Bang, bang, went my master’s gun.
The ghost shook violently then flew away into the air with a hiss of anger. Reaching St. Pancras, it ascended its steeple at great speed, up to the lightning conductor. It whirled round it for three or four seconds, then impaled itself on its spike most violently.
“Devil a bit!” cursed Sherlock Holmes. His face had hardened, and for a long time, he stood up silently in the wind battered night, casting circular glances upon the one thousand and one roofs of London which glimmered faintly in the misty moonshine. When at last he turned back to tell the fair sleepwalker a few comforting words, he felt mystified and puzzled, for he realized at once that she had made the most of his confusion to disappear.
CHAPTER 6
PLAGUE OVER LONDON
Sherlock Holmes, François Le Villard, and myself were seated in Gregson’s office at Scotland Yard. The inspector had greeted us warmly and called for a pot of tea.
“Well, it’s time to have a good chat, isn’t it?” he said, looking about him as in search of approval.
My master nodded. He lit his pipe and began: “A fortnight ago, my excellent friend Chief Inspector François Le Villard paid a call on me to seek my help. He meant to confound a French fairground entertainer called Monsieur Victor, for he knew the fellow was in fact a trafficker in all sorts of illegal goods, and he thought that he was coming to London for some very fishy reasons.”
“Hem, may I ask what they were?” said Gregson.
“Eh bien, you see, Inspector,” replied Le Villard, “in Paris, Victor was involved in a very big business of body snatching. Fairgrounds offered him great opportunities: there are so many misérables and down-and-out people hovering about, whose disappearance goes unnoticed. His underworld friends gave him a helping hand when it came to bringing fresh corpses to dissecting tables. All in all, a simple, easy and very profitable trade, parbleu!”
The Frenchman sipped his tea and resumed:
“Victor was a very clever rascal, and the Sûreté could never collect serious proofs against him. Nevertheless, I kept a watchful eye on him and lately, by searching once again his caravan while he was out, I came across a most interesting document: this was a half-burnt letter in the stove; it made allusions to an appointment Victor had with a certain Karolina Szokoli at Highgate Cemetery’s side entrance, late at night. Diable! For me, it undoubtedly meant body snatching, and I told myself that, at last, here was my chance to confound him. The date of the appointment was missing, having being written on the burnt part of the letter, but some thing told me it would take place soon, probably on one of the nights of the forthcoming week. So I packed up my things and crossed the Channel at once.”
“When François pronounced the name of Karolina Szokoli,” intervened Sherlock Holmes, “I suspected foul play: the lady Monsieur Victor was supposed to meet at Highgate Cemetery was nobody else than Count ess Vetcha, known by her disparagers as the ‘Witch of Greenwich’ … and the lady had been moldering in her grave for over thirty years!” My master took a puff at his pipe and added in an offhand tone: “At least, that’s what she was supposed to be doing!”
Gregson regarded him uncomprehendingly.
“Hey, what on earth are you telling me?” he asked.
“Well, I just meant the Countess didn’t lie in her coffin … .”
“The devil!”
“You couldn’t use a better word, Greg’,” agreed Holmes, grinning from ear to ear.
“Ah, Bon Dieu, oui!” Le Villard broke in. “I saw her ghost floating over the graveyard’s wall!”
“Gho … ghost?” faltered Gregson.
“Mais si! Moreover Billy saw it, too. Am I not right, mon vieux?”
“Quite so, Monsieur!” I answered laconically.
Sherlock Holmes gave a dry chuckle, then turning to me: “The tube, please,” he ordered, “but just be careful, my boy.”
I opened the leather bag on my lap and produced a test tube shut by a cork sealed with a broad circle of wax; I handed it to my master with the greatest precaution. He put it under Gregson’s nose and said:
“What do you see inside it, Inspector?”
“Err … . bug … a small, black bug … a flea, I think.”
“Exactly. For your guidance, I’ll tell you that I picked it up in Countess Vetcha’s coffin. Now …” and Sherlock Holmes’s tone became icy, “do you realize what formidable danger it represents?”
