Authors: Dan Simmons
Holmes lived (and would probably die someday) for details. He’d noticed the first time Watson had ever armed himself for one of their mutual adventures that the “service revolver” was an Adams six-shot caliber .450 breechloader with a 6-inch barrel; standard issue for the British Army during the second Afghan war in which Watson had received his suspiciously mobile Jezail bullet. Dr. Watson’s weapon was not so different, in size and capability, from the Beaumont-Adams pistol that Culpepper had been showing off from his belted waistband. Holmes had noticed that the dandy had worn both braces—“suspenders” his Mr. Baskers would call them here in America—
and
a thick belt. Mr. Culpepper was a cautious man. Just how cautious, thought Holmes, they would all soon see.
Perhaps all five of them are carrying pistols by now
, was Holmes’s last thought before he heard the front door of the hotel being forced open three stories below.
But no—Holmes felt certain, to his deep disappointment, that Mr. J had not joined this expedition. He’d certainly returned to report the interaction to his own superior.
Which meant that he would have to leave at least one of the four men tracking him alive. But not necessarily Culpepper.
Holmes’s materials were set before him on the leather cloth. He’d preloaded his syringe with saltwater and now he brought out a bottle cap taken from a bottle of Hires Root Beer he’d purchased earlier in the morning, after renting his magic-lantern projector. Holmes had tossed away the bottle and its contents—hideous stuff, “root beer”; he wondered how Americans could buy and guzzle three million bottles of it a year. Now he filled the bottle cap with the heroin salts and then squeezed out enough water to liquify the salts.
From another pouch in his unrolled leather bag, Holmes extracted the bit of chemical tubing he’d used that morning to tie off his arm. He did so again, tapping at the veins on the inside of his elbow and then, from his waistcoat pocket, brought forth perhaps the most unique device he owned—a prototype cigarette lighter presented to Holmes in 1891, just months before his self-disappearance, by a satisfied client: a scientist by the name of Carl Auer von Welsbach. The patenting of a flint-like substance called ferrocerium allowed the von Welsbach lighter to be small, simple, and safe, in comparison to the bulky, complex, and extremely dangerous Döbereiner flame-makers of decades past. He held the blue flame from von Welsbach’s gift under the bottle cap.
The von Welsbach lighter had saved Holmes’s life numerous times in the Himalayas; now he asked it only to work quickly so he could heat the heroin-crystal-saltwater mixture before the audible footsteps on the stairway reached his floor.
Holmes took a small pellet of cotton he’d been carrying in his shirt pocket next to the three photographs and dropped the cotton wad onto the Hires bottle cap he was using for a cooker. The cotton acted as a filter, blocking the inevitable undissolved clumps of heroin salts that would clog the syringe and stop his heart.
The footsteps were climbing above the second-story landing.
Holmes lifted the filled syringe, tapped it, squirted a tiny bit to be sure there were no air bubbles, and leaned over to inject the contents into his vein.
It sounded like only four men, not five, climbing to the fourth floor. They were trying to climb quietly, but not too quietly. They obviously weren’t overly concerned as to whether meek Mr. Baskers heard them or not. What could he do if he did?
Holmes wanted time for the heroin to take effect. He tugged the tubing off, emptied and disassembled the syringe, and put the bottles, bottle cap, and precious von Welsbach cigarette lighter back in their proper places.
The heroin hit his system almost at once.
First came the glowing warmth filling his heart, chest, torso, limbs, and then brain. Then came the fading of all pain—especially the pain of his question of existence or non-existence—and then came the sense of rising on the crest of a curling wave.
The footsteps stopped outside the door of his room. Holmes vaguely heard whispering. He ignored it.
Rising rapidly on that silent wave, he could see and sense his own life better now. He could make out the lacunae, the ellipses, the terrible gaps between his so-called cases, his so-called adventures, his so-called life as a famous consulting detective. Those days or weeks or sometimes months between the cases that Watson had been feverishly chronicling were not a memory of life; they were a glimpse of rough sketches with faces not drawn in, backgrounds not sketched, days not filled. Holmes remembered screeching his bow on his expensive violin. He remembered injecting cocaine. He remembered sleeping long afternoons and fooling around in his locked room with his chemistry set like a child, bubbling things, burning things. He remembered the ghost of Mrs. Hudson carrying trays into the common room, carrying trays out. There were a few times when Mrs. Hudson—still looking and sounding like “Mrs. Hudson” in Holmes’s memory—had been inexplicably referred to as “Mrs. Turner” in Watson’s chronicles. All that was a blur now. None of it had any sense of solidity or the simple taste of the real.
