Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1)

by Ralph Vaughan

  He nodded to a few casual acquaintances as he took a pint of dark bitters from the barkeep and made his way to a table of bragging salts. He received several salutes and snaggle-toothed grins from those whose own funds for drinking were running low. None of these men would have met with his brother’s approval, anymore than Sir Reginald would have approved of the establishment itself. Nor would he have approved of his brother drinking common ale, or doing anything at all not dictated the his own standards of decorum, wealth and breeding. But Sir Reginald never visited the ships himself, and he was too preoccupied with clubbing in Pall Mall and seeking the acquaintances of all the right people to keep track of his younger brother’s questionable activities; so, young William Dunning thought, quaffing his heady mug of ale, what Sir Reginald thought about anything mattered not a battered farthing!

  The men told stories of the mysteries of the sea, of which a few might have actually been true, especially that Marlowe fellow who spun his yarns in such oblique and roundabout ways. And they spoke of the London, the city of lights and shadows, of illuminations and mysteries.

  “A Chinky mate o’ mine heard a demon howl in the river.”

  “Seen a drowned man crawl up at the Copenhagen Dock.”

  “They’s been passing strange things seen in the sewers,” declared one old hand.

  “You gots to watch what you pass in the sewers!” another quipped, laughing at his own cleverness.

  “White shapes in the darkness been seen,” insisted the first man. “Me brother seen such in the dark what can’t be called human.”

  “Maybe ghosts,” offered another. “London’s an ancient town, it is. Think what of all the people dead and buried here. Digging down in such fleshy soil, you got to be caring ‘bout what you disturb.”

  “Like the Ghosts of the East End,” Dunning said, thinking not only of some wild stories he had read in the back pages of some of the less discerning newspapers, but of the quickening of his own heart during his sojourn through the mist. “They say people have reported such pale ghostly figures floating through the fog, and have been seen vanishing into the ground.”

  “The Vanishments,” a man whispered. “People taken in the night by no human hand, what are never seen again.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they all have something to do with each other!” Dunning exclaimed, his voice loud with excitement and ale. “The East End Ghosts, and people being spirited away – there must be a connection of some kind.”

  “Sure there are spirits in the East End,” quipped the joker. “Gin!”

  Dunning joined in on the resulting guffaws and snorts of derision, but he did so uneasily. The papers, even the respectable ones, the ones his brother read at his clubs as he smoked Havanas and sipped ancient Frankish brandy, carried stories of the so-called Vanishments. Although the mysterious disappearances had occurred mostly in the poorer sections of London, those regions of the East End, such as Whitechapel and Spitalfields, where were also reported outbreaks of ghosts or demons, some were rumoured to have happened in other less desperate boroughs about London, such as Kensington and Holborn. Dunning suspected there were many more cases occurring than were being reported in the news, that their true scope was being hushed to prevent a public panic.

  He did not press the subject with these men when it was obvious they wanted to leave it alone, to abandon the terrors of the land for the mysteries of the sea. In their eyes was a certain desperation he had not before noticed, and they laughed too loudly, and lingered even after their coppers had vanished, accepting, almost begging, the generosity of others, not for the sake of the free drinks but because it meant a delay in slipping back into the night’s embrace and the noxious vapours shrouding the City. Dunning shuddered at the thought of what madness might lie hidden and unsuspected beneath the greyish pall, but he hid well his revulsion lest these rough men of the sea suspect a landlubber’s heart beating within his breast.

  As the night wore on, Dunning drank and sang sea shanties and listened to barnacled tales until his ordered, ledger-bound life in the City seemed but a dim-recalled dream. He drank and caroused till the ebb of the morning, when he could distance himself no farther from that life of soul-thronged streets and metal-framed business bags, of desperate men and flying hansoms swiftly going nowhere. Then, filled with the bitterness of regret and frustration, he began to slip back. He yearned for endless voyages upon golden caravels beneath tropical bronze suns, but he could not escape the steel trap of his appointed life.

