“Shame on you, sir! Shame!” Ezekiah snapped, then threw his ear to Watson’s chest to ensure he was yet breathing. A smile of satisfaction spread across his ghoulish face. “Alive! Alive and wondrous! Oh, you may have deprived me of one meal, Mr. Holmes, but you have provided me with a finer!”
“Hey. Don’t eat Watson.”
“Hey. Don’t eat Watson,” I protested.
“You mustn’t think of it like that. He shall endure. Here, in his right place with his right brothers. Oh, lost one, come home to the family that understands you! Join with me now!”
With that, Ezekiah Hopkins unhinged his jaw, much like those long snakey things… What are their names…? Ah! Snakes! He stretched his awful, dead-looking mouth to a truly disturbing proportion. Just as I was beginning to reflect, “You know, I think that would fit over Watson’s entire face,” he… well… suffice to say that if Watson thought his first kiss from another gentleman was unsavory, it is perhaps fortunate that he was unconscious for his second. As Ezekiah Hopkins’s lips sealed about Watson’s forehead and chin, his burning eyes narrowed to radiant sparks and a horrible slurping noise filled the room.
Then a second one.
Then a rather desperate-sounding third.
Around me, the skull-spiders reeled and stumbled as if drunk. Hopkins threw his gaze about the room in dazed panic, wondering what might be the source of his sudden displeasure.
“I told you not to eat Watson,” I said, striding up to him, straightening my cuffs. “The source of your present difficulty, Mr. Hopkins, is this: there simply isn’t a soul in that body. It’s off visiting a friend of ours.”
Hopkins gave another desperate, soul-suck slurp, then began feebly trying to pry Watson out of his mouth with weak, uncertain fingers. Though I knew Watson to be in no danger of losing his soul, I realized he might have another problem. His body still needed to breathe.
“And as for you, Mr. Hopkins, as I said before, all this murder is really unacceptable. You are a predator of men, sir. But I am their defender—a predator of predators—and if you think I am about to let you devour my best friend…”
I held my hand out towards the crates behind us and thought of Watson’s Webley-Pryse. The pistol heard me, turned its handle and sped to my grasp. I laid the barrel against Hopkins’s brow, pulled back the hammer, yanked the trigger and told him (perhaps a bit later than I ought), “…you are drastically mistaken.”
As he slumped down dead—properly dead—his little skull minions reeled about in surprise and dismay. I thought they’d die too, but the magic he’d used to animate them did not fail. And who knew how long it would take to wear off? I leaned down to extricate my friend’s face from my most recent enemy’s face, but… I had simply possessed no idea how hard a red-headed soul-sucker could suck! In the end, I had to use the crowbar. Once I had him free, I laid Watson’s body near the flagstone that covered the secret tunnel and went back to gather our gear. I knew I must hasten to Violet’s side, yet the vault had one more encounter in store for me.
As I threw everything back into Watson’s big bag, the flagstone bumped open and a figure emerged. Jabez Wilson stood sheepishly up out of the tunnel, with both hands raised above his head and a pistol pressed against the back of his skull by the exposed forearm of some hidden antagonist, farther down the tunnel.
“Uhhhh… I have been directed to inquire: who is here and what is happening? Oh! Mr. Holmes, is that you?” he stupidly asked, stupidly.
“Jabez! Did you… Did you accept the invitation to your cellar? After Watson told you not to?”
“Uhhhh…”
“You must always listen to Watson! Always! I hate to say it, sir, but Watson is right about you: you are a redheaded ninny! Oh, and it’s not even eight o’clock yet! Double-ninny! Well, I suppose I shall have to save you. John Clay? I know it is you down in that tunnel, John Clay! Your name is known to me, and mine, I think, is known to you!”
Then I gathered all the voices that speak in my head and bound them to my own tongue so that, with all voices, in all languages, I could proclaim myself.
“I am Warlock Holmes—revenger and destroyer!
Wicked one, your plans have come to naught.
I will strike the armor from your shoulders, the weapon from your hand.
Now: stand and face me!”
