Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares

by James Lovegrove

  For a time none of the humans on the quayside moved, too awed and intimidated to do anything but gape at the abomination before us. Then one of the women let out an involuntary gasp of fright, which seemed to break the spell.

  Torrance cried, “We’ve all got barkers, lads. Let him have it!” and he began loosing off shots from his pistol. “This is for all the mates of mine you’ve nobbled, you miserable, misbegotten bludger!” he roared. “You won’t get me like you got them!”

  Sinnott and Creevy added their gunfire to his, creating a veritable blizzard of bullets, all of them aimed point-blank at the great shadowy bulk before us.

  The impact of the shots staggered Baron Cauchemar. Each struck with sufficient force to make him recoil somewhat. For all that, the bullets rebounded off him without causing any apparent harm. I heard the ricochets whizzing off in all directions. One even smacked into the barrels behind which I had not so long ago been sheltered.

  Quickly the guns’ cylinders were spent. The air reeked of cordite.

  Baron Cauchemar remained standing.

  With an oath, Torrance ordered his cronies to attack in person. Both men hesitated.

  “Do as I say, damn you,” Torrance bellowed, “or so help me I’ll stove your brains in myself!”

  Thus spurred, the larger of the two thugs, whom I took to be Sinnott, launched himself forwards with a howling war cry. He drove into the baron headlong, grappling with him like a wrestler. To judge by Sinnott’s physique he most likely was a wrestler.

  He caught Bloody Black Baron off-guard and managed to push him back a couple of paces, but then Cauchemar regained his footing and retaliated. The lower portions of his legs telescoped like pistons and extended to their full length again, and, with a loud psssh-pah, psssh-pah, he thrust Sinnott backwards. The bald brute could not resist or counteract in any way. He was driven wholesale across the wharf until he collided with the wheel of a dray. Wooden wheel spokes shattered with a dreadful splintering crack, as did Sinnott’s ribcage. With a groan, the thug slumped to the ground.

  Creevy leapt on Baron Cauchemar from behind, brandishing a leather blackjack. He coshed the giant creature repeatedly on the head, which served only to annoy him. Cauchemar reached round and hauled Creevy off his back. He suspended him in the air, seemingly with no effort at all, one hand gripping his shirtfront, and I heard a sharp crackle and saw tendrils of bright blue brilliance pass between his palm and the thug’s chest, flickering like lightning.

  For a moment Creevy writhed, his entire body jerking with helpless spasms. His mouth worked but no sound came out.

  Then his head sagged and Cauchemar tossed him to the cobbles, where he lay as insensible as his colleague Sinnott. A wisp of smoke rose from his chest.

  The Bloody Black Baron pivoted on the spot, evidently looking for the third crook, the ringleader, Torrance. He, crafty devil, was nowhere to be seen. He must have sought refuge somewhere out of sight while his two cronies were taking a licking.

  So Cauchemar then turned his attention on me.

  Those glowing eyes of his fixed on me, and I was, as they say, rooted to the spot. The creature had no reason to differentiate me from Torrance and his accomplices. To all intents and purposes I looked like just another people trafficker and, to him, merited the same harsh handling. I braced myself in anticipation of the attack that was sure to come.

  “For goodness sake, Watson! Don’t just lie there, man. On your feet!”

  The oh-so-familiar voice of Sherlock Holmes, coming to me through the mist, had a galvanising effect. I rose, just in time to see a Chinese coolie sprint in out of nowhere – the selfsame coolie who had bumped into me at the pub. He was not stooped any more. He stood straight and tall and ran with a sinewy grace. Now that he was not acting a role, I would have recognised the posture and deportment of my friend anywhere.

  “Are you all right?” Holmes said, helping me up.

  “Alive,” I croaked. My voice had been left reedy and hoarse thanks to Torrance’s strangling fist.

  “I am more than glad to hear it. Curse me for not getting here sooner. I arrived in time to see Torrance manhandling you, but before I could leap into the fray, another appeared on the scene and saved me the trouble.”