  Finally, with a world-weary sigh, he stood unsteadily from the long table, pushed his top hat to a defiantly rakish angle, and bade his tippling companions a most very good morning. He settled his bill with the keep, gave up trying to count his change and made for the doorway. Even as he gripped the handle, he hesitated, wanting to go back to the light, but it was too late, and he pushed on out the door.

  The fog was just thick as when he had first sought refuge from it, perhaps thicker now in the lee of the morning.

  With the light and life within the Neptune now irretrievably behind him, he felt grasped by a bitter melancholy. He would never know the life for which he constantly yearned, never as long as he remained a marionette to his brother’s social aspirations. He was naught but another’s puppet, and those controlling strings were quite unbreakable.

  There were no hansoms or growlers prowling the foetid darkness of Rotherhithe on this April morning. He suddenly realised he had walked some distance away from the Rotherhithe Station, his intended destination, but he was not concerned, for he knew if he continued southward along Neptune to Lower Road, walking between the edge of Southwark Park and Saint Mary’s Workhouse, he would within a few minutes come within sight of the Deptford Road Station; there he could either catch an early train or indulge in the luxury of a cab, or at least pass the remainder of the darkness in relative comfort and security.

  He trekked through the fog-bound night south along Neptune until the avenue emptied into Lower Road. He found himself strolling along the eastern limits of Southwark Park, sixty-three acres of unmitigated blackness behind the nearly impenetrable fog. Opposite him was the brooding lightless bulk of the workhouse. He did not like the loneliness of the region, the desolation of warehouses and ramshackle boarding houses for foreign sailors, any of which could easily have been a front for slaving rings or opium dens. Although he had a romantic turn of heart which his brother would never understand, he was not so foolish to remain ignorant of the dark ways of the world, or the evils of the human soul.

  He forced a smile at the worries suddenly welling from within him, a combination of the black depression that gripped him and too much talk this evening about the darker mysteries of London.

  Perhaps stopping at the Neptune, or lingering so long, had not been altogether wise. If he had followed his brother’s orders he would have been home out of the fog hours ago; or if he had shown a little more moderation in his indulgence, he would have been able to find his way to the busy Rotherhithe Station without confusion. He was able to shrug off his brother’s concerns more easily than he was able to dismiss the foolishness or possible consequences of his own intemperance.

  As he walked, letting the morning’s coolness draw off the heat of the evening’s carousing, he kept an ear out for the quick clopping that would indicate a passing hansom in the mist, or the low rumble of a four-wheeler for hire, however unlikely they were to appear in this district, at this hour. But all that came to his hearing were his own ragged breaths and his own muffled footfalls.

  There were no tradesmen bound for the early markets, nor even any staggering tars or provocative dollymops. To his ale-saturated mind, it was peculiar, damn peculiar. The Vanishments, he decided grimly. People, especially the lower classes, were a superstitious lot, building such things as the Vanishments or the East End Ghosts into demonic manifestations, when they were really nothing more than another extrusion of London’s black heart into civilised society. When there was such an active criminal und
erworld as existed in London, there was no need to populate the darkness with demons or ghosts. Although he felt in his guts that there was some tangible but unclear connection between the East End Ghosts and the Vanishments, he was still willing to bet, pennies to pounds, that every victim taken was either at the bottom of some mud-pit or would eventually float up from the bottom of the Thames, throat cut or garrotting rope knotted tight; that, or slaving under some foreign tropical sun, if still alive.

  Dunning was a little nervous, but he did not truly fear the night or any terror it might hide. His present fearless condition resulted from almost equal portions of brash youthfulness, too many pints of strong ale, and a general bitterness about the futility of the life he led. And there was, of course, the sword in his umbrella. In all the clubs along Pall Mall and Fleet Street to which a young gentleman might belong, willingly or not, there was not one other who could best him with a foil.

  Odd furtive sounds emanated from the depths of the park, then seemed to surround him. But they were not sounds born of the most populous city on Earth, nor the sounds of criminals seeking victims to rob and murder. They were, unmistakably, the sounds of stealthy beasts stalking their prey.

