The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories

by Gafford, Sam

  As the cab pushed through the overcrowded streets toward the West End, past the newspaper dispensers and automated restaurants, Holmes briefly brought me up to date.

  “You’re well aware that the details of my construction and early life are lost to me. Those memories were erased at some point. All I can recall is awakening in my parents’ home where it was explained to me that my name was Sherlock Holmes and that Mycroft was my older brother, even though he was but ten years of age and I was already twice his height. I had been ‘adopted,’ apparently.”

  I nodded respectfully. All this was well known to me, but I allowed Holmes to continue.

  “I was told simply that I had been found wandering the underground of the East End by Mycroft’s father and brought home as a curiosity. It was determined that my brain was an actual working version of Babbage’s Analytical Engine, capable of making calculations and conclusions faster than the normal man. A remarkable achievement, as Babbage himself was unable to make his own invention work. Someone had taken his designs and expanded them, giving me life, so to speak.

  “As time went on, I pressed my own independence and eventually left my parents’ home to make my own way in the world. Shortly after, both of my parents died when their house burned down. Mycroft blamed me and has not spoken to me since.

  “It is he whom we are going to see now.”

  “Holmes,” I said, “something has happened. There’s no other reason you’d speak to your brother after so long. So what has changed?”

  He sat quietly, looking out the window at our newly mechanized world. “I believe he has been trying to kill me.”

  Holmes opened the cab window and thrust his hand out from the cab. “Forgive me, Watson. My anger has increased my consumption.”

  A thin line of black smoke trailed out from under his sleeve and added to the general pollution of the city as he expelled some of his exhaust.

  “I had been aware for some time that there was a force working against me. An evil counterpart to myself, if you will, and I have worked diligently toward his capture. Unfortunately, all I have been able to achieve is the arrest of his henchmen. But, as my attention focused on him, so has he focused upon me.

  “Two weeks ago I was waylaid after leaving the British Museum, where I had needed to consult material relating to the Parkinson case. I was able to fight them off but not without cost. I had to hide myself while affecting repairs and, almost like clockwork, every time I would emerge, I would be attacked again. I knew then that my opponent wanted me at my peak condition. My death when weak was a meaningless victory.”

  “And you think that this mastermind is your brother?”

  “None other. He blames me for our parents’ death and seeks my destruction.”

  “Why now? He has known your location for years. You’ve not kept it a secret!”

  “That is a question I long to put to him face to face.”

  We rode in silence to the Diogenes Club.

  Mycroft had risen in society since his parents’ death, eventually becoming a consultant to the highest officials of the British government. However, he was a thoroughly disagreeable person who preferred to spend his life between two places—his home and the Diogenes Club.

  This, Holmes once told me, was a private men’s club for the type of man unsuited for any other men’s club in London. Not just rich or powerful but rude, arrogant, and contemptuous. This was the type of man we had come to confront.

  To his credit, the doorman did not flinch at the sight of a mechanical man handing him a calling card. “Ah, yes,” he said slowly, “I believe you are expected, sir. Mr. Holmes will meet you in the private ‘discussion’ room.”

  We followed the servant through the club, which was filled with men swallowed by large, mahogany chairs who refused to acknowledge our presence despite Holmes’s insistence on walking loudly.

  After a few minutes in the ‘discussion room,’ which was a bare affair, Mycroft entered. He was an extremely large man of considerable girth. His hair was salt and pepper while his face was flush with red splotches. My medical training told me that he was suffering from a heart condition and, most likely, did not have long to live.

  With a wheeze, he settled into the nearest chair and glared at both of us.

  “You are nine point five minutes late,” he admonished. “My calculations led me to expect you earlier!”

  “Traffic,” I offered, and he nodded dismissively at me.

  “I see you’ve brought your pet along, brother,” Mycroft said with loathing. “I’ve been amused by his . . . tales of you. All in an attempt to humanize a tin man.”

