Warlock Holmes--A Study in Brimstone

by G. S. Denning

  “Calm down, fellers,” Joseph pleaded. “It’s just a damn donut.”

  “No. It ain’t. It’s the bestest, most perfect donut what ever there was. I named her Lucy an’ I love her an’ that’s all there is to it,” Jefferson Hope insisted.

  “Crazy, that’s what you are,” Enoch Drebber said, but they had reached that same familiar impasse they did every night. In the end there was nothing for it but to hunch down into their bedrolls and go to sleep.

  The night was not four hours along and the moon not yet so high in the eastern sky when Joseph Strangerson awoke suddenly to find a hand clapped across his mouth. For a moment he thought to scream, but gazing up he saw the wide, earnest eyes of Enoch Drebber. He had a warning look about him and held one finger to his lips to signal silence. Drebber withdrew his hand and Joseph sat up.

  “What? What’s goin’ on?”

  “I mean t’ have that donut,” said Enoch.

  “That ain’t nothin’ but crazy,” Joseph said, and began to settle once more into his bedroll.

  But Drebber shook him bodily and insisted, “I mean t’ have it, I tell you! An’ you’re goin’ to help me.”

  “The hell I am,” whispered Joseph, trying to pull himself free.

  “You’ve got them light fingers,” Drebber said. “Sure, I’m gonna eat that donut, but he’s sleepin’ on it again and I ain’t got the art t’ git it without wakin’ him.”

  The two men looked over at Jefferson Hope. There he lay, with the peace of angels on his face and his arms curled around the pink box, which lay half under his bearded cheek. Joseph Strangerson heaved a sigh of resignation, like a man condemned as he mounts the gallows steps. He had not the bravery nor the brawn of his two companions, but he could see how this would all play out and he wanted it done with. He drew his long, thin knife from its sheath and crept towards the sleeping form of Jefferson Hope. Silently as he could, he slit the thin strip of clear tape that held the box top closed and cut down both corners of the box, from top to bottom. He scarce dared to breathe as he folded back the side of the box to reveal the precious wax-paper packet within. With steady hands, he pressed the scrubby remnants of a half-burned bush into the box, alongside Lucy, so as to stop it collapsing when the pastry was withdrawn. Then he slipped the long blade underneath the donut and worked it silently out, over the labor of some fifteen minutes. At last he held the tiny packet, balanced on the flat of his knife. He turned and held it out to Drebber, who snatched it and retreated some twenty yards or so from the fading ring of firelight. Joseph wiped his brow; he had not realized how freely he’d been sweating—a practice that could prove fatal in a dry waste such as this. Keeping his footfalls as soft as he could, he followed Drebber away from the camp.

  Already, Drebber was pulling at the paper with quivering fingers. His eyes were wild and fearful. With every crinkle the wax paper released, his eyes shot back to the sleeping form of Jefferson Hope, terrified that the telltale paper had betrayed him to the sleeping giant. Joseph could not help licking his lips as he peered over Drebber’s shoulder at the stolen treasure. Fold by fold, the paper yielded, until at last the naked form of Lucy lay before them, bathed in moonlight. She was half crushed and all stale. Nevertheless, the sight of this forbidden delicacy drew a gasp of awe from the two men.

  “Half,” Joseph dared to whisper. “I want half.”

  Drebber’s eyes flashed with fury and greed, but only for an instant. Wait… yes. Yes. Let him eat. It was the taste of donut Drebber craved, not the quantity. Far better to have a confederate. Should this crime rouse the fury of Jefferson Hope, he would rather it was a two-against-one argument. Here in the wasteland, a man was his own law. Strangerson wasn’t much of a man, but half a donut was a small price for an ally, here where they all slept so vulnerable, beneath the wild sky. Let him eat.

  Eat it, Joseph Strangerson, and whatever fate it brings on me, you will share, as sure as we shared Lucy.

  Enoch Drebber voiced none of this; his eyes drifted to the knife in Strangerson’s hand. It was not the instrument of a man, being pearl-handled and delicate of blade, and Drebber had no fear of it, unarmed though he was. His mind traveled different paths.

