“It’ll still tear us to pieces if we try to get past it.”
“That’s true, Watson.”
“Do you think there’s another way?”
“It wouldn’t be logical for whoever’s hiding down here to only block off one access route, unless the other one was very well hidden.”
Watson raised his revolver again. “In which case, we’ve no option.”
“Did you shoot many crocodiles in India?”
“Not even one.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” Holmes pushed the revolver down. “I doubt a small-caliber firearm like yours will do more than injure this creature. On the other hand, what it will do is alert our real foe. I fancy these sewers would make marvelous echo chambers.”
Reluctantly, Watson pocketed the Webley.
“There will be another way, however,” Holmes said. “I’m sure our bowler-hatted friend hasn’t chanced this animal’s jaws. Let’s backtrack a little.”
They retreated for several yards, until Holmes cast his light on a small grid placed among the arched bricks of the ceiling. Like everything else down there, it was thick with grime, and at the most only two feet wide by one foot high. Holmes examined it carefully.
“This is an overflow pipe,” he said after a moment.
“Connecting with what?”
“The Walbrook, I imagine.”
“The Walbrook?” Watson was startled. “But that river hasn’t been seen for centuries.”
“Then this is truly a voyage of discovery,” Holmes replied.
He thrust his long fingers through the grating and tugged at it experimentally. It came loose almost at once. “As I thought,” he said. “This has been forced open sometime quite recently.” The bolts that had once secured the grid in place had clearly been broken . . . amid the coat of rust, their jagged edges still shone with the luster of clean cast iron. “Which hopefully means our passage through will be unobstructed.”
“It isn’t likely to stay that way,” observed Watson, giving his friend a leg up. “Not when my bulk gets jammed inside it.”
Despite Watson’s misgivings, the next few moments were relatively comfortable. The connecting line to the Walbrook was no more than a tube, but it was smoothly cylindrical and, as Holmes had predicted, clear of debris. Though it was something of a squeeze, it took them only a minute or two to forge its ten or twelve feet, then jump down again into the brown, foaming waters of the subterranean river. Thigh-deep, they pressed on, having to duck under bars and buttresses, but at last emerging into a tall vaulted chamber that was something like a cathedral side chapel. Torrents of water poured into it from various high portals. The vast bulk of the flow then plunged away down a steep, circular shaft.
“What do you think that is?” Watson wondered. He indicated a narrow wooden door on a dry ledge.
“Possibly a relief room,” Holmes replied. “Where the flusher crews take a rest.” A moment passed, then he glanced at their “map.” “At least that may be what it once was used for. According to Harold Jobson, it now has a different purpose entirely.”
Watson glanced over Holmes’s shoulder and saw again the circle of red ink. Whatever it signified, they were now upon it.
The door was not locked. Immediately beyond it, however, there was a small antechamber, in which a grim warning awaited. There was a second door, and beside it three iron hooks had been hammered into the wall, presumably for equipment. Now, however, two dead bodies hung there.
Holmes and Watson approached them with trepidation. At first glance, the bodies resembled Egyptian mummies. They were swathed in linen bandages, their heads as well as their torsos, though most of the bindings were now loose and filthied. In both cases, the left arm had been unwrapped. Watson examined the exposed limbs. On the insides of both elbow joints, the black bruises of old puncture wounds were visible. The doctor had seen similar wounds on drug addicts, though these were larger and less numerous. More shocking to him was the fact that in either case, the fingers of the victim appeared to be webbed, and that hard patches of shiny, mottled skin occupied areas of the wrists and upper arms, which looked distinctly like scaling. Baffled, he made to uncover the first body’s head.
Holmes stopped him. “I shouldn’t,” he said quietly. “It might be more than you can stomach at this moment. In any case, our real business awaits us through here.” He indicated the next door.