  He paused in his journey toward the haven of Deptford Road. He could not be more than a minute or two from the lights of the station, but he now doubted he would see them, for the way ahead was choked with ominous footfalls, quick tattoos against the cobbled pavement.

  Suddenly sober, his back against the bricks of a warehouse, he eased his sword from its sheath and stood at the ready, convinced he was more than a match for any danger concealed by the clotted night.

  The fog seemed to press close against him, smothering him. With the fog came a particularly noxious smell, like the musk of a predator’s lair, accompanied by a crushing silence that seemed to hush his breaths and make his heart sound like an overwound watch wrapped in cotton.

  Suddenly the fog erupted, limbs grasping and claws slashing, red eyes burning like hooded lanterns. Try as he might he could not make out anything distinct about his attackers, only that there were dozens of them and that they were not human…not quite.

  He swung and thrust with his sword, but for all the good it did he might have been hacking away at the mist itself. Within moments of the start of the attack the sword was yanked from his grip and vanished into the darkness.

  He was thrown down. His palms and knees slammed against the pavement. He was pinned by several squat heavy forms covered with pale matted hair. He was choked by stinking hot breaths. His face was smashed against the roadway.

  A cry of pain and terror echoed through the streets of Bermondsey, causing the poor to tremble in their huddling places, and carousers to linger a little longer in the light.

  The cry ended as sharply as it began.

  A curly-brimmed top hat rolled into the street.

  The morning’s silence surged back.

  Chapter II

  After the Incident of the Empty House

  “What do you mean, ‘You have got him,’?” Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade demanded. “Got whom, Mr Holmes?”

  “The man for whom Scotland Yard has hunted in vain since the thirtieth of last month,” replied Sherlock Holmes. “The man who shot and killed the Honourable Ronald Adair with an expanding bullet, fired, by the by, from the same curiously constructed air-rifle he just used to shatter the facing window of my rooms on the opposite side of Baker Street. Murder is the charge to which he will answer in the Assizes, Inspector, not window breaking, or even the attempted murder of a man all London has counted among the dead these past three years. My congratulations, Inspector Lestrade, on your capture!”

  Dr John H Watson frowned. The passing of three years had not changed his friend, neither in his impatience with minds less animated than his own, nor his tendency to let others absorb the credit for his work. The chase was still the all-important game, and when that was ended he was more than content to step aside and let his inferiors seem his superior.

  The prisoner struggled against the stout police constables on either side but to no avail. His red hair and broad moustache bristled like the fur of a maddened beast. His face was virile yet sinister, a philosopher’s brow above a sensualist’s jutting jaw. The man glared in rage at everyone who had participated in his capture, but especially at Sherlock Holmes.

  “You clever, clever fiend,” the prisoner snarled. “This is not the end of it, Holmes!”

  “Ah, but it is, Colonel Moran,” Holmes quipped. “’Journeys end in lovers’ meetings,’ as the old play says. I have hoped for the pleasure of meeting you again ever since you favoured me with your attention as I lay on the ledge above the Reichenbach Fall.”

  “You cunning fiend!”

  “Gentlemen, permit me to introduce Colonel Sebastian Moran, late of Her Majesty’s Indian Army, thought it was hardly an honourable separation, and the best heavy-game shot ever to prowl the provinces of our Eastern Empire. I believe the Colonel’s bag of tigers still remains unrivalled, though he seems to have slipped up tonight. The softness of civilisation must have dulled your wits, Colonel, else such an old shikari as yourself would easily have seen through the stratagem of tethering a young kid to a tree, waiting for the bait to bring the tiger into your sights.”

  Colonel Moran attempted to spring at Holmes, his cry of rage not unlike the savage snarl of the beasts taken by him in his time. He could not, however, break free from the grip of the constables who dragged him roughly back and shoved him into place.

  “I confess it a small surprise that you chose to shoot into my rooms from the very same empty house I chose to watch for you,” Holmes said. “I had imagined you working from an elevated position in the street, as you did in the murder of Adair, where my friend Lestrade and his merry men were awaiting you. Aside from that, all has gone very well – London will be short one murderer, and I can return to the free practice of my trade.”

