“Calm yourself, Watson,” I said, as they bumped me up against him. But then, from deep down within me, came a terrible feeling. Just terrible. A wrenching sort of fear that I’d let somebody down, or was about to. Amongst the voices in my head, one grew louder, more distinct.
“You said you would come to me, Mr. Holmes, in my hour of need. You promised you would honor our bargain. I fear the hour is nearing. I need you!”
Violet!
“Agh! Wait! No! Uncalm yourself, Watson! We’ve got to do something!”
“That’s what I’ve been screaming!”
“No, no! For Violet! We have to help her!”
“What? Holmes… What?”
“She needs us, Watson. And we promised.”
Hmm… How shall I describe the progress of my thoughts, as they occurred to me and drove me to the action I chose? I knew Violet needed us; that much was clear. Yet I knew not the exact source of her troubles—and who was better at figuring out the underlying nature of mysteries, Watson or myself? Watson, of course. I also didn’t feel I could leave at the present moment. I might have projected my physical form to Violet’s side, easily, but would it have been the act of a true friend to leave Watson alone in this vault? Oh dear me, no. So should I take him with me? But then what would happen with all these interesting skulls and the red-headed ninny who had asked for our help? It didn’t seem right to run out on them at a moment like this, did it? Besides, I knew if I did I’d be of little use to Violet—distracted by the thought of the charming skull-pocalypse I’d left behind. Was there no way to solve all these problems? Why, if I could send Watson to help her in my stead, I could deal with the present situation, while still putting our best investigative foot forward for Violet. Yes. But then, of course, Watson was not bound to Violet Hunter by any promise or contact, as I was. All that bound them was that kiss. Ah! So if I could intrude myself into their kiss-bond, could I not also intrude my contractual bond between the two of them?
Of course! That seemed to make sense. And how does one intrude upon a kiss-bond? It’s obvious, isn’t it? And the little hair monsters had left Watson and me bound side by side in their feeble grasp, so, with a final lunge I threw myself onto Watson and…
Well…
A gentleman does not say.
It should suffice for you to know that Watson’s soul was ripped from his body and sent spinning through the nether abysses to lodge within another body, very like his and not far away. As his physical form collapsed in my arms, powerless and angry-looking, I congratulated myself on a job well done. My only regret, I suppose, is that I should have waited six seconds longer. If I had, Watson would have gotten to see the red-headed soul-sucker.
The crate in the center of the room—that first one we’d opened—gave a leisurely creak. One side of it bowed out, then fell off altogether, emitting a flood of gold coins, wadded leaden foil and one desiccated corpse. It seems only the first few layers of the crate had contained orderly rows of packed coins; the lower part was messy, indeed. As I watched, the corpse picked itself up off the floor, groped for its monocle, dusted this on the mildewed remains of its waistcoat and screwed it in place over one eye. Well… where one eye should have been. All he had were empty sockets with little burning embers in them, which oozed oily purple smoke up into the curls of his rather magnificent head of red hair. All the skull minions that weren’t tying up Watson and me bounded joyfully over to him. Several leapt up and wove their own red locks into his, dangling from his prodigious mane like ornaments on a wrong-colored Christmas tree.
“Demon,” I said, “you must be master of this…”
But I trailed off. I suppose it was Watson’s influence that did it. It’s just… if this were a demon, where did he get a garish 1850s waistcoat? Why the monocle? Why the gold-crowned walking stick he picked up from the clutter of spilled coins? Why the fascination with red-headed gentlemen? And why the post-mortem resemblance to one or two pictures I’d seen of late?
“Oh dear, Mr. Hopkins, whatever has happened to you?”
The ghoulish banker turned to me, tendrils of hair seeking towards me in the darkness like wayward and boneless arms. “Do I know you, sir?” he asked.
“My name is Warlock Holmes.”
He stared appraisingly at me for a few moments, then jabbed his stick in my direction and announced, “You’re here to steal my gold!”
“Oh, no. No, I’ve no interest in gold. I’m here to listen to your story and learn the fate of the red-headed men.”
This gave him some pause. He hesitated, as if torn between the natural violence the walking dead display towards the living and the desire to air his woes to a willing ear. After a time, he uttered, “You are an intruder.”
“There, I have no grounds to refute you,” I admitted. “But look on the bright side: I’m an intruder who thought he’d have a bit of a wait. I therefore have a couple of pipes sitting over there and probably about a pound of the good stuff. Care to join me in a smoke?”
“Are you joking?” the animated corpse demanded. “Of course I would! By God, it’s been ages! I’m gasping!”
The skulls unwrapped their hair from me with such rapidity that I’m afraid I lost my grip on Watson, who tumbled from my grasp. Fortunately, I think his arm broke the fall. Unfortunately, I think his arm… broke. Oh, and that screwdriver he was holding? Straight into the leg. Handle-deep, I’m afraid.
Then again, I had other matters to worry about. “Come on then, Mr. Hopkins. We’ll see if we can’t find a couple of crates that might still serve as chairs, eh? This is my usual pipe, so I hope you don’t mind if I…”
“Oh, no. Of course.”
“Thank you. You may use Watson’s. He’s a man of fastidious habits, so I think you’ll find it’s quite clean. He won’t mind if you borrow it. He’s rather indisposed at the moment.”
Soon I had us both settled with smoking bowls. I watched Ezekiah Hopkins enjoy his first few puffs and asked, “How do you find it?”
“Oh, magnificent! Just magnificent! What is it?”
“Well it certainly is not shredded Persian sorcerer, so let’s not have any wild accusations!”
“Eh? No, I only meant… I used to take Tennessee Jackdaw, myself. My favorite brand. Had it shipped in from America. Long ago, you know. Before your time, I am certain.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be too certain. But tell me, Mr. Hopkins, how do you come to be so transformed?”