  He spun to face Cauchemar, who still loomed over us.

  “You,” he said, addressing the giant in a loud, clear voice, with greater nerve than I ever could have mustered. “Baron Cauchemar I presume. This man is not your enemy. He is no associate of Abednego Torrance. Neither am I. You must know that. We two are on the side of the forces of law and order, and so are you, if your actions here tonight and elsewhere are any indication.”

  Cauchemar was momentarily still, like some piece of hideous monumental statuary that had been fashioned with the sole aim of deterring and intimidating. I feared he might yet make a move against us, not crediting Holmes’s claim that he and I were unconnected with Torrance or his ugly commerce in any way.

  Then, from across the wharf, came gunshots. I glimpsed Torrance, some dozens of yards away, leaning out from behind a handcart. He had reloaded and was shooting indiscriminately, caring not whether he hit Cauchemar or us, so long as he hit someone.

  One round came perilously close to embedding itself in Holmes. It tore through the wide loose sleeve of his tunic, missing his forearm by a fraction of an inch.

  “Quick!” my friend cried to me. “Your gun! Give it to me!”

  I fumbled out my revolver. Holmes was certainly right to ask me for it, for I was still too dazed and disorientated even to think about using it myself, let alone shoot straight.

  Holmes snatched the gun from me and returned Torrance’s fire. None of his shots found their mark, but they did at least force Torrance to take shelter momentarily. When the hammer clicked empty, I snatched a handful of extra bullets from my pocket and Holmes began feeding them into the cylinder.

  Baron Cauchemar turned and lumbered towards where Torrance lay. Holmes’s gunfire seemed to have finally convinced the creature that we were not his enemies.

  Torrance, having also taken the opportunity to reload, resumed firing. I did not see how he expected to penetrate Cauchemar’s hide when he had so signally failed to do so before. A couple of rounds pinged and whined off the baron’s seemingly impenetrable shell.

  But then, with Cauchemar less than spitting distance away, one of Torrance’s bullets struck home, virtually at point-blank range, and there was a sharp grating noise and a spurt of liquid. The baron tottered, one leg crumpling under him. For an instant I thought he might fall.

  “Ha!” cried Torrance. “Not so invulnerable after all.”

  Cauchemar recovered his balance and reached for the handcart. He picked it up and tossed it aside as though it weighed nothing.

  Torrance, now exposed, took to his heels, fleeing into the fog.

  Cauchemar loped after him. It seemed he could not move as fast as he had before. Torrance’s shot had done serious damage. The drumbeat of his footfalls, not so rhythmic any more, faded.

  The pace of my fear-quickened heartbeat likewise began to subside.

  “Holmes,” I said, suffused with relief. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. Even in that garish rigmarole.”

  “This disguise, you mean? Garish it may be, old chap, but it fooled you, as my masquerades invariably do.”

  “That is true,” I allowed. “So you were following me, even as I followed Torrance?”

  “Merely making doubly sure that our prey did not elude us. The proverbial ‘belt and braces’ approach.”

  Holmes doffed his conical straw hat and approached the group of frightened women. He bowed and addressed a few words to them in their own tongue, haltingly. It sounded to me as though he was offering them reassurance, a promise of help.

  Then he returned to my side, peeling off his drooping grey moustache and the slivers of foam rubber which he had attached to his eyelids to mimic epicanthic folds.

  “Are you recovered?” he enquired. “Up to a c
hase?”

  I nodded.

  “Then we must hurry. Torrance and Baron Cauchemar are both getting away. Although, with his leg lamed, I doubt the latter will move fast or get far.”

  “How on earth do you propose to track them?” I asked. “Especially in this wretched fog.”

  “Ah, but even if Torrance has left no obvious trail, Cauchemar has.”

  Holmes went over and knelt by a dark, glistening puddle of liquid.

  “Is that blood?” I said.

  He drew a finger through it and held a sample up to his nose to sniff.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “The blood of a machine. Oil. If enough of it keeps spilling out, it should prove easy enough to follow.”