With a crackle of grit, they were able to force it open, and found themselves at the head of a concrete ramp, which led down into a long, spacious chamber now lit by numerous candles. Possibly, the room had once been used for storage—the ramp suggested that wheelbarrows and the like were taken in and out—but now it had been customized into something like a laboratory. Several items of furniture were in there, mainly tables and sideboards, all laden with bottles and test tubes. Beside them, a variety of opened boxes and crates lay scattered. The next thing Holmes saw caused him to nudge Watson’s shoulder. The doctor glanced up and spotted a large cast-iron pipe branching across the ceiling from one side of the chamber to the other, snaking through a canopy of dust-laden cobwebs. Coupled together by bored-socket-and-spigot joints, it bespoke of masterly and care-filled engineering, which suggested only one thing . . .
“The water main,” said Holmes. “And so vulnerable. What would you say . . . ten feet up? One would only need a ladder and a hammer and chisel, and one could penetrate it with ease.”
But Watson had spied something else, something even more astonishing. Wordlessly, he drew Holmes’s attention to a figure at the extreme northern end of the chamber. At first the fellow had been invisible in the dim light, hidden behind an array of connected tubes and vessels, but now, as their eyes attuned to the gloom, they could make him out more clearly. He hadn’t yet noticed them, and appeared to be working feverishly beside a truckle bed on which another of the mummified patients lay under a thin blanket. The fellow was in late middle age, and wore his facial hair in a long, graying beard. He also wore round-lensed spectacles.
“Holmes . . .” said Watson in disbelief. “Holmes . . . that’s Professor Langley. Good God! He’s dead . . . he was burned to a crisp!”
“Someone was burned to a crisp,” Holmes replied. “Evidently not Langley.”
Langley—if it was Langley—was dusty and unshaven, and stripped to his grimy shirtsleeves. He appeared gaunt and sallow-faced with lack of sleep. He was currently operating a hand pump, attached to a rubber tube, which ran from an embedded syringe in the patient’s arm to a complex construction of valves, pipes, and glass jars set up on a low table beside him. With each depression of the pump, a thick stream of blood visibly jetted into the topmost jar. Several of the lower jars were already filled. At the base of the device, a thin, transparent substance was dripping into a flask.
“He’s transfusing blood,” said Watson. “But into what? It looks like a distillation unit.”
Holmes rubbed his chin. “He’s taking something from the blood. Some essence, perhaps . . .”
“How remarkable you are, Holmes,” came a rich American voice behind them.
Both men turned sharply to find the ramp blocked, not only by Rohampton, but by the brutish fellow in the bowler hat and by the clerk, Burgess, who had detached the Gatling gun from its tripod and now cradled it in his arms so that it was trained squarely on them; a full ammunition belt, partially fed into its firing mechanism, was draped over his arm.
Watson went for the revolver in his pocket, but Rohampton shouted a warning. “Don’t even think about it, Doctor!” He tapped the machine gun’s heavy muzzle. “You’re a former military man. You know what this weapon can do.”
“In God’s name, Rohampton!” Watson cried. “What horrors are you engaged in here?”
“Horrors, Doctor? How very judgmental of you.”
“Judgmental? When you’re draining people’s blood to the last drop!”
Rohampton gave an almost sad smile, then shouldered his way past the two intruders, wal
king down the ramp into the center of the lab. The bowler-hatted man followed. Burgess brought up the rear, indicating with the Gatling that Holmes and Watson should go first, pushing them down ahead of him.
“These people . . . as you call them,” the American said, “are volunteers. They have willingly surrendered their lives for a greater good.” He glanced across the room, to where Professor Langley now watched events from behind his racks of flasks and tubes. “Keep working, Langley!”
“But if they’ve seen this much . . .” the professor protested.
“Trent!” Rohampton said sharply. “Remind our friend the professor why it is so important that he keep his mind on the task at hand.”
The bowler-hatted man wove his way across the lab, then drew the curtain back on a small alcove at the other side. Beyond it was a chilling sight. A hospital operating table was propped upright against the dank bricks of the alcove wall, and strapped to this by several belts was a young girl. She still wore the bedraggled tatters of nightclothes, and her fair hair hung in tangled, dirty knots. She gazed at Holmes and Watson pleadingly, but was unable to speak owing to a tight gag pulled across her mouth. Clearly, this was Laura, Professor Langley’s daughter.
