“That you, guv?” a low hoarse voice asked.
“Over here, Bagby,” Holmes said softly. “I hoped I would find you about.”
“Ah, there you are, Mr Holmes,” the newcomer said as he drew near. He was short, bald and garbed in sooty garments; he also smelled foul, even for the nether half of London. “It’s a bloody black night, Mr Holmes.”
“Indeed it is, in more ways than one,” Holmes agreed. He said to his companions: “Mr Bagby is a…collector, of sorts, quite well acquainted with the world beneath our feet.”
Bagby laughed. “Collector, Mr Holmes, that’s a right good one. Scavengin’ it is, down in the drains, and a tosher I am, looking for what otherwise would get washed into the briny. Course, I can’t say I been in me haunts much of late, it being passing strange.”
“How do you mean?” Holmes asked. “Have you seen anything odd in the sewers?”
“Not seen,” Bagby admitted. “But heard down where the night is eternal and blacker than black. They say it ain’t safe to walk these streets, but I’m telling you it ain’t no safer down below.”
“Think you could show us one of your ways down?” Holmes asked.
Bagby rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “To tell you truthfully, Mr Holmes, I ain’t been down in the sewers nearly a fortnight. There was something that came too close, made me think I was near to being brown bread, and I ain’t been back since. Those underground channels have always been my coin, but of late I’ve been setting by much more meager stores from rubbish piles. A poor living it be, sir, but a living what leaves you breathing.”
“Tell me, my good man, did you see anything of tentacles?” Sherrington asked.
“Daft,” the Brigadier muttered.
The scavenger Bagby look at Holmes’ companions as if seeing them for the first time. “Tentacalies? Like a devil-fish? Naw, I ain’t seen anything of that, but I heard things sliding and splashing in the darkness, didn’t I? Felt something monstrous-huge passing, didn’t I?” The man shuddered. “I ain’t gone back, and not gonna.”
“Not even for a sovereign?” Holmes asked.
Fear and greed warred across Bagby’s coarse features, and in less than a moment it was clear which emotion had won out, the gleam in his gimlet eyes clear to all even in that oppressive and murky atmosphere.
“Well, I wouldn’t do it for no one else,” Bagby justified as he took the proffered coin. He glanced at the trio dubiously, noting that of the three only Holmes was suitably garbed for a journey into the foetid netherworld of London, the other two dressed as if they were off to the bloody opera. “All three of ye?”
“Rather!” Sherrington said enthusiastically.
“Don’t be impertinent, fellow!” the Brigadier growled.
“All right, all right,” Bagby said hastily. “No need to get your knickers in a twist. I told Mr Holmes I’ll take you down, and down I’ll take ye. Come on, then.”
“I should try to find Archie,” the Brigadier said.
“If your friend is following, in his own way, the same trail we are, then we might encounter him at some point,” Holmes pointed out. “Even if we do not, however, the lives of the many will usually outweigh the lives of the few.”
“Or the one,” the Brigadier said, frowning. A harsh reality, he knew, but one the logic of which he could not dispute. “Very well, then. Let us do what we came to do.”
Sherrington glanced at the Brigadier. The old soldier’s face did not now carry the expression of a man who thought himself on an expedition in search of nothing more than a legend, but Sherrington held his silence.
Holmes and the Brigadier, being the strongest of the group, took charge of the bulky listening device, while Bagby was given care of the two bulls-eye lanterns, which he lit with a Bryant and May lucifer, then closed the apertures. Sherrington was wondering what to do with himself when the driver handed down the canvas bag Holmes had brought out with the other gear.
He gave Holmes a quizzical look.
“Do be gentle with that bag, Sherrington,” Holmes cautioned.
“Oh?”
“A dozen sticks of dynamite,” Holmes explained, “courtesy the Grennels.”
“Oh,” he said, then stared at Holmes with wide eyes. “Oh!”
“If you are correct, Sherrington,” Holmes pointed out, “then we shall surely need more than the revolvers carried by you and the Brigadier.”
