Encounters of Sherlock Holmes Page 9

  I take it, staring vengefully after the little hellion that’s just disappeared into the darkness, and am about to thank my colleague when he exclaims, “There!” and hares off into the night.

  “Holmes?”

  I follow, keeping a hand near the pocket where I’ve put my gun.

  “This way, Watson,” I hear him cry, his form becoming ever more spectral and seemingly incorporeal the farther ahead he gets.

  “Slow down, Holmes,” I urge, but he is a hound with the scent of the fox and has no intention of losing the hunt. It is all I can do to keep him vaguely in my line of sight.

  We are racing through the London streets and despite my best efforts I lose track of exactly where, my bearings foiled by the night’s darkness.

  After a long and enervating sprint, Holmes takes a sharp turn and I lose him, just for a few moments. I barrel around the end of a street corner and find it empty.

  “Holmes!” I call, worried that I might have lost his trail or my colleague had fallen foul to some urban predator. The area is industrial, as is much of London beyond the tenement squalor, and I hear the action of distant machineries going through their circadian motions.

  “Shhh...” I hear from behind me, and turn to see Holmes crouched down in the lee of a doorway. More precisely, I realise, we are in a warehouse district and enclosed on either side by buildings devoted to public works. In the sudden stillness, above the frenzied beating of my own heart, I discern the mechanical grind of the pumping works that services all of London’s sewers and drains. The stink of that dank place is strong here too and I wonder suddenly what we have unwittingly walked into.

  Holmes is pointing. “At the end of the alley,” he says.

  I follow his extended finger and see only darkness at first.

  My breathing is rapid, my heart rate elevated, and not from the impromptu burst of exercise.

  “From Brick Lane,” Holmes adds in a rasp, “we were followed.”

  I can still see only darkness, and then, with all the slow resolution of an eclipse, a shadow detaches itself from another and, at the back of the alley, I see what appears to be a man.

  Certainly it is human in shape, two arms, two legs, a head, but the silhouette it creates is massive. I gauge it then as over seven feet tall, but my estimate is later proven false.

  “Reveal yourself!” I declare with greater courage than I feel.

  He has an odour, this giant, one of ammonia and embalming fluid, of naphtha and menthol. There is something else too, a hint only. Decomposition.

  Holmes hisses in my ear, and it takes all of my resolve not to cry out in panic, “Did you bring your gun, Doctor?”

  Silence has fallen upon the narrow cordon in which we have found ourselves, the actions of the pistons and the wheels of the waterworks unable to lift the strange quietude that has descended. I am not ashamed to admit my hand is trembling as I reach for the gun.

  The giant man advances a step, and I am suddenly, disquietingly reminded of how empty the streets now are, of how isolated we must be in a city teeming with souls. None have ventured here, braving the shadows and the rain-soaked night. Save us.

  A word manifests in my brain as I look upon this hulking brute and brandish my pistol.

  Monster.

  “Halt,” I warn the man. “Do not come any closer or I will shoot. I am a trained military marksman, I warn you. I shall not miss.”

  Holmes steps out from the alcove. I see he too has brought a gun.

  The giant comes closer and a baleful moan passes his lips, like air escaping a leather balloon through its stitches. I hear something else too, the scrape of metal against stone, and I realise that the giant walks with a limp.

  “Halt, I say!” shouting to convey my vehemence and commitment. “Step no closer.”

  Then I fire, a single shot aimed at the heart.

  Holmes fires a fraction before me, targeting the head.

  There is a brief flash of light from the muzzles of our guns, in which I see the suggestion of something grotesque and misshapen, pallid flesh and a snarl of blackened teeth. The after-flare blinds me, but I hear Holmes reloading for a second shot. I do too, but by the time I have the bullet primed the giant figure has gone.

  “Where is he?” I ask, searching the shadows, half-expecting one of them to move.

  “John...” says Holmes, pistol held forward in his outstretched hand, advancing into the darkness.

