Shadows over Baker Street

by John Pelan;Michael Reaves

  “Gentleman!” came a cultured American voice.

  They turned and, for the first time, beheld Julian Rohampton. He came lithely out from the dim rear section of his premises. There was at once an aura of the school sports captain about him. He was tall, of impressive build, and had a shock of fine golden hair. At first glance, he was exceedingly handsome, though up close he had a white, curiously waxen pallor and a silky, almost solid texture to his flesh. When he smiled, only his mouth seemed to move. His eyes remained deep set and startlingly bright.

  “Mr. Rohampton?” said Holmes.

  “The same. And you are the famous Sherlock Holmes?”

  “I am. This is my friend Dr. Watson.”

  “I’m honored,” said Rohampton. “But what fascinating murder case can have brought you here?”

  “No murder case,” Holmes replied, “. . . as far as we’re aware.”

  “We’re looking into—” Watson began, but Holmes cut him short.

  “We’re looking into a theft. Our client has recently imported goods from America, and somewhere in transit between Tibbut’s Wharf and his home in Greenwich, certain of these goods have gone missing. I learned from the pier master that you yourself recently brought items into the country via Tibbut’s Wharf. I take it you haven’t experienced similar problems?”

  Rohampton thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not as I’m aware. It’s not that I make a habit of shipping in goods, you understand. The recent cargo was mainly botanical specimens. They were intended for an associate of mine. He certainly hasn’t complained that anything was missing.”

  “I’m glad,” Holmes said. “Of course that doesn’t mean that no attempt at theft was made. The passengers who accompanied your imports, I take it they reported nothing unusual?”

  Rohampton gave him a quizzical look. “Passengers? There weren’t any passengers. At least, if there were, they have no connection with my business.”

  “I see.” Holmes sniffed. “In which case, that concludes the matter.” He made a move back to the door. “Thanks for your assistance. Please don’t let us trouble you any further—”

  “Wait gentlemen, please,” Rohampton entreated. “It’s no trouble to have such lauded guests. Won’t you stop for a drop of sherry?”

  Burgess had reappeared from the rear chambers, now carrying a tray on which sat a dark bottle and three crystal goblets.

  “Well,” said Watson, eyeing the tipple thirstily . . .

  “Thank you, no,” Holmes put in, quite firmly. “We have a lot of work ahead of us. It wouldn’t do to get too light-headed.”

  Rohampton made an amiable gesture. “Whatever you wish. Good day to you, then.”

  “Oh . . .” Holmes said, before leaving, “there is one minor thing. Would it be possible to speak to your associate . . . the gentleman who received the shipment, just to ensure the consignment was untampered with?”

  “Surely,” said Rohampton. “His name is Marsh, Obed Marsh. Here, let me write it down for you. He’s a former sea captain turned botanist . . . interesting fellow.”

  He took a pen from his upper breast pocket and, tearing a strip from the blotter on the clerk’s table, scratched out a quick address. His mouth curved in a rictal grin as he handed it over . . . again, that grin failed to travel to his eyes. “If anything is missing, you’ll let me know? Obviously it won’t do to be stolen from, and not realize it.”

  “Of course,” said Holmes.

  Five minutes later, they were seated in a cab and bound across the City for Liverpool Street. The piece of paper they had been given read 2 Sun Lane, which both knew as a small cul-de-sac directly behind the railway station.

  “Curious chap,” said Watson as they rode. “Did you notice, his facial expression hardly changed once?”

  “I also noticed that he is little given to work,” Holmes replied.

  “How do you deduce that?”

  “Come, Watson. There was minimal evidence in that office that any work is done there. And if that fellow Burgess is a clerk, then he’s recently made it his new calling in life. That limp of his suggests he’s more familiar with the ball and chain than the accounts book.”

  “So what about Obed Marsh?”

  Holmes rubbed his chin. “He, I am uncertain about. But I fancy Mr. Julian Rohampton was rather too ready to give us his address, wouldn’t you say?”