Sherrington nodded, but the logic of Holmes’ argument did not change the fact he was carrying a bag of dynamite. Going against supernatural horrors and terrors from beyond the grave was one thing, but carrying explosives was quite another. He forced a smile.
“You can count on me, Mr Holmes.”
“Good man.”
IV
They followed the scavenger Bagby into the Whitechapel murk till they reached a tumbled ruin, dilapidated even for this neglected region of London. The collapse of the veneer revealed brickwork of much more ancient workmanship, easily Elizabethan, perhaps earlier, Sherrington thought as the feeble lights from the shuttered lanterns flashed over it. The antiquarian had little time to consider its elder nature as Bagby led them deeper into the blackness. They adjusted the lanterns’ shutters, exposing a brick-strewn chamber. Quickly, Bagby cleared some carefully arranged debris, exposing the way down into the underworld of London.
“This way is perishing old, it is,” Bagby said as a weathered set of steps was revealed. “Makes those Romans look like babes, don’t it, and even them blood-drinking Druids newcomers. Follow me close, gents, and follow me, all silent like.”
Sherrington saw carvings incised into dank walls, effaced by time but still recognizable as gods and glyphs, though it was unclear what hand, or other appendage, could have wrought them in some primal era. He cursed the urgency of their mission, and though he vowed to return at some future time, he doubted it was likely he could rediscover this place on his own, or even that he had much of a future to look forward to.
The sound of rushing water and the rising stink told him they were approaching an artery of the sewer system, but it was equally clear this way had never been dug by any of London’s nightmen or maintained by flushers. It was an ancient place found by this tosher, a secret way with a wall broken through to where he picked his living from the ebb and flow of the city. As they entered the sewer proper, the miasmic air that rose from the clotted waters assailed the senses, and Sherrington was struck by the incongruity of treading the foetid river’s narrow shore clad in evening clothes and carrying a bag of dynamite. He would have laughed, but it was all he could do to keep from choking. It was no place for a dapper man about town, a scholar of the arcane and occult, but, he reflected, this was a sticky situation of his own making, and hardly the first.
When they reached a rather small opening in the wall, Bagby the tosher set down a lantern, then hesitated at length, his expression giving every indication of a man at odds. He obviously did not want to venture back into the city’s drainage system, but he had taken a sovereign to do so. Honor or greed, the result was the same.
He crawled into the murkiness beyond, Holmes following after, handing a lantern through. The Brigadier pushed the box to Holmes, then crawled through the ragged opening with an agility that belied his years. Lastly came Sherrington, dragging the bag of dynamite after him, carefully.
Like most Londoners, Sherrington had never ventured into the Capitol’s netherworld, indeed had never given it a thought. He had, however, read Hugo’s Les Miserables, so an attempt to envision the realm of sewers would result in a high romanticized construction of murmuring waters, shimmering lights, mysterious shadows, walls encrusted with glowing lichen, and chilling breezes. How wrong he had been—the only light was the pathetic beams from their lanterns, which Holmes adjusted to their smallest apertures; there was very little movement of air, and that foetid air made his eyes burn; the water moving by more gurgled and sucked than murmured; and although the brick walls were indeed heavily encrusted they did not glo
w, nor did he think it was lichen. As for the smell assaulting him, he had no words…not in any language, living or dead.
Bagby breathed deeply. Indeed, the foul atmosphere seemed to actually revive and invigorate the tosher.
Setting the bag against the wall, Sherrington joined Holmes and the Brigadier as they unpacked the underwater sensing apparatus and lowered the metal disk into the flowing water. The meters over the battery cells glowed a faint amber. Several dials jumped and at the same time they heard a series of strange unearthly sounds from a opening covered by a rectangle of finely perforated metal.
“My word,” Sherrington murmured.
Holmes motioned him to silence and peered intently at the dials and meters. Clicks, moans, and whistles sounded softly, and behind them was another sound, arhythmical yet regular, with a tonality not found in nature, full of menace, surrounding them.
“I have never anything of the like,” the Brigadier murmured.
