How happy he would be when it was all done and he could deliver the object into Bronislav’s grasp. He was to meet Bronislav at The Doves. Actually, he would rather have met Harkeen there to effect the transfer and pay the money promised, but his master’s explicit instructions necessitated he rendezvous in an unpleasant alleyway near the bridge. With murder now Harkeen’s reward, there was no way he would enter a room at a coffee-house with Harkeen and leave a body behind. One need not be a criminal mastermind to see the folly in that.
No, at The Doves he would meet Bronislav instead.
And then…
Then what?
McBane had sought out Bronislav and sided with him because he believed that the mysterious man really had the power to change the world, to twist the warp and woof of reality with powers unknown to science. Bronislav would institute a new world order, and McBane desired to be part of that brave new world, to be a master, to wear the caestus and hold the whip. He still believed in Bronislav’s intent and his ability to transmute that intent into action. What waned was a belief he would ever be a part of that new order, that he would ever be more to Bronislav than a means to an end, and a disposable one at that.
He sighed and raked his fingers through his hair. Perhaps their meeting at The Doves Coffee-house would be, and should be, their parting. His destiny might lay outside London, assuming he still had a future after his association with Bronislav. Grasping a small hope, he wondered if he might better seek his desires upon the Continent, or among the ancient warrened cities of the Levant, or perhaps even in a great metropolis of America, where corruption was rampant and crime held so many opportunities. Or was he, he wondered, ignorantly standing in the mouth of madness, shrouded by darkness, companioned by death?
McBane peered through the gathering mist, attempting to distract his mind from the unpleasant task before him, or its possible consequences and aftermath.
The unique ornamental façade of the bridge’s terminus on this embankment of the Thames was barely visible in the gaslight. The sweep of the bridge was discernible against the greater blackness of the river. McBane’s eidetic memory spewed forth such minutiae about Hammersmith Bridge as would be unknown and useless to the masses: first erected in 1827, designed by Mr Tierney Clarke, first bridge to span the Thames based upon the suspension principle, the original replaced just some years ago, christened in 1887 by Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence. Memories of yellowed news cuttings told him the new bridge was of sounder construction, but unimproved in its suspension design and its roadway not wider than its original twenty feet.
In times of anxiety, McBane often retreated into his filing cabinet mind, It was an odd trait of his, but the more trivial the fact the greater solace he seemed to draw from it, as if he were erecting a bulwark of facts, a redoubt constructed of the information that had become his life. His attention was suddenly taken by the appearance of two figures moving under the gaslamps on the Lower Mall Road, one tall and slender, the other nearly as massive as Harkeen and carrying a package—Holmes and Challenger. McBane felt neither sympathy nor regret, but it was most unfortunate these two men had to die. Their deaths would be a greater blow against society than Harkeen's would be a boon, but hey had been drawn into a struggle against Bronislav, and their deaths were absolutely necessary for the ultimate fruition of his plans.
No compunction against murder, true, but, still the deaths of such men, with whom he felt more commonalities than differences, grated upon his sensibilities. If things had gone differently in his life, perhaps he might have even walked at their sides. But he was who he was, and they were who they were; both had chosen the paths upon which they journeyed, and neither could escape the doom before then.
As he watched from his vantage point, he observed the two figures approach the terminus of the bridge, then pause, looking about. He wondered how Bronislav had lured them to this point in space and time. Certainly it could not have been anything complicated, for Bronislav’s strength, despite his great intellect, did not reside in the formulation of plans and designs. McBride would have felt more confident about the situation had Bronislav left everything to him. As it was, he felt a certain lack of control, and perhaps that, more than anything else, was the source of the anxiety plaguing him.
The men at the bridge waited.
In hiding, Harkeen waited.
Watching, McBane waited, barely daring to draw a breath.
A luminescence gathered in the mist above the bridge, a play of subtle light and shadow that had nothing to do with the feeble gaslamps. It recalled to mind the phenomena sailors termed St Elmo’s Fire, the ragged spheres of light that played upon mast-tops and were often taken as omens. Strands of pale fire writhed and the crawling shadows inside began to coalesce into definite and terrible shapes, reaching outward. If the play of light and shadow was accompanied by any noise, it was not discernible to McBane.
It was, McBane thought, as if a portal were forming between this world and…another.
Something was emerging, McBane realized, something summoned from that dark realm in which Bronislav so easily walked, a realm in which McBane had always wanted to believe but never had, till now. The shadow creature, huge now, stretched forth limbs that had no basis in mundane biology.
As the two men at the base of the bridge took note of the danger above them, the sound of gunfire, split the night. Then McBane swore bitterly—the fool Harkeen had emerged from his hiding place, drawn by the sound of revolvers being discharged. A long knife, what might have passed for a gladius, the short sword of a Roman gladiator, in a smaller hand glinted under the gaslamps and the cold fire above.
Challenger suddenly ripped the covering from the package he carried. He lit a lucifer and ignited a scintillating fuse. A half-dozen men swarmed up from the dock alongside the bridge and began firing weapons at the creature. Challenger threw the explosive. A massive roar split the night. The shadow-beast, which had seemed little affected by bullets, was engulfed in fire.