  “You split. I choose.”

  Joseph bent over the moon-drenched donut and, for a moment, his nerve failed him. He stopped, his blade trembling in the air above Lucy. Finally, conscious of what Drebber must think of him, he leaned in to do the deed. Strange, but as the blade slid into Lucy’s soft flesh, he felt the hand of fate close on him. Othello must have felt it at Desdemona’s last gasp. Hannibal, as he watched the Roman lines close at Zama. What had he done? Such a simple thing, but so permanent. No mortal hand had the power to mend that cleft; the closer side of the donut had been cut right through. Even if he were to put it back, Hope would know what he had done. There was but one way now: forward. The second cut was easier. He made one half noticeably larger, as if claiming the smaller share would lessen his blame.

  With a muffled laugh of triumph, Drebber pounced upon the larger half and ran with it still further into the darkness. Strangerson picked up his half and followed. The two of them ate, already laughing, already reminiscing about their crime, not one minute past. To one another, they painted it as boyish mischief, a simple prank. For a few moments this lie comforted them, as their white teeth tore the flesh of Lucy. Yet moments fly fast in that desolate and open land; there is nothing to hold them in—no rocks, no trees, no buildings to stop them drifting away into the vastness. There, amongst the crumbs, the sky began to press down on the two men. They sat in silence for almost half an hour. Their joy faded. The deed remained.

  “Let’s leave him,” Drebber said.

  “We can’t!” said Joseph, louder than he meant to. “A man can’t live alone in a place like this! It’s murder.”

  “It ain’t! Ain’t!” insisted Drebber, wide-eyed and shaking. “Look, we all come into this thing, free to leave whenever we chose. We ain’t abandoning him. It’s only… you leave the group and I leave the group, just at the same time. Tomorrow, you and me, we’ll form a new group, but tonight we’re just quittin’. That’s all.”

  Joseph shook his head. “It ain’t right.”

  “We don’t need him!” Drebber said. “He’s got us all the way out here, that’s what we wanted him for. He don’t know a thing about prospectin’ and that’s a fact. Look, Joseph, look: California’s just over them hills. We kin make it!”

  “I can’t. I just… I can’t.”

  Drebber rocked back on his heels. Strangerson disgusted him sometimes, the weakness of him. Though they were supposed equals in this venture, though Joseph in fact possessed the knowledge of geology they both hoped would make them rich, Drebber knew himself to be the master. He decided to show it.

  “Fine,” he said. “Better this way. You tell him… when he wakes up, you tell him I ate it. Tell him I took it all. Mebbe he won’t look too close at those pretty little slits down the side of the box. Mebbe he won’t know you had a hand in it. Mebbe he won’t notice your tremble or how you hide your eyes from him, all the long years you work together. Mebbe not. Me, I’m strikin’ out on my own.”

  “No. Enoch, no,” Joseph mewled, but Drebber moved off to gather his gear, silently as he could. In the end, Joseph gave in—just as always. Jefferson Hope was a sound sleeper and the two made off that night without waking him. They left him little, only two canteens of water, and those half empty. They took all three horses and the pack mule, as it was Drebber who had paid for them. Strangerson left the knife; he didn’t want it any more, never wanted to look on it. As the two rode off, dreading every clop of every hoof, Joseph Strangerson looked back at the sleeping bulk of Jefferson Hope. He tried to imagine what that form would look like with no meat upon it. Flesh could not bide in a desert such as this. No, this was the land of dry and bleaching bones. Without water or hooves, Strangerson knew, the desert would destroy Hope. The shifting dust would cover their crime. The open sky would never te
ll.

  Let the desert have him.

  12

  A MAN COULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED, BUT JEFFERSON Hope was no longer a man. Love died. Reason died. All the better graces of humankind dried up and perished in him. Though hunger dogged him and thirst was his constant companion, he took no joy in food or water. Hate sustained him. He staggered about the desert, by day and by night, howling for vengeance with Lucy’s empty wrapper clutched in his fist. The beast was all that remained in him. The reaver. Wendigo, the Indians called it.