  “And what of these women? We can’t just abandon them.”

  Before he could answer, we heard running footsteps. Holmes swung round with the revolver, taking aim. He lowered the gun the instant he perceived that the new arrival was none other than a police constable, easily identified as such by the shape of the conical helmet perched atop his head.

  “Quick, Watson,” he said. “We must abscond before he sees us.”

  We darted into the fog, padding as softly as the cobbles would allow. The constable went by without spotting us. Discovering the huddle of Chinese women, he immediately began questioning them in his sternest official tones.

  “What’s all this then? I heard gunshots. Who are you ladies? What are you doing here?”

  Naturally his interrogation got no response – none that he could comprehend, at any rate.

  Holmes and I hurried onward. Behind us, the constable started blowing his whistle to summon aid from any colleagues within earshot. Its shrill peeps were soon far behind us, getting fainter.

  “A stroke of luck, him coming along,” Holmes said. “He and his fellow officers can attend to the women, and the presence of police should deter Torrance, if that villain doubles back to reclaim his ‘goods’, which I doubt.”

  “Shouldn’t we at least have stopped and explained to the chap what was going on?”

  “No time right now. Come on. We must keep on the trail while it is still fresh. Something yet can be salvaged from this night’s setbacks!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE REALM OF RATS

  The spatters of oil were few and far between but formed a distinct, unmistakable spoor nonetheless, which we followed easily for half a mile.

  Until, that is, the trail terminated abruptly. We were in a cul-de-sac, silent warehouses towering to either side of us. Holmes inspected the doors and windows of the building for signs of forced entry. He found none.

  He rejoined me in the middle of the road, frowning.

  “A dead end,” he said. “Yet our friend the baron can’t simply have vanished into thin air. It’s not feasible.”

  “I disagree,” I said. “You saw him yourself. He’s a monster of a thing, capable of who knows what. Why should the normal laws of physics apply to him?”

  “Because the laws of physics apply to everything, Watson,” Holmes said in sharp rebuke. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Baron Cauchemar is in any way a being of magical or supernatural origin. That might be what he wishes people to believe, but trust me, he is not. He is as human as you or I – just augmented somewhat.”

  “Augmented? You mean to say he’s –”

  “Confound it. Of course!” Holmes slapped his forehead. “What a dunce I was not to think of it straight away. The sewers.”

  There was, dead centre of the thoroughfare, a manhole. Holmes knelt and studied the cover.

  “Look there. Those scratches around the edge. Two sets, almost exactly opposite one another.”

  “As though put there by fearsome talons.”

  “Watson!” Holmes shook his head in a parody of despair. “Here, help me lift it.”

  He bent and began to grapple with the heavy iron cover. I joined him, and together, at some cost to our backs and fingernails, we succeeded in dislodging it. The smell of human waste drifted up from the aperture to greet us, along with the faint susurration of running water.

  “We’re going down there, aren’t we?” I sighed.

  “Needs must, my dear doctor.”

  Holmes produced a nickel-plated pocket-lantern from the folds of his silk pyjamas and lit the candle within. The flame, magnified by mirrors, shed a penetrating beam of light through the lantern’s glass front.

  “How convenient that you brought that with you,” I remarked.

  “I’m never knowingly under prepared,” Holmes replied with the merest hint of a smile.

  We descended the clammy iron rungs of the ladder that was bolted to the side of the shaft, and soon we found ourselves ankle deep in a stream of foul-smelling and disconcertingly warm fluid.

  “I don’t suppose you thought to bring a couple of pairs of galoshes as well,” I said.

  “Not that well prepared, alas. But if the worst we come away with tonight is ruined shoes, we should count ourselves lucky.”

  Actually, the boots I had on were an old, worn-out pair, in keeping with the rest of my outfit. I would not mourn their loss that greatly.