Men shouted but those petty sounds were lost in a keening cry such as could have come from no earthly throat.
More shots were fired, but not at the beast. Harkeen tottered in his charge toward his prey. He staggered under the impacts of bullets fired by the operatives that Holmes had obviously secreted aboard the steam launch. As tenacious as he was stupid, Harkeen kept on, intent on completing his perceived task.
A mere half-dozen bullets would not have been sufficient to kill Harkeen, McBane realized amidst the chaotic thoughts assaulting his mind. In the end, it was not the volley of gunfire that brought the huge assassin to his demise. A flaming limb grasped him just before being withdrawn into that rapidly diminishing vortex.
Harkeen was gone.
The creature of darkness vanished, driven away by the defense mounted by the men. Whether or not the flames of the explosion had delivered it a mortal wound, it had returned to the demesne from which it had been called. Nothing remained to prove it had ever existed, except the unworldly scent of charred alien flesh.
Though numb of mind from what he had witnessed, McBane realized their plan, Bronislav’s plan, had fallen through. Somehow Holmes had known it was a trap.
Yes, Bronislav’s plan, not his. But McBane knew he would be held accountable for its failure.
Harkeen had been his choice.
Still, McBane told himself, all was not lost. The situation could still be saved. Already he was devising plots and machinations that might bring the idol into his master’s possession. Not his plan, he would point out, but here is what you should do, Mr Bronislav, here is how to salvage the situation. The failure of a plan that was not McBane’s might actually work to prove his worth to Bronislav, he hoped, might serve to reveal the sagacity of leaving all future details for operations in his capable hands.
Yes, that was it, the path to follow. Bronislav was an intelligent man and would not break the chain of logic McBane was forging even as he turned away from the debacle of Bronislav’s mak
ing. Resolved to make the best of a bad situation, he hurried away to keep his appointment at The Doves.
“What was it Holmes?” Challenger demanded. “What was that damned thing?”
“If you were to ask these Pinkerton operatives now, they might tell you it was the devil,” Holmes replied, leaning against one of the bridge’s trusses. “Ask them tomorrow, and they might deny they saw anything at all. Such is the weakness and strength of the ordinary man’s mind.”
“I shall never forget what I saw, nor shall you,” Challenger accused. “Was it really what it seemed, a demon called forth from the netherworlds?”
“In the past, when the Church held sway and men’s fates were still the province of gods, it might have been described as such,” Holmes admitted. “But this is the age of science. Men have not completely put aside their gods, but they no longer define the universe by the wills of divine or infernal beings. Science has taken the world for its own, as you tried to convince poor Wilkins, but physicists like Planck, Tesla and Einstein are also appropriating heaven and hell, though they would no doubt deny it.”
“How can you accept what we both saw as part of reality?” Challenger said. “The mind rebels…”
“Which is why these men will recall little of what manifested itself here, and will deny what they do recall,” Holmes pointed out. “They defend the views they hold as truth through the mechanisms of denial and self-induced amnesia. Men who assert themselves in this world by means of their intellects and define it by logic and deductive reasoning do not have that luxury. Men, such as you and I, cannot simply deny our eyes, nor can we explain it away by calling it either god or demon. Were we savages, primitive but not ignorant, as you so often point out, and were to behold for the first time a railroad train or one of Germany’s dirigible airships, others of our tribe might worship it, but we would study it and eventually derive its true nature. Such is the situation now. Our fellow tribesmen might want to worship or exorcise the beast, but we must admit its mortality, and from that mortality deduce the existence of worlds unseen.”
After a very long moment, Challenger nodded. “And that which man calls magic and the occult…”
“Realms perceived through a glass darkly,” Holmes explained. “As if all we knew of France was what we might discern from peering across the Channel through a telescope possessing warped lenses. Heretofore, such observations have been made solely by unreliable observers like Crowley and Bronislav, using whatever crude instruments as were devised by the intuitive talents of the Ancients. That, of course, will change as we progress through the Twentieth Century and science begins a systematic investigation of electricity and whatever other energies might exist beyond the ken of our limited senses.”
“Such admiration for scientific disciplines beyond chemistry and biology,” Challenger mused. “Perhaps you will apply yourself to the study of astronomy.”
Holmes scowled. “Even in an age driven by science I doubt I shall ever care whether the sun orbits the earth, or the reverse.”
“I see,” Challenger said, nodding bemusedly. “What next, Holmes? Now that we and Bronislav have tipped our hands towards each other, what shall we do?”
“The next step,” Holmes replied, “is to seek out Chief Inspector Durant. By now he should be ready to redeem himself in the eyes of his superiors.”
Chapter Eleven
Laslo Bronislav did not look back as he left The Doves Coffee-house. Nothing in his demeanor or carriage indicated anything was amiss or that he was in a hurry.
The beclouding mesmerism with which he afflicted the mind of the serving lad had worked perfectly, and still was. He had stood by blindly while that fool McBane died. With any amount of luck, the police would fix the blame on the lad, taking his vacant memory as proof of a guilty conscience. Despite McBane’s earlier assertions to the contrary, the police of London were just as incompetent as its criminal element, as far as Bronislav was concerned.
