With the airship acting as a kind of anchor, the flatbed truck began to slew, then all at once it jumped the track and was jolting crazily along behind the locomotive at an angle. It leapt and bucked as the wheels on one side of it rode the sleepers while those on the other side sheared through cinders and earth. I could feel the Duc En Fer being pulled backwards and sideways, struggling to stay on the rails itself. Holmes and I were completely helpless, like ticks riding the back of a runaway horse, with no choice but to pray it didn’t slip and roll over.
Then an immense lurch. The Duc En Fer broke free of its stricken item of rolling stock and went rocketing forwards, more or less smoothly again. The locomotive and the truck had become uncoupled, I assumed thanks to the latter’s torquing, skewing action.
Together, airship and truck plunged headlong down the embankment and collided with a solitary oak. The huge, venerable tree exploded into a million fragments, reduced in an instant to so much tinder. The Delphine’s Revenge and the artillery piece did not fare much better, both disintegrating on impact. Débris fanned in all directions, and there was an almighty whump as the cache of shells detonated. A fireball the size of a five-storey house billowed up into the sky, its brightness momentarily eclipsing the red flare of the setting sun.
Baron Cauchemar. Had he still been aboard the airship? If so, armoured or not, I could not see him surviving such a fiery apocalypse.
We had just lost our strongest ally, our one uncontestable advantage over our enemies.
However, in the credit column, to offset that debit, we had destroyed the artillery piece, which de Villegrand had surely been meaning to use to bombard the Royal Train. His scheme, therefore, had been thwarted. And de Villegrand himself? Was it too much to hope that he had still been on the flatbed truck when it came off the track? Could he have been incinerated along with Cauchemar, the two antagonists fatally consumed in the same conflagration?
The answer, regrettably, was no. At the rear of the coal tender, de Villegrand’s head popped up. He hauled himself up, joining Torrance on the piled coal. He looked unkempt, ruffled, murderously aggrieved. I realised he must have performed the uncoupling himself, saving the locomotive by sacrificing the truck.
Now it was him, Torrance and the two other accomplices, versus Holmes and myself.
I did not like those odds.
De Villegrand snatched Torrance’s revolver and bullets from him, not happy how long it was taking the one-armed man to load the gun. He finished the job swiftly, and snapped the cylinder into place with a flick of the wrist.
Holmes, by this time, was at the cab, clambering down the side of it in order to get in. His plan, I took it, was to assume control of the locomotive and bring it to a halt. That meant overpowering Gedge and Kaylock, but I reckoned that in a fair fight, with his baritsu skills, he was up to the task.
De Villegrand did not wish it to be a fair fight, though, and took aim at my friend. I, in turn, levelled my revolver at the Frenchman and fired off what I am going to call, with pardonable modesty, the shot of a lifetime. Given that I was on a speeding locomotive, I would have been lucky to place my bullet anywhere near its target. That I managed to blast the revolver out of de Villegrand’s grasp was little short of incredible. It is a feat I doubt I could repeat ever again, yet on this occasion providence, some might even say a higher power, smiled on me.
His gun gone, lost over the side of the tender, de Villegrand reared up with a growl of fury. He gesticulated at Torrance, instructing him to take care of me. Over the clamour of the engine I just made out the words “Kill that wretched -!” accompanied by a highly degrading epithet. Torrance obediently lumbered towards me, leaping up off the tender onto the cab roof. De Villegrand himself went after Holmes, scuttling across the heap of coal and down into the cab interior.
I could not leave my friend to fend for himself against three ruffians, especially when one of them was the vicious, savate-savvy vicomte. I headed rearward. Torrance moved to waylay me. With a grimace of resignation, I aimed my revolver at him and pulled the trigger – only to hear the dispiriting click of a misfire.
I pocketed the gun, knowing Torrance would never allow me the luxury of checking the firing pin or the mainspring or fishing some tiny foreign object out from between the hammer and the frame. The same higher power that had smiled on me a moment ago had abruptly and capriciously turned its face away.