“A world beyond the perception of our ordinary senses,” the detective said.
He had always considered himself the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind, possessed of the ability to observe that which other men generally ignored. He had often scorned his fellow humans, occasionally aloud, for their inability to deduce from observations that which was painfully obvious to him. It was a blow to his ego and a shock to his mind there existed realms beyond his ken which could yet have some effect upon the workaday world of ordinary mortals.
“Enlightening,” Holmes murmured.
Holmes, listening intently as he watched the dials, motioned for Bagby and the Brigadier to carry the device. The three men moved carefully along the ledge. Sherrington started after them, bearing one of the hooded lanterns, then darted back for the satchel over which he had been given charge. Hurrying to catch up, he almost collided with the trio which had come to a sudden halt.
“Holmes, did you hear it?” the Brigadier whispered urgently. “In with those strange sounds?”
Holmes nodded. “Yes, a human voice, too faint to make any sense of it, but definitely human.”
“I say, could it be your chum, Archie?” Sherrington offered.
The Brigadier frowned. “What the blazes would he be doing down…” He paused. “Yes, if would be just like the impetuous arse, but, truthfully, it is too faint to tell.”
“Many others have vanished,” Holmes pointed out softly.
“You think they may still be alive?” Brigadier Knight asked. “Down here in the darkness?”
“It is unlikely,” Holmes admitted, especially for those taken from the streets at the beginning, but it has been my experience that when no body has been found, there may not yet be a death.”
The Brigadier nodded. “I hope you’re right, Mr Holmes.”
Suddenly, something splashed in the foul water, just beyond the range of the lamp. A low growl sounded from out the darkness. Sherrington turned the lantern and opened its shutter, but all they saw were ripples across the flowing black water.
Bagby made a fitful choking sound and backed away, vanishing the way they had come, taking one of the lanterns.
“No, let him go, and remain silent,” Holmes said as his two companions started to protest.”
As Holmes and Brigadier Knight continued to listen to the odd sounds emanating from the sewers Sherrington kept watch around them, slowly sweeping the darkness with the shuttered lamp, holding it up and out in one hand while his other now and then lightly touched the revolver in his coat pocket.
“It is moving away from us,” Holmes murmured.
The Brigadier lifted the case.
Sherrington moved to assist.
“You have enough with the lantern and the satchel,” the old man pointed out.
“But…”
“Don’t let the white hair fool you, young man.”
“Quickly,” Holmes urged, quietly but tensely.
Sherrington would have protested further, but he was silenced by the sound of ripping fabric, the upper sleeves of the Brigadier’s jacket bursting as tendons flexed and reacted to the heavy burden.
“Being old does not equate with being feeble,” the Brigadier said, fixing Sherrington with a baleful glare. “Once, in the Khyber Pass, I…”
“Brigadier,” Holmes murmured, edging into darkness.
“Quite right,” the old man muttered, following in Holmes’ slow steps. “Come, young man, light the way. And don’t shirk that blasted satchel!”
Sherrington hesitated only long enough to snatch up the bag, but carefully, and followed in the wake of his companions, using the lantern to light the way, but not, at Holmes’ orders, with an excess amount of illumination.
The trio had proceeded just over a hundred yards when Holmes again indicated they halt. Brigadier Knight crouched beside the case and breathed softly but audibly, perspiration beading his brow. Holmes settled to one knee, still listening intently, watching the fluctuations of the dials. Sherrington eased the bag to the rocky floor, reassured himself by a quick touch of his revolver, then swept the blackness with the tiny beam of light.
“Swing the light about forty-five degrees to the right,” Holmes instructed softly. “Increase the opening of the aperture.”
Sherrington nodded, even though he knew no one was looking, would not be able to see him if they were. The pale beam widened as it swept across the flowing black waters.
“Look,” Sherrington whispered, pointing into the clotted night.
The opposite wall was shattered, a ragged hole revealing an even deeper darkness. At the deep fissure, the waters of the sewer commingled with water just as polluted, but its flow unrestrained by any construction of man.
“The lost river,” Holmes murmured.