“Well … no.”
“I’ll tell you.”
My master shook the test tube and one could see the flea jumping up and down, slightly magnified by the thick glass. He declared: “This insect, at the moment, is the most dangerous creature in the world! The tarantula’s or the asp’s bite is a kiss by comparison!”
“By jingo! What do you mean, Mr. Holmes?”
“I mean that this flea carries … bubonic plague!”
The inspector’s eyes opened in terror.
“Black … black death?” he said, in an awestricken whisper.
My master nodded gravely. He handed me back the test tube and resumed: “It is obvious to me that the responsibility for this most dreadful deed falls in first place upon Monsieur Victor’s head. I imagine that, through his foul acquaintances at the Faculté de Medecine in Paris, he obtained some infected fleas. It was very, very easy then to make them multiply by the hundred, the thousand … .”
“The thousand?” exclaimed Gregson in tones of pure horror.
“Indeed. The buyer of Victor’s deadly parcel had a most ambitious and deadly scheme. In fact, something unseen in London since 1665!”
“Wait … wait, Mr. Holmes! All this goes too fast for me. Please tell me at first who he was!”
“She rather, Greg’! Well, she was—or pretended to be—the Witch of Greenwich.”
“Gug-gug-great Scott!” cried the inspector, jumping to his feet. He fidgeted about the room for a minute or so, then asked abruptly:
“What about that dirty plan she had cooked up?”
My master stood up in turn, and, casting his eyes into Gregson’s, declared in a voice in which was no note of a doubt: “To spread bubonic plague all over London!”
Gregson’s blood ran cold. “Mercy me!” he gasped, staring blankly at Sherlock Holmes.
There was a dead, flat, stricken silence, then my master declared in a solemn tone, as if addressing the Queen, whose picture hung on the wall:
“I have seen right through the Witch’s plans and this shall never happen. I swear it!”
He sat back, obviously full of mingled perplexities. For a while, he kept entirely motionless and Gregson, Le Villard and I did the same. At last, as the clock was striking six, he moved a little and spoke again:
“The wretched lady had a first try over Bog Town with the atrocious results we have witnessed. Who could think of a better place to spread plague with infected parasites? Fleas are the unfriendly but common companions of rag-and-bone people. Besides, the Witch knew—though I still don’t know how—that there was a large oak chest filled with gold, hidden deep under one of the big rubbish heaps. Why not use Victor to open it and carry the riches away, then get rid of him with a good pistol shot. That’s what she did in cold blood.”
“But how did the Witch manage to slaughter the entire rag-picking population at once, Master?” I wondered.
“By an abominable but most clever trick, Billy. I have read somewhere recently that in ancient China, Prince Tsin used the same tactic against Mongol invaders in the year of our Lord 296. You see, Tsin had the brilliant idea to tie pouches full of infected fleas to fuses set on rods. He had but to fire them then at the menacing host of foes to decimate them.”
Sherlock Holmes made a slight pause. He cast a glance round and then said: “In the present case, the Witch used some kind of … fireworks!”
“Fireworks?” exclaimed the three of us like a single man.
“Yes, great explosive balls whose fragments, when they burst, cover a radius of a quarter o
f a mile. I think she hid them for a while in her family tomb at Highgate Cemetery and brought them into the vicinity of Bog Town, with the help of Monsieur Victor, on the intended night. They were let off from Deptford Bridge, as Constable Miles told us casually.”
“Bon Dieu!” exclaimed Le Villard; “Good Lord!” echoed Gregson.
Sherlock Holmes nodded. He knocked the ashes from his pipe and began to refill it slowly.
As he was proceeding to light it, I remarked indignantly: “I presume that, to sweeten the pill for the good folk of Bog Town, the she-devil played the organ while the fireworks were lighting up the sky!”
My master agreed with a very bitter smile. He drew a heavy puff at his pipe and declared, looking past me into the face of the setting sun that was sinking, red and angry and somber, beyond great ranges of Victorian houses:
“Fairy lights and sweet music … Who could dream of a more sadistic way of spreading the Black Death over London again!”