  He rarely uses my Christian name. It is usually something he holds in reserve for when he wants to express sentiment but finds he does not possess the emotional faculty to do so. I think now he means to convey the seriousness of the danger we are in and his own exasperation at being confounded by what we had just witnessed.

  “I have you covered, old boy,” I reply. “Proceed with caution, Sherlock.”

  He does, the veneer of the reckless showman he often adopts dissolving like all the light of the gas lamps behind us. We are surrounded, he and I, by the shadows and everything they might harbour.

  Lowering the pistol, he quickens his pace, just as I settle into a two-handed firing stance. My hands are steady as I am suddenly cast back to Afghanistan and the ranges where I learned my craft as a soldier before being deployed more usefully as a medic. At this moment, I would prefer those war-torn fields to this endless and unknown dark.

  Holmes ducks down and I lose him to the shadows.

  “Sherlock?” I call.

  A few seconds lapse without answer. They stretch into minutes.

  “I’m all right, John,” he says at last, before adding, “Join me, if you please. I believe I have found how our ugly duckling flew the coop.”

  I venture into the alley, following my colleague’s footsteps, and note as I get closer that there is a dead end, a blank wall to which the grotesque giant could not simply have dematerialised.

  Holmes is crouching by a barred vent through which the noisome gases of the sewer emanate. As I join him, I try not to gag.

  “Holmes, how can you not retch at the smell of it?”

  He doesn’t say, but instead directs my attention to a faint scraping next to the sewer grate.

  “Light?” he asks.

  “I beg your pardon, Holmes?”

  “Light, illumination, a match, Watson,” he expounds with some exasperation. “Do you have a match upon your person, Doctor?”

  I do, and produce the book from my pocket, which Holmes snatches in short order. Striking one before I can protest, the scratches next to the grate are revealed in greater detail, as is the size and heft of the iron barrier blocking our own ingress in the dank darkness of London’s effluent underworld.

  “It would take three men to lift that,” I observe, not bothering to hide my shock that our giant seemingly managed the feat alone.

  “A pity then,” says Holmes, “that we are only two.”

  After a tense pause as we stare into the mouth of the grate, I say, “I hit him, Holmes. A heart shot, I have no doubt.”

  Holmes looks at me sidelong. “No doubt, Doctor? In this gloom, your body fighting to overwhelm its very natural urge to flee? Can you be that precise?”

  I nod. “In the heart, Holmes. I am sure.”

  He regards me for a moment then nods himself. “Very well then.”

  “And you?” I ask.

  “The head. Left temple. Certain to kill or severely debilitate in the unlikely probability the bullet ricocheted off the skull and away from the brain.”

  “Then why—” I begin, before Holmes interrupts.

  “Is our grotesque not dead? That is an excellent question.”

  His gaze has returned to the grate, and I see the yearning in his eyes to know the solution to this puzzle before us. Then the match fades and we are enveloped by shadow again.

  “Would you venture down there?” I ask.

  There is a moment of silence from Holmes when I assume he is contemplating that very course, before he stands up straight and dusts off his hands.


  “No, I think that would be unwise. Our grotesque is not far away, I believe. He is waiting for us,” he says louder, presumably for the benefit of the giant.

  We leave the alleyway and the sounds of the waterworks behind us. It is a long way back to Baker Street, made longer by my imaginings. I am not ashamed to admit the experience shook me to my core. Not since the moors and our encounter with the beast that preyed there have I been so afraid.

  * * *

  Upon our return, a fugue-like state settles on my companion as the deep contemplation needed to unwrap this ghastly conundrum begins. We exchange few words before Holmes retreats into himself and indulges in habits I would rather not be privy to.