  Holmes turned on Mycroft. If his face were able to present emotion, I am sure it would have been one of intense hatred and loathing.

  “The sight of you is equally disgusting to me, Mycroft. Shall we dispense with the pleasantries?”

  Mycroft nodded.

  “I have come to arrest you for the murder of our parents.”

  Laughing, Mycroft replied, “Once again, your deductions are faulty. Yes, I am behind the recent attempts on your ‘life,’ but I was working under the instructions of another—a man who seeks your destruction as fervently as do I!”

  “You are seeking to distract me. I have evidence that it was you who set the fire that killed our parents.”

  Mycroft looked at me and pointed toward Holmes with a snide movement of his head. “Like a parrot, he keeps on repeating the same phrase over and over again.”

  He turned back to Holmes. “No, you abomination, that ‘evidence’ was left for you to find. We knew that nothing other than that would bring you here to me. I know that it was you who burned down the house because I saw you do it!

  “Lost within a frenzy of hate, you destroyed the laboratory in which you were created. Simply because you sought to kill the man who gave you life.”

  “That is not logical,” Holmes responded. “Our father was not capable of constructing—”

  “Do not speak of him!” Mycroft shouted as his body shook with rage. “He was a good man, though somewhat simple. No, the man you wanted to kill, your creator, was my math tutor, Professor James Moriarty!”

  The revelation shook Holmes, and I actually saw him step backward. “Impossible! I have no memory of such events.”

  “Because you deleted them! Erased them like some uncomfortable truth. But it was you, and I shall see you ripped asunder while I yet live.”

  Before I could move, Holmes leapt over and grasped Mycroft by his throat, lifting him off the chair.

  “Where is he? Where is Moriarty?”

  “Closer than you think,” replied the man in the doorway. He was a thin man with an air of knowledge and learning about him.

  “Moriarty!” Holmes screamed, his tin voice shrill in the room. With a movement, he snapped Mycroft’s neck and reached for Moriarty, who pulled goggles over his eyes and tossed something into the room.

  Suddenly, a white flash blinded me and a screeching noise filled my ears. As I lost consciousness, I saw Holmes standing as if frozen, and then I was gone.

  When I awoke, Inspector Lestrade was standing over me. I tried to move, but a crippling pain seized my head.

  “Slowly, Doctor. You’ve taken quite the blow.”

  I looked around and could see a few others around me, most notably Inspector Gregson. There was a sheet covering a large body on the floor; I could only assume it was Mycroft.

  “What’s happened here, Doctor?” Gregson asked.

  I quickly filled them in on the events and saw them look at each other.

  “We’ve reports of a man fitting your description leaving the club with a large crate.”

  My heart fell. “Then he has Holmes! Quickly! Where did he go?”

  I struggled to my feet with Lestrade’s assistance. “The doorman got him a steam-cab and heard him ask for Waterloo Station,” said Gregson.

  “There’s no time to waste,” I said. “Moriarty means to kill Holmes, and he already ha
s a head start!”

  We nearly flew to Waterloo Station, where we learned that Moriarty had had a private train waiting for him. Thankfully, a stoker had been pressed into service filling the train’s boiler and had been told by the engineer to make sure there was enough coal for a non-stop trip to Essex.

  That’s when I knew.

  “Home, Inspectors—they’ve gone home.”

  It took the better part of an hour to get Scotland Yard’s airship diverted to us, and by the time we were underway I feared the worst. As we set down on the great lawn of Holmes’s ancestral home, I could see the ruins. Even though the fire had occurred well over a decade before, there had been no rebuilding. The burnt shell still stood there—a silent reminder of the tragedy of that night.

  The three of us leapt from the airship and began running toward the ruined pile. I was shouting out Holmes’s name when the rest of the building exploded.

  We were thrown off our feet and backwards by the concussion. There was nothing left of the mansion. I tried to run into the debris, but Lestrade and Gregson stopped me. I crumpled on the lawn and wept.

