A moment passed, then Rohampton backed away a couple of yards, turned, and surveyed the destruction. His eyes flickered fleetingly over the body of Trent and the groaning, only semiconscious form of the professor, but when they located the shattered distillation unit, his features twisted into a hideous scowl. “Blast you and damn you, but you haven’t won anything yet!”
Holmes, though groggy, had come ’round sufficiently to start edging away across the floor. Watson saw that his face was marked with flash burns and riddled here and there with minor cuts. Worse seemed to be about to follow, however.
“You think I can’t re-create all this?” Rohampton barked, rounding on them again. “It’ll only take days, and this time you goddamn meddlers won’t be alive to interfere!”
He took aim at Holmes and was about to fire, when something suddenly distracted him . . . a muffled, guttural grunting. All three of them turned toward the alcove, where Laura Langley still hung in her bonds, now in a dead faint. She was not the object of their attention, however; it was Burgess . . . the so-called clerk, now more like something from a nightmare.
When Watson had wounded him, he’d tottered backward into the alcove, but only so far as the barrel of Devil’s Reef Moss, which he’d collided with, sought to steady himself against, and inadvertently had slipped into, hands and face first. Now he came slowly back into view . . . already thickly sprouting with shoots and fronds and hideous clusters of anemones. A vile stench of salt and sea caves came off him.
He lurched into their midst, swaying back and forth, gasping and hissing like a deep-sea diver, yet amid that pulsating mass of marine parasites, his eyes were still horribly human . . . and with another gurgling, agonized groan, he rolled them toward his master, who, even after all the things he had seen and done, was mesmerized with horror by the sight and stink.
“Get back, Burgess!” Rohampton shouted. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you dare!”
Possibly Burgess failed to hear, though more likely he chose not to . . . for he now blundered blindly toward the only person he knew who might somehow save him.
“Burgess!” Rohampton screamed, retreating swiftly, swinging the Gatling gun around. “BURGESS, GET AWAY FROM MEEEEE!”
The weapon fired with a thundering roar, flames and smoke gouting from its muzzle. The servant was ripped apart where he stood, each slug blowing bloody ribbons from his tortured flesh. He hurtled backward, his arms flailing, till he struck the far wall, which he slowly slid down, a gory trail on the bricks behind him . . . Rohampton didn’t let up, he fired and fired, but in doing so, he failed to notice Holmes rise to his feet, draw something from under his coat, and spring a blade into view.
It was Trent’s lock knife. The detective despised all weapons, and this tool of the gutter was particularly repellent to him . . . even so, in desperate times all needs must. He hurled the knife full-on, just as the hybrid turned back to face him. The blade struck home, slashing deeply into the American’s upper left arm. Rohampton gasped and twisted. The Gatling gun slumped down across his knees.
Taking his chance, Watson grabbed up his revolver.
“Don’t, Watson!” Rohampton snapped. “I’ll kill you both . . . I swear it!” But this time even he didn’t sound convinced.
His left arm now limp and useless, and running with blood, he was struggling both to support the heavy weapon and to keep it trained on its targets. With urgent pants, he backed away across the rubble-strewn room and up the ramp toward the door.
“You’ve still won nothing,” he said, but his voice was cracking with effort. He came up against the door and back-heeled it open. “We’ll breed you out yet!” Then he opened fire again.
Holmes lunged down behind the upended table. Watson went the other way, diving behind a brick buttress. Neither need have bothered, however . . . for the hail of random shots rattled inaccurately around the room, several rebounding and narrowly missing Rohampton himself. Furious, but knowing he had no option, he turned and scrambled out into the sewers.
“Come, Watson!” said Holmes, giving rapid chase.
“Are you all right, old man?” Watson asked, hurrying up the ramp alongside him.
“Never better. But beware . . . friend Rohampton is waging a war for his race. He’ll not be taken easily.”
