by Cavan Scott
CHAPTER THIRTY
PROGRESS
“An eventful trip,” said Holmes, as we headed back towards London on the 8.15 to Euston the following morning.
“And there was I thinking you were a master of deduction,” said I, “when your real talent lies with understatement.”
Following John’s outburst at the asylum, we had been directed to the front door by Dr Dougherty. The brouhaha had set off something of a chain reaction through the surrounding wards, the other patients driven wild by the commotion. Never had Bedlam been a more accurate description.
“You know the way,” Dr Dougherty snapped at Mrs Stevens, before darting towards a neighbouring room where an inmate was jumping on his bed and howling at the ceiling. We passed similar scenes of pandemonium before we stepped into the outer, more civilised area of the building. Even then the atmosphere had become electrified, the behaviour of the gentler patients becoming agitated as if madness were sweeping out in waves from the hospital’s secret heart. My relief was considerable as we followed Mrs Stevens’ determined march towards the gates. She didn’t look back, but I could tell from the line of her shoulders that we would feel her wrath the moment we stepped out of the grounds. I felt like a naughty child waiting to be scolded, and had to fight the urge when we were back out on the pavement to walk briskly in the opposite direction.
Mrs Stevens took a few angry steps away from the gate and then whirled around.
“That,” she hissed at my colleague, “was not what we agreed.”
“I beg to differ,” Holmes replied. “You asked me to uncover something about the man’s past, and I discovered his name.”
“We don’t know that, and I never asked you to drive him into a frenzy. If you’ve undone all the good work Dr Dougherty and I have done with John—”
“With Danny,” Holmes pointed out.
“We are sorry if we caused distress,” I interjected quickly.
“You didn’t do anything,” she all but spat. “In fact, from what I could see you just sat back to see what happened. Good show, was it? Material for another story?”
“Now, look here—”
“No, you look. You two have put me back months. Do you think Dr Dougherty will welcome me back to his hospital after that performance?”
“You wanted me merely to observe?” Holmes said. “To take a look at the man and work out his past from the way he combs his hair, or the food caught between his teeth?”
“That is what you do, isn’t it?”
“Not this time.” There was anger behind Holmes’s words. No, that wasn’t it. Frustration. “I was unable to tell a thing about him, nothing anyway that made sense. That person in there is impossible, and I do not believe in impossibilities. I do not deal in impossibilities.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That I cannot tell anything from his hair, because it is not his hair. At least it doesn’t belong to his face. Often there are differences between a man’s beard and the hair on his head; a fellow with jet-black locks discovers that he has a ginger beard when it grows out, for example. But nothing – nothing – matched about that man. His hair was chestnut and yet those striking brows were blond, as opposed to the stubble on his chin, which was dark. As for his teeth? Nothing on earth could persuade me that the maxilla matched the mandible, and before you suggest one or both sets were false, no dentist with any pride in his work would produce false teeth of that colour and condition.
“I could also mention the misshapen neck, the strangely bunched deltoids, or the fact that one of his hands was free of hair, while the other was so matted that it would have not looked out of place on the arm of a chimpanzee.”
By now, Mrs Stevens’ eyes were wide. She turned and walked away, shaking her head. “You’re mad. I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
“If I am insane, then you brought me to exactly the right place,” Holmes said, walking after her. “But you must see it, Mrs Stevens. You must see what we are dealing with here.”
The lady stopped short, spinning around. “And what is that, Mr Holmes?”
“A person who should not exist. A person who, somehow, has been fabricated from multiple bodies. A homunculus. A golem.”
This was too much, even for me. “Holmes, calm yourself. You’re talking nonsense.”
“Yes. Yes I am,” my friend responded. “And you know me, Watson. You know how even uttering words such as these is anathema. However—”
“—When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Since we first met Holmes had repeated the phrase time and time again, but this was different. What Holmes was suggesting wasn’t merely impossible, it was abhorrent. The thought of stitching together body parts to form a new soul? It was laughable. Worse than that, it was unholy.
Still Holmes refused to let it go, no matter how ridiculous he sounded. “The stitching, Watson, on his face and arms. Did you see it?”
“Of course I did.”
“And it reminded you of something?”
I was reluctant to answer. Thankfully, he gave me no chance to do so. “The hand, on the banks of the Thames. It was the same suture work, the same precision that Mrs Stevens so admired. So clean. So tight.”
I was all too aware that Mrs Stevens’ mouth was hanging open with incredulity. “The hand? On the bank of the Thames?”
Holmes ignored her. “And his skin. That waxy complexion. No, that is not the right word. Marbled. That’s it. The capillaries, beneath his cheeks and around his eyes, clear for all to see. What did they remind you of?”
“Holmes, that is enough.”
“Tell me what they reminded you of!”
“Of a corpse!” I responded, louder than intended.
Without a word, Mrs Stevens turned and walked away, her heels clicking on the pavement. Ahead of her was the cab that had been waiting patiently to take us to our next location. I had a suspicion that the lady would now favour travelling alone.
“Mrs Stevens,” Holmes called.
“Leave her, Holmes. You’ve done enough.”
