A Study in Brimstone

by G. S. Denning

  The fundamental basis of scientific thought is that an observed truth that undermines one’s understanding is yet the truth. If the observation is not flawed, one’s previous understanding must be. To the open mind, this is not a crisis; it is an opportunity to form a new, more perfect understanding of the world. Did I ever abandon science for a belief in magic, as some people may accuse? Never. Rather, I included magic in my understanding of the physical phenomena that shape our world. Science is a path to knowledge—one that must include and explain every observable fact, embracing all and rejecting none.

  So, there is the professor’s answer. To the reader who cares not a whit for science or the scientist, let me say: curiosity. That’s why I went. I was curious, all right?

  Of course, that day in the cab, I had no ready answer. All I could do was stammer half-truths until I looked out the window and noted, “Lauriston Gardens! We’re practically there, Holmes.”

  Holmes rapped on the ceiling with my walking stick and called, “Driver, stop here.”

  4

  I WALKED CALMLY DOWN THE STREET TOWARDS 3 Lauriston Gardens. Holmes did not. On the pretense of investigation, he ducked behind every single hedge we passed. Occasionally, he would break a leaf between his fingers and examine the sap, or rub his finger against a brick in one of the neighbor’s walls and say, “Yes, that’s all very well, but I wonder…” The closer we got to Number 3, the slower his pace became. At last, he eschewed the pavement altogether and slunk from lawn to lawn, hopping over the walls when he thought himself unobserved. I waited patiently in the street. Or rather, let us say, I waited in the street. I deduced that Holmes must have some compunction about actually arriving at 3 Lauriston Gardens, but could not guess what it might be. It remained a mystery, until the constable guarding the front door saw him pop up over the garden wall.

  “Oi! It’s you!” the officer shouted, face reddening. At Holmes’s chest he leveled one finger—it shook, nearly bursting with the strain of containing so much vehemence and accusation.

  Warlock stopped, halfway over the wall, frozen like a deer in a hunter’s sights. “No it isn’t!”

  But the constable’s whistle was already at his lips. He blew three sharp blasts and shouted for his fellows, then turned to Holmes—who was engaged in extricating his trouser leg from the wrought-iron railings that topped the wall—and cried, “Warlock ’olmes, I charge you stand in the name o’ th’ lawr!”

  Warlock didn’t stand. Instead he toppled backwards into the neighbor’s azaleas, shrieking. When at last he was free of both masonry and shrubbery, he endeavored to take to his heels, but accomplished no more than three steps before being tackled by two burly constables. A third arrived a few moments later, huffing and panting. He must have been embarrassed to have missed the apprehension, for he made a point of re-tackling Holmes, right out of the arms of his comrades.

  My walking stick bounced free of the melee and clattered into the street. I made sure to recover it before wading in to save my friend. It is good to have something to lean on when dealing with constables—they can be tiring.

  “Wait! I didn’t do it this time!” Warlock was protesting as I approached. “Oh! I mean: ever! That’s what I meant to say: I didn’t do it, ever!”

  “Officers, what is the meaning of this?” I inquired, in my most imperious tone.

  “We har hengaged into th’ haprehension of this suspicious hindividual! Stand haway, sir!” One of the peculiarities of London’s police force is that they are all recruited from areas of Britain where folk use no h’s at all, or far too many.

  I almost protested that Warlock Holmes was not a suspicious individual, but caught my tongue just in time; it was not an argument I could have won. Instead, I told the red-faced constable, “This gentleman, whom you have just collared, is here on the particular request of Detective Inspector Grogsson, to assist in the solution of this crime.”

  “I don’ know habout that,” he said. I rolled my eyes at the man, reached into Warlock’s overcoat and withdrew Grogsson’s letter. I presented it to the constable, who glared at it for the barest instant before huffing his disapproval and waving his friends away.

  “We don’t need none o’ ’is mumbo-jumbo,” one of them protested, as he wandered back to his post. Warlock gave me a look of deep relief and sidled away towards the garden path, by the side of the house.

  “Hand ’oo might you be then, my fine friend?” the constable barked at me, as if the murderer might make the mistake of approaching the police to argue the innocence of other suspects.