The American’s trail was easy to follow. Even in the gloom of the sewers, his blood besmeared the brickwork and lay in oily swirls on the brackish waters. Though he took turn after turn, passage after passage, he hadn’t got too far when Holmes and Watson came in sight of him again. Once more, he turned and greeted their challenge with blazing gunfire. In the narrower confines of the culvert, the furious volley was far more deadly, and both men were forced to cower in the effluent.
“Gad!” Watson cursed. “This filth . . . mind you, he can’t hold us off for long. That bandolier must be almost spent.”
“He doesn’t need to hold us off for long,” Holmes replied. “Somewhere along here there’ll be a downflow pipe to the Thames. If he reaches that, he’s as good as free.”
“What do you mean?”
Holmes hurried on. “For Heaven’s sake, Watson . . . Rohampton is an amphibian, and the Thames connects with the sea. What I mean is he’ll shortly have escaped to a place where nobody can ever reach him!”
The full import of that dawning on him, Watson scrambled frantically in pursuit. They rounded a sharp bend and again were almost shot from their feet. Only ten yards ahead, Rohampton had stopped. Just behind him, there was a breach in the wall where a series of bricks had fallen through. From beyond it came the furious gushing of the downflow pipe.
The hybrid gave a riotous laugh. “Humanity’s finished, Holmes!” he roared. “And London dies first!”
And then the noxious waters behind him surged and exploded, and the next thing any of them knew, a colossal pair of jaws had snapped closed on Rohampton’s midriff. He gave a piercing shriek, which was instantly cut off as the crocodile guardian tossed itself violently over, sending a wave of slime against Holmes and Watson, and tearing and twisting its hapless catch like something made from rags.
The two men could only watch, rooted to the spot.
For what seemed like minutes, the giant, half-starved reptile rent and ripped at its prey, regardless of his shrieks and gargles, swinging him ’round and ’round, beating him on the brick walls in order to pulp and tenderize him, then tearing and chomping on him again, finally swallowing him down in quivering, butchered hunks. The waters around the animal ran deepest red; bone and gristle were swallowed in dinosaur-like gulps; clothing and shoes vanished, too; even the massive machine gun was bent and buckled in the frenzy of the attack, and almost consumed.
The echoes of the slaughter continued until long after it had finished.
When he was finally able to move, Watson drew slowly backward in shock. “Thank . . . thank God I didn’t shoot the thing . . . I suppose.”
Holmes, steely as he normally was in these circumstances, was also shaken by what they had witnessed. “Thank God indeed,” he whispered.
“Of course, you know what this means,” Watson finally added. “No one will believe us. I mean, there won’t be a scrap of the blackguard left as proof.”
Holmes nodded. “Much as I hate to say it, Watson . . . a price worth paying.”
The scaled beast had now sunk back under the stained surface, only its ridged back and beady crimson eyes visible. It watched them steadily, hungrily.
The Horror of the Many Faces
TIM LEBBON
What I saw that night defied belief, but believe it I had to because I trusted my eyes. “Seeing is believing” is certainly not an axiom that my friend would have approved of, but I was a doctor, a scientist, and for me the eyes were the most honest organs in the body.
I never believed that they could lie.
What I laid eyes upon in the murky London twilight made me the saddest man. It stripped any faith I had in the order of things, the underlying goodness of life.
How can something so wrong exist in an ordered world? How, if there is a benevolent purpose behind everything, can something so insane exist?
These are the questions I asked then and still ask now, though the matter has been resolved in a far different way from that which I could ever have imagined at the time.
I was on my way home from the surgery. The sun was setting into the murk of the London skyline, and the city was undergoing its usual dubious transition from light to dark. As I turned a corner into a narrow cobbled street, I saw my old friend, my mentor, slaughtering a man in the gutter. He hacked and slashed with a blade that caught the red twilight, and upon seeing me, he seemed to calm and perform some meticulous mutilation upon the twitching corpse.
I staggered against the wall. “Holmes!” I gasped.
