Shadows over Baker Street

by John Pelan;Michael Reaves

  I identified the British insignia upon his uniform. “Colonel, I thank you as well. I am Magnus Larssen, these good people’s guide. We have wounded.” The beater who had been disemboweled by the Creature was dead or dying quickly, but I could see James picking himself up painfully, his father crouching beside him with an expression of terrible grief. Dr. Montleroy was already trotting to their side.

  “Colonel Sebastian Moran, Her Majesty’s First Bengalore Pioneers,” he said. I noticed that in addition to a sidearm and saber, there was an elephant gun sheathed on his saddle in much the fashion that the Americans carry their buffalo rifles.

  Von Hammerstein and Rodney were crouched where the Creature had been. Rodney held up a burst leather water bottle: the object that the colonel had thrown in its face.

  “There’s no spoor, sahib,” Rodney said. “It leaves no marks in the grass. Like smoke. There are”—a silence—“specks of molten lead.” Bullets, he did not say.

  I felt a cold, thickening sensation in my belly: fear.

  “Shikari,” began the colonel, but then he hesitated with a glance to the grief-stricken father, and began to dismount and unlimber his gun. “The young man looks well enough to ride. Have him sling the boy over my saddle. We must make it to the river by nightfall.”

  He spared a glance for the Arab, and another caress for the exhausted horse. “This man is my prisoner. I pursued him from the border, and I will be bringing him back with me.”

  Kolinzcki, rising to his feet, seemed about to protest, but something in the glitter of the colonel’s eyes silenced him. For myself, I merely nodded, and went with von Hammerstein to collect the casualties.

  The events of that afternoon return to me now only as a heat-soaked blur. We walked only when we could run no longer. Waterhouse clung to the stirrup of the colonel’s horse, trotting alongside it as he steadied his sons. Conrad still breathed, but he had not regained consciousness, and I believed James was suffering an internal injury: he grew ever whiter and more silent, and most of our water went to him.

  I knew the Creature stalked us, as wounded cats will, for every so often I caught a taste of its red scent upon the breeze, and the gelding was hot-eyed and terrified. I feared the poor beast’s wind was broken: it wheezed through every breath and staggered under its double burden, but it kept up gamely.

  The colonel had bound the Arab’s hands before him with a leather strap. Through this means, Moran contrived to keep the prisoner upright and moving, although he was staggering from exhaustion.

  I came up beside him when we had not been moving long and leaned into his ear. “The Arab is a Tsarist agent?”

  “Of a sort,” he said, one wary eye on the individual in question. “A tribal shaman. A personage. And an Afghan, not an Arab.” He raked me with a sidelong glance and I nodded to encourage his discourse. “He was traveling to India with an entourage. We stopped the rest at the border, but this one got through. Fortunately, I’ve apprehended him before . . .” His voice trailed off. “What are your politics, Larssen?”

  “I haven’t any.”

  He grunted. “Get some.” And walked away.

  My especial burden was the fat Count, who staggered along in our wake and complained. Miss Adler kept along nicely, bearing her own distress very well, despite suspicious looks from the Count. Almost, I thought he was about to break into open argument with her, but he directed a hard look at Moran and kept his comments to the heat.

  Finally, in the haze of heat and despair, Moran turned on the Count. “If you don’t stop whining, I’ll send you back in pieces!” he snapped, shaking his gun for emphasis.

  The Count halted. “A common Englishman does not call me a fool!” he replied sharply. “I am accustomed to a dignified pace, and if this Norwegian idiot had not led us into the lair of monsters”—a rude gesture in my direction—“we’d all be bathed and fed by now!”

  The colonel’s prisoner chose this moment to break in, gesticulating and seeming to berate the Count, shrieking in anger. The Count listened for a moment, and shook his head. He glanced around in appeal. “Do any of you understand this barbarian?” he asked, glancing from one to another.

  None answered, but Moran’s eyebrow rose in silent speculation.