  The cabbie let them down at the mouth of the court in question, took his fare, and drove off. For a moment, they stood and stared, and listened as well. Sun Lane was little more than a grubby access way. Various bins and sacks of rubbish were stacked along it. It was hemmed in by high brick walls, and at its far end, a single door connecting with some rear portion of the railway station stood locked and chained. Nothing moved down there, though it echoed to the racket of shunting locomotives and tooting whistles.

  “And a botanist lives here?” said Holmes tightly. “I think not.”

  He ushered Watson to one side, and they took shelter behind a clutter of old tea chests. Moments later, a curtained carriage appeared at the end of the street. The two men watched in silence as the coachman sat there, unmoving, a scarf about his face. A moment passed, then the curtain twitched and a sinister object poked out . . . something like a hefty gun barrel, though it consisted not of one muzzle, but nine or ten, all bound tightly together in a tubular steel bundle.

  Watson seized Holmes by the wrist. “Good Lord,” he whispered. “Good Lord in Heaven . . . that’s a Gatling gun!”

  “No doubt fresh from America with whatever else our cold-eyed friend imported,” said Holmes quietly. “Little wonder they lured us to a cul-de-sac.”

  “Great Scott!” Watson breathed. Only now was the nature of those they confronted beginning to dawn on him. “What . . . what do we do?”

  “I suggest we lay low for a moment.”

  Both men held their ground and waited. Minutes passed, during which the team of horses became uneasy and began to paw the ground. The coachman himself stirred, and started to glance around as though confused. At long last, a pedestrian arrived, sloping along, hands in pockets. Holmes and Watson immediately recognized him as the bowler-hatted fellow who’d attempted to follow them on Pickle Herring Street. Rather conspicuously, he was still without his jacket. He shuffled about for a moment when he reached the carriage, then leaned back against the nearby wall. To Holmes’s eye, the fellow’s posture gave him away . . . he was tense, in fact alarmed.

  “Yes,” mumbled the detective. “Something should have happened by now, shouldn’t it, my friend? Well . . . don’t let us disappoint you.” Calmly, he produced a police whistle from his pocket and blew three sharp blasts on it.

  The effect was instantaneous. The coachman whipped his team away without hesitation, the carriage bouncing on the cobbles as it tore around the corner into Bishopsgate. It barely gave whoever was manning the machine gun time to flick the curtain back over it, let alone the bowler-hatted chap time to climb aboard. He now found himself entirely alone and in full view of anyone who happened along. In a panic, he turned and began to run in the opposite direction.

  Holmes tapped Watson on the arm, and they rose and followed. Moments later, they were threading through the crowds on the forecourt of Liverpool Street station. Not twenty yards ahead, the bowler-hatted chap had stopped at one of the ticket barriers, where he handed over some change, then bullocked his way through, glancing once over his shoulder, his brutish face a stark purple red in color. If he’d spotted either Holmes or Watson, he didn’t betray it, but hurried off down a flight of steps toward the platforms.

  “Where did that man just buy a ticket to?” Watson demanded of the clerk on the barrier.

  The clerk shook his head. “Nowhere, sir. It was a platform ticket. Only cost tuppence.”

  “Two platform tickets,” Holmes replied, handing over fourpence.

  Moments later, they were hastening down the steps in pursuit. At the bottom, they gazed left and right. Thankfully, their p
rey was still distinctive in his hat and shirtsleeves. He was just in the process of descending another flight of steps.

  “He’s going to the underground railway,” Watson said, surprised.

  Holmes didn’t reply. A hideous idea had suddenly occurred to him, one which he instinctively wished to put aside, but now found that he couldn’t.

  They followed the bowler-hatted man onto the westbound platform of the Metropolitan Line, and there, briefly, lost him in the gaggle of commuters. It was the end of the day, after all . . . the station was now at its busiest. They’d fought their way down to the first-class section before they caught sight of him again. To both their amazement, the fellow, having reached the very end of the platform, slipped down onto the rails directly behind the train, and vanished into the wall of wafting steam.

  “What the devil . . . ,” Watson began.

  “Hurry!” Holmes said.

