by Cavan Scott
“It’s obscene.”
“And beyond the laws of science, not that that seems to worry the League.”
I examined the pump, recognising the design. “This is the work of Melosan. When I offered to give blood…”
“Melosan shares a tattoo with Redshaw and Hawthorne,” Holmes said. He approached an iron cage that hung from the ceiling near the back of the chamber. “Here’s another relic from an earlier age.”
I had seen similar objects depicted in some of the more esoteric books Holmes liked to read. It was made of iron, the bars curved to form the outline of an adult man.
“A medieval coffin cage,” I said.
“In which blasphemers were hung to be pecked at by birds.” He turned, looking at the unholy machine the League had constructed. “How lucky we are to live in more enlightened times, eh, Watson?”
“But what’s the cage for?”
Holmes made a motion for me to be silent.
“I was only asking…”
“I mean it, Watson. Be quiet.”
He darted across the chamber, leaping over the mess of rubber tubing to disappear through another arch.
“Watson, quick!”
I rushed after him, finding Holmes stooped over two figures, both bound and gagged.
“Clifford!” I exclaimed, recognising Anna’s husband.
“And Father Ebberston too,” Holmes pointed out, working the gag from the priest’s mouth.
“Oh, thank God,” Ebberston gasped. “You have to help us.”
“It’s B-Benjamin and the others,” Clifford said. “They’ve g-gone m-mad. Some kind of r-r-r—”
The last word proved too much for him, so Holmes completed the sentence for the terrified man.
“A ritual, to raise Edwyn Warwick from the dead.”
“But why?” Ebberston said.
“To provide leadership?” Holmes theorised. “To lead them into a golden age?”
“Or r-return us t-to o-one,” Clifford said as Holmes worked on the knots that bound him. “B-Benjamin and Sir G-George have talked about it b-before.”
“A time before workers’ rights,” I said, remembering Redshaw’s words in the drawing room. “When business was allowed to be business.”
“They were going to sacrifice Mr Clifford,” Ebberston gabbled, shivering both from the cold and from abject terror. “And make me watch from that cage.”
“‘Under the deceitful eyes of the damned’,” Holmes said, quoting the ritual. He leant across to where I was trying to free the priest, and inspected Ebberston’s arms. “No tattoo for you.”
“What do you mean?” Ebberston asked.
“The participators in the ritual have been marked by Sutcliffe.”
“V-Victor?”
“You are a pawn in their game, Father. Your face betrayed you when Warwick’s body was discovered missing. You already knew it was gone.”
“Tavener told me not to tell anyone.”
“Why? What does he have on you? He blackmailed Mrs Mercer. What secrets is he using against you?”
Ebberston shook his head. “No, that’s not it. He promised support for St Nicole’s, for our work in the city, the opening of a new shelter for the poor and destitute.”
“And you went along with it?” I said.
“He was offering a small fortune. Told me it would be bad for the city if the truth of Warwick’s tomb were known. Even when you came to the church, asking questions, and the tomb was opened… I went to him, begged him to let me tell the truth…”
“But the deed has already been done. He has made a liar of you, sir,” Holmes said, “and you have damned yourself by your silence. Your deceitful eyes must bear witness so that the ritual will work.”
“And w-will it?” Clifford asked.
“Of course not,” I insisted, unable to loosen a single knot of Ebberston’s ropes.
“No one will ever find out, one way or the other,” Holmes insisted, working on Clifford’s restraints. “I shall see to that.”
“Will you indeed?” said a voice from the other side of the arch.
We wheeled around to find Lord Redshaw standing behind us, flanked by Dr Melosan, Tavener, a prim-faced woman whom I could only assume was Mrs Nell, and a large man with a crop of red hair whom I didn’t recognise. Mrs Nell was wearing an austere black dress, with boots of patent leather, fastened with white buttons. So this was the mysterious Mrs Protheroe. The men were all dressed in the same way, wearing black breeches and loose cotton shirts rolled up at the sleeves. Like Redshaw’s and Melosan’s, Tavener’s wrinkled arm was tattooed, a single black ring to Redshaw’s two.