  Holmes led the way along the vaulted tunnel of the sewer, his pocket-lantern’s beam piercing the mephitic darkness. Rats scurried away in alarm from our advance. It was their realm, but they were accustomed to having it to themselves and were unused to intruders. Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who had devised this entire subterranean drainage system just thirty years earlier, could scarcely have guessed that he was creating the perfect environment for rodents such as these to flourish in. The rats thrived off Londoners’ effluvium and detritus, their population larger now than at any time in the city’s history. Above ground, the capital may have become a cleaner and less noxious place to live, thanks to Sir Joseph and his engineers, but below ground it was more infested than ever with vermin. A paradox of the modern age. For every advance of progress, a drawback.

  “Holmes,” I said. “These tunnels stretch a hundred miles and more. We’ve entered a veritable labyrinth. How can we hope to find Cauchemar? He could be anywhere.” I didn’t add that I had no great desire to meet the baron again; I would not have Holmes thinking me a coward.

  “I fear you may be right, Watson. However, there is always a chance that – Ah-ha.”

  “What is it?”

  We had come to a bend in the tunnel. Holmes held the pocket-lantern close to the wall, low down. “Do you see?”

  I peered. “It seems to be... a scrape of some kind.”

  “A straight-edged groove gouged in the brickwork,” said Holmes. “Fresh, too.” He fingered the mark. “Observe how the brick powder comes away readily to the touch. This was made in the last few minutes. And look, here’s another.” He moved the lantern. “Running parallel to the first, but a good three feet higher up. And a further one, directly above us. It is as though the edges of something large and metallic has bumped against the wall, something travelling at speed.”

  “Whatever can it signify?”

  “Too early to tell,” said Holmes. “But it suggests to me that not only did the baron come this way, he continued his journey with a celerity that we cannot hope to match on foot. No, he is long gone, my friend. Further searching down here will yield little more.”

  I was not unhappy that he had said that. The stench was starting to get to me. I was dizzy, almost lightheaded with it.

  “So we turn back?” I said, not attempting to feign disappointment.

  “We do.”

  As we retraced our footsteps to the ladder, I noticed that Holmes appeared cheerful, more so than the situation seemed to merit. I remarked on this.

  “We have made some headway this evening, Watson,” said he. “My gambit to draw Baron Cauchemar into the open, using the disagreeable Abednego Torrance as bait, paid off.”

  “But how did you know he would go for Torrance?”

  “I have been lurking around the East End all day, in disguise, eavesdropping
. Nobody pays much attention to a coolie, and most assume he ‘no speakee English’, so people are unusually candid in the presence of one. Once I got wind of Torrance and his shipment of women, it seemed exactly the sort of crime Cauchemar would wish to put a stop to. You know how I like to go on about ‘the balance of probabilities’. I applied it in this instance, and it bore fruit.”

  “Inspired.”

  “There’s no denying that I’m disappointed that Torrance got away from us, as he did from Cauchemar too. The baron was clearly quite badly damaged by Torrance’s bullet, so Torrance was easily able to outpace him and elude him. Cauchemar must have then decided to repair to the sewers and make good his own escape.”

  “All of which leaves us little better off.”

  “Come, come. Don’t be downhearted. We are still alive, that is something, and we are undoubtedly wiser than before. More importantly, we have saved those Chinese ladies from an appalling fate. Speaking of whom, let us return to the docks, where in all likelihood a rather confused constable is still trying to get some sense out of them. I will help him out with my admittedly somewhat sketchy Mandarin. After that, we both deserve a good night’s rest. Then, tomorrow, we shall reconvene and consider our next move.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  A LIVING IRONCLAD

  Owing to the demands of my practice, I did not make it to Baker Street until well after noon the next day. A familiar visitor preceded me there: G. Lestrade of Scotland Yard. The sallow little CID inspector had taken a chair beside the hearth, near the Persian slipper on the mantel in which Holmes kept his tobacco, and was tucking into some buttered crumpets. I asked Mrs Hudson to prepare a plate of the same for myself, and a pot of hot tea, as I had forgone lunch in my eagerness to come over from Paddington and was famished.