  Yet he who lives for revenge must find his prey. Madness is blinding; one may not steer by it. Only reason can make a clear path. Thus—not because it was welcome, but because it was needed—thought began to return to him. Jefferson Hope could not say how long he had wandered those wastes, living on scorpion meat and his own tears. It must have been months, maybe years, yet he knew he must leave the cradle of his madness. His destiny lay in the goldfields of California, though that metal did not shine for him now.

  The mountains could not stop him. He crossed to California. There he encountered his first test. Drebber and Strangerson, no fools, had elected to change their names. Nobody knew them here and they abandoned their tarnished identities in favor of a fresh start. Hope had no easy time garnering information. His grief had transformed him totally; he had lost command of the language of man, forgotten the taste of donut.

  Had Drebber and Strangerson hidden in the wild, Hope could have tracked them like a wolf, but men hide amongst men, not trees. Even as the local prospectors and tribes began to whisper of the wild man, Hope began—word by agonizing word—to teach himself to speak again. He never did get it quite right, in those days. Though he always tried to pass himself off as a fellow human, when he did get a tidbit of information, it was never civility that afforded it to him, but fear.

  That first winter after his return to the world of men, he had a breakthrough. He came across a trio of dejected prospectors, on the brink of abandoning their claim. They’d purchased it some months before from a duo from back east. One of the pair had been a geologist, they said, who had been in the territory not two weeks before discovering the vein that made his fortune. He and his partner had worked the claim for some months until, flush with money and tired of their labors, they resolved to head to one of the major cities and set themselves up as outfitters, to profit from the sweat of other hopefuls. These new owners were hot with rage, for having purchased the profitable claim with the last of their monies, they found it had been quite played out. They had no stomach for revenge themselves, but happily told Jefferson Hope that the pair had headed up to ’Frisco in early autumn, under the names Jenoch Strebber and Oseph Dangerson.

  It was a hard and heavy winter that year; many an old squaw, huddled in her tepee, found it to be her last. Yet Jefferson Hope had no care of cold. He did not stop to rest. He no longer slept, except for when exhaustion took its hold and he fell where he stood. Foot by foot, step by step, he made his way north. The earth rejoiced at spring as Jefferson Hope reached his destination, but the man himself took no more comfort from the season of rebirth than he had in the season of death.

  It was in San Francisco that Hope made his first attempts on the lives of his quarry. At first he had trouble nearing them, since they were respectable businessmen with the trappings of money and he was a ravening wild man in three-year-old rags. Only in the rough-hewn docks district was he accepted, so that was where he lodged. He took on work as a dockhand, slowly gaining money for a haircut and respectable clothes. He met his first true friend since the Lucy disaster (and as it turned out, the last one he ever had). It was the self-proclaimed ruler of the United States, Emperor Norton I. Norton allowed Hope to lodge with him for a time, and taught him the streets and customs of San Francisco.

  Once able to blend with the general population, Hope began to hunt again. Drebber and Strangerson were easy to locate—they had opened their own outfitter’s shop—but difficult to slay. Jefferson Hope’s first attempts were artful, but met with no success. A load of lumber, being hoisted to build a new roof, fell and nearly crushed Strangerson, who leapt away at the last moment. Examination of the main hoist rope revealed that it had been cut (how alarmed Strangerson would have been to know it was his own pearl-handled knife that did the deed). Drebber found a bootlace woven in amongst his linguine one day and lucky for him that he had—it was rumored that bootlaces were indigestible and caused sickness or death in anybody unfortunate enough to ingest one.

  In early June 1873, Drebber was very nearly the victim of a strange incident in which a gorilla appeared at the highest point of Lombard Street and began rolling barrels down at the unfortunate people below. Drebber only managed to preserve himself by leaping over the barrels as they rolled towards him. Two days later, the Union Square Theater reported one of their ape costumes missing and Enoch Drebber began to doubt the random nature of these occurrences.