I was unable to see whether the red-haired man’s arm was inked. I was too concerned about the shotgun he pointed in our direction.
Holmes went to stand.
“Stay where you are,” the flame-haired man said.
“Now, Lacey,” Redshaw said. “We’re not savages. Let the fellow get to his feet.”
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Mr Lacey, the esteemed editor of the Bristol Mercury. He was in on it too.
“Thank you,” said Holmes. “I assume I no longer need to maintain my disguise?”
“We know who you are,” sneered Redshaw. My former host was slightly hunched over and I could see bloody dressings through the fabric of his shirt.
“Benjamin, you don’t have to do any of this,” I pleaded with him. “Those babies upstairs. They don’t have to die.”
“You are right,” Redshaw nodded. “Of course you are. Clifford was to be our pure heart. So naive. So guileless. But no longer. Not compared to you. Dr Watson, who has seen the evil of the world time and time again and yet still clings to good; railing against injustice, defending those who cannot protect themselves. You are a perfect candidate. ”
He nodded in Melosan’s direction and the doctor stepped towards me. Holmes moved to intercept, but was halted by a warning from Lacey and a wave of the gun. Melosan tried to grab my arm and pull me forward, but I resisted. He was no match for me. But then Redshaw joined the fray. He pulled at my free arm, and blood splattered against his shirt as the stitches in his side burst. He was unperturbed, even as he buried his fist in my stomach.
I doubled over, winded, and Redshaw shoved me to the floor. Before I knew it, he was kneeling on my chest, his large hands around my throat, pressing down hard. Melosan held one of my arms, leaving my other free to batter Redshaw, but my strength was deserting me, Redshaw’s grip too tight. I gagged, trying to call Holmes’s name, but my friend was unable to move without risking a shot from Lacey. There was a flash in the corner of my vision; Mrs Nell had something in her hand. Was that a syringe? I had no fight in me. She bent forward and I felt the sharp scratch of a needle before everything went dark.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT
I had no idea where I was. I was unable to move, hardly able even to breathe. Something was in my mouth. I bit down with what little strength I could muster. It was hard against my teeth. I coughed. Something tickled the back of my throat, a hair or a thread, I couldn’t tell what.
I tried to open my eyes, but they refused to respond; I wanted to move my arms but they were strapped down. The air was cool against my chest. Where was my shirt?
I groaned, and heard my name echoing from far away.
I turned my head, finally able to open my eyes a crack.
There was my name again. Watson. Nearer this time.
I was unable to see properly. There were lights, dancing in front of me like will o’ the wisps, tiny specks that became flickering candles. There were figures too, standing around me. White shirts. Black trousers. Blurred faces. Movement. Hushed voices.
And my name, over and over again.
Watson.
Watson.
Wat-son.
Suddenly, everything came into focus. I knew where I was. I knew what was happening.
I turned my head, seeing Warwick’s coffin on the slab beside me. I railed
against the leather straps that bound me to the altar, yelling Holmes’s name, my voice hoarse and desperate.
Holmes hung in front of me, in the coffin cage, hands bound behind his back. A rope gag hung loose around his neck, identical to the one clamped between my jaws. He had worked his loose, but I could not do likewise, the gag was too tight.
All around was silent activity, the anticipation in the room palpable. Mrs Nell inspected the cots. Oh God. That meant the babies were in place. To my side, Dr Melosan was arranging a line of scalpels on the edge on the altar. I looked down, realising to my horror that the skin across my naked chest was smooth, devoid of hair. They had shaved me while I slept.
“Watson,” Holmes shouted. “Watson, listen to me. You’re going to be all right. Do you hear? We’re going to get you out of this.”
I could see the muscles of his arms twitching through the sleeves of the jacket. He was working at whatever they had used to tie his wrists together. He would be free soon, of that I had no doubt, just as he had escaped the cuffs in the police carriage, but what of that cage? It was fastened with two huge padlocks, which looked strong enough to confound even the greatest escapologist, let alone Holmes.
A shadow fell across me. I looked up to see Benjamin Redshaw.