He didn’t.
From within the tunnel came a slightly muffled, “Aw, bollocks!” Then another voice cried out in pain and protest. Mr. Clay must have brought the red-headed confederate who had posed as Duncan Ross, too, for I heard Clay shout, “Out of my way, Archie! Jump, man! Jump! Back down the tunnel or we’re done for!”
I listened as the two of them scuttled back down the tunnel; then came a few moments’ silence, followed by a few screams, a few thuds and silence once more.
“Uhhhh… what was that?” Jabez wondered.
“Oh, Watson took the precaution of having Grogsson and Lestrade standing by outside your pawnshop. I imagine John Clay’s days of mischief-making are at an end. He’s a very smart man, my friend Watson; had the whole thing figured from the very beginning.
“Well…” I added, gazing about at all the floppy, disoriented skull-hair-spiders, “…most of it. There are one or two details he might have missed. But those will soon come to light. Er… as long as John Clay doesn’t try to fight Grogsson. But enough of such distractions! Watson and I have another adventure to get to. An important one! Not this waddle-rot you’ve got us mixed up in!”
“Uhhhh…”
“Yes, I made that word up. But I don’t care. It seems apt. This is waddle-rot, sir! Utter waddle-rot! Watson and I have got to save Violet, so I’m going to bandage him up a bit and then you’re going to help me drag him back through that tunnel.”
“Uhhhh…”
“Oh, very well! You just bring the bag, then.”
As we made our final preparations, the skull-spiders swarmed all over their fallen master in desperate confusion. And who can blame them? Dead, they might be. Brainless. Thoughtless. Lifeless. Pointless. But this was the first time they’d been alone.
Poor cute little skull-buggers…
It was probably my job to destroy them, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “Attention, all hair-monsters! I hereby declare this disused vault to be the clubhouse and headquarters of the Red Heads’ League! All of you are charter members, with full use of the premises, all rights and privileges, blah, blah, blah! Just don’t go wandering up into the bank and everything ought to be all right.”
And that is where I left them.
I’ve been back to visit, a few times. In my later adventures, I recovered the trinket for which Ezekiah Hopkins had done so much and slain so many. And what better place to keep it? I laid it in his dead little hand, though I think he gained no joy by it.
The skull-monsters always liked to stay in a pile, all clustered up on the fallen back of Ezekiah Hopkins. The first couple of times I went, some of them would pad over to greet me, looking up eagerly to see if I’d brought them their old bodies back—or whatever other treat it is that skull minions yearn for. Yet with each visit, there would be fewer who came to see me and ever slower they would move. The last time, none of them stirred at all. There was nothing there but broken boxes and a crusty lump of lustrous hair, with about a dozen skulls in it and one complete skeleton lying at the base of it all.
I don’t go back there now. It is a lonely place.
But there. I’ve done it. A silly little adventure from years ago. I’m sure I told Watson most of it before. The important bits, anyway. The stuff I could remember. But now he’s given me a duty and I’ve taken it to heart. I’ve made this ancient and intractable mind of mine dredge up every detail and laid it all down for Watson’s benefit. And for yours, dear Anyone-Watson-Cares-To-Show-This-To. Yes. A job well done, I must say.
* * *
Watson’s note: I include Holmes’s account of the Adventure of t
he Red Heads’ League in this volume for two reasons. One: so that the chronological adventures of Holmes and myself might make some sense to the reader.
Two: blame.
And I do take a fair bit of it on myself, surely. But Holmes… God damn it, Holmes… Those things Ezekiah Hopkins told you in that dusty vault were the very pieces of the grand puzzle I’d been missing. If you had told me all this the moment I woke up, I could have…
Maybe we could have…
But no.
It’s too late now.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE APPRENTICES
ONCE AGAIN, FROM THE JOURNALS OF DR. JOHN WATSON
AS WELL AS I KNOW HIM, I AM AT TIMES UNCERTAIN HOW much guile I should attribute to Warlock Holmes. I know he was trying to distract me from my pursuit of the Woman, but I don’t know the true extent of his efforts. “Let’s find a case to keep Watson distracted” was a plan he’d not only accidentally admitted on a few occasions, but actually managed to effect. When that plan failed to distract me as long as he’d hoped, it is possible—just possible—that he elected instead for a plan of “let’s find a case to get Watson horribly wounded, so he can’t do anything”.