  They, too, jumped down, and a moment later found themselves stumbling along the rails, pressing on into the tunnel, which was smoky and hot and echoing and reechoing with the furious crashes and bangs of the underground railway system. Several yards farther on, just as Watson was about to call time on the pursuit, fearing that they were endangering their lives, they saw an open area to the left-hand side, with a dull glow filtering into it from a high skylight. They entered and stopped for a moment, breathing hard and surveying the ground. It was thick with dust and strewn with rags and litter. The fresh footprints of their quarry, however, led clear across it and ended beside a wide, rusty grating, which sat open against the wall. Below this, iron ladders dropped into darkness. The smell that exhaled from that forbidding aperture was as vile and as cloying as either man had ever known.

  Watson put a handkerchief to his nose. “You don’t suppose he’s really gone down there?”

  Again, Holmes didn’t answer. Watson glanced around, and found his friend staring down at the scrap of paper that Jobson had given them.

  “Holmes?”

  “Watson,” the detective finally whispered, “. . . Harold Jobson deceived us. But only slightly. He didn’t leave us a puzzle. He left us a map.”

  “A map?” Watson was astonished. He gazed at the paper for a moment, then down into the foul recesses below the grating. “Not . . . not of the sewers, surely?”

  Holmes indicated the numerous tenuous lines on Jobson’s paper, and the way they all seemed to reach a common confluence at the right-hand side of the page. “These are the interceptory sewers built by Bazalgette some thirty years ago . . . they divert the city’s waste eastward from the main sewers, and studiously avoid the Thames.” When he mentioned the river, he indicated a thicker central line with a downward loop that was suddenly reminiscent of the point where the River Thames curved around the Isle of Dogs. Holmes indicated two pencil-scrawled blobs, also at the right-hand side of the map. “Here is the Abbey Mills pumping station in Stratford . . . and here the sewage treatment works at Beckton.”

  “But what does the red circle signify?” Watson wondered.

  Holmes couldn’t suppress a shudder. “Well, it lies to the left; in other words, to the west of the city center. If I am correct, this straight line passing through it will be one of the mains that brings fresh water from the drinking reservoirs at Surbiton and Hampton. Watson . . . this circle, whatever it indicates, is located at a point after the water is passed through the filters.”

  Watson felt a crawling between his shoulders. “Jobson said there’d be a calamity . . . dear God, would that be a water-borne calamity?”

  Holmes’s skin had paled to an ashy gray.

  “We must send for Lestrade straight away,” Watson insisted.

  Holmes struggled with this, then shook his head. “There’s no time. Come . . . we have a map.”

  He bent down as though to climb under the grating, but Watson stopped him. “For God’s sake . . . you can’t mean to venture into the sewers?”

  Holmes glanced up at him. “What choice do we have?”

  “In the name of heaven . . . you’ll need waders, a safety lamp, some sort of lifeline—”

  “Watson . . . this may be the gravest case you and I have ever embarked on,” Holmes replied, staring at his friend. “Personal safety cannot even enter the equation.”

  Subterranean London was a multilayered labyrinth of lost sewers, underground railways, pipes, tunnels, culverts, and conduits of every description, a sprawling network of forgotten passages comprising centuries of buried architecture, level upon level of it, from the medieval to the very modern. It was so vast and deep that no known maps covered it in its entirety. It was also hellishly black, and constantly swimming in a foul miasma from the rivers of excrement and industrial and chemical ooze that meandered back and forth through its slimy entrails.

  Once down there, Holmes made a torch by tying pieces of rag around a broken stave, and bade Watson do the same, though even then they proceeded with utmost caution, wading warily westward along arched passages of ancient, sweating brickwork. Everything they saw was caked in the most loathsome detritus. Strands of putrid filth hung in their faces; the squeaking of rats was all around them; there was a continuous rumble and groan from the streets above. Persistently, Watson advised against the foolhardiness of such an enterprise, warning about the dangers of Weil’s disease, hepatitis, bubonic plague. “And these naked flames,” he added worriedly. “They’re a perilous option on our part. Suppose we encounter firedamp?”