He stood erect on the roof of the cab, fist clenched, legs splayed to brace himself. Through his beard, his grin was coldly gleeful.
“Gun failed, eh?” he crowed. “How unlucky for you. I shall make this quick. Wouldn’t want you to suffer any, would I? Then history will celebrate me doubly, first as the man who aided in the death of an entire royal house, but also as the man who did away with the companion of the poxy meddler Sherlock Holmes.”
“Better men than you have tried,” I said. “Men with a full complement of limbs.”
“Oh, I’ve never let a small thing like a dismemberment stand in my way, Dr Watson. Look at me. I’ve more vigour in my right arm than most men have in both.”
I could not deny that. I had seen the evidence with my own eyes a number of times, and indeed felt it when he throttled me nearly to death at the docks in Shadwell. Yet I maintained my pose of grim bravado, hoping I sounded more courageous than I felt.
“I am an ex-soldier,” I said. “You will find me more of a challenge than, say, a drugged Chinese girl.”
“I didn’t the last time,” Torrance said. “Let us put it to the test again, shall we?”
And so we grappled, that great barbarous hulk of a man and I, as the Duc En Fer hurtled onward. We threw ourselves into a clinch, and as his hand sought my throat in order to obtain a stranglehold we both knew I would be unable to break, I fended off his arm with both of mine. His strength was just as appalling as I remembered. He bore down on me, and it was all I could do to keep him at bay.
We shuffled in circles on the cab as we wrestled, and I was acutely aware that I was being pushed inexorably outward, closer and closer to the roof’s edge. Torrance, with sadistic fire in his eyes, was giving himself the alternative of shoving me off, if for some reason he could not throttle me. I fought back but it was like battling a grizzly bear. I had the terrible sensation, not of simply being outclassed, but of being toyed with. My foe, this one-armed Goliath, was revelling in his superiority.
Yet, if I could not match him physically, could I not outwit him?
“Is it worth what de Villegrand’s paying you, Torrance?” I said through clenched teeth.
“Every penny – and there are plenty of them, believe you me. Money may not matter so much to a glossy-coated swell such as yourself, but for a bloke like me, coming from where I come from, it’s all that counts. It’s the difference between being somebody and nobody. I’m not fitted to scrabble around in the dirt all my life like some shoreline mudlark. I was made for better things.”
“But to conspire against your own country...!”
“England’s done nothing for me,” Torrance spat. “I don’t care if the whole damned place sinks into the mire, and every bloody Englishman drowns. Why should I? Long as I’m all right.”
We were now in such a position that Torrance had his back to the direction the locomotive was travelling in. I glanced ahead, gasped in alarm, and then dropped straight onto my belly, pressing myself flat onto the cab roof, hands over my head. Torrance didn’t even look over his shoulder but copied me without delay. It was pure instinct. If I was ducking in anticipation of an oncoming tunnel, then so must he.
I sprang to my feet in a trice, for there was no tunnel. Torrance rose too, realising he had been duped, but he was a split second behind me. As he hoisted himself upright, I kicked his arm out from under him. He collapsed awkwardly. His chin struck the coachwork, stunning him, and he sprawled. His legs swung out over space, and his own considerable body weight dragged him half off the cab roof. He groped with his arm, trying to gain purchase on the sm
ooth metal. His expression was pure panic.
“Please!” he cried. “Please help me! You’re a doctor! Your oath!”
I moved to grab him. Perhaps I could have been a mite faster, I don’t know. Moments earlier this man had been hell bent on killing me, which would account for my hesitation. My incentive to go to his rescue was not great, especially as he would not have done the same for me had our roles been reversed.
At any rate, I did not reach him in time. His clawing hand slithered across the roof, and then it clutched empty air, and Abednego Torrance was gone, tumbling down the embankment at high speed like some piece of ghastly human jetsam. I saw him strike a wooden fencepost at the bottom, crown first, and lie still. It didn’t take a knowledge of medicine to tell that he had suffered the kind of injuries one does not recover from. His body was twisted and bent around itself, his head canted against his neck in a deeply unnatural manner.