  Night came on more quickly than I could have imagined. My feet were bloody in my boots, and sun blisters rose along the length of my nose where my helmet did not shade it. I grew deaf to the hum of insects, the chatter of monkeys and birds. The sole promise of relief was the black storm front piling up on the horizon: the long-overdue monsoon, racing northward to greet us. Whenever I found the strength to raise my head, I glanced at those bulging clouds, prayerful, but they never seemed closer. As if some invisible army held them besieged, they roiled and tore, but could not advance.

  Dr. Montleroy sought me out as the afternoon waned into evening. “I’m going to lose James unless I can get him to help, and quickly. I may anyway, but there’s still time to try.”

  “What does his father say?” I croaked.

  “He knows,” Montleroy answered, with a glance over his shoulder to the white-faced man. “It is one son or neither.”

  I nodded once. “Take all the water. Go.”

  We pulled Conrad down off the exhausted gelding over James’s feeble protests, and the good doctor swung up behind. Moran poured water for the horse into his hat, and the animal sucked it up in a single desperate draft. “Go like the wind,” he said to it, and slapped it hard across the flank. It startled and bolted, Montleroy and James bent low over its neck.

  “Godspeed,” said Miss Adler from beside me. I glanced around in surprise. It was then that I noticed that the Count was missing.

  No one had seen him fall behind, and we could not turn back. Mr. Waterhouse, von Hammerstein, and I took turns carrying Conrad, who drifted in a fever. He mumbled strange phrases in a language I had never heard, but which seemed to discomfit Moran’s prisoner greatly.

  The prisoner attempted to speak to me, but I could only shake my head at his foreign tongue. He tried von Hammerstein as well, to equally little avail, and Moran did not interfere. I had the distinct impression that the colonel watched out of the corner of his eye, as if observing our faces for any sign of comprehension, but the chattering of the monkeys meant more, at least to me.

  With her paramour gone, Miss Adler stalked up to the front of the group. It was she who first identified the clearing where we had killed the tigress. We paused for breath, and the prisoner threw himself down in the long grass and panted.

  “Two more miles to the river,” she said, in a flat and hopeless tone, resting the Winchester’s stock on the ground. Moran glanced from her to the rapidly darkening sky and grunted. Waterhouse’s face clenched in terror and I knew it was not for himself that he feared.

  “We could try to run it,” offered von Hammerstein. He shifted the still form of Conrad Waterhouse on his shoulder and stared out toward the grasslands, a calculating look on his face. “Could you keep up, miss?”

  The woman frowned. “I daresay.” She bent down to unlace her boots while Rodney held the Winchester. She stepped out of them and knotted them over her shoulder.

  The monkeys fell silent. The prisoner started up, eyes staring, and he cried aloud—“Ia! Ia Hastur cf’ayah ‘vugtlagln Hastur!”—and then, in mangled Hindi, “The burning one comes!” His eyes shimmered insanely. His voice was exultant. I wondered why he had not spoken Hindi before, at least to myself or Rodney.

  “Run,” Moran shouted, yanking on the leather strap, and we ran.

  The six of us, Moran dragging his captive, pelted out of the sal and down the slope of the land toward the riverbank. Around us the grass burned from gold to bloody in the light of the sunset. An enormous orb, already half concealed by the horizon, lit the scene like the plains of hell.

  I ran with my hand clenched on my rifle, heedless of clutching grasses. Rodney darted ahead with one hand on von Hammerstein’s arm, nearly dragging the laden man. Conrad bounced o
n his back, voice raised in a peculiar shriek, raving a string of words that pained my ears.

  The ground blurred under my feet, and as I passed Miss Adler I caught her elbow and dragged her along—she was running well, but my legs were longer. Ahead of me, I saw Moran give an assisting shove to Waterhouse and turn around to yank the leather strap again. His prisoner simply piled into him, swinging his hands like a club, teeth bared to bite.

  “The dagger!” he shrieked in broken Hindi, foam flying from his teeth. “You fool, or it will have us all!”

  Moran moved with the speed of a man half his age. “Go on,” he yelled at me as I moved to help him. He ducked under the prisoner’s swing and brought his gun butt up under the man’s jaw. As I pelted past, the Arab tumbled boneless to the ground, and Moran raised his weapon.

  I flinched, expecting a shot, but Moran snarled as he hauled the prisoner to his feet.