The warped door was shoved open. The Finns came in, almost tiptoeing, like cartoon characters from
Comic Cuts, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday
, or
Illustrated Chips
, all guilty favorites of Dr. Watson. Holmes ignored them; he had no time left but he also had no choices left. He had to see what the drug would allow him to see before he could pay attention to his would-be murderers.
Holmes’s consciousness had expanded until he came up against the horizontal iron bars of his cage. The bars were not solid. Sections of different lengths floated in the gray air—no, not air, some gelatinous aether—in front of him, but no two horizontal blocks were far enough apart that he could press his head or shoulders between them. Holmes realized that the floating horizontal elements of his cage were distinct words, giant words, separate words like slugs of type set into a gelatinous void of a medium, but the huge words and sentences were written backward from his point-of-view. Holmes grabbed at two of the longer floating words—the metal was so cold it burned his hands—and he stared through the imprisoning word-bars with the expression of a madman or a castaway seeing his first ship in years receding from view.
Holmes looks at you. He sees the blurred outlines of the room or space behind you. He strains to make out your face.
“He’s slammed,” said one of the Finns.
“He’s all shot up. He ain’t even half here,” said the other Finn.
“Shut up,” snapped Murtrick.
All four men were inside the open door now, the Finns and Murtrick having worked their way carefully around to their right, Holmes’s left. But Culpepper stayed in the doorway. Braces
and
belt, Holmes remembered through the glow and wondrous, fearless terror of the heroin. If Culpepper remained a truly cautious man for the next two minutes, Mr. Sherlock Holmes of London would soon be a corpse.
Holmes had tucked away his leather foldaway and was on his knees as if praying to the drizzle falling vertically in front of him. Somewhere above the hole in the ceiling the sun had grown brighter; the waterfall was now made of skeins of liquid gold. Holmes’s walking stick was propped against the wall behind him and to the right. It would be most awkward for him to try to reach it and would take too long to try. The three men creeping up on him noted this. Holmes’s eyes were not focused on anything, but he vaguely noticed that Murtrick had removed the Bowie knife from its sheath. Culpepper had removed the revolver from his waistband. The Finns now raised their Paleolithic clubs.
Then Culpepper stepped into the room and wedged shut the door behind him. Most probably it was just old habit—seeking some privacy for a murder. Holmes had instinctively hoped for such a habit to be there, but he had not been certain. He had not been certain. Now he seemed to take no notice.
Now all four men were moving carefully around the perimeter of the terrible hole in the floor, keeping as close to the west wall of the empty room as possible. The Finns kept glancing down into the cavity with something like terror in their little Troglodyte eyes.
Holmes decided that it would have to be one of the Finns who should survive and carry back the details of this encounter to Mr. J and his superiors.
“Don’t cluster too close when you get him,” whispered Culpepper, following them but staying several paces back, then stopping completely at the west side of the hole while watching the other three advance. “The floor might not hold you there if you cluster up. We need the bottles intact.”
No one said anything but the three men opened more distance between themselves. The Finns shouldered their short clubs with nails driven through the working ends. Murtrick had his knife and was moving in an experienced knife-fighter’s crouch. Culpepper held his pistol loosely down at his side, every inch the vision of the accomplished duelist anticipating another easy victory. The Beaumont-Adams revolver’s hammer was cocked.
Holmes had not turned his head to watch their final approach. His eyes were vacant, the drug obviously in full control. There was a single drop of blood on the inside of his still-bare left arm.
The Finns attacked with Murtrick close behind.
Holmes—so cool behind his buffer that he watched with the most disinterested attention imaginable—whirled, away from the attacking men, as if attempting a retreat into the dead-end corner where the crater came all the way to the east wall, but the whirl was no half-turn away. He twirled almost completely around and came up out of his crouch with his walking stick in his hand.