Directly in front of her there sat an open barrel, stuffed with a green, spongy herbage. Rohampton now approached it, stripping off his frock coat as he did. He took a rubber apron from the wall, along with two heavy-duty industrial gauntlets, and put the entire assembly on. Then he gingerly dipped one gloved hand into the barrel.
“You see this, Holmes?” he said, lifting up a handful of the green material. “Devil’s Reef Moss. It’s virtually unique. It grows only in one particular place off the New England coast. Don’t ask me why, I’m not the scientist here . . .”
Holmes watched carefully. Something about that handful of rank vegetation touched a deep primal fear within him. “Presumably it’s toxic?”
“Oh, it’s much worse than that,” Rohampton replied, gazing at the moss as if fascinated. “But then why am I telling you? You’ve seen the results for yourself.”
“Randolph Daker,” said Holmes.
The American opened his hand and wiggled his fingers, making sure to return every scrap of moss to the barrel. “That’s correct. Daker . . . the only weak link in our chain. Inevitably, he’d seen something of what we were about, yet what was he? A common carter, a ruffian, a drunkard . . . likely to gossip the first time he got into his cups. We couldn’t allow that, Holmes . . . so we spiced those cups.”
“Rather glad we didn’t sample your sherry,” said the detective.
Rohampton smiled. “Yes . . . very intuitive of you. Of course, the moss is quite slow acting. Eventually we became concerned that even infected as he was, Daker might still blab.”
“So you dispatched one of your followers to put him out of his misery?”
“That’s right.”
Holmes glanced at the fellow called Trent. “He wasn’t terribly efficient.”
Rohampton began to strip off his gauntlets. “These are the tools we must work with, I’m afraid. When one recruits at short notice, and can offer in return only vague promises of wealth and power . . . one is lucky to draw on anything more than the sweepings of the streets. Harold Jobson was a case in point. He and several others successfully orchestrated the kidnap of Professor Langley and his daughter, replacing them in their burning home with two drunken derelicts snatched from the backstreets . . . and then Jobson went and allowed himself to be captured.” The American shook his head with feigned regret.
“You are aware, I suppose,” said Holmes, “that it was Jobson who led us to you?”
Rohampton made a vague gesture, as if it hardly mattered. “He took his death sentence with a pinch of salt. I think he expected to be rescued virtually up till the final day. Only then did his ambition switch from survival to revenge.” Rohampton gave a cold chuckle. “As if anyone in my position has the time or inclination to save the necks of fools.”
Watson, meanwhile, was staring at the bandaged form lying on the truckle bed. All the while Langley had continued pumping out its blood. By the lifeless manner in which its arm now lay by its side, it was evident that this patient, too, had expired. “These so-called volunteers?” he said distastefully. “Who are they?”
Rohampton was now removing the apron. He moved back into the lab, beating brick dust from his dress shirt. “Their names are unimportant. Suffice to say this . . . they were chosen from among the ranks of my native townsmen.”
“Innsmouth,” said Holmes.
For the first time, the American seemed surprised. “You know it?”
“Only stories,” the detective replied. “About the tainting of the Innsmouth bloodline some fifty years ago . . . and how the townsfolk have been degenerating ever since.”
“Degenerating?” If it was possible for the white, rigid features of Julian Rohampton to grimace with rage, they did so now. “Some would call it evolving. Into a higher life-form.”
“If it’s so high a form,” Holmes asked, “why do you hide behind that waxen mask?”
There was a moment of silence, Watson gazing from man to man, bewildered. His gaze settled on Rohampton when the American suddenly hooked his fingers into claws and began to attack his own face. In strips and gobbets, he tore away what had clearly been a finely crafted disguise. Beneath it, the flesh was a pallid gray blue in tone. More horrible yet, it was patterned with scales and fishlike ridges. The lips and eyebrows were thick and rubbery, the nose nonexistent. Down either cheek, lines of gills were visible.
Watson could scarcely believe the abomination before him. “Good . . . Lord!”