  I retire to my quarters and, despite my fear, try to bring to mind every detail of that night. The sheer strength of this misshapen man, his obvious and terrible injuries, his seemingly impervious nature, or un-nature—I am at a loss to explain it, especially the latter. At the time I wonder if I am in fact mistaken, that my shot went wide of the mark; my colleague’s too. Certainly, there is a great deal I bring into question about my understanding of science and nature on account of this night. Holmes is not only a champion of the law, he is a champion of enlightenment, of science and reason. I am his able batman, I am not too proud to admit, as well as a subscriber to the same beliefs. But what we witnessed defied our logical creed and threatened to bring it burning down around us.

  Sleep, when it comes that night, is fitful and fraught with images of a giant patchwork man, glowering from the shadows, resurrected from the grave.

  * * *

  The next morning I cannot rouse Holmes from whatever drug-induced torpor he has inflicted upon himself. Perforce, I keep an appointment I had made with the physician conducting the autopsy on the poor, unfortunate wretch we discovered in Brick Lane.

  A walk in the fog-laden day does little to banish the demons plaguing my nocturnal hours, but I feel a measure of calm return. London’s warts are ugly to behold in the naked light of the sun, as is its dirt and squalor—but they are at least entirely corporeal, rational things and I find the solidity of that reassures me.

  The visit to the attending physician is of little import, so I will not recount the details of it here. Most saliently, I discover the victim’s name is Bartholomew Shelley. Upon inspection of his internal organs, the viscera and other matter also found on Brick Lane are determined not to belong to the man, thus suggesting a second victim.

  According to Lestrade’s investigations, Shelley is a chemist and owns property in the vicinity of where his headless body was discovered. Several chemicals are noted in the autopsy, the evidence of which is found on his clothes, fingertips, even his hair. I catalogue mercury, antimony and arsenical salts; charcoal, clay and ethanol, all of which are or could be used in the process of embalming.

  Despite all of this additional information, I am no closer to understanding the grotesque man, although his candidacy for the role of murderer has been greatly enhanced. My intention is to take all of this to Holmes, but by the time I return to our lodgings he is no longer there and a note remains in his stead with instructions to meet him at an address in London.

  I take a carriage and do just that.

  * * *

  Late into the afternoon, I arrive in Southwark and the somewhat forbiddingly named Ossory Road. According to Holmes’ directions I am in the right place, standing in front of a dishevelled building which looks as if it hasn’t been occupied for some time. A notice for public demolition is pinned to the door.

  I am about to knock when a shuttered window on the second floor opens and my colleague leans out, a distinct cloud of dust billowing free behind him.

  “It’s neither locked nor barred, Watson,” he says, and promptly disappears again.

  With little other recourse, I wrench open the door and am conveyed up to the second floor by a flight of worn and rickety stairs. Through a second door, I emerge into a room that has every appearance of a study. It is a closeted space, festooned with nook and cranny, antechambers and shadow-swathed corridors. There is one desk, fully laden, and a great many bookcases and glass cabinets.

  “Holmes?” I enquire, not seeing my colleague amongst the raft of books, papers and academic materials. He surfaces from behind a stack of volumes dedicated to anatomy, chemistry and thanatology amongst other more esoteric subject matter.

  “Glad you could join me, Watson,” he says, a fat bell jar held aloft in one hand as he examines it in what little light penetrates the grimy window.

  Coughing up some of the dust from my lungs, I say, “Join you in what, Holmes? What is this place? And why are we here?”

  “August Wilhelm von Hofmann,” he replies, failing to elucidate me.

  My frown evidently spurs a more detailed response as Holmes brandishes the bell jar, a briny-looking liquid sloshing within.

  “Formaldehyde,” he adds. “A solution used in the process of embalming. Von Hofmann’s invention.” Holmes smiles as if indulging an indolent child. “A better question, Doctor, would be to whom does this domicile belong?”

  Outside, the sun is dipping below the London horizon and with the coming of the dark I feel the slightest resonance of the previous night’s anxiety.

  Distracted, I answer, “I have no idea.”

  “Look around, John,” he says, setting down the bell jar so he can encompass the room with the spreading of his arms, “and tell me what you see.”

  My brow wrinkling further, I do as he requests.

