“Look, this is all very interesting, and I appreciate it, but I don’t have time—”
He quirked his eyebrows. “You’re in the Louvre, before the
Mona Lisa
, and you do not have time—?”
“I know. It sounds foolish. But … a friend … I was supposed to meet a friend here, and he’s not here. He’s long overdue.”
The guard tossed his old, narrow hands in the air and smiled. “Let me help. I can help. I’m a guard.” He pointed to the chevron piping on his coat sleeve. “What does your friend look like?”
Watson was not a fool. He knew that the guard may well have been Harold Silence. His friendliness, his chattiness, the way he lingered … the disappearance of Thomas—all of these clues told Watson to beware, but he still wasn’t certain enough to strike an old man. “He’s, uh”—Watson coughed twice loudly—“my friend is, well, young, British, with dark hair, a ratty trench coat.”
“Ah,” the guard said. “An art student.”
“Yes, an art student.” Watson pressed his hand into his coat pocket, feeling the scalpel there. At least he wasn’t defenseless. If this old man tried anything … He coughed twice more. “My friend … he liked the
Mona Lisa
most of all. Said he would meet me here—but I don’t see him anywhere.”
“Wait a moment,” the guard said as if in thought, “a young British art student with a thin mustache and goatee?”
“Yes.”
“Well”—the guard scratched his head—“you see, there was a young man like that taken to the infirmary. He couldn’t breathe—blood on his lips. Blood on his shirt, too, right here.” He touched his heart.
What if Thomas truly has collapsed?
Watson wondered.
In his condition, it’s not only possible, but also likely
. “Where’s the infirmary?”
The guard crooked a finger above his shoulder. “Here, let me show you.” He turned his back and strode with a bandy-legged step down the middle of the gallery.
Watson followed, letting go of the scalpel. He couldn’t cut this man’s throat, even if he were Harold Silence. And Watson
had
brought a haymaker, after all. At the first sign …
“Through here,” the old man said, gesturing toward a door that read INFIRMARY. Nothing suspicious about that. But then he opened the door and stepped back and motioned Watson through. “After you.”
Watson shook his head. “You know the way.”
Shrugging, the guard stepped through the doorway. He and Watson descended a short flight of stairs, passed through a hallway, and came out into a long, low room. Cots lined one wall, and a doctor stood at a surgical table in the middle. On it lay Thomas, writhing beneath straps. Blood foamed on his lips and spattered his shirt and coat.
“Is that your friend?” the old guard asked.
“Yes.” Watson rushed past him to Thomas’s sickbed. “Out of the hospital, into the infirmary …”
Thomas looked up with imploring eyes and tried to speak, but he could only hack out a gobbet of blood.
Watson shook his head. “He shouldn’t be strapped down this way He can’t clear his airway” He grasped the great buckle that ran across Thomas’s chest and started to loosen it.
As he did, Thomas gasped a breath and sputtered, “Look out!” A shadow moved across his eyes, the shadow of a man’s fist.
Watson saw a flash of white light.
Then everything went dark.
As he crumpled to the floor, he heard a voice say, “Welcome to Paris, Dr. Watson.”
Then there was only silence.
REPENT OF HEAVEN
H
ere are the things I was banking on:
1. Watson and I would be irresistible bait for Holmes.
2. Either Watson or I could hold Holmes off in a fight until the other arrived.
3. We had the element of surprise, so Holmes would not be able to marshal his guards to swarm over us.
4. Holmes would not risk a public scene that might alert the police to his plans.
5. Holmes would attack with his wits rather than his fists.
I was wrong about every item except the first. I seemed to have forgotten, you see, that Holmes was not Holmes but a demon.
“So far so good,” I said as I stood among medieval paintings and spotted Watson in the adjacent gallery. He gave me a circumspect nod, his eyes level and serious. I returned the look and strolled onward
The next hall held Renaissance works. On the far side, patrons clustered around the
Mona Lisa
, though on the near side was an even more impressive masterwork: Michelangelo’s
sculpture
The Dying Slave
. I approached the towering figure, nude and swooning in anguish, his flesh and muscle all supple and alive in white marble. I thought of the sculptor nearly four hundred years before, and of his model—and of both of them lying now in separate graves, both of them living still in this one figure. So rapt was my attention on the statue that I forgot for a moment about myself.
Something struck my heart.
Pain! I staggered back, groped at my chest, felt for the knife handle that must be jutting there—but no. It had just been a fist, one that knew where the wound was and smashed it and reopened it. Blood rose in my throat. God, the pain!
“
Vous allez bien?
” shouted a man, very near—too near.
As I collapsed to the floor, the man swooped down over me—a tall, thin man with white hair, mustache, and beard. His eyes glowed briefly red, and he smiled the smile of a barracuda. The demon Holmes spoke in a voice that gushed concern, “
Vous saignez, monsieur
.”