There was no time to feel either relief or remorse. I could hear a commotion below me, the thump of blows, grunts of pain – Holmes in a frantic physical altercation with Gedge, Kaylock and de Villegrand. Abruptly the Duc En Fer braked. I was thrown off my feet. Locked driving wheels squealed across the rails, showering out sparks. I tottered backwards off the cab and managed somehow to land in the coal tender rather than on the ground. I lay there on that heap of fuel, dazed. The locomotive juddered like a stutterer’s tongue. I caught a glimpse inside the cab. Holmes was hauling back on the brake handle, pulling it fully round, while at the same time clutching Kaylock with an arm around his neck, using him as a human shield to ward off de Villegrand. Gedge lay unconscious on the footplate, half slumped against the water and steam injector levers.
The Duc En Fer grudgingly, grindingly came to a standstill, hissing like some monstrous serpent venting its frustration.
De Villegrand, the moment we halted, let out a similar infuriated hiss. As everyone recovered their equilibrium, he hurled himself at Holmes. Holmes thrust Kaylock to the fore. De Villegrand, without even pausing, drove his fists into his henchman.
“Out of my way!” he yelled, subjecting the hapless lackey to a tempest of blows. “Incompetent! Débile! You’re no good to me any more, and I’m damned if you’ll be any good to him.”
Kaylock caved in under the furious onslaught, protesting and mewling. A brutal, bone-crunching savate kick to the skull left him just so much inert weight, more than Holmes could usefully support with one arm, so my friend was obliged to drop him.
Now it was just Holmes facing de Villegrand in the stationary locomotive, with me looking on from the tender.
“You haven’t won, monsieur le détective privé,” said the vicomte.
“It rather looks to me as though I have,” came the reply. “There are two of us and one of you, and Watson and I will prevent you from restarting this locomotive even if it kills us.”
“Hear, hear,” I said. “So give up now, de Villegrand. It’ll go hard for you otherwise.”
“Who said anything about restarting it?” said the Frenchman. “How little you know. The Duc En Fer may look like an ordinary railway engine, but trust me, it is not. It has, shall we say, hidden depths. Behold. Voilà!”
De Villegrand reached for a control device I did not recognise. I cannot confess to being any kind of expert on steam locomotives, but this particular large red lever, situated up among the valve stopcocks, served no obvious function that I could see.
No sooner was it pulled, however, than the Duc En Fer began to vibrate and shake from stem to stern. Something was happening, that was for sure.
Holmes, whether or not he had any clearer idea than me what de Villegrand had initiated, looked alarmed. “Watson, I recommend we get off this thing – now!”
De Villegrand chortled. “Yes,” he crowed. “Get off. Go. Shoo, rosbifs! Go and stand helplessly by as the future takes shape before you.”
I scrambled off the tender, dropping onto the trackside. Holmes joined me there, leaping down from the cab. We backed away from the locomotive, which was now, as far as I could judge, starting to break apart. Segments of the boiler were separating from one another. The pistons were parting company with the wheels and sweeping outwards.
Had de Villegrand triggered some sort of self-destruct mechanism with that lever?
No. I swiftly realised he had not.
In fact, the very opposite.
CHAPTER FORTY
A MANMADE TITAN
Even today, I can feel the incredulity I felt then as the Duc En Fer somehow disassembled itself and put itself back together in a new form. Individual sections of the locomotive articulated outwards, folded, shifted, dovetailed, slotted into fresh positions. Jointed shafts extended and contracted. Cogs whirred and meshed. Bits of the engine’s innards were briefly exposed then hidden again. The Duc En Fer underwent a kind of auto-dissection, jumbling up all its parts and re-gathering them in a wholly different configuration.
“What in the world...?” said Holmes. It was rare to hear him so astonished, to see him so clearly awestruck. His customary diffidence had deserted him. He, like me, could only look on at the locomotive’s metamorphosis and marvel and quail.