“Mrs Stevens!”
She reached the car, pulling open the door without looking back. Holmes caught up as she climbed inside, addressing the lady through the open window.
“Go and see Ellie Grimshaw,” he instructed. “Ask if the name Danny means anything to her. If it does, we will be staying at the Palace Hotel on Oxford Street.”
At her command, the taxi drove off, leaving Holmes on the pavement.
After that, for the rest of the day, Holmes had festered; there was no other word for it. We had hailed another cab, making our way to the hotel, where our overnight luggage had already been delivered. We checked in, but while I freshened up in my room, and later availed myself of the restaurant for afternoon tea, Holmes sat in the lobby, glaring at the revolving doors. After fetching a book from my room, I waited with him. I had seen him in such a state before and, even though his earlier behaviour had been unfathomable, nothing good would come of pressing the point, for the time being at least.
Even as I tried to concentrate on the novel, reading the same passages over and over again, I was unable to shake my own unease. The reason I had reacted so badly to his outburst was that I recognised some truth in his words, truth that I had been unwilling to accept sitting opposite John. The man’s body was simply wrong, mismatched even. The length of the arms compared to his torso, the width of his shoulders to the waist. At first, I had put such idiosyncrasies down to an unknown trauma on the battlefield. The scarring. The hunch. The obvious damage to the brain.
Mrs Stevens had chided me for sitting in silence during the interview, but in all honesty, I had been fighting the urge to run. I was incapable of articulating it at first. There was, however, a sense that we were in the presence of someone – of something – unnatural. As I sat there, rooted to my seat, I had told myself not to be so stupid. I had merely been disturbed by those long sterile corridor
s, and the tension of being in a room with a man in shackles, a man who was obviously not in his right mind. I had been in similar places before, had even sat in front of similar men, but my skin crawled as if infested with lice and I could feel a scream building in my chest. I was fascinated and frustrated in equal measure by my reaction, not understanding where it came from – until Holmes had ranted on that thankfully empty street, appalling and no doubt scaring Mrs Stevens; until he had forced me to utter those dreadful words:
Of a corpse.
And that had been the truth of it. The skin. The eyes. The broken veins. If I had seen them on the mortuary slab, I would have flinched not at all, but to see them animated, the black lips smiling and snarling, spittle running down John’s chin…
In that moment, on that street, I knew that, implausibly, unimaginably, we had been in the presence of a living cadaver. Worse than that. An amalgam of cadavers. A patchwork devil.
Everything I thought I knew about medicine, about science, had been turned on its head with that single admission. And it terrified me.
So, sitting in the lobby, silently accompanying Holmes in his vigil, I put it out of my mind, denying that the thought had even occurred. It had been a momentary lapse of reason, a fevered fancy. Whether or not Holmes was willing to admit it, we were no longer the men we had been when we first met all those years ago, in the prime of our lives. My wife had been right to pour scorn on this silly adventure.
All I wanted was to go home.
The revolving doors at the entrance turned, as they had turned all morning. Beside me, Holmes remained still. Yet, when Mrs Stevens stepped into the lobby, he sat forward in his seat, silent but alert.
Unlike my friend, I stood as she approached, her face a tight mask. She took a seat across from mine. I sat down again, even as Holmes held her in his level but expectant gaze.
To her credit, she stared straight back, like a cobra staring into the eyes of its charmer. Only once did her eyes shoot across to me before looking almost instantaneously back at Holmes, her tight lips twitching before she spoke a single sentence: “Ellie Grimshaw was engaged to be married.”
“To a man called Danny,” Holmes said softly. It was not a question.
Mrs Stevens gave the curtest of nods. “Daniel Blake. He worked on the canal, before volunteering for service.”
“But Daniel is not the man who accosted her in Hulme.”
“So she insists.”
Holmes sat back, falling silent again.
“So how did he know the name?” Mrs Stevens asked, her expression troubled. “Why say it?”
“A coincidence?” I suggested, knowing that Holmes would tell me that there was no such thing. He made no response. “Or perhaps Danny was his friend on the Western Front. In his confused state—”
“He returned to find Mr Blake’s intended?” Holmes intoned, finishing my sentence.
“It’s as good a theory as any.”
“Other than that there are no records of ‘John’ ever serving in the war.”
“There was his tattoo,” I pointed out. “You said so yourself. Men had them done in the trenches.”
“As they do in every town in England,” Holmes said. “Did Miss Grimshaw have a photograph of Daniel?”
Mrs Stevens looked shocked. “How did you know—”
“That you would ask? You are an intelligent woman, Mrs Stevens. You will not rest until you understand all of this.”
She looked at Holmes for a second, before reaching into her bag to retrieve a dog-eared photograph. She handed it to Holmes, who gave it a cursory examination before passing it in turn to me. A handsome young man, standing self-consciously in front of the camera, peered back at me. If this had been the same man we’d met today, and who had loomed out of the shadows at Miss Grimshaw, then his mutilation on the fields of France must have been more terrible than any of us previously thought. There was not the slightest resemblance. This was not the Hulme Giant.
I returned the picture to Mrs Stevens, who stowed it safely in her bag.