CHAPTER 7
HORROR IN A LONDON FOG
I was moving through the jaundiced mists of the London fog. Walking up Oxford Street, I occasionally overtook the vague shape of an automobile guided at a snail’s pace by an invisible driver. In the neighborhood of Old Cavendish Street, I caught a quick glance of a bearded character lighting a cigarette; I chuckled in comparing him to Captain Nemo at the controls of his Nautilus lost in a sea of impenetrable thickness. Farther on, as the street lamps provided scant illumination, I gave myself a delicious shiver by imagining that their flames were jack-o’-lanterns which misled the overconfident passerby to bottomless sewer pits. Then, turning back to more serious thoughts, I evoked mentally the many appalling crimes committed under the fog’s sheltering cloak: men and women had been waylaid, girls raped, children torn from their mothers and wives from their husbands.
I was nearing Baker Street when, abruptly, out of the mist came white things, like so many figures on a magic-lantern screen. In the midair they wavered, assuming shapes beyond comprehension. At the same time, from Soho Square, came a sound as of a stifled sob, immediately followed by weird, unearthly groans. All this was so blunt, so gruesome, so menacing, that it made my heart thump like a steam engine. Then, all of a sudden, in a phosphorescence all its own, a most abominable ghost rose from the gray folds of mist. Its black, putrid face was purely atrocious: no trace of a nose, empty eye sockets fringed with filth, and a large, toothless mouth grinning bestially. The horror of its presence shattered nerve and reason: Could it be the Black Death itself, riding the fog-drenched night with a posse of fiends? Such was the mad idea that came to me as I tried to turn back and run away. Unfortunately, my legs failed me and I remained aghast on the pavement.
With arms upraised, as if declaring vengeance, the abominable apparition was glaring at me while the other specters were starting a wild saraband around me.
“I’m done for!” I thought, trembling in all my limbs.
Actually, the situation was desperate and, barring a deus ex machina, I seemed condemned to the flames of hell. But, as improbable as it may seem, the deus came. And it came under the very human shape of … Sherlock Holmes!
“Courage, Billy!” cried my master as he dashed out of the fog, “Courage, my boy!” the planted himself in front of me to shield me with his body, and he cast a fierce, scornful glance at his vapory opponents.
“I’ve had enough of this ghastly farce!” he roared, suddenly producing an automatic pistol. He made two steps forward and, without warning, started firing at them.
Bang! Bang! Bang! … Plof! Plof! Plot! …
Three ghosts, one by one, blew up in the air.
“Rubber dummies!” I exclaimed, totally bewildered.
“Yes! Inflated with helium gas! I was played the trick twice before, recently,” retorted Holmes with blazing eyes.
Bang! Bang! … Plof!
The last pseudo-specter exploded under the detective’s well targeted bullets and the street was rid of all aberration again.
My heart bouncing with joy this time, I searched for the proper words to tell my master my gratitude, but I didn’t even have time to open my lips: indeed, the gun’s last report had hardly faded away when Sherlock Holmes called out, with challenge in his voice:
“Will you dare show yourself now, Countess?”
No reply came.
“Cowardess!” scowled the detective.
No reply again.
A couple of seconds elapsed, then, through the gray curtain of mist, a tall, white figure moved slowly forward—a pale, transparent form—which seemed to carry the light along with it. Billy could see loose strands of golden hair, floating from the creature’s upright head. It glided like a moonbeam, as if wafted by the faint breeze. But this time, there could be no mistake, the apparition was a flesh-and-blood person, and a most handsome one: a young girl, not over twenty. Holmes, at her sight, could not help giving a start, for she was none else than the fair damsel in nightgown that he had briefly met on his terrace roof, the evening before.
“Is … is she Countess Vetcha, the … the Witch of Greenwich, Master?” I asked him in low, uneasy voice.
“No, Billy, certainly not.”
I gave a sigh of relief.