It was unfortunate that McBane had to die, but what choice did Bronislav have? He gave the man every chance to prove himself worthy of association, but in the end McBane was just another stupid criminal. Bronislav blamed himself. He should have known better. Others had tried to walk the dark path upon which he journeyed, and they too had become worm-food. Still, McBane had seen Bronislav’s work with a lucidity the others had lacked, and that quality alone should have given him a chance to succeed.
True, the plan had been of Bronislav’s own devising, but the responsibility for its success remained with McBane. Harkeen had been a man of McBane’s choosing. Had he not broken from cover before the Devourer had dispatched Holmes and Challenger, the outcome might have gone another way. Harkeen’s impetuousness had obviously tilted the game in favor of the consulting detective and his companions.
Companions? That was disturbing, Bronislav mused as he made his way back toward his Kensington abode. How Holmes had discovered the nature of the trap was perplexing, but he suspected it was due to some lapse on McBane’s part. He had put too much stock in McBane’s self-aggrandizing, had let him have too much of a hand in planning the acquisition of the M’tollo idol. Obviously, McBane’s bumbling had somehow alerted the detective to the idol’s importance, probably when he encountered them outside the British Museum. But the real question was how much Holmes actually knew about Laslo Bronislav.
He gave Crowley’s name to Whitecliff as a jest, but that irritating bug knew nothing about him. Had his association with McBane been more costly than he knew? McBane claimed anonymity in the gangs, but who could say if that was true?
Bronislav quickened his pace. Normally he might have enjoyed the rather rural nature of the path once free of King Street and the Hammersmith Station, communing with the darkness he always sensed at the edges of reality. He was ever aware of the furtive beings still haunting the places where mankind’s encroachment was not complete, but this morning his mind was in a turmoil. He was not afraid, for he feared nothing, neither of humanity’s abode nor the unsuspected realms beyond, but his sudden concerns about the extent of Holmes’ knowledge made him more wary.
He had had enough of these games. No more of the intricate machinations of which McBane had been so fond. He would take the most direct route, just as he had done to wrest the idol from its savage caretakers in the first place, hiring a dark-souled man who would kill as many people as necessary to steal it. It made no difference whether it was in the heart of the Maldives or in the wilds of the most populous city on earth. In fact, the closeness of the human animal in London might be an asset, as it had proven when his otherworldly agent had slain slatternly dollymops in the proper geographic pattern back in ’88. If it became necessary for him to loose floodgates of blood, he would do so, for it would ultimately swirl away into the sewers of London without a trace, quickly forgotten by people who did not want to remember.
He felt somewhat better now, more confident after his rationalization of the situation, at least as it pertained to Sherlock Holmes and Professor George Edward Challenger. As to the trio of Orms that had taken up residence in the brackish reaches of the Thames, that was another matter entirely.
He would have to do something about them, somehow.
Vanquished gods were always so troublesome.
Perhaps there was some way they could be put to use.
Chief Inspector Winston Durant of Scotland Yard signaled his men to move forward, but not to approach too closely. He pressed to his ear a device connected to a copper wire that vanished into a nearby sewer opening. At his side was George Dunning, a stout-shouldered lantern-jawed representative of the Home Office, a silent man who never revealed whether anything pleased him or not. At the moment, however, this agent of His Majesty’s Government, who could hold his career in his hands, was of no concern to Durant. His attention was focused on the red brick building in Bermondsey, off Union Road, across the Thames from the night-shrouded London Docks, by all accounts, the site of some furtive activities, both ashore and upon the ri
ver.
He had hoped Sherlock Holmes would be here to see the end of the chase, for it had been due in large part to information provided by him that Durant had come to this point. Others in the Yard regarded Holmes as a meddler, a publicity-monger, a dilettante, but Durant was not one of them. True, he had at one time let his judgement of Holmes be colored by the opinions of his then peers and superiors, but time and association had changed him The very fact that none other than he and Holmes knew the part the detective had played in this vital investigation, and at Holmes’ own insistence, was all the proof Durant needed of Holmes’ intentions.
All the suspects were inside the building, but he held back. He wanted to capture as many as possible despite all that had been done against the nation and those of Durant’s personal acquaintance. He did not want this to become a blood bath for either side. Besides, he was not about to let the Separatists easily have any martyrs. So he waited, listening for the soft clack of an electric switch that would indicate the cellar wall had been broached.
Then it came, the signal from the sappers loaned from the Royal Corps of Engineers and the chemist recommended by Holmes. He motioned for his men to close in; at that moment, a loud report sounded simultaneously from the building before them. The ground beneath their feet shuddered. Acrid smoke billowed outward and with it came droves of Irish sympathizers, into the waiting arms of the police and military. A few shots were fired, but in the smoke and confusion no one was hit.
Enclosed police wagons moved out of the darkness of the branching lanes and the gasping Dynamiters were tossed in.
Masked troops entered the building to make a complete sweep. The force that had gone in through the sewers came out, several prisoners in tow.
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