Which, he also effected. Perhaps by design. Perhaps by happy accident.
I returned from my adventure with Violet Hunter sure that it would be my last for some time. My right arm was badly broken. The left had been mangled by a barghest. I had two cracked ribs. My leg was wounded to the bone, with no small amount of attendant tendon damage and I had crowbar marks all over my face.
Plus, my screwdriver was bent.
Oh, and my hair! It was a total loss. Holmes could have put it back to rights, but that would have required the use of magic and—on his advice—I thought it better to just shave it all off and begin again. Holmes was convinced it would grow back normally. I explained to him that this was not the way hair follicles worked, but he explained to me that it was the way magic did, so I let myself be overruled. To my great relief, it grew back its accustomed, unremarkable brown.
I hesitate to think of what I’d have done to Holmes if it hadn’t.
To fix the rest, I summoned the best trauma surgeon I knew: James Mortimer of Dartmoor. By which I mean: I sent him a letter and he agreed to come. Holmes was prepared to properly summon him—out of his bath, or wherever he might happen to be at that exact moment— but I insisted on normalcy. Even though it hurt. Solid fellow: James hastened down by train and performed just hideously painful surgery all over me. Nevertheless, I was confident that the worst was behind me; that so long as I was diligent in my efforts to recover, I should be whole again.
The process was a long one. I was soon able to leave my bed, but by then my atrophied arm didn’t allow me to grip anything heavier than a pencil. I could make it from my bed to the lavatory and back before my leg gave out on me, but the front door was simply beyond me. My great nemesis was the stairs. The day I finally conquered them, I had my first taste of fresh air in weeks and began a series of laughably short walks around the neighborhood.
I slowly lengthened them, day by day, teaching my injured limbs their old strength (such as it was). As I labored, the last days of winter and the entirety of spring fled by. And so did something else: my sense of immediacy. I should have hastened back to the game, to face the Woman. Instead, I allowed myself to settle into domesticity and inaction. I do not know that I would ever have deemed it was time to go forth and test myself against magic and strangeness again, but—as was often the case—adventure came and found us at 221B.
Holmes and I were seated at our dining table, each absorbed in a separate discipline. By that time, I had returned to medical practice. Well… no… let us say that some of the neighborhood vagrants had discovered that there was an under-employed medical man living near them, who had no great concern over money. Thus, it had become common for me to find some ragged specimen or other, collapsed in the street—always with suspicious proximity to 221B—moaning to nobody in particular that they were unable to work in their current state and that their six idyllic, churchgoing children might starve if not for the timely medical intervention of a beneficent savior who would surely find his reward in heaven. Though— just as surely—said savior must be a bit of a dimwit if he thought he was going to be paid for his efforts.
Thus it was that I found myself laboring to concoct a tincture for a local knife-grinder’s horrid foot-blight. I was hoping to find a way to apply it from across the room, with some sort of twelve-foot daubing swab. It was a difficult recipe to get right and I would have been struggling, even if it were not for the interference of Holmes.
He was at that damned jigsaw puzzle again.
He sat opposite me, staring at the splayed pieces with a frustration that was rapidly mounting to outright rage. He’d been at it for the last week and a half. Day after day— and night after night as well—he sat at our table, staring at the diverse pieces, insisting that I take my meals in some other location. Though I was glad to see him occupied, it nevertheless irked me to see him thus. I suppose I was embarrassed for him, because…
“Holmes, that is a child’s twenty-four-piece puzzle. How many days do you intend to waste upon it?”
“Not now, Watson! I’ve almost cracked it!”
I was inclined to be less optimistic.