Up it rose, from prone to erect. The driving wheels and chassis became legs. The boiler became a torso. The cab surmounted the whole thing like a head. The coal tender tipped up, emptying its contents down a chute and becoming a back and shoulders. The pistons shot down to serve as arms. Each was tipped with one of the bogie frames, which had broken down into a set of finger-like rods, the little wheels serving as knuckles.
In all, it stood some thirty feet tall, a humanoid giant which had a minute ago been, to all appearances, a simple steam locomotive. The alteration from one state to another was complete, and now, with an eerie creaking and clanking, this fearsome, transformed Duc En Fer turned towards Holmes and myself.
De Villegrand leaned out from the cab and yelled down, “Do you see? This is what I had up my sleeve. How pathetically small you both look. And how emasculated. French knowhow! French genius! This is why my country will always be superior to yours. This is why the world deserves to belong to France and France alone.”
“I am impressed, I admit,” Holmes shouted back. “It just seems a shame to me that your ambitions are so limited.”
“Limited? What are you saying? Absurd! How can ruling the entire world be a ‘limited’ ambition?”
“Think of what else you could achieve with this brilliance of yours, monsieur le vicomte. The benefits you could bring to all of mankind. You have the wherewithal to usher in a technological golden age, an age of wonders, single-handedly. But no, all you think of is domination and conquest. Petty aims for one so gifted.”
“Holmes,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, “he’s sitting in a massive walking automaton that looks like it could make mincemeat out of us. Best not to bait him, eh?”
“I’m not baiting him, Watson, merely trying to talk some sense into him.”
“I think he’s gone beyond sense.”
“But what else have we got? He’s unassailable up there.”
“It will be a golden age, Monsieur Holmes,” de Villegrand insisted. “That is surely what is coming. But it will be an age dor, a uniquely French golden age. There is no nation better suited to run the world. We boast the finest poets, philosophers, artists, scientists and, yes, inventors. All that piffle I told you about the greatness of Great Britain – pah! Nothing your race has to offer is the equal of anything mine has to offer. You will learn that. Once your Queen is dispatched, your country will be in disarray and ripe for takeover. French troops will swarm across La Manche and occupy. It will be touted as the decent thing to do, the act of a Good Samaritan coming to his neighbour’s rescue. You will welcome us with open arms – anything to quell the anarchy you will have descended into. The Tricolore will be hoisted above Buckingham Palace and Westminster, and soon the pattern will be repeated elsewhere. America, Russia, even the prodigious Germany will succumb, especially wi
th weapons of my devising at our military’s disposal. This is just the beginning.”
“You’d better hurry, then,” said Holmes. “The Royal Train is out of sight. You’ve some ground to make up.”
“This evolved Duc En Fer is faster than its other incarnation. I put the feet on the track like so...” The giant automaton’s wheel-feet went from flat, like snowshoes, to vertical, like ice skates, as de Villegrand lodged one on each rail. “I run.” The legs scissored back and forth, and the entire body moved a few yards. Steam purled from the funnel, which was now protruding from the thing’s back. “I can achieve a good hundred miles an hour when I get up to full speed. I move like a skier, gliding along.” He reversed, drawing level with Holmes and me again. “So I am not worried about the Royal Train, no. I can afford to let it travel a little bit further ahead. I have time.”
“Time to do what?” asked Holmes, and we both wished he hadn’t.
“To kill the two of you, naturellement,” said de Villegrand. “You have been remarkably persistent opponents, and remarkably annoying ones. My conservatory anti-burglar mechanism failed to put an end to your snooping. I shall rectify that now. I cannot let you live to plague me again in the future. You have been pestilential like flies, and so, like flies, I shall swat you.”
One vast metal hand rose into the air, furling into a fist.
“Holmes?” I said in a faint voice. “Should we run?”
“Watson, I believe that would be a capital idea.”
Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares Page 24