Of course I was bleeding, but the demon did not speak these words for my benefit. A museum patron had just then knelt down on the other side of me, and he asked, “
Vous saignez, monsieur?”
I tried to tell the man what had happened, but I was gagging on blood.
The demon’s eyes had gone dark, and his grin had turned to a look of concern. “
Je ne sais pas. Il s’est effondré tout à coup!
”
The man pointed to the blood on my mouth. “
Il saigne de la bouche!
”
Nodding decisively, the demon pointed toward the infirmary door: “
Aidez-moi à l‘amener à l’infirmerie!
”
I spat blood and gasped a breath and tried to get up, but Holmes and the other man looped their arms under mine and hoisted me. I tried to protest, but already my throat had filled
again, and I hacked it out across my shirt. I kicked to break free. “
Il ne peut pas respirer!
” said the other man.
“
Vite! A l’infirmerie!
”
Two more men arrived—guards dressed like Holmes—and the knowing look between them told me that these were his accomplices. They were burly, with stubbled chins and missing teeth, thugs that Holmes had somehow charmed into his service.
The demon said to the museum patron, “
Nous prendrons soin de lui
.”
The patron backed away, letting the guards take his position as they dragged me down the gallery.
I struggled to get loose, but one of the thugs drove his knee into my side. I coughed more blood. Couldn’t Watson hear? The cough was our signal. I tried to cough again, but Holmes seized my throat, choking off the sound. Watson would never hear now. Part of me was glad. I didn’t want him to be doomed along with me.
The brutes lugged me to a doorway marked INFIRMARY, and the demon Holmes released my throat so I could hack a breath. He said to his henchmen, “Take him to the infirmary and strap him down. Make sure none of the personnel know. Only our people.”
“What then, boss? Kill him?”
“No. I’m going to finish him myself.” He lifted Watson’s black medical bag, dandled it a moment before my face, and handed it to one of the thugs.
“How long will you be?” the man asked.
“Only as long as it takes me to nab the other one,” Holmes replied, flashing his red eyes my way before turning and striding away.
The passage beyond was too small for two men to go abreast with me slung between, so one of the thugs stooped
down and hoisted me over his shoulder. Blood shot from my mouth across his back, and I called out, “Help!” My cry was cut short as the man bashed my head against the wall.
The other thug slammed the door behind us. “Shut up, you!”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Boss says.”
“Don’t you know … who he is …
what
he is?”
The guard answered with a wicked smile. “He’s the boss.”
We descended a short set of stairs, passed through a hall, and ducked under a doorway. Beyond lay an infirmary with cots along the walls, medicine cabinets at one end, a human skeleton at the other, and a steel table in the center of it all. The man who carried me dumped me flat on my back on the table. I riled, gasping. The man grabbed my hands and held me down while his partner cinched wide leather bands down over my legs and waist and chest. Once the straps were in place, one man went off to secure the entrances and the other man dragged a doctor’s coat onto his shoulders. He stood above me, grinning.
Now the true horror began. Lying on my back, I couldn’t get my throat clear. I sputtered and gasped tiny breaths, but they came foaming back up on my lips. I was suffocating. I flipped my head from side to side, spitting out what I could, but it was no use.
And then Watson came walking in. The moment he saw me, he rushed over to the table. “Out of the hospital, into the infirmary …”
I tried to scream a warning but could only gurgle.
“He shouldn’t be strapped down this way. He can’t clear his airway,” Watson said, leaning down to undo the strap over my waist.
I hacked, grabbed a breath, and shouted, “Look out!”
It was too late. A fist cracked Watson in the jaw and sent him spilling to the floor.
“Welcome to Paris, Dr. Watson,” said the demon Holmes, who had stepped up behind him.
The two criminals stared down at the prostrate form. Holmes nudged Watson with his boot, got no response, and then kicked him in the side. Still, Watson didn’t move.
The demon squatted above Watson, rolled him over, and peeled back his eyelids. “He’ll be out for hours. Won’t remember a thing. Perfect.” He smiled up at his comrade. “I’d always known he had a glass jaw—spotted it in the gray vein along the left side of his face—but even I couldn’t have hoped for a one-punch knockout.” The other thug returned, and Holmes said to them both, “Take him down the hall, far enough that he can’t hear the screams. Guard him until I come.”
The two thugs stooped down, grasped Watson’s wrists and ankles, and hoisted him between them. “What if he wakes up and starts asking about his friend?”
“Put him off. The murder of Thomas Carnacki will be part of our larger case—the
Mona Lisa
Mystery.” The demon fondly brushed Watson’s bruised jaw. “Sleep well. When you awaken, the Louvre will have lost a million francs’ worth of art, and I—your old friend Sherlock Holmes—will be on the case!”