He’d yet to connect any of the pieces. Instead, they lay spread all over my table, attached to little notes which said things like, “Green. Suspiciously green,” and, “Rectangle? Poorly executed! Two edges are somewhat irregular…”
The image was of a child leading a billy goat. By the whim of chance, one piece of the puzzle featured a complete goat eye, along with one of its nostrils and just the corner of its upturned grin. This, Holmes was sure, was the ringleader to them all and possessed of a special infamy. It always had pride of place, next to a note that read, “Egad! Who would paint such a thing?”
I was about to offer my help for what must have been the two-hundredth time, but just as I opened my mouth, the bell rang. This, I presumed, would be my rotten-toed knife-grinder, so I prepared my most professional disgust-masking face and rose to answer.
It wasn’t him.
Just as I reached the door, Mrs. Hudson’s voice came from outside, stuporously reciting, “Nobody is here. Nobody needs to see Mr. Holmes. And I wouldn’t remember if anyone was here. I fell asleep drinking my tea and slept all afternoon, didn’t I? Answer the door, Warlock Holmes. Nobody needs you.”
My outstretched hand stopped, hovering a few inches from the handle and my eyes sought Holmes’s. I found him utterly transformed, his gaze steely, his jaw set. Outside, I could hear Mrs. Hudson taking a few clumsy steps down the stairs. Skree-er-ka-reeek, went the third step from the top. I heard Mrs. Hudson stumble twice on her own, well-known steps. Whoever “Nobody” might be, he presumably stood alone, just on the other side of our door.
“Careful, Watson,” Holmes whispered.
“Er… maybe you should answer it?” I suggested.
He shook his head.
“Better if you do, Watson. I’ll just be over here.”
He took up position in the center of the room, staring at the door as if expecting a mortal challenge to issue through it at any moment. His weight was on the balls of his feet and he had the unwavering focus of a gunfighter. I turned back to the door with an even more reluctant heart than I would have gathered for Old Stink-Foot.
“No! Wait!” hissed Holmes. “Over here. I’ll be over here.”
“Soames? Hilton Soames?”
My friend threw himself behind our sofa. For a moment, he disappeared entirely, but then his eyes peeped up over the edge, like those of a five-year-old lad with particularly poor hide-and-seek skills.
“All right. Open it.”
I stepped to the side and craned my hand out towards the handle, mindful of the pumpcrow-strangling I’d received the last time this had happened. I wordlessly mouthed, “One… two… three!” then yanked the door open and flun
g myself away, towards the corner.
There, in our doorway, stood a gaunt gentleman, with an aristocratic grandeur. He was tall, but not as tall as Holmes. He wore a black silk hat and a theatrical cape. He was pale. Age had dusted his black hair gray at the temples. He wore a moustache and goatee so sharp, it looked as if the tips might double as glass-cutters. A tarnished silver pentagram hung around his neck on a rough leather cord and the buttons of his shirt were expertly wrought onyx skulls. If one walked up to one’s local music-hall costumer and said, “Please make me look like an evil stage magician,” one could not have hoped to achieve any result superior to our guest’s own appearance.
Warlock’s eyes widened as he popped up over the edge of the couch to exclaim, “Soames? Hilton Soames?”
“Greetings, Warlock,” our guest said in a rich, severe baritone. “May I come in?”
“Well, I… I suppose… just this once.”
Hilton Soames spared me a look of distaste and distrust as he breezed across our threshold, then turned his attention to our lodgings, gazing this way and that before he declared, “Cozy little hovel you’ve built for yourself, Holmes. I should have expected something of the sort.”
“Hey,” Holmes muttered.
I rose from the safety of my chosen corner, reclaimed my position by the fire (as well as some of my dignity, I hoped) and noted, “It seems the two of you are acquainted.”
Our guest’s lively black eyes flicked in my direction. “We are.”
“And you must be a practitioner of magic?” I continued.
He snorted derisively. “Magic? Bah! A child’s word for phenomena he fails to understand. I am Professor of Occult Studies at the College of St. Luke’s.”
“And you must be… well… evil,” I said.
“Evil? How dare you? Why would you think so?”
Warlock Holmes--My Grave Ritual Page 23