“Thank God! But in that case, what’s this poor one doing out alone here?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Well …”
I looked up into her face. The wide open, vacant eyes, the rigid features, told their own story: the girl was sleepwalking. As if he had read into my mind, Sherlock Holmes said in a whisper: “Yes, she is! But don’t you wake her up, my boy; it could be fatal.”
“What shall we do, then, Master?”
“Hem! Just let her go her own way.”
The fair sleepwalker went past us without paying us the slightest notice, and vanished into the mist. “Where is she going and why is she up?” I wondered. It was all very mystifying, but I did not have time to ask myself more questions, for, at that very moment, an old man came out of the fog: he was small, rawboned, with a rather stupid-looking face, side whiskers, and a round, bald skull. He seemed in a great hurry.
“Pardon me, gentlemen,” he asked politely, “have you seen a fair-haired girl just now, er …”
“Sleepwalking in the street? Yes, we have, my good man!” replied Holmes with a strange little grin.
“Thank God! I feared I had lost her. But please, sir, could you tell me which way she went?”
Instead of answering the stranger, my master looked him over and asked:
“You were Countess Vetcha’s warden, weren’t you?”
An expression of surprise and apprehension came over the old man’s face.
“Indeed, sir,” he said, “but how do you know it?”
“I have seen your photograph on an identification sheet at Scotland Yard. My name is Sherlock Holmes!”
The old man bowed servilely. “Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective,” he said with downcast eyes. “I understand now. As you probably know, sir, I am called Beresford.”
My master nodded. “Beresford, yes,” he said thoughtfully. For a moment, he stared keenly at the old servant, then, all of a sudden, to my amazement, he advanced upon him, crying in tones of great disgust:
“Alias … the Witch of Greenwich!”
The warden’s attitude changed the minute he heard that name; it shifted from servility to ferocity, and there he stood in the fog-sodden street, facing Sherlock Holmes with strained eyes and bestially gnashing teeth. He crouched as my master ran in upon him, but, as he had little the advantage of the latter in size or weight, there seemed to be no great misgivings as to the outcome. They closed. As the warden’s muscles tightened on his, Sherlock Holmes knew, with a sudden, daunting shock, that he had met the strength of fury. For a moment the two men strained, then with a rabid scream the warden dashed his face into my master’s shoulder and bit through shirt and flesh until his teeth grated on the shoulder blade. Now, upon the outrage of that assault a fury not
less insane than that of his opponent fired Holmes, and, clutching at the throat, he tore that hideous face from his shoulder. Another moment and he should have strangled him but a female voice appealed:
“In Heaven’s name, don’t kill him!”
Holmes’s hold relaxed and the warden collapsed, unconscious, on the pavement. My master shook himself painfully and took a glance over his shoulder: by my side stood the fair sleepwalker, looking at him with a painful attempt at a smile, fully awake now.
EPILOGUE
“When, in the early nineties, Count Vetcha married young and fair Karolina Szokoli,” told my master later to François Le Villard and Inspector Gregson, “he made an excellent deal: indeed, he was the heir of a most illustrious Bohemian family, but he was totally penniless, while, an orphan, she was at the head of a huge fortune. Greed dazzled the Count, and when his bride gave birth to a girl, he ruthlessly tore the baby away from her. Then he began living a life of perpetual orgies in their mansion at Queens croft Road. For wicked reasons, he confined Karolina and began to impersonate her, propagating infamous excesses under that dressing-up: thus was born the legend of the Witch of Greenwich. Worn out by grief, poor Karolina died a premature death, and the Count squandered the remains of his wife’s fortune in the following years. At last, wanted by Scotland Yard for a nasty episode related to his scandalous habits, the Count disappeared and was never heard of ever again.”
Sherlock Holmes took a puff at his pipe and resumed: “In fact, he never left Queenscroft Road: under a very clever disguise, he quite simply became Beresford, the warden. Besides, he put up a highly organized gang of housebreakers, chosing his accomplices mostly amongst rag-and-bone men. Over some twenty years, the rascals accumulated a tremendous loot in silver, gold, and jewels, kept in a huge iron-bound chest of wood that was hidden in a secret chamber, deep beneath a dust heap in Bog Town.”
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