  “My name is Dr. John Watson; I am here as a friend of Warlock and to lend my knowledge to the case. You may want to take note of my name and address, Constable, in case anybody asks you to identify me later.”

  He nodded curtly, as if to say that was going to be the next thing out of his mouth (which it was not, of a certainty) and began searching his pockets for a notebook and stub of pencil. He took down my information and even ventured to get a little free work done, which is a hazard of my trade.

  “Medical doctor, then?” he inquired.

  “I am.”

  “Hi wonder ’f you’d take a look at me back, Dr. Watson, sir. Pains me somethin’ hawful now.”

  “No need, man. There are three courses of cure for you: take the clerk’s position the next time they offer it, spend more on shoes, or spend less on pastries,” I said, gazing around his bulk towards the door.

  “Hoi! Wait there! I said me back!”

  “Your back is in sad shape because you have been walking your beat far too long in cheap shoes on cobblestones. The whole situation is not aided, Constable, by the fact that you have doubled your weight since joining the force—observe the stretch marks on your neck and your original-issue academy stockings, which are swollen almost to bursting. This has ruined your feet and the waddling gait you have adopted to pamper them has begun to work upon your spine. I am told that should a constable break his leg, it’s considered poor form to take him out behind the station house and shoot him. Instead, the force finds desk jobs for its physically unsound members. If they haven’t offered you sedentary employment already, they soon shall. Accept it. Now, I feel I must reclaim my friend and address the matter of the day, if you please.”

  “Very well, Doctor,” he replied. “And here’s some hadvice in payment: you need to consider more carefully the comp’ny you keep.”

  I found Warlock crouching over a patch of mud by the garden path, absorbed in the examination of some characters scrawled in the dirt. Some of it was in our Roman alphabet, but in pseudo-Latin phrases that made no particular sense. Much of it was symbolic in nature—drawings of little stick-figure constables with daggers stuck in them.

  “Look, Watson!” Warlock enthused. “Someone has inscribed symbols of ancient power, right here, beside the crime scene!”

  “Have they?” I inquired, observing his muddy index finger. “What is the meaning of it, do you think?”

  “Who can say, Watson; who can say?” he piped, springing to his feet. “Well, I suppose we ought to examine the scene, eh?”

  “Let’s,” I agreed and we strode past the angry constable at the door and into the house.

  We found ourselves in a gloomy hallway, which led us to an equally dank sitting room. There was a dead man, lying face up with eyes wide and a rolled piece of paper jutting from his mouth. Disconcerting to some, perhaps, but I had seen dead men before. There was blood on the floor, but a doctor is no stranger to such sights.

  No, the thing that stopped me cold in my tracks was Detective Inspector Torg Grogsson. The room seemed barely able to contain him and his clothes had an even harder job of it. He stood at least seven feet tall. I could not swear to the exact measurement, for at that moment he was bunched up against the ceiling, unable to straighten to his full height. His shoulders were broader than most men are tall and every seam of his brown tweed suit stretched and groaned to contain the muscles that bulged against them. Through many of t
hese belabored seams jutted tufts of spiky brown hair, which I suppose must have covered most of him, in the fashion of an ape. The stubble on his chin looked as if it would serve as sandpaper and he scraped at it constantly with a silver-plated straight razor. His fists were wrapped in cloth as a prizefighter’s and upon his head was perched a battered bowler. When we first met I could not imagine what might work such ruin upon an innocent hat, but I soon discovered the source of the damage. In spite of his height, Grogsson had a habit of failing to duck under doorways. The lack of care he took with his own head was alarming.

  When he saw my companion, his jutting brow relaxed and he grumbled, “Warlock! Good! You’re come!”

  “Good afternoon, Inspector,” Warlock said, then turned to the shadowy corner behind us and added, “Inspector Lestrade.”

  I hadn’t noticed at first, but there was our queer little Romanian visitor. He lurked in the darkest corner over one of the pools of blood that dotted the floor. He had traces of that blood on his fingers and on his lips. He was entirely silent. I would have been prepared to swear he was not even breathing, until he drew air to say, “What is this, Holmes? Have you brought your fellow lodger?”

