“What need for watches, when we have merchants?” Holmes enquired. “Shall we watch the patient in Room Six unfold his leathery wings and fly to the sound of mortals in torment?”
There was a different orderly at the door, built along the lines of a prizefighter, who held his truncheon as if it were an extension of his right arm. His predecessor had told him of our expected return. He reported that all was quiet. After a brief visit to Dr. Menitor’s consulting-room to confirm that he continued to sleep soundly beneath the blanket I had spread over him, I rejoined Holmes, who had retained the key to John Smith’s cell. I gripped my revolver as he unlocked the door.
Smith looked as if he had not moved in our absence. He sat with his hands resting on his thighs and his mocking smile firmly in place.
“How was the service?” he asked.
Holmes was unshaken by this assumption of our recent whereabouts.
“You’re inconsistent. If you indeed saw into our minds, you would know the answer to that question.”
“You confuse me with my former Master. I am not omniscient.”
“In that case, the service was indifferent, but the fare above the average—surprising, in view of the proprietor’s laissez-faire attitude regarding the source of his stock. We would have brought you a sample, but it might slow your flight.”
Smith chuckled once more, in that way that chilled me to the bone.
“I shall miss you, Holmes. I am sorry my holiday can’t be extended. I should have admired to snare your soul. I could build a new display with it in the centre.”
“And to think only a few hours ago you offered me a seat at the head table.”
“That offer has expired.”
“Still, you exalt me. Dr. Watson is the better catch. He has the fairest soul in all of England, and the noblest heart.”
Smith stroked his chin thoughtfully, as if he expected to find a spade-shaped beard there out of a children’s illustrated guide to Holy Writ.
“I shall not be gone forever. If I return in a year, will you wager your friend’s fair soul that I cannot vanquish you in a game of wits?”
“Twaddle!” I exclaimed; and looked to Holmes for support. But his reaction surprised and unnerved me. When he was amused, his own cold chuckle was nearly a match for Smith’s. Instead, he appeared to grow a shade more pale, and raised a stubborn chin.
“You will forgive me if I decline the invitation,” said he simply.
Smith shrugged. “It is one minute to midnight.”
“You have no watch,” I said.
“I told the time before there were clocks and watches.”
I groped for the timepiece in my pocket, eager to prove him wrong, if only by seconds. Holmes stopped me with a nearly infinitesimal shake of his head. His eyes remained upon Smith. I clutched the revolver in my pocket, tightly enough to make my hand ache.
The first throb of Big Ben’s iron bell penetrated the keep’s thick wall.
“One minute, precisely,” Smith said. “I don’t pretend to think you will accept my word on that.”
The bell bonged a second time; a third, fourth. We three remained absolutely motionless.
Upon the seventh stroke, the play of a cloud against the moon cast Smith’s face in precise halves of light and dark, making of it a Harlequin mask. Still none of us stirred.
Eight.
Nine. The shadow passed; his visage was fully illuminated once again.
Ten.
Eleven. Another cloud, larger and denser than its predecessor, blotted out the light. The man seated on the cot was a figure drenched in black. I nearly squeezed the trigger in my confusion as to what he might be up to in the shadows. Only my old military training, and my long exposure to Holmes’s own iron nerve, allowed me to hold my fire.
Came the final knell. It seemed to reverberate long after it had passed. Silence followed, as complete as the grave.
“Right.” Holmes stirred. “Wake up, Smith. St. Walpurgis has fled, and you are still with us.”
The moon now fell full upon the seated man. He raised his head. Relief swept through me. I relaxed my grip. Circulation returned tingling to my hand.
John Smith blinked, looked round.
“What is this place?” His gaze fell upon Holmes. “Who the devil are you?”
To this day, I cannot encompass the change that took place in the man in Room Six after Big Ben had finished his ageless report. He was still the same figure, fair and blue-eyed and inclining towards stout, but the mocking smile had vanished and his eyes had become expressive, as if whoever had decamped from them days before had returned. Most unsettling of all, his upperclass British accent was gone, replaced by the somewhat nasal tones of an American of English stock.
“Stop staring at me, you clods, and tell me where you’ve taken me. By God, you’ll answer to Lord Penderbroke before this day is out. He’s expecting me for dinner.”
The young man’s story would not be shaken, even when Holmes admitted failure and sent for Inspector Lestrade, whose brutish technique for obtaining confessions made up to a great extent for his shortcomings as a practical investigator. It was eventually corroborated when Lord Penderbroke himself was summoned and confirmed the young man’s identity as Jeffrey Vestle, son of the Boston industrialist Cornelius Vestle, who had dispatched him to London to request the hand of his lordship’s daughter in marriage and merge their American fortune with noble blood. Young Vestle had failed to keep a dinner appointment three days before, and the police had been combing the regular hospitals and mortuaries to determine whether he’d come to misfortune; private hospitals and lunatic asylums were at the bottom of the list.
Lestrade, in conference with Holmes and me in Dr. Menitor’s consulting-room, was shamefaced.
“I daresay you have the advantage of me this one time, Mr. Holmes. The constables who brought the fellow here didn’t recognise him from the description.”
Holmes was grave.
