it was well suited to the task at hand: a small depression of low ground, with ample higher cover on all sides where we could settle in with our rifles, enjoying clear sightlines and waiting to see if the bait attracted any notice.

  The mute man carried his sack of child to a tree in the centre of the hollow and let the boy out of the bag. The child was ragged and wretched, with a thatch of unruly black hair, and he complained in a slurring but uncomprehending voice as Newman lashed him to the tree with stout ropes. We stayed out of sight, neither Fraser nor I openly acknowledging that it was better if the boy didn’t see our faces, but acting according to that principle. A four-year-old is an unreliable witness, and perhaps unlikely to be believed in any case, but Fraser and I were foreigners, and thus more prone than most to the suspicion of the locals.

  Once the boy was secured, Newman joined us behind the cover of some large rocks. The boy began to weep, and then to wail, howling inconsolably.

  Fraser beamed. “If the oh-mah is anywhere nearby, that noise will surely attract its attention.”

  I grunted. “And we’re sure it won’t attract the attention of anyone else?”

  Fraser shook his head. “The nearest human habitation is miles away.” He dispatched Newman to a point on the far side of the hollow to keep watch in that direction, then asked me where I’d like to settle.

  “Here is fine.” There was a sloping rock to lean my back against, and sitting on the stone was more appealing than squishing about in the damp soil. I had a good line of sight down to the child but was screened from his view by brush, and I was upwind besides, in case the “big man” had a keen sense of smell. Not that I believed there even was such a beast, but once a hunter, always a hunter.

  Fraser clapped me on the shoulder and rose to take up his own position elsewhere on the rim of the hollow, whispering “Good hunting” as he went. Those were the last words Fraser ever spoke to me.

  Much of hunting is waiting. I sat with my four-bore close to hand, and my walking stick laid across my knees, taking the occasional sip from a flask of warming whisky. The boy alternated periods of quiet whimpering with louder bouts of weeping and shouting, affirming the old maxim that children should be seen and not heard, though in this case, of course, the noise was theoretically useful. I expected nothing to come of this endeavour, and wondered how long we would be required to sit in the damp before Fraser gave up and let us return to camp.

  Then, perhaps an hour before dusk, I saw movement in the trees: a towering figure, though probably closer to seven feet tall than nine, appeared briefly between the trunks of evergreens, and then disappeared. I let out a whistle, imitating the song of an English songbird, to alert Fraser that I’d seen something. I readied my gun, staring ferociously into the trees, alert to the slightest movement. The boy’s wailing rose to a new and more irritating pitch.

  I can’t verify the exact order of events that followed and must indulge in a certain amount of speculation. After several long moments, there was a gunshot off to my right, the familiar boom of a large bore weapon. Then I heard Fraser shout and, shortly afterward, scream. I fancy I could make out a few words: “No,” and “Please,” and “You aren’t,” and “You mustn’t” among them.

  When he cried out I immediately began moving towards the sound, crouched low, long gun in my hands, the thrill of the hunt singing in my veins. A shame about Fraser, but when a predator is busy savaging its prey, you can often take it unawares, after all, and if the major were only injured, I might be able to save him.

  I also dared to hope Fraser wasn’t mad after all and that I would soon have the opportunity to kill a beast unknown to science.

  By the time I reached Fraser, though, the predator was gone, leaving only the mangled body of its prey. The old soldier was on his back, head twisted at an unnatural angle, eyepatch askew, his chest a bloody ruin. The major’s weapon lay nearby, still stinking of its recent fruitless firing. I glanced around, and up, in case whatever killed him hunted from the trees like certain jungle cats, but saw no sign of any predator. I took a moment to examine Fraser’s wounds, as they seemed strangely regular. I have seen many men killed, by al
l manner of animals and weapons, and it seemed to me these wounds were not made by teeth or claws. If called upon to make a wager, I would have bet my fortune they were caused by an axe.

  A man, then, and not a beast, had killed Fraser. Had Newman gone mad or chosen this moment to redress some injury done him by his employer? I lifted my head and saw the boy was still tethered to the tree, his shouting having subsided into whimpers. Perhaps the gunfire had frightened him into something approaching silence.

