The Holmes-Dracula File

by Fred Saberhagen

  I caught her gently in the doorway. “Sally, you must invite me in. Bid me come into your dwelling, dear. Sally—?”

  It took a minute to extract from her the coherent words I needed. With their pronouncing, the overwhelming resistance to my entry was gone at once. (It could have been only psychological, you say? But so is life.) Now I could walk her to a chair, where I settled her and soothed her, and kissed the thrice-marred whiteness of her throat. Leaving her still quietly a—tremble, I walked over to the far wall, to see if a source of information might be salvaged.

  Alas, it was at once apparent that no sort of appeal—even from me—was going to make much impression upon my quondam opponent. His eyes were half open and his vital signs had all but disappeared. Where the stone had struck his forehead there was a visible depression. Cursing my ill-fortune, I let him fall back to the floor.

  At this, Sal let out a faint shriek, and I turned to regard her thoughtfully. Tremoring and twitching, staring now into space, she was seemingly indifferent even to the full display of her great birthmark in the reflected harshness of the electric lantern which still glowed where Matthews had left it on the table. I sighed. It was becoming plain to me, however belatedly, that Sal’s good-hearted nature was very ill-suited to stresses of the kind that Fortune had lately visited upon her. The very gentleness and sensibility which could not bear to see a sick old man disposed of in the Thames, now began to appear as possible liabilities to that old man’s cause.

  Ah, Sal! If only, before Jem Matthews, there had come into your life some solid London workman, with love that could be blind to your marked face—but of course at seventeen she had had very little time for such a miracle.

  I stood before her and patiently held out my hand, until hers came to take it. She shuddered at the contact now. Her face began to turn away, but stopped because her gaze had locked itself almost unwillingly on mine. There were the two little raw punctures on her throat. They would be extremely slow to heal; but heal they would, if we embraced no more, and with their disappearance all signs and shadows of my vampire presence would vanish from her mind and body.

  Now softly I entreated her. “My dear? Dear Sal?” And when at length I saw enough awareness in her eyes I went on: “We must now consider how best to keep you safe. If any of Matthews’ associates observe you in this state, they are sure to consider you dangerously unreliable. And should they connect you even indirectly with his death—well, you would not be safe at all. I can of course remove his body from your dwelling, but—”

  Terror had been slowly replacing the blankness in her face. “It was you on that bloody cart.” She made it an accusation. “In irons, lookin’ like an old ’un—I seen you there.” Her voice fell to an awed whisper. “I know they drowned you—didn’t they? Or was it smothered? Yer a dead ’un now.”

  I shook her—oh, just a little, very gently—and persisted. “Never mind about all that—about the old man. The question now is, what is to be done with you?” Sal’s gaze had turned toward the still form huddled by the wall. “He was my man—my Jem. You killed ’im... broke ’is neck like a chicken... like a bloody rat...”

  Now this was neither accurate nor apposite, to say nothing of the lack of gratitude it showed. I resumed my shaking of the wench, this time with a little briskness of irritation. Still there was no restorative effect, and I soon let her go.

  I paced around the wretched room, came back. “My own thought, my dear,” I said, “is that you had best be taken straight to the police. They can protect you both day and night, as long as those who work with Matthews are still alive. Are you presently wanted by the police? For anything, I mean, besides giving the alarm at Barley’s?”

  Sal continued to stare at the body of the one she thought of—now, at least—as “her man.” She did not answer me at all.

  Oh, I might have brought her out of it, even restored her to a temporary gaiety. There are ways. But those ways would not have been good for her in the long run. And the danger to her from her criminal associates would have remained. “Come! Answer!”

  She turned to face me, and swallowed. “No—no, the peelers don’t want t’ buckle me, ’cept fer wot I did at Barley’s.”

  “Then to the peelers, as you call them, you shall go. And you must tell them all you can—be willing to give evidence and they’ll protect you day and night. Tell them where that building is, where I was held a prisoner. And say you’ll testify against that young doctor—what’s his name?”

  “Dr. David Fitzroy. I ’eard it once.”

  “Fitzroy.” I breathed the name a few times, savoring its syllables. “And also any of the others whom they can manage to arrest. Name them all. Fitzroy is the leader?”

  “Not ’im. The way ’e talked sometimes, I know ’e got ’is orders that ’e ’ad t’ follow.”

  “From?”

  “I dunno who.” A ghost of Sal’s normal spirit showed in her eyes, and glad I was to see it. “Me turn evidence? Stand up t’ peach on ’em in court? Ah, if I on’y dared! Jem’d be alive now if it weren’t fer them.”

  “You must dare. Never fear, you will not be called upon to testify, as they shall never come to trial. I swear it, as I swore the same to Matthews.”

  “Ah... ”

  “Fitzroy.” Once more I enjoyed the name. “Yes, you must tell the peelers all you can, even about me, I shall not mind. And they will keep you safe—for long enough.”

  “Ah...”

  “But all you mean to tell them, you must tell me first...”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Late though the hour was, and tired as we all were, the urgency of the matter would not allow of any delay. Holmes and I dressed, went down with our visitors to the waiting carriage, and rode with them at a brisk pace through almost deserted streets. Then, at the same hospital where I had first encountered Sherlock Holmes, in a small, guarded dissecting-room not far from that very laboratory, Sir Jasper Meek showed us the body which had been so horribly deposited before his door.