He looked up, and in his honest eyes there was nothing. No light, no twinkle, not a hint of the staggering intelligence that lay behind them.
Nothing except for a black, cold emptiness.
Stunned into immobility, I could only watch as Holmes butchered the corpse. He was a man of endless talents, but still I was amazed at the dexterity with which he opened the body, extracted the heart, and wrapped it in his handkerchief.
No, not butchery. Surgery. He worked with an easy medical knowledge that appeared to surpass my own.
Holmes looked up at me where I stood frozen stiff. He smiled, a wicked grin that looked so alien on his face. Then he stood and shrugged his shoulders, moving on the spot as if settling comfortably into a set of new clothes.
“Holmes,” I croaked again, but he turned and fled.
Holmes the thinker, the ponderer, the genius, ran faster than I had ever seen anyone run before. I could not even think to give chase, so shocked was I with what I had witnessed. In a matter of seconds, my outlook on life had been irrevocably changed, brought to ground and savaged with a brutality I had never supposed possible. I felt as if I had been shot, hit by a train, mauled. I was winded and dizzy and ready to collapse at any moment.
But I pinched myself hard on the back of my hand, drawing blood and bringing myself around.
I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, but when I opened them again the corpse still lay there in the gutter. Nothing had changed. However much I desired not to see this, wished it would flee my memory, I was already realizing that such would never happen. This scene was etched on my mind.
One of the worst feelings in life is betrayal, the realization that everything one has held true is false, or at least fatally flawed. That look in Holmes’s eyes . . . I would have given anything to be able to forget that.
His footsteps had vanished into the distance. The victim was surely dead, but being a doctor, I had to examine him to make sure. He was a young man, handsome, slightly foreign looking, obviously well off in the world because of the tasteful rings on his fingers, the tailored suit . . . holed now, ripped and ruptured with the vicious thrusts of Holmes’s blade. And dead, of course. His chest had been opened and his heart stolen away.
Perhaps he was a dreadful criminal, a murderer in his own right, whom Holmes had been tracking, chasing, pursuing for days or weeks? I spent less time with Holmes now than I had in the past, and I was not involved in every case he took on. But . . . murder? Not Holmes. Whatever crime this dead man may have been guilty of, nothing could justify what my friend had done to him.
I suddenly had an intense feeling of guilt, kneeling over a corpse with fresh blood on my fingertips. If anyone rounded the corner at that moment I would have trouble explaining things, I was sure, not only because of the initial impression they would gain but also because of the shock I was in, the terror I felt at what I had witnessed.
The police should have been informed. I should have found a policeman or run to the nearest station, led them to the scene of the crime. I was probably destroying valuable evidence . . . but then I thought of Holmes, that crazy grin, and realized that I already knew the identity of the murderer.
Instead, something made me run. Loyalty to my old friend was a small part of it, but there was fear as well. I knew even then that things were not always as they seemed. Holmes had told me that countless times before, and I kept thinking, Impossible, impossible as I replayed the scene in my mind. But I trusted my eyes, I knew what I had seen. And in my mind’s eye, Holmes was still grinning manically . . . at me.
With each impact of my feet upon the pavement, the fear grew.
Holmes was the most brilliant man I had ever known. And even in his obvious madness, I knew that he was too far beyond and above the ordinary ever to be outsmarted, outwitted, or tracked down. If his spree is to continue, I prayed, please God don’t let him decide to visit an old friend.
I need not have worried about informing the police of the murder. They knew already.
The day following my terrible experience I begged sick, remaining at home in bed, close to tears on occasion as I tried to find room in my life for what I had seen. My thoughts were very selfish, I admit that, because I had effectively lost my very best friend to a horrendous madness. I could never have him back. My mind wandered much that day, going back to the times we had spent together and forward to the barren desert of existence which I faced without him. I enjoyed my life . . . but there was a terrible blandness about things without the promise of Holmes being a part of it.