  “I have, Vladislav. You may trust him. He is sympathetic to peculiar individuals,” said Holmes, then grinned at me and added, “Surprisingly sympathetic, I must say.”

  I smiled, wanly. Lestrade smiled back. I nearly cried out. His lips drew back much further and higher than a normal person’s ought, revealing a maw of overlapping fangs. As I watched, they grew, sliding from his gums until each of his teeth, from the front to the very rear, was a curved white knife. At least I understood why he had always been so tight-lipped when he spoke.

  “Well then, let us bid farewell to the world of men,” Lestrade suggested, but rather than embark upon a mystic journey to a faerie realm, he simply shut the sitting-room door.

  In all my strange adventures with Warlock Holmes, that is the moment I came closest to washing my hands of the whole business. Perhaps if I had not been too terrified to move, I might have run away and never more associated myself with Warlock or his “peculiar” friends. I didn’t. I stayed. And in that moment, my illusions fell from me. Despite what I believed to be true about my world, despite all my medical knowledge, I was forced to admit that the room certainly appeared to contain an ogre, a vampire, a warlock and a dead man. Oh, and myself, of course. Ignorant of Holmes’s true powers, impotent against Grogsson’s strength, no more than a tasty treat to Inspector Lestrade—there I stood.

  5

  I CANNOT RECALL WHAT I EXPECTED TO HAPPEN NEXT. Did I anticipate some sort of black mass? That my hideous companions would fall upon the corpse and devour it? Creeping shadows? Chanting? Perhaps I was too involved in my terror to anticipate anything at all.

  In any case, I was heartily relieved when they started doing police work. It was in no way supernatural and it was also in no way… competent. Grogsson seemed unable to talk about the corpse without giving it a derisive little nudge with his foot, quite disturbing the crime scene. Vladislav Lestrade had a professional demeanor, compared to the others, but could not stop himself dipping his fingers in the congealing pools of blood and sucking at them greedily. Warlock raised a magnifying glass to his eye and began looking all about the room.

  “What is that device for?” I asked.

  “Ah,” he said, as if divulging a great secret, “only look at my face and you shall know! It makes one of my eyes look large and disconcerting!”

  That it did. Though nobody asked me, I endeavored to help. Understand, I had no knowledge of investigative practice. At least, I had no knowledge of investigating a crime. Then again, what does a doctor do but investigate illness? Each disease leaves its mark—its signature—for any man with the wit to spy it out. My instinct was to approach crime-solving with the medical method; to observe the symptoms, their effects and aftermath, and from that data, determine the cause. By happy chance, this proved to be an apt method.

  “It makes one of my eyes look large and disconcerting!”

  I began with the object most familiar to me: the human body. This particular specimen was approximately forty years of age and utterly without friends. I assumed this last part, but his expression, even in death, was one of an insufferable, self-centered blowhard. I cannot explain what gave this impression, only that upon entering the room and beholding him, one got the feeling that he was much more fun to be around now than he had been while living. There were no visible wounds on his body. I concluded that, if it were not for the note in his mouth, there would be no reason to judge this a murder. It had every appearance of a heart attack. The only strange thing about the body was the smell. It reeked of alcohol, but there was something else as well, a bitter tang not native to corpses, whiskey, or any food I knew. Poison, I surmised.

  Despite the lack of wounds upon the corpse, the room contained a notable quantity of blood. There were no spatters upon the walls, such as one might expect from a sword-swing or gunshot. Rather, it was spread across the floor, mostly in small droplets. There were a few puddles of it, one only a few feet from the corpse, near the door. I guessed it must be the murderer’s blood, unless there was another victim. Probably this man’s killer had some slow-bleeding injury or other and the puddles represented spots where he had stood for a time. He must have paused by the door to watch the victim expire. The blood was O negative, as I learned from Lestrade, who practically moaned, “Rare. This is rare. Such blood would sustain any human into whom it was suffused. This blood is the purest; bringing life to all, death to none. Oh, rare…”

  A search of the man’s pockets revealed more clues. He had personal cards; they listed no occupation, but gave his name as Enoch Drebber. He had a wallet, with several banknotes still in it (until Grogsson snatched them), so theft was clearly not the motive. Nor had the killer taken much care to obscure the victim’s identity.