Rohampton wiped off the last fragments, then removed his blond wig. “Behold, Dr. Watson, the Innsmouth look! When Obed Marsh returned to us from the South Seas, he brought more than just a new wife. He’d intermarried with a race of beings in every way superior. When the bloodlines were fully mingled, Innsmouth became the cradle of a truly new civilization. As the generations passed and we natives of the town slowly transformed, a cosmic awareness began to dawn on us . . . of the Deep Ones, of their culture and science and beliefs, and of our destiny to be as one with them. In time, I will join their teeming ranks beneath the waves. And I won’t be alone!”
Holmes remained dispassionate. He strolled to the nearest table, surveying the many bottles of chemicals there. Rohampton’s men watched him warily.
“You’re creating a bacillus, I take it?” he said, picking up an open jar. He noted with interest that it had dry salts encrusted around its rim. When he sniffed it, he detected picric acid, as he’d suspected.
“Put that down, Mr. Holmes,” said Rohampton firmly.
Holmes turned to face him. “Distilling an infectious agent from the life fluids of your own people . . . is that what you’re about?”
“You know I am.” Even now, Rohampton couldn’t resist boasting. “I’m tapping the genetic core of my race. Courtesy, of course, of Professor Langley’s biochemical genius.”
Watson glanced again at the pipe running overhead. One would only need a ladder and a hammer and chisel, Holmes had said. “And you intend to impregnate London’s water supply with this thing?” he blurted out.
“The loyal Watson gets there in the end,” said Rohampton, so amused that he hadn’t noticed that Holmes had still not put down the picric jar.
“It’s . . . it’s inhuman,” Watson stammered.
The monstrous thing smiled, now fully and broadly. “Certainly it’s inhuman. But tell me, is that necessarily to the detriment? Has humanity made such a work of art of this planet that a scheme to transform it into something better should be decried?”
“To transform humanity?” Holmes scoffed, sensing rather than seeing the rusty iron plate set into the tabletop quite close to him.
“Don’t be too quick to jeer, Holmes,” Rohampton retorted. “Loud and filthy as she is . . . London is still is the crossroads of world commerce. Once she falls, the rest will fo
llow.”
“A grand conquest indeed,” said Holmes, reaching toward the iron plate with the acid jar. “And all achieved from a hole in the ground, with a few bottles of solvent . . .”
Professor Langley realized what the detective was doing first, and ducked beneath the table.
“HOLMES!” Rohampton warned.
“. . . and a flash of inspiration!”
The moment the picric crystals met the exposed iron, they detonated.
There was a dazzling flash, a crunching bang, then glass was flying and the dank laboratory was filled with smoke. Rohampton and his men covered their eyes. Holmes went down, flung backward by the force of the blast, but he was up again just as quickly. With all his strength, he turned over the smoking, wreckage-strewn table, sending it toppling against the distillation unit, which fell heavily to the floor and burst apart in a welter of fresh-drawn blood.
Watson, meanwhile, took the opportunity to drag his revolver from his pocket. With a soldierly impulse, he turned first to Burgess, who was wielding the Gatling gun, took aim, and squeezed off a shot. The report crashed and crashed in the deep chamber, but the bullet flew straight, hitting the thug in the left shoulder, sending him staggering backward into the curtained alcove, dropping his deadly weapon. Automatically, Watson turned and pumped two shots at Trent. This second hireling had now snatched up an iron bar. The first bullet punched into his throat, however, the second into his chest. He dropped without a sound, his eyes rolled white in his brutal face.
But in the brief space of time afforded by the chemical explosion, only so much resistance had been possible . . . and now Rohampton dashed forward. He’d already grabbed up the Gatling gun, and with an angry roar, he swung its hefty stock into Holmes’s side, then up against his temple, knocking him half senseless to the floor. Ten yards to his left, he sensed Watson falling to a crouch, his revolver leveled.
“Drop it, Doctor!” the hybrid roared, the Gatling gun trained firmly on Holmes. “Drop it . . . or your friend is dead!”
Instantly, Watson realized he had no choice. He only had three shots left, to the several dozen still visible in the machine gun’s ammo belt. “Don’t shoot,” he said, releasing the grip of the Webley so that it swung upside down from his finger. As gently as he could, he lowered it to the floor.
Shadows over Baker Street Page 24