  Still holding my gun at the ready, I went in search of Newman, moving more silently than most would believe a man of my stature could.

  I found Newman on the far side of the hollow, face down, his head nearly severed from his shoulders by an axe blow. Perhaps, being mute, he couldn’t have cried out anyway, but I think he was taken entirely unawares. There was another person in these woods, then, armed with an axe. Perhaps the child’s father, come to rescue him and punish his abductors? That seemed most likely. I could hardly blame the chap, if so, though I would shoot him, of course, rather than succumb to his ideas of justice.

  I glimpsed movement in the hollow. A figure was approaching the boy… and I could see why the man had been mistaken for a great hairy beast of legend. He stood over seven feet tall, as broad-chested as an ox, his face three-quarters obscured by an unkempt dark beard, his hair a thatch of wild black liberally snarled with leaves and twigs. He wore clothes, though they were so mud-smeared they were barely recognisable as such. His feet were bare and black with mud, and quite large, though nowhere close to eighteen inches. The boy redoubled his screaming at the approach of this immense wild man, and who could blame him? This, doubtless, was the local thief of children: some sort of violent mad man.

  (I learned, later, that my supposition was correct. I cannot recall the fellow’s name now, but he was a Canadian hired to cut timber and was, by all accounts, a man of slow wit but even temper, and prodigious strength. One day, some months before I met him in the woods, a tree fell badly, and a passing branch struck him on the head hard enough to addle his brains. He lost the power of speech, and became prone to black and violent rages. He killed the camp doctor who came to tend him, reportedly breaking the man’s neck with a single blow, and then snatched up an axe and disappeared into the forest. How this timber beast made his way to the vicinity of Fraser’s camp, nearly fifty miles from the place he’d vanished, no one ever knew, but clearly his injury did little to diminish his woodcraft or survival instinct. No one knew why he took the children or what he did with them. The remains of those abducted were never found.)

  The man – a big man, indeed, though not of the type Fraser sought – stood before the boy and lifted the axe. I took up my gun and sighted down on him.

  My detractors do not like to credit me with any human feeling, but it’s true: I hesitated because I saw no way to kill the man without also killing the boy. My gun could put a good-sized hole in an elephant or a rhino, and I had no doubt, given my angle of fire, that the slug would pass through the man and hit the boy. My indifference towards the fate of the American child didn’t stretch to a willingness to kill him myself, you see. I thought the wild man was going to slay the child with the axe, as he had Newman and Fraser, and if so, I resolved to kill him immediately after.

  Instead, the big man cut the ropes with one blow of his long-handled axe, snatched the boy up under his arm as easily as I’d carry a newspaper, and loped away, vanishing into the trees. I almost wasted a shot, but chose to hold off rather than reveal my position. As far as I knew, the big man was ignorant of my existence, and I had no wish to alert him to my presence. I considered returning to camp, to the horse, to the train station, to London… but there might be some investigation by the local authorities, even in this uncivilised backwater, and my visit was hardly a secret. Many witnesses had seen me join Fraser at the station. I had managed to avoid entanglements with the law until that point, and while some involvement might be unavoidable in this case, I preferred not to be considered a criminal. If I killed the wild man and saved the child, I would be hailed as a hero, rather than suspected as a kidnapper or killer.

  And, in truth, I’d travelled thousands of miles to shoot something, and hadn’t yet fired my gun. I was eager to make some kind of kill.

  Some say man is the deadliest creature to hunt, but that’s balderdash. Hunting men is easy. In wartime there are ample targets and opportunities, and if they sometimes shoot back, that’s only sporting. In peacetime, especially in a civilised city like London, people don’t expect to be hunted, and as a result, they’re as easy to pick off as a rabbit locked in a hutch. No, there are more dangerous creatures than man.

  Nevertheless, I treated the big man with all the respect I would have given a tiger or any other formidable predator. He left little sign of his passage, but he could not entirely muffle the voice of the boy, and the occasional cry in the distance allowed me to correct my course and remain on their trail.

  I fancied that I moved with the stealth of a big cat myself, but now I freely admit the wild man was my better in that regard. The child’s cries grew louder, and I saw a flash of movement ahead. I thought the big man must have paused, perhaps for rest, or to kill or silence the child. I crept within range, then dropped my walking stick to the ground and readied my rifle.