  Shifting through the pieces, Gregson found Holmes’s recording device. He’d use it when making notes for me to use. I took it home and there, the four of us (Lestrade, Gregson, Mrs. Hudson, and I) listened to Holmes’s last words.

  There was a conversation between Holmes and Moriarty.

  “For years I tried to forget you, forget the thing I created.”

  “Why did you?”

  “You were an experiment—an attempt to create mechanical life. When I saw you move and talk, when you came into my bedroom the night of your creation, I knew what I had done and could not bear it. I fled. But they took you in and cared for you.”

  “You deserted me. A new creation and you abandoned me.”

  “Yes. I should have destroyed you then, but I was willing to forget your existence.”

  “Then things changed.”

  “Mycroft came to me and revealed that he had been the one opposing you. Your ‘Napoleon of Crime.’ I played along until he told me what had really happened that night.”

  “The fire.”

  “You had gone back home because of what you’d discovered. Somehow you’d learned that your mother and I had had an affair and I was Mycroft’s true father. You confronted them and, berserk at your mother’s betrayal, went mad and started the fire. Until that moment, I did not know you had killed them, had killed her. I vowed to destroy you then. For her sake. Because I had loved her and she had loved me and my creation had been the cause of her death. Because you could not inspire love, you inspired fear.”

  Holmes’s voice was cold with hate. “I have tried to give my life meaning, to be the sword of justice. Now I understand why.”

  “It will not help. I’ve wired this room. It will explode in three minutes even as your friends arrive to try and save you. ‘From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee . . .’”

  “‘For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee . . .’”

  There was the sound of them struggling against each other and then the explosion. Finally, there was silence.

  We found no trace of either man. I am sure that Holmes left the recorder for me to find. But there is still a part of me that wonders if he survived after all. At night, I find myself listening for the heavy sounds of his metal footsteps on the seventeen stairs of 221B Baker Street. Perhaps, one day, I will hear them again.

  Homecoming

  Ruth Frye had been missing for five days. As one would expect, the town of Dunwich had gone a little crazy because of it. The news media from Arkham and Boston came down with all their cameras and reporters, and Ruth’s mother and I spent a lot of time begging her to come home or for any news. The cops spent hours searching our house, looking in every corner for clues, tearing apart her room for secret messages from boys or men, but they found nothing. They impounded her laptop and had the phone company print out every text she’d ever received or sent. They even took me in and sweated me for a very long night because, after all, I was her stepdad and she was a pretty teenager, so maybe I had something to do with it. In the end, the police had to confess that they had no clue what had happened to Ruth. She’d gone out jogging one night and, just like that, the sixteen-year-old pride of Dunwich’s high school track team had vanished without a clue. No one knew where she was or what had happened to her.

  Until, that is, she showed up on our doorstep on the fifth night. She was dirty, her clothes were a torn mess, and her blond hair was spotted and matted with mud. She looked as if she’d dragged herself through several miles of hell, but she was smiling as she stumbled through the door. My wife, Crystal, screamed and caught her before she fell down. Crying, Crystal asked where Ruth had been for five days, why hadn’t she called? “I got lost,” she said. “I’ve been lost in the woods. I couldn’t find my way home.” Together, they hugged and cried and held each other as the photographers snapped picture after picture. Stunned, I stepped forward and hugged them both, knowing that I had to make it look good. The cops would be suspicious if I didn’t. But I couldn’t think. My mind was blank. Because I knew, beyond a doubt, that I had killed Ruth five days earlier.

  I’d held her lifeless body in my arms. I’d seen the light go out of her eyes. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever expected or seen on TV or in the movies. It was as if she was just there one minute and then gone the next. I didn’t feel any different either. I’d just raped and killed my stepdaughter and nothing had happened. God didn’t strike me dead. The earth didn’t swallow me whole and drag me to hell. Nothing was different. Well, nothing other than the fact that Ruth was dead, that is.