“You won’t hear it from me, Inspector. When the first stone is cast, you will hardly be the one it strikes.”
Lestrade thanked him, although it was clear he knew not what to make of the remark, or of the grim humour in which it was delivered.
The mystery of the Devil of St. Porphyry’s Hospital is a first in the matter that I was the client of record; but it is a first also in that I have chosen to place it before the public without a solution.
Dr. Menitor was satisfied, for with the departure of “John Smith,” exited also the curse that seemed to have befallen his institution. He erased the mark from Nurse Brant’s record and reinstated the temporarily larcenous orderly, assigning their lapses to strain connected with overwork, as he had dismissed his own emotional crisis, and thanked Holmes and me profusely for our intervention.
Holmes himself never refers to the case, except to hold it up as an example of amnesia dysplacia, a temporary loss of identity upon young Vestle’s part, complicated by dementia, and brought on by stress, possibly related to his forthcoming nuptials.
“I might, in his place, have been stricken similarly,” he says. “I met Penderbroke’s daughter.” But the humour rings hollow.
He considers his role in the affair that of a passive observer, and therefore not one of his successes. In this I am inclined to agree, but for a different reason.
I do not know that “John Smith” was the Devil, having left Jeffrey Vestle’s body for a brief holiday from his busy schedule; I cannot say that Holmes’s scientific explanation for the phenomenon—in which, I am bound to say, Dr. Menitor concurred—is not the correct one. I fervently hope it is. However, it does not explain how Smith/Vestle knew of the Milverton business, cloaked in secrecy as it was by the only two people who could give evidence (and never would, as to do so would lay us open to a charge of complicity in murder). At the time of that incident, the young Bostonian was three thousand miles away in Massachusetts, and in no position to connect himself with either Milverton or his fate. I am at a loss to supply suc
h a connection, and too sensitive of Holmes’s avoidance of the issue to bring it up.
Lack of evidence is not evidence, and such evidence as I possess is at best circumstantial.
Within months of Smith’s leaving Vestle’s body, the Bloemfontein Conference in South Africa came to grief over the British Foreign Secretary’s refusal to back away from his political position and an ultimatum from Paul Krueger, the Boer leader, precipitating our nation into a long and tragic armed conflict with the Boers.
Less than two years later, on September 6, 1901, William McKinley, the American President, was fatally shot by a lone assassin in Buffalo, New York.
All the world knows what happened in August 1914, when Kaiser Wilhelm II invaded France, violating Belgium’s neutrality and bringing Germany to war with England, and eventually the world. That prediction of Smith’s took longer to become reality, but its effects will be with us for another century at least.
Regardless of whether Sherlock Holmes sparred with the Devil, or of whether the Devil exists, I know there is evil in our world. I know, too, that there is a great good, and I found myself in the presence of both in Room Six at St. Poor’s.
For one fleeting moment, my friend put aside his pragmatic convictions and refused, even in jest, to gamble with Satan over my soul. I say again that he was the best and the wisest man I have ever known; and I challenge you, the reader, to suggest one better and wiser.
THE
SERPENT’S
EGG
(An unfinished Sherlock Holmes story)
Author’s Note: Many years ago, Jon Lellenberg and Martin H. Greenberg envisioned an ambitious project: a collaborative “round robin” Sherlock Holmes novel to which a group of established writers would contribute a chapter apiece. Ruth Rendell and Isaac Asimov accepted, among several others; but corralling disparate talents is one thing, getting them all to deliver on deadline another. As months and then years passed, the project faded away for lack of a complete manuscript. Fortunately, I drew the first spot, and can offer Chapter One without further preamble, for the first time in print. The title and concept are all mine.
I apologize for presenting a mystery without a solution: But perhaps the late Dr. Asimov, a prolific master of science fiction, may yet someday deliver his entry through a portal from the other world.
Throughout the score of years during which I assisted—and, I fear, far too frequently impaired—the efforts of my friend Sherlock Holmes to assemble the broken fragments of intelligence which came his way in the interests of curiosity and justice, I can count upon the fingers of one hand those occasions when he happened upon the singular circumstances by pure chance.
There was the grotesque affair of the Comte de Barzun’s senility, the unexplained disappearance upon succeeding days of first one, then the other of the Pierpont twins in the London Underground, and the international sensations attending the murder of Lady Abigail Skinner and the marriage of the defrocked Bishop of Blackwell, neither of which was resolved to the satisfaction of either Holmes or the public.
He was, it must be noted, a consulting detective, and as success upon success mounted and his reputation grew beyond New Scotland Yard and our modest quarters in Upper Baker Street to encompass Buckingham Palace and all the great capitals of Europe, it was only natural that his cases should be brought to him rather than that he should venture out in search of them.
However, Holmes was no dilettante. While he may have refused the entreaties of a prince whose problem bore none of the intriguing points his intellect craved, he was not above imposing himself uninvited upon a situation whose features were sufficiently outré to draw him out of his occasional lethargy, without thought of personal gain. Such were the features presented by the terrifying and ultimately tragic adventure I have identified in my notes as The Salisbury Horror.