  Something felt wrong. Perhaps Fraser was right, and it is possible, sometimes, to tell you are being watched. It occurred to me that perhaps the wild man was aware of my pursuit and was playing the same trick on me that Fraser had tried to play on him: tethering the boy, and letting his cries act as bait, this time to draw me.

  Apprehensive of ambush, I started to turn and look behind me, and so the wild man’s axe struck me in the right shoulder instead of the back of my neck. The blow staggered me, the cold blade biting viciously into flesh and scraping on bone, but I did not fall. A few inches to the left and it would have chopped my neck and killed me.

  I tried to turn and defend myself. My arm was numb below the agony of my shoulder, hampering my attempts to lift the long gun, which would have been useless at such close range anyway. The big man loomed over me, raising up the axe, his eyes bright and furious between the filthy mess of hair above and beard below.

  I scrabbled for my revolver, reaching across with my damnable clumsy left hand, and dodged his axe swing at the same time. I managed to draw the revolver, but he slapped it out of my hand, sending it into the undergrowth. Then he struck me across the face so forcefully my vision went black.

  I don’t know why he didn’t kill me, though I can guess. When my senses and vision returned, I was down in the dirt and saw the wild man running after the boy, who was attempting to escape. The wild man probably stopped short of finishing me off in order to go after the boy. I groped for my rifle, but it was gone; the big man wasn’t entirely devoid of caution, and had hurled my gun away. I saw no sign of my revolver either.

  My walking stick, however, was nearby. The wild man hadn’t seen it as a threat, and why would he? It was well made but seemed otherwise unremarkable. Readers of this account are likely familiar with my famous air rifle, crafted for me at the professor’s behest by the blind mechanic Von Herder, but they may not be aware that Von Herder made me other weapons, too. While the air rifle required some preparation to transform from walking stick to weapon, with some mechanisms to be attached and adjustments to be made, the walking stick I’d taken with me into the woods was a simpler device. Its body concealed a long barrel, and it contained a single slug and a single charge of powder. The boom-stick wasn’t particularly accurate, and firing it even once would shatter the end of the stick, damaging the whole mechanism irreparably: it was a weapon of last resort. Indeed, since by design it could never be test-fired, I couldn’t even be sure the boom-stick would work as promised, especially after so many years.

  But what choice did I have? I crawled through the brush towards the stick, took it in my hands, twisted off the ornamental head to reveal the firing mechanism, and pointed the
other end at the wild man as he crouched over the boy. There was still some chance I would hit the child, but by that point, the desire to harm the one who’d harmed me was greater than any other concern.

  The boom-stick’s recoil was vicious, but the results were most satisfactory. The large slug struck the man’s head and very nearly disintegrated it, and his body fell into a bloodied heap. I let out a weak huzzah, but my consciousness was already ebbing; the blow to my head and the loss of blood from my shoulder conspired to draw me down into blackness. I called to the boy to go get help, but then realised the wild man had tied him up again. The child struggled against the ropes binding his arms and legs, weeping and wailing.

  This would be my death, then. With a gun in my hands, and my prey dead along with me. A decent enough ending for an old shikari like myself. My only regret was that I wouldn’t die on English soil.

  I freely admit that the next portion of my account is unreliable. I can report only what I witnessed, or seemed to witness. I settled into a darkness that I fancy was death’s anteroom, but a searing pain pulled me out of it. Someone was turning me over, lifting me up, and I complained bitterly, for death seemed preferable just then to agony. I smelled something musky, animal and pungent. I opened my eyes and looked around as best I could. Someone was carrying me over their shoulder, as easily as I’d carry a child. I looked at this stranger’s back, which seemed to be covered in thick, coarse hair. The ground seemed far away from my face – at least three or four feet too far away, if the person carrying me was a man of ordinary stature. I turned my head and looked into the face of the kidnapped boy, who was slung over this figure’s other shoulder, and gazing at me wide-eyed in fear or wonder.

  Words in Fraser’s voice drifted through my mind: There are also tales of the creatures acting to help those lost in the woods, but I don’t much credit those.