  “Books, papers, beakers, jars, vials... dust,” I add, ruefully

  “No, no, no,” Holmes impatiently snaps. “Those are all objects in this room as any fool with eyes can perceive. Tell me what you see.”

  I look again, and at first notice nothing further, but then a pattern begins to form in the madness. At first, I merely thought the place to be untidy, forgotten and left to decay, but that wasn’t true.

  “It has been ransacked,” I say, touring the small study.

  “More...” Holmes cajoles, patiently following in my stead.

  I see a recent paper, some damage to one of the many bookcases that looks fresh and a smashed beaker, the glass crunching underfoot.

  “Someone has been living here, but not the owner. He left long ago,” I say, pausing by a stack of scientific journals unobscured by the dust which is ubiquitous throughout the rest of this abode. “These are a much more recent addition.” I see a treatise by von Hofmann; a paper written by Frederik Ruysch; another in Russian, which I cannot read but am able to discern its author as a Ilya Mechnikov.

  A quiet moment of contemplation settles in, so, belatedly, I recall my conversation with the physician and reach for my notebook.

  “I met with the physician conducting the autopsy and discovered that the victim’s name was —”

  “Bartholomew Shelley,” says Holmes. “A backstreet chemist and former associate of one J.G. Utterson.” He produces a yellowed piece of paper from his breast pocket and brandishes it with aplomb. “A receipt for services rendered, I believe. One that the unfortunate Mr Shelley had concealed about his person and which I liberated during my examination of the body.”

  “And you felt that was unworthy of Lestrade’s attention?”

  Holmes returns the paper to his pocket. “The good inspector has enough to deal with without adding this to his already challenged and overworked mind.”

  By now, the light outside the window has all but disappeared and Holmes ignites the oil lamps in the room to provide some meagre illumination.

  “Very well,” I say, not entirely in agreement, adding, “But that is not all I learned. There were chemicals found on the victim’s body common with the process of —”

  “Embalming,” Holmes interrupts again, prompting me to fold my arms in exasperated consternation.

  “If you already knew all of this then what was the point of my visit to the autopsy physician?”

  “What indeed, good Doctor, but no matter; we are here
now, if a little behind speed.”

  I am about to protest again but see no point in it, opting for a different tack.

  “Who, then, is this J.G. Utterson? The owner of this hovel?”

  “No. He is, in fact, a lawyer who uncovered the deeds to this ‘hovel’, including the identity of its previous owner, and then granted access to our now-headless Bartholomew Shelley.”

  I am still, at this point, nonplussed. “So who was the previous owner and how is this relevant to our murder?”

  Night having now fallen, the shadows have deepened in the room, the paltry light from the oil lamps doing little to lift the gloom.

  “One Victor Frankenstein,” Holmes declares, and in that moment of revelation I feel a creeping dread up my spine as a solemn voice issues from the back of the room.

  “He was my father...”

  It was a grave rasp, a deep and forbidding cadence best left to the darkest corners of the mind.

  Surprised, I turn to face the speaker and am confronted with the same diabolic image as we saw in the alleyway next to the waterworks.

  The grotesque, the giant man is here!

  “Holmes, get behind me!” I shout, pulling out my gun, though more to bolster my courage than in the hope it could actually protect us from this monster.

  Holmes raises his hand, his eyes on the lumpen silhouette at the back of the room.

  “A secret passage,” he says, and I am unsure if he is making a statement or asking the grotesque. To me, he adds, “Put down your gun, Watson. It will not avail us here.”

  I hesitate, gauging the distance to the door and Holmes’ distance from the man.

  “Down, if you please?” Holmes requests calmly a second time, while beckoning the man forward.

  I raise my gun anyway, unconvinced of our safety at this point.

  “Holmes, what are you doing?”

  “If he meant us harm he would have done so already,” Holmes replies. “And I do not think that is why you were following us,” he addresses the man.

  To call it such would be a gross dereliction of the term, for as it steps forward into the wan lamplight, we see it fully revealed for the first time.