  “I think he was American,” I mused. “See here, he carried his wallet in his back pocket, in the American style, rather than in his breast pocket. And look, it is stamped with the motif of a bull’s head within a star. I can think of no people barbaric enough to fashion such a monstrosity; none but the Texans.”

  Yet, the best clue—and also the most baffling—was the paper in his mouth. I drew it out, employing my surgical practice of slow and steady hands. It is well I took such care, for the artifact was fragile in the extreme. It was wax paper, yellowed and brittle with age. It bore the marks of having been carefully folded and kept for some time. Unrolling and then unfolding it, I beheld the faded logo of Hall and Sons’ Bakery, St. Louis, Missouri.

  “That!” Warlock cried. “Give me that! I had nothing until now, but this—this is precious to someone.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “Oh… well… you know… observation?”

  Since his tone was so desperate, I elected to bail him out. “I see. You suppose its good condition, despite its fragility and age, means someone has gone to pains to see it preserved, thus proving that it is not rubbish, but treasure to them?”

  “Quite right, Watson, quite right,” Warlock said, with a relieved sigh. He turned the paper over and over in his hands, folded it gingerly and placed it in his breast pocket, saying, “He should not have left it; I’ll have him now.”

  Precisely how he intended to lure the murderer with a baked-goods wrapper was beyond the reach of my reason. Then again, I realized that reason would only carry me so far, in this present company. I began to examine the room and, after only a moment, gave a cry of discovery.

  “Look here!” I called to my companions. “Here, scrawled on the wall, in blood. It’s a word! Somebody has written ‘Rache.’”

  “No!” insisted the vampire Lestrade. “Not possible. It was not there before; I would have smelled it.”

  “I shouldn’t pay much attention to that,” Warlock said. “It has nothing to do with the murder.”

  I was quite taken aback and demand
ed to know, “How can you say that, Holmes? ‘Rache’ is German for ‘revenge’! Surely this is a fine clue!”

  “No. It isn’t,” he said.

  “Revenge.” Grogsson smiled; it was one of his favorite words.

  “This was not here when you came in,” Lestrade insisted.

  “It must have been,” I said. “None of us has been near this wall. And anyway, why would we wish to write ‘revenge’ in German, in blood, on a wall?”

  Holmes turned on me, wagging his finger, and said, “Dr. Watson, if you recall, before you moved in with me, I distinctly warned you that certain objects, notably walls, are likely to bleed in my company. When I listed my faults as a living companion, I told you to expect bloody messages to appear in German, Latin and Sanskrit.”

  “Excuse me, you did not!”

  “Oh. Did I not?” replied Holmes, with a sheepish look. “I ought to have. Anyway, it’s nothing to do with the murder. Lestrade, you can have it, if you like.”

  “I’ll not be touching that,” he said, staring at it as if it were… well, the word ‘revenge’ scrawled in blood. In retrospect, I suppose revulsion should have been a common reaction and unusual only for Lestrade.

  “Ahem… well… I suppose we must try to determine who he was,” I suggested, indicating the body of Enoch Drebber.

  “Easier said than done,” Holmes shrugged. “I suppose we—”

  He did not finish, for in that moment, his spine spasmed and stiffened. He threw back his head and his green eyes lit the ceiling once more. Quicker than I thought possible, Lestrade’s hands flashed to his pocket and emerged holding a notebook and pencil. With these, he took notes in a positive blur as Warlock recited, “He is Enoch, of the Latter Day Saints, fallen from grace, fallen from life, soiled and sotten, spoiled before he fell. From the dry dusts of wild Mojave, he is come in company. Seek ye Joseph, Son of Stranger; their steps lie side by side, their fates intertwined. Enoch the master; Joseph the man. Clerk. Secretary. Brother in faith and blackest crime! Rache! Rache! Justice comes upon the wicked! The finder knows! He that beheld the work beheld him that did the deed!”