“You were correct then,” Sherrington said. “The beast…”
The Brigadier harrumphed.
“…or whatever,” Sherrington continued, “is using a lost river to exit the Thames and navigate under Whitechapel.”
“More than that,” Holmes replied. “Most of the vanishings are on the course of the underground river, but not all. Now we know why, and can see the proof of it.”
“Indeed,” the Brigadier agreed. “Quite apparent.”
Sherrington frowned, then his countenance brightened. “Ah, I see, the bricks have collapsed inward…”
“Not collapsed,” Holmes corrected.
“Ah, Shudde M’ell pushed through the from the river into the sewers, how very remarkable!” the young man exclaimed in a rush of excitement. Then he paused, frowned and swept the lantern all about them. “That means that Shudde M’ell now has access to…and could even now…oh dear. Vexing, chaps, very vexing.”
Holmes stiffened as a dissident cacophony burst from the device. At the same moment a low, gurgling growl sounded from out of the darkness. Though there was no way of telling from which direction the dread sound emanated, it was clear to all that it was approaching them, and quickly.
“Might be time to ready a defense, don’t you think, Holmes?”
Silence.
“Holmes?”
The Brigadier and Sherrington looked to their companion, but the detective seemed totally absorbed in the sounds manifested by the listening device, entranced by a secret world previously sensed only dimly with coarse gifts endowed by an enigmatic providence. Suddenly, Holmes straightened from the device, pushed it away and turned to faced the unrelenting darkness.
“This way!” he yelled, “Follow the sound of my voice! Come toward us quickly and do not falter come what may!”
“Holmes…” the Brigadier and Sherrington started to say.
“Brigadier, call out to your friend, with all your breath!” Holmes gasped. “Gentlemen, your weapons! Sherrington, pray pass me that bag with deliberate urgency!”
Both Sherrington and the Brigadier, who was himself a leader of men, responded to Holmes’ sharp commands without question or hesitation. Sherrington slung the satchel across to Holmes, and they both pulled th
eir revolvers. The moan of a great beast echoed from out the clotted subterranean night, louder now, and Sherrington and the Brigadier cast quick dubious glances toward each other. They aimed their weapons into the darkness, Sherrington swept the lantern to and fro, and the Brigadier did as Holmes had told him, though he did not understand the reason.
“This way, come this way!” Brigadier Knight bellowed with a voice accustomed to cleaving the fog or war and being heard from one end of a thunderous battlefield to the other. “Follow the sound of my voice! Come here!”
For a moment, he thought he heard an answering cry, then was sure of it, small desperate voices echoing out of the darkness like lost souls clamoring for salvation from the nethermost pit of the Inferno. As he recognized the strongest of the voices, a roar filled the length of the sewer, a bestial response to the Brigadier’s calls.
“Archie, come this way, you blasted fool!” the Brigadier shouted. “This way!”
“Brigadier, is that…” a faint voice called, weak with fatigue but now buoyed by hope. The words, however, were lost in a monstrous roar and titanic splashings.
“Steady!” Holmes cautioned.
From the corners of their eyes, the Brigadier and Sherrington saw Holmes readying the explosives, though they could spare their companion but scant attention. Sherrington had joined the Brigadier in exhorting the captives of the beast, even as they trained their weapons into the darkness with unwavering steadiness.
Two events occurred simultaneously. A pale face appeared on the other side of the sewer, joined by a half-dozen others, stepping into the lantern’s light through the ragged opening between the sewer and the swift flow of the lost river beneath Whitechapel. At the same moment the black water of the sewer boiled furiously and a writhing mass of black tentacles erupted into the foetid air. The flashing appendages glistened as if covered with dripping oil and surged toward the invaders of its realm.
Two revolvers barked as with a single voice, spitting a volley of large caliber slugs. The bullets tore into the rubbery flesh. The attack elicited howls of pain and rage but slowed the creature’s advance only momentarily. The pause, however brief, provided Sherlock Holmes opportunity enough to fling two sputtering sticks of dynamite at the beast.
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