  “That’s a chance we must take,” Holmes replied, again consulting the map as they approached a junction. “If we turn right here, I believe we’ll be cutting north onto the Piccadilly branch.”

  “Holmes!” Watson protested. “This is a deadly serious matter. Suppose there’s a sudden downpour? These pipes get flooded!”

  Holmes looked up. “Watson . . . I am perfectly aware of the risks we are taking. Believe me, I wouldn’t have brought myself, let alone my dearest friend, into such danger if I wasn’t absolutely convinced of its necessity.”

  “But, Holmes—”

  “Watson, I can’t force you to accompany me. If you wish to return to the surface and hunt down Lestrade, then by all means do so. You’d be serving a useful purpose. But I must continue.”

  He was wearing his most no-nonsense expression. It was at once plain how utterly serious he was. Finally, Watson shook his head. “And a fine thing that would be . . . for dearest friends to abandon each other in their hour of need.” He smiled bravely.

  Holmes smiled back, then gripped his companion by the shoulder. “This maze may appear daunting, but Jobson’s map is not too difficult to follow. He must have been this way many times himself, to be able to draw it from memory while sitting in the death cell. If he can manage it, I fancy we can.”

  They plodded on for another fifteen minutes, making turns both left and right, occasionally passing under manholes and ventilation grilles beyond which the upper world was briefly visible. The overwhelming stench of rottenness and sewage became slowly bearable, but that didn’t lessen the visual horrors in London’s dark and fetid bowels. Here and there, gluts of offal were heaped, having been jettisoned from the slaughterhouses; the carcasses of cats and dogs lay decaying, enriching the already poisonous waterways in the most rancid and sickening fashion.

  “I doubt anything they could put in the drinking water could be worse than this brew,” Watson commented as they sloshed into a low-roofed, egg-shaped passage, which seemed to run endlessly in a roughly northwesterly direction. “Where is this place you mentioned, anyway? Innsmouth? I’ve never even heard of . . . GOOD GOD, LOOK OUT . . .”

  With a reptilian hiss and a ferocious snapping of gigantic jaws, something came barreling out of the noisome darkness in front of them.

  “HOLMES!” Watson shouted again, then he was dealt a blow to the chest, which sent him reeling backward.

  The torch flew from his hand and extinguished itself in the thrashing water, but not before it cast a fleeting glow on ten to twenty fee
t of gleaming leathery scales, on a colossal tail swishing back and forth, on an immense saurian-like head filled with daggers for teeth.

  Holmes, too, had fallen back, though he maintained his balance and held his light out before him. Its wavering flame reflected in two hideous crimson orbs, but also on a stout iron chain, which was connected at one end to a plate in the tunnel wall, and at the other to a thick ring clamped around the monster’s neck. Gasping and choking, Watson scrambled back to his feet, then dug his revolver from his overcoat pocket.

  “I wouldn’t,” Holmes advised. “Not unless you want to deprive Inspector Lestrade of his next triumph.”

  Watson had already taken aim with the weapon, but now lowered it. “You . . . you think that’s the animal missing from the zoo?”

  “I’m certain of it,” said Holmes. “Unless there’s a breeding population of krokodilos down here in the London sewers, which I seriously doubt.”

  He ventured forward to get a closer look. Watson went with him. The brute was now entirely visible, a squat, broad monstrosity, so large it was only half submerged in the brackish fluids. It filled the passage from one side to the other, and now simply sat there, its mouth agape and steaming in a defiant show of menace . . . though a show was about all it could manage. By the torchlight, it could be seen that the chain holding the thing was only three or so feet in length and already pulled taut; it meant the savage beast could successfully block access to the tunnel but was unable to advance and pursue those it turned away.

  “Whoever went to the trouble of procuring this guard dog must be very committed to their privacy,” Holmes mused.

  “It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us both,” said Watson. “We were virtually on top of it.”

  “Yes . . . mind you, reptiles draw their energy from sunlight.” Holmes glanced up at the low roof. “This creature hasn’t had that opportunity for several days. Fortunately for us, it’s rather sluggish at the moment.”