  I caught my breath in my teeth. It hurt. “Not . . . going to make it,” Miss Adler groaned between breaths.

  A lone tree rose before us as I stole a glance over my shoulder. We were less than halfway to the river, and I could see the red glow of the sunset matched by an answering inferno only yards behind.

  Von Hammerstein and Waterhouse had reached the same conclusion, for as we drew up we saw them crouched in the grass. Rodney stood just behind them, his eyes very white and wide in his mahogany face. He clapped my shoulder as I passed him, and I realized that he was younger than Conrad Waterhouse, over whose raving form he stood guard.

  “Good lad,” I said to him, which seemed wholly inadequate, and I came and stood beside him. I remembered that we had given all our water to James, and nevertheless I found my fear lifting. I was resigned.

  Moran came up to us and took in the situation with a nod. We turned at bay, the devil before us and the sunset at our backs.

  It let us see it coming—a glowing specter in the darkness, a demon of flame and fear. It leaped through the tall grass toward me—a bound of perhaps forty feet. I caught a very clear view of it as it gathered itself. Flaming eyes glittered at me with unholy intelligence in the moment before it leaped.

  I felt something rise in my heart under that regard, an antique horror such as I had never known, and I heard Waterhouse whimper—or perhaps I myself moaned aloud in fear. Words seemed to form in my mind, words of invocation that I both knew and did not know, powerful and ancient and evil as maggots in my soul: “Iä! Iä Hastur . . .”

  I emptied the .534 at it, to no effect. Beside me, I heard von Hammerstein’s gun choke and roar twice. He reached for a second one. The reek of powder hung thick upon the air.

  The beast was in midair—it was among us—Conrad had risen to his feet with madness on his face and thrown himself at Rodney. Waterhouse caught the blow, staggered, and bore the boy over onto the ground, kneeling on his chest and bearing his hands down only with great difficulty. Rodney never flinched.

  I dropped the empty weapon. “Boy. Gun!”

  Rodney snapped the Purdey into my hand, and I aimed along the barrel with a prayer to Almighty God on my lips. Moran was distracted from his prisoner, shaking his weapon loose and raising it in a futile and beautiful gesture. His luxurious mustache draped across the scrollwork on the gun as he sighted, and he placed two shots directly into the beast’s eye as it lunged.

  The flaming paw hurt not at all. It struck me high on the thigh, and I felt a distinct shattering sensation, but there was no pain. I lost the Purdey, and I saw poor Rodney hurled aside by a second thunderous blow. He fell like a broken doll, and he did not rise. Mr. Waterhouse started up to defend his boy, and was knocked backward fifteen feet into the tree before its next blow crushed von Hammerstein against the earth. I felt the impact from where I lay.

  Moran turned with his gun, coolly tracking the Creature. He did not see his prisoner rise up from the ground clutching a rock in his bound hands, and my shout came too late. Even as he spun, the villain laid him out.

  Then, suddenly, Miss Irene Adler was standing behind the prisoner, something glittering in her hand. She drew her arm back, and with a Valkyrie shout she plunged the Count’s dagger deep into the Arab’s back. The man stiffened, shuddered, and clawed, tied hands thrust into the air as if to drag Miss Adler off his back. I was eerily reminded of the poor, wounded elephant.

  He sagged to his knees as the Creature snarled its throbbing snarl and spun about on its haunches. It took a step toward Miss Adler and screamed as only a cat can scream.

  The prisoner fell to the ground dead, and Miss Adler stood defiant and braced behind the corpse, ready for whatever death might find her. Seeming unaffected by the death of the Arab, the Creature crouched to leap. Pain grinding in my broken leg, I started to drag myself upright with some futile idea of hurling myself on the thing.

  At that moment, the rain came.

  The monsoon was upon us like a wall of glass, and the Creature screamed again—this time, in agony. It turned this way and that, frantic to escape the raindrops, like a dog that seeks to elude a beating. Each drop sizzled and steamed as it struck, and with each drop the devil’s light flickered, spots appearing on its hide like the speckles on a coal sprinkled with water.

  It twisted about itself, shrieking, and finally seemed to collapse. A sickening scent of char rose from the wet ashes that were all that remained.