After his henchmen lugged Watson from the room, the demon turned and crossed to the table where I lay. He grasped the tabletop and leaned his manic face over me. “Hello, Thomas. At last, you arrived.”
I spat blood into his face.
The demon didn’t flinch, didn’t wipe it off, but simply let it drip from his fake mustache and beard. “I’m surprised how long it took you. A full week. I’d put every clue in the papers, every scrap of evidence you would need, day after day. I was
starting to think you would never arrive. But now, the charade is over.” He peeled off the mustache and tugged off the beard and wig, and his face was once again the face of Sherlock Holmes—except for the blood that spattered his cheeks.
I coughed out another gobbet. “Holmes … Listen … Drive out the demon … Take your body back.”
He began to pace, a smile on his lips and a laugh deep in his throat. “Your friend is gone. I’m not Holmes. I’m not Moriarty. I’m not Jack the Ripper. I’m the Undying Evil that rides them. I’m a divine horseman.”
“You’re … what—?”
“It’s voodoo, Thomas. Voodoo!” He waggled his fingers beside his bloodstained face. “Voodoo mambos call the spirits of the dead the ‘divine horsemen.’ They enter people and possess them to live again. They ride people like horsemen ride horses. I’ve ridden so many.
“I was riding a voodoo mambo in Haiti when a ship’s mate named Enoch Jones killed her. I rode him back to London, where a Whitehall hooker named Martha Tabram plied him with rum till he died and then rolled him for his two months’ wages. I rode Martha for a long while until another sailor lad—John Harder—took us along George Yard and told me that the other men pushed him into it, said they thought he was homosexual, said he had to prove himself a man by laying a whore. He proved it, all right. Thirty-nine stab wounds proved it. And so I rode John Harder after that, and I made him into Jack the Ripper, and he killed and killed and killed.”
The demon glanced down at me, seeing that blood filled my mouth and tears filled my eyes and I was about to lose consciousness. He blinked once and then bent down and pressed his lips to mine and drank the blood out of my mouth. As repelled as I was, I could breathe again.
The demon licked his lips and said, “We love murder. It frees us to enter a new host. Our blood is the key. Sacrificial blood. When someone kills us, we can travel from victim to victor. We trade up. And even if we’re caught and it’s the noose or the blade, we just skip merrily from the snapped neck or the severed head into the trap man’s fingers or the axman’s arm.”
“You trade up … .” I repeated incredulously, only beginning to catch on. “Murder for murder … And when Moriarty killed Jack the Ripper—?”
“I rode Moriarty. How grand a ride it was! Genius. Until Holmes brought him down. Until Holmes made him the most wanted man in Europe. Then, where could I ride Moriarty? Where except to prison—? Unless …”
Horror overtook me. “You never wanted to kill Hotmes—”
“I wanted
him
to kill
Moriarty
!” the demon proclaimed. “I wanted to trade up, from the genius Moriarty to the greater genius—Sherlock Holmes!”
Suddenly, it all made sense. “You planned it all along.”
“Yes. I brought a knife to the falls and pulled it on Holmes and slashed at him. At the first chance, though, I let him knock it from my hand, hoping he would snatch it up and bury it in my heart. But no. The fool would not take an unfair advantage. He threw the knife over the cascade. Then we grappled, and I hurled myself backward to shatter my head against stone, but Holmes held on and slowed my fall and lost his balance and plunged over the falls. I watched him go, hoped he would survive, hoped I could fish him from the river and take him to an inn and force him to kill me so that I could enter him—but you and that Moriarty brat changed all my plans. I chased you, tried to catch you so Holmes could kill me—even caught him in an alley and pleaded for him to do so.”
I trembled. “But now you have his body. Now you have everything you’d been after.”
“He understands at last. My final foe knows the man who will kill him. Oh, it is so much sweeter to kill a man who understands than to kill a fool.” The demon lifted the exorcism machine from the black bag and set it on the table beside me. “And sweetest of all to kill a man with his own weapon.”
The demon knew everything Holmes knew—understood how the electric pentacle would form around my body, how it would drive my soul out of my flesh and kill me.
“Exorcise, electrocute, execute,” the demon said, punctuating the words with clicks of the alligator clips. One by one, he positioned them.
Metal teeth bit down on my toes and fingers and earlobes. I struggled against the straps, but they held firm.
“Do you want to know the truly delicious thing, Thomas Carnacki? Even if you somehow manage to escape and kill me, I will merely take over your body. Though I may die a hundred thousand times, I will live forever.” He shrugged. “Of course, you won’t manage to escape. You’re no match for Sherlock Holmes. And since that’s the case, well … it’s time for you to die.”
He cranked the handle of the generator. The rotor hummed, and sparks snapped. Energy poured through the black cables and jolted into my extremities—feet, hands, and head. Toes curled and soles arched, fingers clenched and fingernails cut into palms, jaw clamped tight and teeth clenched together and ground like rocks.