“All that nonsense, on the street,” she said, looking from one of us to the other. “About cadavers. Corpses. What was it?”
“Thinking aloud,” was Holmes’s only response.
“But you don’t believe it. You can’t. It’s—”
“Horrible?”
“Ludicrous.”
He took a deep breath. “The last week has seen me making one promise after another. Yesterday I promised a woman I would find her sister.”
Mrs Stevens’ eyes narrowed. “Sister? What has that got to do with all this?”
Holmes ignored the question. “Today, I promise you that I shall discover what links the man in that photograph with our friend in the asylum. Whether any of us believe the answer when it is found remains to be seen. In the meantime, I shall write to Dr Dougherty and apologise for my behaviour, imploring that you be allowed to continue working with and for John. I applaud you for your endeavours, Mrs Stevens, and sincerely hope that through them you find peace.”
The lady had left our company less than satisfied, but Holmes had been as good as his word and before running for the train this morning, had written a letter on crisp Palace Hotel notepaper which was duly posted to Prestwich Asylum.
“What now?” I asked as the carriage swayed and rattled on our way back to London.
Holmes considered my question, before letting out a tired breath. From the rings beneath his eyes, I could see that sleep had not come easily to my friend last night, whereas I had fallen into a deep slumber, albeit one plagued by dreams of corpses writhing on mortuary slabs, each cadaver sharing John’s ruined face and calling like birds.
Caw, caw, caw.
“Now, we try to piece together what we have learnt,” Holmes said, “which is still precious little, save for the fact that our assailant at Abberton Hospital is not alone in this world.”
“So you think that he too is, like John, a…” The words trailed off, as I struggled to bring myself to describe the man using the terms Holmes had employed.
“A composite,” the detective said. “Disparate body parts moulded together to form a whole.” He gave a wry chuckle. “Even now, it seems a ridiculous thing to say, but at least it is a theory that finally explains Samuel Pike’s severed hand. We know that Pike met his end two years ago.”
Our conversation in Scotland Yard came flooding back.
“Replantation,” said I. “You believed that the hand had been reattached to Pike’s body.”
“But what if it were not Pike’s body? What if, instead of replantation, it were transplanted onto another arm?”
“One of these patchwork devils.”
“A devil with one foot significantly larger than the other?”
“The footsteps in the dust.”
Holmes sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“The theory matches the facts, and yet is too outlandish for words. Have you any idea of the torment this brings, Watson? All my life I have prided myself on possessing a rational mind, and yet now rational thoughts lead to conclusions which can only be fantasy.”
“Unless…” I began, hardly knowing how I should continue the sentence.
“Unless we have stumbled upon a monumental leap in medical science, whereby suddenly, despite everything we know, such procedures are now a possibility. In which case, our world view is about to be shaken beyond recognition.”
“But for it to happen in a disused hospital?”
“No, that is stretching credulity to its limit. No one could achieve such things in those conditions. If it happened at all, then it happened elsewhere.”
“On the battlefields of France, then? Is that any more plausible?”
“War and innovation go hand in hand. If it were not for trench warfare, would the tank ever have been invented? There was a problem, a stalemate, and science and technology provided the solution.”
“And with aircraft, too,” I pointed out. “Who would have thoug
ht we should see machine guns mounted on biplanes? But surely, Holmes, this is different. Vehicles and weapons are one thing, but the human body? To transplant organs, entire limbs? It’s incredible, not to say terrifying. Holmes, at the beginning of all this, you castigated me for not moving with the times, but when the pace of change is so fast, so unbelievable, how can any of us keep up?”
Holmes did not answer, but instead retreated into a fretful silence. There he stayed, looking out of the window, watching the countryside hurtle past. In that instant, all I wanted to do was to stop, to take a breath, but that seemed as impossible as the thought of sewing together a man as if he were nothing more than a doll.
I just wanted to be at home, to see my wife.
However, hours later, as afternoon became evening, and a cab delivered us back to Cheyne Walk, any thoughts of comfort disappeared. The door to my house was open, a policeman standing guard outside.
While Holmes paid the fare, I flew up the front stairs, bursting through the door. The house was in chaos. The cupboards were open, their contents strewn across the floor next to overturned furniture, my beloved books yanked from their shelves.
I could hear Holmes talking to the policeman at the door, even as I found my wife sitting in the drawing room, in the presence of another officer.
Seeing me, she rose from her seat and flung herself into my arms.
“Whatever has happened?” I asked, addressing the policeman over her shoulder.
Holmes replied for him, appearing at the door. “You have been burgled. Mrs Watson interrupted the perpetrator in the midst of his crime.”
I eased my wife from her embrace and, with what I hoped were comforting hands on her arms, asked her if she were hurt.
“I’m fine, John,” came the shaky reply. “Oh, but you should have seen him.”
“The thief?”
She nodded, tears flowing freely. “He was huge. A giant. Seven, maybe eight foot. And the scars…” She hesitated, and my blood turned to ice at the word. “He had scars all across his face, John. Deep, deep scars.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
FACE TO FACE WITH A MONSTER