The Finns shouted a single primal scream and raised their clubs.
Decades of single-stick practice guided Holmes’s two-second blur of six blows: two lateral swings to break their right arms; two vertical swings to club their underjaws and drop them to their knees; two fluidly vicious downward swings—one to crush the larger Finn’s skull, a lesser blow to knock the slightly shorter Finn down, but to leave him semiconscious.
Murtrick had made the mistake of staring at the blur of violence and leaping blood, but now he leaped closer, crouched lower, swung the deadly blade to the right, to the left. He jumped over the dead Finns: one motionless on its face, a river of blood flowing from his ears, the other twitching on his back, moaning as he cradled his aching head and bleeding scalp with both hands.
Holmes took a step backward, not because he feared Murtrick’s blade or needed the room but because he was sending a subliminal message to Culpepper to join the fray.
Come closer
. The dandy did take two steps closer but still stayed well out of club range. His pistol was raised but the man was obviously waiting for Murtrick to do his job. “The heroin bottles!” he screamed at his stinking friend. “Don’t break them!”
The Bowie knife was its own blur. Holmes was fast enough with his stick to have batted it across the room in the quarter of a second when Murtrick tossed it from hand to hand—the man was obviously as ambidextrous at ripping his enemies open from sternum to crotch as he was filthy—but Holmes had use for the knife stuck in the floor here, not lost down the golden waterfall hole or sticking from an unreachable wall or door across the room. He risked more by waiting for Murtrick to sweep the blade a final time and then lunge forward in a ballet-beautiful single motion. Only in Spain and once in Calcutta had Holmes seen knife-fighters perform that brilliantly. It was precisely the kind of super-fast knife move, Holmes knew, that almost always left the expert knife-wielder’s opponent’s bowels hanging out and then dropping to the floor with that ultimately final, squishy sound that the horrified and dying victim lived long enough to see and hear. The length of a Bowie knife only made that full
hari-kari
more likely, but the
weight
of Mr. Bowie’s famous blade and hilt did slow the killing move by that necessary fraction of a second on which Holmes counted.
Holmes arched his body while balancing on his heels, the tip of the Bowie knife took a button off his waistcoat, and then he slammed his weighted stick down on Murtrick’s right hand—the knife dropped and embedded its point in the floor exactly where Holmes had wished it—and then, without pausing in its complex arc, the stick swung up and caught Murtrick in the side of the head.
Dazed, Murtrick wobbled toward the drop, started to go over.
Holmes grabbed the man, then pulled him toward his own chest with what felt like an infinitely powerful heroin-assisted left hand, keeping his stick in his right hand between them. Holmes brought his face so close to Murtrick’s it seemed as if he was going to kiss the semi-conscious thug, then Holmes lowered his face to the man’s chest, making himself smaller as he pushed both of them forward around the perimeter of the crater.
The four cracks from the .442 Beaumont-Adams revolver seemed to reach Holmes hours after the impacts had shattered the back of Murtrick’s skull, lodged in the man’s spine, blown his left shoulder into bone fragments, and passed through his body—that final ball passing between Holmes’s right arm and his torso.
It was a five-shot pistol, but Holmes had pushed the upright corpse up and into Culpepper by this point and the fifth shot blew wet plaster out of the rotted ceiling. Holmes dropped Murtrick’s corpse, unhurriedly clubbed the empty gun out of Culpepper’s hand, and dragged him back to where he had injected the heroin, both men doing rather dainty dances over the three fallen bodies. The rotted and tilting floor sagged under their weight, but Holmes needed Culpepper near the knife embedded hilt-up in those groaning floorboards.
He swung Culpepper around and shoved him toward the edge of the hole, stopping his fall only with his left hand grasping the older man’s jacket collar. Culpepper teetered and whimpered. Holmes suddenly smelled urine.
Holmes tossed away his club and reached into his shirt pocket to retrieve the three photographs there. Still holding Culpepper at a steep angle over the drop, he thrust the first photograph—the one of the older, heavier, dark-eyed, mustached man—in front of the murderer’s face.