  Moran looked to Inspector Lestrade. “If I’m caught, I’m caught, but there’s no reason why I should have to submit to the gibes of this murderer.”

  “Murderer!” Watson exclaimed.

  “He speaks of his associate, the late Professor Moriarty, who perished alone at the Reichenbach Fall rather than myself, despite the Professor’s best efforts, and those of his confederate in hiding,” Holmes explained. “A death, certainly, but just as certainly neither unfortunate nor murder. I will certainly never lose sleep over the part I played in the final moments of Professor Moriarty, just as I will never be troubled by the part, small as it may be, in bringing you to the gallows.”

  Moran stared with narrowed smouldering eyes. “If I am in the hands of the law, let this be done in a legal way.”

  “That sounds reasonable enough,” Lestrade conceded expansively. “Are there any further gibes you would like to make, Mr Holmes?”

  Holmes smiled thinly. “The elapsed three years seem to have given you a certain puckish humour against which I shall have to keep guard, Lestrade. But, yes, I am quite through with Colonel Moran.”

  At Lestrade’s nod, the constables roughly removed the shackled prisoner from the room and hurried him down the stairs to the police wagon waiting on Baker Street.

  Holmes examined the air-rifle. “An admirable and unique weapon, having tremendous power and being virtually silent,” he commented. “Professor Moriarty ordered its fabrication by the blind German mechanic Von Herder some years ago, and it has caused its share of misery in London and abroad, both in the snuffed lives of its victims and to dozens of police departments in the form of unsolved crimes. I had never thought to have the opportunity to handle it. When you link this gun, its unique bullets and Colonel Moran to the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair at 427 Park Lane, many of your fellow detectives worldwide will owe you a great debt of gratitude. I commend it into your care, Lestrade.”

  “You can trust me to look after it, Mr Holmes,” said Lestrade. “And after Colonel Sebastian Moran. Short of a miracle, it’s th
e hangman’s noose for him.”

  Sherlock Holmes frowned. “Then you should be on your guard, for many a barrister has pulled an eleventh-hour miracle from out his bag of tricks.”

  They exited the empty house and stood on the walkway. It was a cool spring night, clear above and with gaslamps flickering serenely along the quiet thoroughfare. With the presence of the Metropolitan Police dissipated, there was no evidence Baker Street had seen any recent excitement. Even the shattered window of 221-B was not immediately noticeable to the casual observer, save for the occasional and gentle flutter of the sash curtain beyond what remained of the pane.

  “I know I’ll get all the credit for this nab, but never think me fool enough not to know who really brought the blighter to ground,” said Lestrade. “It is so very good to have you back amongst the living, Mr Holmes, and, believe me, sir, my sentiments have nothing to do with either crime or criminals.”

  They shook hands.

  “Good night, Inspector Lestrade.”

  “Good night, Mr Holmes…Dr Watson.”

  When they were alone, Watson said: “Peculiar fellow. Just when I think I have him figured out, he surprises me.”

  “People are as complex as the world in which we live,” Holmes remarked. “It is a serious mistake to think that what we see is all there is of either.”

  “I have many questions about what happened tonight, Holmes, and about Adair’s murder,” Watson said, gesturing upward with a glance. “Perhaps a glass of sherry and a cigar, like old times…”

  Holmes hesitated, clearly reticent, yet his sharp features betrayed no emotion. “A half an hour, perhaps, but no more. You’ve had enough shocks for today.”

  When Watson entered the chambers he had shared for so many happy years with Sherlock Holmes, he uttered a small gasp of recollection. They were exactly as he remembered, with all the old landmarks in their proper places – the chemical corner and the acid-stained, deal-topped table; the shelf of formidable scrap-books and reference books which would have been welcome at many a criminal’s bonfire; the violin-case, the pipe-rack, even the Persian slipper packed with shag. So overcome was Watson by the spirits of evenings past he did not at first notice the diminutive figure of Mrs Hudson standing near a wax-coloured bust perfectly recreating the features of Sherlock Holmes, except for a small hole in the temple and a much larger one out the other side.