“It is nearly time, Watson,” he said, a manic look in his eyes as he stared at his pocket watch. “Five minutes to midnight. It is fitting that you wake to see what you would have halted.”
“We will halt it,” Holmes yelled from his cage. “Do you hear me, Redshaw? This plan of yours, this ungodly rite; it’s insane. You know that, don’t you? It won’t work. It can’t. Sutcliffe made it up, all of it. The legend of Izanami. It doesn’t end the way he told you. She isn’t restored, Redshaw. She is left rotting in hell. You will do the same if you go through with it. If you hurt a hair on Watson’s head you will hang, and Warwick will still be dead.”
“Says the damned from his cage, watching all, but unable to act,” Redshaw shouted back, his voice echoing around the chamber like a mad evangelist. “As it was written.”
“As Sutcliffe wrote. One man, consumed with revenge. Do you not see, Redshaw? He was going to trap you, to shame you all as you shamed his father. That’s why he had to die, wasn’t it? Why you sent Hawthorne to throttle him? He had met with Lacey, in the Admiral’s Club. Offered him the scoop of the century. The Worshipful League of Merchants performing a blasphemous act of black magic. How he must have laughed when you swallowed his occult claptrap. You fell for it hook, line and sinker, didn’t you, Redshaw? All the lies that you wanted to believe, the spells written on ancient parchments thousands of miles away. But they weren’t. They were written here, in Bristol, by a man who hated you, who hated what you had done to his family.”
“The damned man lies,” shouted Tavener from his place beside Redshaw, “as deceitful now as when dressed as a vagrant, or as his non-existent brother. You don’t know what is true. This organisation has practised rites for centuries. We have protected this city and we will do so again.”
“The hour has come,” Redshaw said, snapping his watch shut. “Midnight. Gather around, brothers. The ritual must begin. Warwick will rise.”
I looked around frantically as the members of the Worshipful League formed a circle around the chamber. There must have been twenty of them or more, one for every cot, one for every life that was about to be snuffed out.
“Dr Melosan?” Redshaw asked. “Are we ready?”
Melosan checked his surgical implements once again, his eye twitching violently. “Yes, yes we are.”
Redshaw looked down at me, rapture written all over his face. “Your heart will become his, Watson, and then the blood of the innocent lambs will bring new life.”
How much of this was mania, or the painkillers he had been given for his wounds? I bucked against my restraints, but they held.
“You will play your part in our restitution, Watson,” he said, saliva flecking his lips. “Our innocent heart.”
“Innocent?” Holmes jeered from his cage. “Watson? Now I have heard everything. If you wanted innocent you have chosen the wrong man. Should have stuck with Clifford.”
“Silence!” Redshaw bellowed. “We must begin.”
“And you will fail!” Holmes promised, even as Melosan picked up a scalpel from the slab. “Think about it, Redshaw. If Sutcliffe’s parchments contain the truth, if you can raise Warwick from the dead, can you risk that John Watson is the man you think he is?”
Redshaw ignored Holmes’s jibes and nodded at Melosan, who leant across my chest, scalpel in hand. He was about to open me up alive!
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
THE PERFECT SPELL
“Do not listen to him!” Redshaw boomed. “He is the damned.”
No, listen to him, I begged silently as the scalpel brushed my chest. Please, listen to him!
“Yes, I am the damned, but so is Watson,” Holmes insisted, as he pulled his hands apart behind his back.
“He is free!” Tavener yelped in panic, only to be hushed by Redshaw.
“He will never escape the cage.”
Holmes twisted, barely able to move, and reached a hand to one of the padlocks. All the time, he shouted down at the doctor. “Listen to me, Melosan. I’ve seen your work, the precision of the pumps, the craftsmanship. It will all be for nought, because John Watson is no innocent.”
Above me, Melosan faltered just for a moment, as Holmes continued both with the assassination of my character and on the locks.
“Think of it. He is a doctor who has killed, time and time again. Not on the operating table, not by accident. But in anger, a gun in his hand. He is a gambler too, unable to stop himself from risking everything. So much so that I have to lock his money away, so that he is unable to squander every last penny he has.”