  My leg flared at last into agony, and a black tunnel closed upon my sight.

  I groaned and opened my eyes on a vision of bedraggled and ineffable beauty tucking a jeweled dagger into her reticule. There was a tarpaulin under me—wet, but drier than the ground—and another one hung over the branches of the tree to shield me from the worst of the rain. I recognized it as gear Rodney had carried. Moran lay beside me, under a blanket, quite still.

  She laid a damp cloth on my forehead and smoothed back my hair before she stood. “Your leg is broken. I beg you to forgive me for leaving you in such straits, Mr. Larssen. I assure you I will send help, but I must leave at once: it is a delicate matter, and vital to the security of a certain Baltic nobleman that the theft of this dagger from his household never be proven—either by the English or the Russians.”

  “Wait,” I cried. “Miss Adler—Irene—”

  “You may certainly call me Irene,” she replied, something like amusement in her voice. I saw that her gloves were burned through, and the palms of her hands were blistered.

  I tried for a moment to formulate a question, but words failed me. “What has happened here?” I finally asked her, trusting that she would understand.

  “I am afraid you have been rather overtaken by events, my dear Mr. Larssen . . . Magnus. As have we all. I came here to retrieve this dagger, which was stolen from a friend of mine. The rather vile Mr. Kolinzcki, whom I fear is neither a Count nor a Lithuanian but an agent of the Tsar, stole it and brought it here with the intention of providing it to this Afghan sorcerer.”

  She spurned the corpse with her toe.

  “For all I know, he intended some foul ritual of human sacrifice, which may have greatly discomfited the British army. At the very least, it seems to have had the power to control that.” She gestured expressively to the pile of ashes. “A pity I had to kill him. I imagine he would have befuddled British intelligence greatly, if they had the chance to interrogate him. But once I understood that he was somehow holding back the storm . . .”

  “Monsoon. If I may be so bold as to correct a lady.”

  “Monsoon.” She smiled.

  “But how? You cannot tell me how?” I wished I could grit my teeth against the pain in my leg, but they chattered so that I could not manage it. I did not look to where Rodney lay, out in the cold rain.

  “It seems that there are things in heaven and earth that lie beyond our ken as Western minds of scientific bent.”

  I nodded and a wave of pain and nausea threatened to overwhelm me. “The Count?” I asked.

  She lifted her strong shoulders and let them drop, her expression dark. “Left behind an
d eaten, I presume. I assure you that your assistance has been invaluable, and that the war in Afghanistan may now come to a close.”

  She set a pan of rainwater and a loaded pistol close by my hand. “The colonel is alive but unconscious—it seems the blow rendered him insensate.” A final hesitation, before she turned to go.

  She turned back, and seemed to study my face for a moment. I hoped I saw something like affection there. “I am also very sorry about Rodney.”

  It was a very long, cold night then, but the villagers and Dr. Montleroy came for me in the morning. We did not speak, then or ever, of the thing we had seen.

  James survived, although Conrad never regained himself. I had occasional dealings after with Colonel Moran, until he left the region for cooler climes. I understand he has come to a very bad end.

  As for Miss Adler—her, I never saw again. But my dreams are haunted to this day by her face and, less pleasantly, by those eerie words—Iä! Iä Hastur cf’ayah ‘vugtlagln Hastur!—and I have never since been able to take up a gun for sport.

  The Case of the Wavy Black Dagger

  STEVE PERRY

  Holmes sat in the overstuffed leather chair, making ready his briar pipe. The room was more or less quiet. A small coal fire burned in the iron stove set upon on the brick in front of the fireplace, the stove’s metal creaking slightly from the heat; two oil lamps with well-trimmed wicks provided enough light to read by, and with the window open but a tiny crack, the winter winds and cold were kept more or less at bay. A woolen shawl about his shoulders finished the battle against whatever slight chill might whisper its way into the room. From the adjoining chamber, the door of which had been left ajar, came Watson’s snores, not so loud as to impede Holmes’s concentration, but enough to mark the doctor’s position precisely.

  It was not as comfortable as 221B Baker Street, but it was sufficient shelter for their brief visit to New York City. He had certainly stayed in worse places.