  The final proof came on August 2, when Hope—frustrated at his failed attempts—decided to simply shoot Strangerson down in the street. He bought a derringer from a dockside pawnshop and intercepted Joseph as he walked to work. Hope called Strangerson by name; he wanted his foe to know who it was that killed him and why he must die. Strangerson later recalled the moment when those terrible, angry eyes resolved into a once-familiar face and Jefferson Hope entered his life once more (though he had never disappeared from Strangerson’s guilt-induced night terrors). Hope raised his pistol to fire, but at that very moment, Strangerson was rescued by what appeared to be a small outdoor dining area, packed with grinning patrons, which sped up the hill behind him. Strangerson leapt onto this passing monstrosity and made good his escape on what turned out to be the city’s first cable car—the Clay Street Hill Railroad—on its maiden voyage. Hope fired, but the derringer, like most of its make, carried only two shots and was inaccurate at a range of more than three feet.

  Once again, Drebber and Strangerson fled in the night. Leaving their inferiors to sell their shop and settle affairs, they abandoned their homes at about three that next morning to board the first steamer to Seattle. It didn’t take Hope long to figure out where they had gone and he followed, hot on their heels. By the time he reached that northern town, he was once again short of funds and was compelled to take work as a timber-feller in the hills above the city. Drebber and Strangerson now went armed and took care with their persons, never walking alone, always sitting with their backs to the wall and their eyes on the door in every public establishment they entered. Still, Hope’s attempts grew ever more bold until they were forced to flee Seattle as well.

  So began the merry chase that stretched on for another eight years. From Seattle they fled to Cleveland, from there to Detroit, thence to Pittsburgh, Austin and finally New York. If only they had thought to settle in St. Louis, they would have been safe, for Jefferson Hope would have died of grief if ever he had happened past Hall and Sons’ Bakery. In each city where they landed, Hope pursued menial labor while Drebber and Strangerson sought to expand their trade in the little time they had before their pursuing phantom materialized again and forced their departure.

  Finally, they left the United States, thinking Hope would lack both the funds and the heart to follow them to unfamiliar lands. They first tried their luck in St. Petersburg, after hearing that the burgeoning Russian empire wished to modernize and open trade with the West. Unfortunately for the two pastry thieves, they spoke no Russian and ran headlong into that country’s entrenched conservative values. Outsiders were not welcome. They were there less than a year, struggling to begin a successful trading company, before Hope found them. They could hardly have been more conspicuous. Strangerson, especially, was glad to shake the dust of the place from his boots and flee to Copenhagen.

  From Copenhagen to Paris. From Paris to Barcelona. From Barcelona to Berlin. Here predator and prey parted ways. Drebber and Strangerson fled to Rome. Hope to London. Years of study had taught him well the habits of his quarry—Hope realized Dreb
ber and Strangerson had a predilection for capitals. He also knew they were nearing the end of their patience with the language barrier. London, then. When the pair fled Berlin, Hope ignored their destination. Instead, he installed himself in London and found work as a cabbie. They would come, he knew. They would land here and when they did, this time he would already be on his feet, with a job, the funds to pursue them and knowledge of the terrain. London’s streets are a study in madness, or perhaps randomness, or perhaps the threshold between the two. Nevertheless, with diligence, Jefferson Hope learned the streets well enough. His job took him often to the docks, to train stations, to hotels, and in each of these he asked after his prey. When they came, he would know.

  PART III

  ONCE MORE FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. JOHN WATSON, AND ISN’T THAT A RELIEF?

  13

  THE DRIVE TO SCOTLAND YARD WAS A LONG ONE AT THE best of times. In the middle of the afternoon, through streets bustling with traffic, trade and about six thousand “flower girls” showing off their “wares” it took even longer. Thus, Jefferson Hope finished his tale ere we arrived.

  “As soon as I found they had landed in London, I began to shadow them,” he told us. “I started spending most days and nights near Charpontier’s boarding house. But they took care, as they always did, not to travel alone. That last fateful night, I followed their cab to Euston Station and watched ’em make for the trains. I don’t mind telling you, I was desperate. I couldn’t have them escape me again, for the pressure in my head and heart had grown so intense that I thought I might explode early.”

  At this point, I was forced to intrude myself upon the story and ask, “Now, precisely why are you convinced that you are going to explode?”