  The corpse was that of a grizzled and unshaven man, past middle age, and thin as any of the homeless poor. It bore the classical tokens of the plague, in the form of hard, black swellings in groin and armpits. Additional marks on wrists and ankles indicated that the victim must have been heavily manacled at, or shortly before, the time of his death.

  Holmes, bending close through the reek of carbolic to examine the body, soon disposed of our impression that the man had been a derelict in life.

  “The illiterate poor,” said he, “do not spend a great deal of time holding a pen between thumb and forefinger, as this man undoubtedly did. We might bring in the next of kin of any elderly clerks reported missing during the last month or six weeks. It may help us if we can learn this victim’s identity, and how and when he was taken as an experimental subject—are our opponents seizing people on the street at random for that purpose?”

  “The police, then, are to be notified?”

  “I recommend informing Inspector Lestrade, after swearing him to secrecy. He has the capacity to follow instructions to the letter—once he can be made to understand them—and also to keep a closed mouth when necessary. Yet we must not tell even Lestrade the full story. Not yet.”

  Holmes returned to his examination of the corpse. “These small red marks clustered on the chest—they have the appearance of flea—bites, have they not, Sir Jasper?”

  “Indeed they have,” replied the illustrious physician. “Though why they should be so curiously concentrated I cannot guess. The body elsewhere is remarkably free of any evidence of attack by vermin. I say remarkably, assuming this man to have been kept in poor and unhealthy conditions during the last days of his life.”

  “Quite. Well, unhealthy is surely not too strong a word.”

  I ought perhaps to interject a comment here, to avoid puzzling my future readers unnecessarily. It was not until 1905, some eight years after the events herein described, that the bite of fleas was generally understood by the m
edical community to be the ordinary means of transmission of plague to humans—although as early as 1894 it had been confirmed by repeated studies that epidemics of plague in rats coincided closely with those in man. John Scott’s work in Sumatra, had any of his results survived, might have greatly speeded the advance of science in this direction.

  In 1894, also, Alexandre Yersin in Hong Kong, and Kitasato in Japan, both succeeded independently in isolating the plague bacillus, Pasteurella pestis; and in the following year Yersin had prepared a serum to combat the disease. Recalling this as I stood in the dissecting-room, I mentioned the existence of a serum to Sir Jasper, but he only looked grave and shook his head. Of course, months of effort would have been necessary to provide London with enough of the serum to be of substantial help against an epidemic.

  The door opened, and a senior official of the hospital, his face very grave, looked in to make an announcement. “Gentlemen, more police are here with another body that has just been found. The marks appear similar.”

  Holmes at once directed that this cadaver also be brought into our room, where it was laid out upon the remaining table. I was scarcely surprised to hear that this corpse had been brought up during the continued dragging of the Thames near the murder site. When found, it had been sealed inside one of John Scott’s oilcloth bags, and wearing one of the peculiar shirts that had made up part of his expedition’s equipment. The body had been in the water too long—perhaps a month, I judged—for us to be able to determine whether there were any flea-bites on the chest.

  Working beside me in the intolerably close, foul air. Holmes suddenly swayed, so that I felt it necessary to put out an arm and steady him. He muttered to me in a low whisper: “But I feel sure that the fleas bit this man also, Watson. Again, the drinking of the blood. Do you see? The fleas will have it, or the other. And in this case which is deadlier?”

  I tightened my grip upon his arm. “Holmes, you are coming home with me. Immediately, for you must rest.”

  For once, I think, I was as forceful as he himself was wont to be. Still, when he acquiesced almost meekly, I was surprised. Holmes perhaps enjoyed my reaction, for there was a faint twinkle in his eyes when we had taken leave of the others and were out of the dissecting-room. “As yet, Watson, no directions have been given for the delivery of the ransom. Do you mark that? It means that we have yet a little time to spare. It may mean that things do not go smoothly for the blackmailers. I pray that it is so... but in any case, you are right, now is the time to rest.”

  Early next morning, Lestrade appeared at Baker Street. The inspector was somewhat mystified by the orders he had received from his superiors to cease work on all his current cases and place himself completely at Holmes’ disposal. He came in bemoaning the fact that he was thus being forced, without explanation, to drop his work on the Grafenstein killing. And this just when, as he put it, there had been “a shocking development, but one that promised to be helpful.”

  “And what might that be?” Holmes demanded sharply.

  “Why, another murder.”

  Lestrade went on to inform us that one Jem Matthews, formerly of “the fancy,” and since his retirement from the ring one of the most accomplished ruffians in London, had been brutally slain during the night just past, in the lodgings of a young woman named Sally Craddock. “You might have noticed her at Barley’s, gentlemen. She was the one who gave the alarm. And she had just been arrested and put into the van there when that scoundrel we were after leaped onto it somehow and drove off.”