  It’s important to me that you know that I did not start out evil. I’d had a good enough childhood, I suppose. There was nothing in my youth to suggest anything like this. I didn’t wet the bed. I didn’t kill small animals or start fires. Sure, my father beat me up when I was a kid, but only if I misbehaved, so I learned quickly to do what was expected of me. I was just a quiet, unassuming kid who read comic books and watched a lot of TV. I wasn’t the brightest kid around, but I’d always been good at fixing things, so when I grew up I got a job as a mechanic. Soon after that, I’d worked myself up to the point where I owned three garages. Even in the midst of recessions and bad economies, I managed to keep things running. I suppose, in a manner of speaking, that I was something of a success.

  I’m not trying to excuse what I did or what I did afterward. I just want you to know that I wasn’t always like this.

  When I met Crystal, Ruth’s mom, I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I’d had them before and they’d never really worked out. To be honest, I knew I was ugly. My own mother said I had a face like roadkill. So I pretty much kept my head down and focused on working. Occasionally I’d go out with a few of the boys to the bars or strip-clubs and, yeah, I’d had my share of lap dances and nights in sweaty hotels, but they’d never been anything special or important.

  Then Crystal started coming to the garage. It seemed her car was always breaking down or needing some repair or other. Then she began coming by for no reason at all. Before I knew what was happening, we were dating, then engaged, then married. I suppose that most people considered her the dominant one in our relationship, but that didn’t matter much to me. I moved into her house with her fourteen-year-old daughter and six-year-old son and, just like that, I had a ready-made family and a wife in my bed. It was a good arrangement, I guess, for a while at least. After all, for a thirty-eight-year-old woman, she still looked damn good and I enjoyed her bleached blond hair and large boobs.

  I went about my business, working in the garages, keeping them going. Crystal kept the house running and was a good mom to her kids. I tried to be a good dad but didn’t really know how. After all, my own father ran off when I was about twelve and Mom never remarried. There were lots of guys around, but none that she stayed with. My stepson, Kyle, was a pretty good kid, I guess. Didn’t get into too many fights and h
ad the coordination of a one-legged frog, but good enough kid.

  But when Ruth turned sixteen, things changed. I didn’t notice her at first, but suddenly I couldn’t stop looking at her. I’d wake up thinking about her and noticed how skimpy her clothing was. I thought that she was acting nicer to me, putting her hand on my arm or bending over in front of me, but now I wonder if I was just seeing what I wanted to see. She was a pretty girl, all the folks around could see that, and she’d come from an old Dunwich family, unlike myself. I came from Marlborough and never really spent much time in Dunwich before opening my garage there. All the folks seemed to know Crystal and her kids; it was just me they weren’t too sure about.

  Well, I won’t go into the details. After all, you don’t really want to know about that, do you? Let’s just say that I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew where Ruth ran and I knew where the woods around Cold Spring Glen were. I found her there, jogging, and offered her a ride home. More eager than I expected, she got in my truck and we drove away. By the time she realized what was going on, it was too late. She didn’t even fight me all that much. Soon she was dead and I made sure not to leave any evidence. I’d seen enough true-crime shows to know what not to do. I still can’t say why I did it. No more than I can really say why I married Crystal in the first place. It just seemed that, once I set my foot on that path, it pulled me along. It’s like when you get on a roller coaster. Once you’re in that seat you have no choice—you just have to grit your teeth and try and make it through to the end of the ride.

  But I knew one thing. Certainly and without any doubt, I knew this one thing to be true . . . Ruth was dead when I left her. Now her lifeless body was standing in the doorway and I was hugging her and trying to make myself cry. Sure, I was shaking, but it wasn’t from tears.

  Her flesh was warm to the touch. She smelled of trees and leaves, not death at all. When I pulled back and looked in her eyes, something looked back. It wasn’t Ruth. It was something old, evil, and hungry. I backed away as the Ruth-thing smiled at me. For a moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of the thing behind her face but, just as quickly, it was gone and she was hugging her brother, who was crying so much that I thought he would vomit.