It began on a particularly fine day early in June 1896. The wind was blowing towards the harbour, carrying with it the choking yellow fog and the thousand reeks of four million souls, their beasts, and their great chugging and clamouring machines out to sea and replacing them with the sweet green scents of wood and meadow. It was a day calculated to make one rejoice in living, and consider reacquainting oneself with old comrades.
I decided I had neglected my friendship with Holmes for too long. Although the walk from the door of my club to his rooms was a long one, I turned away from the hansom cabs queued up along the pavement and struck off upon foot, swinging my cane and humming some nonsensical tune then popular among the music halls.
When I entered the sitting-room at 221B, Holmes was seated at his desk in his mouse-coloured dressing-gown, his long, spare form bent over an enormous ancient volume of the sort that in the years of our cohabitation had come in boxes to our door as regularly as eggs and milk. Others of their ilk had long since spilled beyond the confines of his presses and heaped the floor, indicating that the deliveries had not fallen off since my departure into marital territory. His austere features were frozen in a mask of intense concentration, and rather than disturb him, I made no greeting as I put up my hat and cane and fixed myself in my old armchair with that morning’s edition of the Times.
“So Watson,” observed he, after some little time had passed, “were you and Colonel Apperson successful in working out a more satisfactory conclusion to the Battle of Maiwand?”
“I fear not,” I said. “His mind is of a military bent, and mine—”
Breaking off thus, I lowered the newspaper to stare at him across the top of his desk. His keen eyes bore the cold glow I had come to associate with the triumphal workings of his remarkable brain.
I crumpled the shipping columns in exasperation.
“Really, Holmes, I should think the Westminster theft a worthier recipient of your time than the business of following me about London and observing my activities for the mere purpose of a parlour trick.”
“The Westminster theft was scarcely worthy of Inspector Lestrade. I resolved it over breakfast and sent my conclusions off to Scotland Yard by the morning post. Since then I have been at this desk, reacquainting myself with the idiosyncrasies of cuneiform and attempting to find merit in the current popular notion that patterns in crime are influenced by the phases of the moon. There is none, nor was there ever, at least as far back as Cyrus the Great.” He slammed the book shut with a reverberating report and a cloud of yellow dust.
“How came you to know I was with Apperson, if you did not follow me?”
“By the grease upon your right coat-sleeve. The last time you thus defiled it was upon the twenty-ninth of April, when you stopped off at his rooms on your way to your club and wheeled him round the square in his bath-chair. He, or whoever looks after him in your absence, is evidently in the habit of over-lubricating the wheel nearest the brake, to the extent that anyone who leans forwards to release it must come away with a residue.”
“Indeed. And what of your surmise that we were discussing Maiwand?”
“My dear fellow, you and Apperson always discuss that fateful conflict. Apperson is a Liberal and a teetotaler. Moreover, he does not gamble, and looks upon those who do as slaves to greed. Beyond the fact that you were both wounded at Maiwand, what else could you possibly find to talk about that would not result in a fit of fatal apoplexy for you both?”
My hand crept ruefully towards that old injury.
“You are a wizard, Holmes. I confess that I sometimes worry why you suffer me. My company must offer you no stimulation whatsoever.”
“Quite the contrary. A garden cannot grow without compost.” He sighed. “As things stand, my bed lies fallow. The current harvest of murderers and footpads all seem to have sprung from the same tired plot of ground. What I wouldn’t give for a lone exotic orchid in that patch of onions.”
I had seen him in this fug, but had seldom known him to belabour a metaphor to the point of absurdity.
“Perhaps you need fresh air. The air in here is as foul as Blackwall in November. Come with me upon a stroll
.”
“To what destination?”
“None in particular. I’m suggesting it for the exercise.”
His great brow furrowed.
“I do not hold with this business of aimless locomotion to no useful end. The day will come when without warning you will require the energy you squandered scattering pigeons from your path.”
“That is layman’s fancy. As a physician, I can assure you that exercise increases endurance. As your physician, I strongly prescribe an outing. To remain cooped up on a salubrious day such as this is unnatural and unhealthy.”
“Are you not expected on some domestic errand or other?” he asked petulantly.
“I am as free as the breeze. Mrs. Watson is engaged upon charity work all this week.”
Further debate ensued, but whilst Holmes bowed to no one in matters of detection, his respect for my medical training was deeply seated in his regard for all things scientific. He knew as well that once I have expressed a conviction, I shan’t be swayed from carrying it out.
At length, hatted and swinging our sticks, we found ourselves walking along Baker Street in the direction of George. The sun shone brilliantly and the folk of that busy thoroughfare were contentedly bustling about, the gentlemen sporting their best gaiters and patent-leathers, the ladies in their flowered hats with shopping baskets on their arms.
Holmes frowned when I ventured to comment upon the fine weather.
“I’m afraid that I cannot share your enthusiasm for bright days and fresh breezes, Watson. It is under just such conditions that the most loathsome things crawl from their holes. If you seek security and peace of mind, I offer you a driving rain and a plunging mercury every time. They are a lazy lot, these scoundrels, and admire their creature comforts.”
“I should think they’d prefer to work under cover of darkness.”
The Perils of Sherlock Holmes Page 14