  Lestrade went on to explain that an hour or so before dawn the girl had walked into the Commercial Street police station, of her own volition and evidently in a state of shock, to report Matthews’ killing. She had begun to give evidence, saying that the wanted man—whose name she insisted she did not know—had quarreled with Matthews, and had slain him somehow by brute strength when Matthews drew a knife. Then, in the midst of being questioned, Sally Craddock had fallen into a deep sleep of exhaustion, almost a coma; a police surgeon was in attendance upon her now.

  I was glad that Holmes and I had had the chance for a few hours’ sleep and some breakfast, for within minutes of Lestrade’s arrival the two of us were in a cab and once more on our way to the East End, while the inspector at Holmes’ orders had begun his search for information regarding missing clerks.

  “You are certain, then,” I asked Holmes as we rode, “that Jem Matthews’ killing is connected somehow with the blackmail scheme?”

  “ If it was in fact done by the same man, the one we have been searching for. And there seems little doubt of that.”

  “This mad fellow appears to be at the center of it all.”

  “He is at the center, certainly, or very near it. But I think he is not mad. Watson, we were interrupted last night just as I was trying to reconstruct the events taking place on the pier and culminating in the Grafenstein woman’s death.”

  “I am prepared to listen.”

  “But you do not yet, I think, see the importance of these events in the whole tangled skein of crime confronting us. In this I include not only the violent deeds of this peculiar killer, but the blackmail threat, and even the disappearance of John Scott.”

  “I am also prepared to learn.”

  “Excellent. Let us then begin with Frau Gratenstein standing or walking on the dock at approximately midnight, her pistol in her purse and, I fear, no very good intentions in her heart.”

  I interrupted: “How do you know she was not brought to that deserted spot against her will?”

  “By some assailant who allowed her to retain her pistol? Whom, nevertheless, she did not attempt to resist until that lonely place was reached? It is conceivable, I suppose—but let us try another hypothesis first.”

  “Yes, I see. Go on, Holmes.”

  “As I remarked to Lestrade, the river is very often used to dispose of bodies. We saw last night evidence that it has been so used, for a month or longer, by those who are now threatening to loose the plague upon us. Surely it needs no very great leap of the imagination to suppose that Frau Grafenstein, given her background in chemical science and its abuses, was in league with them. That her presence on the dock was connected with the disposal of yet another experimental victim. But this time—something went wrong.”

  Holmes’ eyes turned piercingly upon me as he went on. “At some hour near midnight, her short-barreled but powerful pistol was fired; at or about the same time, matching bullet-holes were made in the shirt, and a bullet of a caliber to fit the pistol lodged in the boat-house wall. Also, the lady had her throat torn out.

  “Again concurrently, or nearly so, the oilcloth bag containing the manacles was left in the water near the spot. Does it suggest anything to you, Watson, that when that sealed bag was recovered it contained no body? And no shirt, whereas we found a wet shirt on the pier?”

  I replied: “The intended victim was not dead after all, and managed to escape.”

  “Very good! I do not mean to imply that your answer is the wrong one, when I repeat that the bag when found was still fastened shut, not cut or torn in any way. I wish only to point out what a very remarkable escape that must have been.”

  Another thought, somewhat distracting, had just occurred to me. “Holmes, if what you say is true, this man is most probably infected with the plague. If it should go into the pneumonic form, he will represent a deadly peril to the whole city, with every breath he takes.”

  My friend was silent for a moment, and I thought he looked at me strangely. “I cannot say it is impossible, Watson. But I think that particular danger is not one which need greatly concern us.”

  “I am sure I do not see why, if this man is infected.”

  Holmes peered ahead, impatient at some snarl of traffic that was momentarily delaying us. “Do you recall, Watson, those scratches on the planking of the dock? I examined them very carefully.”

  “I do.”

  “The radius of their arcs was equal to the length of long human a
rms—of arms as long as mine—or of the arms of the man who wore that shirt.”

  There came an unfamiliar creeping sensation along my scalp. There seemed to loom, just beyond the limits of my understanding and imagination, some horror that threatened—to unnerve even Sherlock Holmes, and which he was endeavoring to point out to me—to point out slowly and indirectly, as if he were reluctant to speak of it at all. For the first time in my life, perhaps, I truly understood how a vague danger may sometimes be more terrible than one definitely known. “Holmes,” I cried, “I do not see what you are getting at.”

  His eyes again were fixed on mine relentlessly. “Those scratches were made by the killer, Watson. By the same man, tall, lean, inhumanly strong, who so closely resembles me-and who has now killed again. My one hope, Watson, my one hope is...”

  “Yes?”

  “That he is killing with justification. In self-defense or with some other purpose that he considers honorable.”

  I thought aloud: “He stole money from the woman’s purse.”

  “He took her money, yes. But he might have seen that as an honorable act—to the victor belong the spoils of war. I have hopes, because he next scrupulously bought the clothing that he needed.”

  “A peculiar concept of honor, I should say. For a man of this day and age, at any rate.”

  As if to himself, Holmes murmured: “Ah, if I could only be sure that he is not.”

  “I fail to understand.”

  He shook his head. “I spoke of my one hope. If he is behaving honorably, that means he is actually our ally, an ally we sorely need against our terrible enemies— and he may gain for us the time we need.”