Sherlock Holmes 01: The Breath of God (8 page)

It was all I could do not to vomit as all of this assaulted my senses.

I reached out, meaning to steady myself against a tree trunk, to stop this terrible spinning, to find stillness in a world that was moving too fast. My hand connected with the bark and the wet ooze of beetles and worms pressed beneath my palm like grapes exploding in a wine press. Nothing would hold me and nothing would stop the world from revolving around me.

I gave a short cry as I lost my feet once more, toppling onto my back in the undergrowth, feeling its wet leaves and creepers wipe themselves on my cheeks and reach for the wet sustenance of my mouth and eyes.

The ground beneath me continued its motion, rippling like the soft ebb of high tide. I could feel it embracing me, the earth cool and damp as it lapped over my arms and legs, pulling me down into it where I would rot and feed the fat, glistening earthworms that I could swear were exploring my hair. As I sank even lower, what little light there had been vanished as the soil buried me, pulling me deeper and deeper.

Soon I was so far down that I could no longer tell which way led to the surface. Slowly, and with a sharp pain in my chest, I breathed nothing but thick soil and wet clay. I fought to cough the sodden mass from where it clogged my throat but there was nowhere for it to go and I choked. The last sensations, felt just above the pounding in my head, were the touch of the molluscs and beetles that worked their way beneath the folds of my clothes.

“Watson?”

My eyes snapped open at the sound of my friend’s voice. I was lying on my back in the undergrowth, both Holmes and Inspector Mann looking down on me with obvious concern. I confess my embarrassment quite got the better of me and my initial response was somewhat tetchy.

“I’m fine,” I retorted, brushing away their hands and pushing myself to my feet.

Utterly disorientated, I looked around, assuming I would determine what had happened in a moment, I just needed to get my bearings... I could still taste soil in my mouth and I rubbed at my face, sure there would be creatures still clinging to me. There were not.

“What happened?” Mann asked.

To my great irritation I simply couldn’t provide a satisfactory answer. So I provided a lie. “It was nothing,” I said. “I just caught my foot on a root. Shall we carry on?”

I pushed past them both, meaning to force them to continue our pursuit of the trail. I realised almost instantly of course that I could no more lead than explain what had just occurred. Holmes may be able to discern the telltale signs of broken branches and compressed grass but to me their passage was as good as invisible.

Luckily my friend circled around me and took the lead again. He gave me a brief look, as if to ascertain I was all right, then kept his eyes to the ground where the trail was so clear to him it may as well have been painted.

Soon we reached the road we had travelled down earlier. Holmes scouring the verge for further evidence.

“Is it possible to hire a cab from the station?” I wondered aloud.

“Indeed,” Mann replied, “though I have already enquired from the station master as to whether any strangers arrived on the late train. He assures me they didn’t. This is a quiet area, Dr Watson, and strangers would find it hard work to arrive unnoticed.”

“Besides,” said Holmes, “if you planned on paying a legitimate visit to the hall you would drive up to the front gate. If your visit was intended to go unnoticed – as their arrival via the forest would certainly suggest – you wouldn’t ask a local cab driver to drop you here.”

“Yes, all right,” I agreed, irritated again. “It was a stupid idea clearly.”

“Not at all,” Holmes said, giving me a friendly glance. “It was simply a consideration that needed to be addressed and then discounted. It’s only by so doing that we get to the truth.” He sat down on the verge. “Certainly they did arrive by a small carriage, there are clear grooves in the grass where they pulled off the road a few feet.”

“They can’t have travelled too far then,” Mann said. “Only an idiot would use a horse and carriage for a journey of any great distance.”

Holmes shook his head. “Not so much an idiot as a cautious group of men,” he said, “one of whom smokes a particularly unusual tobacco.”

He scooped a few strands into another empty envelope.

“They had smoked during the journey,” he explained, “and knocked out their bowl – most likely on the carriage wheel – here before refilling with enough fresh tobacco to accompany them on their walk through the trees.”

“A devoted smoker indeed to feel the need for a pipe on that walk,” I said.