“Shut him up,” Redshaw raged.
Lacey moved to the cage, shaking it in an attempt to silence Holmes, even as the detective abandoned the first padlock for the other.
“He could have stayed at home with his wife,” Holmes continued, “the honest and decent thing to do. But he left her alone to come away with me, and I am a devil after all. He is no more innocent than any man in this room. He will fail you as he has failed everyone, time and time again.”
The harsh words stung me, but they drove Redshaw into a fury.
“Don’t listen to him,” roared the peer, moving around the altar to shake Melosan as one might rouse a man from slumber.
“But…” Melosan began to argue.
“Idiot,” Redshaw raged, grabbing the scalpel from the doctor’s hand and pushing him to the ground. Redshaw whirled about, and I realised that he meant to cut my heart out himself. Melosan scrambled up, trying to stop him.
“Benjamin, wait. If he’s right…”
Redshaw answered by bringing his elbow back into the doctor’s nose with a nauseating crunch of cartilage.
“Holmes is lying to you,” he spat. “He’s lying to everyone.”
“No,” shouted a voice from across the room. “He’s telling the truth. No man is innocent, especially here.”
There was the sharp retort of a gun, the acoustics of the underground temple magnifying the sound to that of thunder. Redshaw let out a guttural cry and froze like a statue for a second, before the scalpel slipped from his fingers. The life draining out of him, he toppled forward to land heavily across my chest. His body slid to the floor as all hell broke loose in the subterranean chamber. The members of the League ran in panic as blue-uniformed constables swarmed down the staircase, passing the figure of Inspector Abraham Tovey, his gun still raised and a bloody patch across his left eye.
Dr Melosan ran beneath the coffin cage just as it snapped open and Holmes dropped down on him. The surgeon let out a cry of terror and Holmes delivered a punch that sent him sprawling across the floor.
“On the stroke of midnight, Inspector!” Holmes panted, standing over the unconscious doctor. “That’s what I told Hegarty. I thoug
ht policemen could tell the time!”
Tovey let his gun drop and staggered back to sag against the temple wall.
“Inspector Lestrade’s report was right, Mr Holmes. You really are impossible.”
“Then it is fortunate that the impossible is your business,” Holmes replied.
* * *
In the relative quiet of the Lodge library, I rubbed the sore skin of my wrists. After Tovey and Holmes had stopped bandying words, someone had remembered me, strapped to a stone altar like a sacrificial virgin. Holmes had released me, whereupon I leapt from the slab to check on the infants. They were alive, each and every one drugged to the eyeballs with laudanum, but breathing all the same.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Mr Woodbead, asking if I could assist in carrying the babies upstairs. Word had been sent to the Bristol Royal Infirmary and help would be on its way, but in the meantime we had much to do. I was happy to oblige, anything to avoid thinking about the scalpel discarded on the temple floor.
Now, sitting alone, I was content to let the others clear up. Tovey’s men were everywhere at once, and a team of nurses had arrived to take care of the children.
“How are you feeling?” said Holmes, breezing into the library as if he had just spent an evening playing whist.
“How do you think?”
He perched himself on the side of the reading desk. “Tovey’s been taken back to hospital, where he should have remained. He couldn’t bear not to see things through to the bitter end, no matter what the cost. I can appreciate that.”
“But how…” I stopped myself and laughed. Here I was, once again asking for an explanation from Sherlock Holmes. This truly was my lot in life.
Holmes spared me the indignity. “I was out of the cuffs before we had even left Ridgeside Manor. All I needed to do was to reach into my back pocket to retrieve my notebook and pencil. While I kept Hawthorne talking, I wrote a note to Hegarty…”
“Behind your back?”
“Behind my back. I admit, the handwriting was not my neatest, but you can’t have everything. It was clear from Hegarty’s face that he was uncomfortable with our arrest. I had observed him in the short time I spent in Lower Redland Road Police Station. He is a good policeman, like Tovey. And he made his choice, ending Hawthorne’s corruption once and for all.”