I mourned, conscious all the time of the shape of my army revolver beneath my pillow.
Mixed in with this was the conviction that I should tell the police of what I had seen. But then the evening papers came, and somehow, impossibly, the terrible became even worse.
There had been a further six murders in the London streets the previous night, all very similar in execution and level of violence. In each case, organs had been removed from the bodies, though not always the same ones. The heart from one, lungs from another, and a dead lady in Wimbledon had lost her brain to the fiend.
In four cases—including the murder I had witnessed—the stolen organs had been found somewhere in the surrounding areas. Sliced, laid out on the ground in very neat order, the sections sorted perfectly by size and thickness. Sometimes masticated gobs of the tissue were found as well, as if bitten off, chewed, and spat out. Tasted. Tested.
And there were witnesses. Not to every murder, but to enough of them to make me believe that the murderer—Holmes, I kept telling myself, Holmes—wanted to be seen. Though here lay a further mystery: each witness saw someone different. One saw a tall, fat man, heavily furred with facial hair, dressed scruffy and grim. Another described a shorter man with decent clothes, a light cloak in one hand and a sword in the other. The third witness talked of the murderous lady he had seen . . . the lady with great strength, for she had stood her victim against a wall and wrenched out the unfortunate’s guts.
A mystery, yes, but only for a moment. Only until my knowledge of Holmes’s penchant for disguise crept in, instantly clothing my memory of him from the previous night in grubby clothes, light cloak, and then a lady’s dress.
“Oh, dear God,” I muttered. “Dear God, Holmes, what is it, my old friend? The cocaine? Did the stress finally break you? The strain of having a mind that cannot rest, working with such evil and criminal matters?”
The more I dwelled upon it the worse it all became. I could not doubt what I had seen, even though all logic, all good sense, forbade it. I tried reason and deduction, as Holmes would have done, attempting to ignore the horrors of the case in order to pare it down to its bare bones, setting out the facts and trying to fill in the missing pieces. But memory was disruptive; I could not help visualizing my friend hunkered down over the body, hacking at first and then moving instantly into a careful slicing of the dead man’s chest. The blood. The strange smell in the air, like sweet honey (and a clue there, perhaps, though I could do nothing with it).
Holmes’s terrible, awful smile when he saw me.
Perhaps that was the worst. The fact that he seemed to be gloating.
I may well have remained tha
t way for days, my feigned sickness becoming something real as my soul was torn to shreds by the truth. But on the evening of that first day following the crimes, I received a visit that spurred me to tell the truth.
Detective Inspector Jones, of Scotland Yard, came to my door looking for Holmes.
“It is a dreadful case,” he said to me. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” His face was pale with the memory of the corpses he must have been viewing that day. “Different witnesses saw different people, all across the south end of London. One man told me the murderer was his brother. And a woman, witness to another murder, was definitely withholding something personal to her. The murders themselves are so similar as to be almost identical in execution. The killing, then the extraction of an organ.”
“It sounds terrible,” I said lamely, because the truth was pressing to be spoken.
“It was.” Jones nodded. Then he looked at me intently. “The papers did not say that at least three of the victims were alive when the organs were removed, and that was the method of their death.”
“What times?” I asked.
“There was maybe an hour between the killings, from what we can work out. And yet different murderers in each case. And murderers who, I’m sure it will be revealed eventually, were all known to those bearing witness. Strange. Strange! Dr. Watson, we’ve worked together before; you know of my determination. But this . . . this fills me with dread. I fear the sun setting tonight in case we have another slew of killings, maybe worse. How many nights of this will it take until London is in a panic? One more? Two? And I haven’t a clue as to what it’s all about. A sect, I suspect, made up of many members and needing these organs for some nefarious purpose. But how to find them? I haven’t a clue. Not a clue! And I’m sure, I’m certain, that your friend Sherlock Holmes will be fascinated with such a case.”
Shadows over Baker Street Page 25