Holmes smiled. “Yes, even I managed to avoid tobacco for the duration.” He got to his feet. “Right, I don’t think we have anything else to learn here. Might I suggest we head back to the station ourselves?”

“You don’t wish to interview the servants?” Mann asked, sounding somewhat disappointed.

“Not for now,” Holmes replied, “though I will happily read the transcripts of your interviews if you would be so kind as to share? Watson and I have a long journey ahead of us today and I need time to think as well as pack a travel bag.”

Holmes and I said goodbye to Mann and were soon on a train back to London. I had hoped I might be able to persuade Holmes to allow us lunch at a public house before our journey, but he was resolute that the afternoon held tasks enough that the time could not be allowed. When pressed as to what tasks he had in mind, he would not say. I therefore travelled back in something of an irritated mood. Not helped by a lingering sense of unease after my bizarre episode in the forest. I was still unable to understand what had happened. In my capacity as a doctor I have assisted a number of patients who had experienced fainting spells and blackouts, but try as I might I could pin down none of the obvious symptoms in my case. Unless, of course, it was an early sign of something much worse. Worrying about that wasn’t going to help me, however, so I pushed the concern from my mind. After all, it’s not as if I didn’t know an excellent doctor.

Once we arrived at Liverpool Street, Holmes bade me a goodbye and vanished into the crowds. It was hardly the first time I have been abandoned mid-investigation. Still, with the disorientation of earlier lingering I stood on the streets of the city and felt utterly adrift.

Around me Londoners moved at the only pace they know, hustling to and fro, darting past one another in a complex dance that always reminds me of schools of fish navigating around each other. Stood amongst them I was just another obstacle and was besieged on all sides, both by their impatient shoulders and also by the noise: the constant percussion of hooves on the streets, the shouts of the news vendors, the station announcements behind me. All with that low, bass line of general chatter running underneath it.

For a few moments I felt unable to move, as submerged by the life around me as I had been by the imaginary soil earlier.

What was happening to me? I felt one step removed from the world and unable to drag myself back into the sharp, defined city I knew and loved.

I raised my hands to my head, tapping at my forehead to test for a temperature. My skin was cool.

I wasn’t surprised, this didn’t feel like an illness. Perhaps I had been poisoned? I thought back to being in Ruthvney’s study, trying to imagine when I might have come into contact with something, perhaps even the same chemical that had affected him so markedly. I could think of no way, I had touched nothing, tasted nothing... If it had still been in the air then surely all three of us would have been equally affected?

“You just going to stand there?” asked a voice ahead of me. I looked up to meet the gaze of a news vendor, his ruddy skin a sure sign of years of over-drinking. It began with a wee dram to keep the chill off, I thought, then you got a real taste for it. “If you do,” he continued, “you’ll be trod underfoot for sure when the rush hour really starts. You think it’s busy now, you just wait until the offices close. Like ants they is, all running for cover.”

“I won’t be here then,” I said, feeling foolish, “just getting my bearings.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, “bearings is it? I always keep mine close to hand.” With that he proved my earlier guess accurate by removing a hip flask from his pocket, unscrewing the cap and taking a big slug. “Bearings is easy to find if you always keep ’em in the same pocket.” He grinned at me and showed two large gaps in his front teeth. Diabetes, the medical man in me decided, probably caused by his diet, or lack of it... He held the hip flask out to me and, somewhat to my own surprise, I moved forward and took it. I drank a mouthful. Cheap rum, that burned rather than warmed. A man of the ocean I decided, revising my opinion, nobody but an ex-sailor would find comfort from this rough stuff. I handed the flask back and checked his wrists for tattoos as he took it from me. Sure enough, the fine curl of a rose stem peered out from beneath his cuff. Rum and tattoos, I thought, if he were any more obvious I would be able to smell the salt.

“Better?” he asked, and despite the roar in my stomach that spoke of indigestion to come I found that the answer was yes and told him so. “I reckon it’ll cure almost anything,” he said with a knowing twinkle in his eye, “or make it so you don’t much care. Liquor’s like a politician that way. It don’t always fix things but it makes sure you don’t notice what’s broke.”

“You might benefit from a square meal to soak some of it up every now and then,” I told him.

“Yes, doctor,” he said and for a moment I studied his face, nonsensically believing it might be Holmes in disguise. Of course it wasn’t, Holmes was about better business than this.

“Look after yourself,” I told him and walked off into the crowd.

Unlike my friend I did not have a bottomless bank account so I took the underground train rather than a cab.

The experience of descending beneath the streets into the tiled corridors of the underground stations is one that is both alarming and invigorating. There can be few that are not impressed with our capital’s subterranean travel system. As limited and restrictive as it may currently be, there is no doubt in my mind that it will one day expand, triumphing over its initial difficulties to become the preferred method for all. Its detractors point to thirty years of staggered development and the king’s ransom that’s been ploughed into it. When will they just give up? they wonder. But in my experience that’s something that the British in general and Londoners in particular have never been very good at. It’s just not in our nature to accept defeat – we bang our heads against a problem until it has the good grace to acquiesce.

Soon they say the lines will be filled with the new electric carriages, strange beasts that whine endlessly as they carry themselves to and fro beneath the city. Until then we are stuck with steam trains and the air in the tunnels is as poisonous as if we were burrowing through an alien world.

I worked my way through the crowds towards my platform, the thick smell of smoke and sweat clinging to me as I stood waiting for the next train.

I held onto my hat as the wind began to build, forced along the tunnels by the train as it approached.

“Enough to knock you off your feet so it is!” cackled a woman to my right. I offered her a polite smile as she eyed me up. Judging by the state of her painted face it was clear that she considered me a potential client. She gave a grin that showed yellow teeth stained by carmine lipstick, the smile of a clown or a cannibal. She pushed down her skirts as the wind grew even stronger, as if afraid they may blow up around her. I looked away, on the off chance that she was right.

A young couple stood hand in hand, a handsome pair, on a day trip I guessed. They had that awkward air of a fresh couple, excitement tempered by nerves. It made me think of my darling Mary, now lost to me, and I was somewhat ashamed to realise my eyes were watering as the oncoming train’s whistle howled. “Your feelings are showing, John,” she would have said, reaching out to dry the tears with a soft, gloved thumb. Like Holmes, she had always accused me of keeping my emotions so close to the surface you could read them from a mile away. I couldn’t argue with her, it was true enough. But then what Holmes frequently saw as a failure she saw as an asset. I am as yet undecided as to my own opinion on the matter.

The train pulled into the station and we climbed aboard. Sitting down on the upholstered bench, I looked at the wooden panelling of the carriage and was uncomfortably reminded of the inside of a coffin, all walnut, velvet and sweet, damp earth.

The young couple sat down across from me. The doxy a few feet to my left, a puff of cheap lavender toilet water erupting from the folds of her clothes as she rearranged herself on the seat. In front of her an ageing minister, his grey-and-white curls bobbing around his pink face as the train began its shaky journey, scanned the pages of his well-worn bible. Every now and then his lips quivered as he read the words, a soft, sibilant noise coming from him, like a dying breath, as he nearly spoke aloud. An elderly lady sat next to him, picking at loose threads in her bonnet, her face was vacant and dreamy as if she imagined herself to be anywhere but here. At the end of the carriage a pair of young lads laughed and cuffed each other playfully, standing up to “ride” the unsteady train as it shook on the rails.

I closed my eyes, and listened to the rattle of the wheels on the track, the eager chuffing of the engine as it ate its coke and its heart blazed hot within its iron cage. I could imagine it as a voracious creature, consuming all it could swallow, burrowing through the earth, a never-ending beast of appetite.

“It will kill us all,” said the doxy and I opened my eyes to look at her. She writhed against the bench as if being tugged by invisible hands, her back arched, her mouth opening and closing as if eating the air. “It will blow hard and sweep us from the earth,” she continued, “the Breath of God cannot be stopped, it curls hot in the lungs of the world.”

“Is nobody to help her?” I asked, reaching across to hold her thrashing arms.