He gave a few, thoughtful puffs, then a great sigh. “This is what loss does to a man, Mr. Holmes.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Hopkins, no, it isn’t. I’ve lost a great deal myself and look at me. I never died from it.”
“Died?” cried my host, visibly incensed. “I never died! Perhaps I have wasted a bit, in all the years, but I am a living, breathing man, sir, just like you!”
“Living?”
“Yes!”
“In a crate of coins?”
“Well, I mean… perhaps I have modified my lifestyle in order to prolong it, but what else could I do? I cannot die, Mr. Holmes—not until what I’ve lost has been restored to me!”
“That’s no excuse not to die,” I said, shaking the stem of my pipe at him sternly. “We’ve all lost things, Mr. Hopkins.”
“Not like I have!” he thundered, rising to his feet. He raged for a few moments—not at me, I deem, but in frustration at his ancient loss. He paced back and forth, fuming. His pipe, his eyes and his mood: all fuming. Finally, he stopped right in front of me and said, “Now, look here! I went off to America, didn’t I? Made all that money? Came back home to the old town to settle down. That’s all I wanted. And yes, I always was a funny-looking one, I’ll admit that. Big nose. Reddest hair you ever saw. Bit round. Bit old, by the time I’d come home. But I never wanted much. The wife I’d missed in my youth! A sweet, pretty thing to stay with me and love me; move this old blood, warm my heart. Children, you know! Someone to enjoy the fruits of my labor. To grow and play in the comfor
t I could provide them. I’d have denied them nothing. Nothing! But what did I get?”
“Well clearly not that, or you wouldn’t be so angry, would you?”
“They laughed at me! They tittered! Nobody wanted to marry the funny old man, not even if he was rich! So clueless, he was! And that hair? The kind of girl I wanted wanted nothing to do with me. So what do you think I did?”
“Probably what all of the world’s ultra-wealthy do when they are disappointed: spend lavish amounts on mystics and charlatans, trying to find a solution to their problem.”
“I spent lavish amounts on… oh… yes… exactly as you say. But I got luckier than most, you see. I found a method that works! It was all down to Charlemagne. Or, to be more precise, one of his advisors: a man of unfathomable origin, Montevbello Goosh!”
“I don’t know about ‘unfathomable’. Montevbello sounds rather Italian, doesn’t it?”
“And Goosh?”
“Rather made-up. Oh… yes, I see…”
“Nobody knows what the man’s real name was, but it matters naught. The point is: he was fascinated about the underlying powers that made our world work.”
“Demons, you mean?” I asked.
“No, no, no! That’s just the thing. That is the very distinction! He wanted to identify forces that are native to this world. And he did! He discovered nine agencies by which the will of men can be controlled—and on any scale—individual men or entire nations. We are all puppets to them. He made it his life’s work to understand and control them. He built nine trinkets, one for each power, to present to Charlemagne to help him take over the world!”
“I always thought Charlemagne was doing rather a fine job of that by himself.”
“Well exactly. And a good thing too, for Goosh made two critical errors which ensured his work could never be of service to Charlemagne.”
“The first?”
“He took too long. Charlemagne died.”
“Well, that will do it. The second?”
“The Nine were just terrible. Awful! Yes, he had distilled the ideas and created foci that gave the holder some power over the idea they represented, but his work also so focused these powerful ideas as to grant them physical form—he granted them life!”
“Never a good idea,” I observed.
“Certainly not in this case. The Nine are good for only one thing: unspeakable slaughter. They look like men, or… a bit like men. And they are easiest to control when one has the proper trinket. But they are dangerous in the extreme. One small error, the tiniest transgression against the power they represent and they will lay unstoppable waste to the perpetrator and all around him. There has never in the history of our world been a mystical power to match even one of the Nine.”
“Well…” I said, with as much humility as I could muster, “perhaps not.”
“Yet I was in luck, you see. The Nine had been recently bound—enslaved to the will of a great American sorcerer. But—and this is the important bit—he’d managed to do it without possessing all nine trinkets!”
“How?”
“Nobody knows, but it presented a unique opportunity. He who could lay his hands upon one of those mystic foci had a brief period where he could experiment with the underlying power without invoking the wrath of that power’s guardian. And I knew the one I wanted, Mr. Holmes! Everybody assumes Fear to be the greatest motivator of men, but it isn’t. Not Secular Power. Not Religious Power. Not Pain. Hope. Hope is the greatest of the Nine. I spent two-thirds of my fortune for it, but at last—at last—I made it mine.”
“And what does hope look like, Mr. Ezekiah Hopkins, when you hold it in your hand?”
His burning eyes softened, somehow. His cadaverous shoulders slumped. He gave a sad but fond little sigh. “Funny little thing, really. Just a medallion made of dark metal. The background is a house. You can see in through the door. There’s a hearth. A table, laden with food. Not much, but enough to give the impression that here is a place of warmth and plenty. In the foreground stand the figure of a man and a woman, leaning together, shoulder to shoulder and holding a child up above their heads. It’s crude workmanship, really, but there’s just the impression that the child is laughing… It’s enough that if you think of yourself as that man, or that woman, you couldn’t help but reflect how lucky you’d been to have found the other. Think of yourself as that child and… well… who wouldn’t want to be hoisted, laughing, into the air by two parents who loved you, with a place of safety to grow up in? I tell you, Mr. Holmes, there is no promise of great wealth in that tableau. No power. No long life. Yet, Mr. Goosh had it exact. The truest hope of our kind is to spend our days safe, happy and provided for, giving our love and feeling love in return. And then—when we pass from this world—to know that the children we have loved will accomplish the same. And will miss us. That’s all. That is all…”
Well, I will admit I was rather taken aback. I knew exactly what he was speaking of. I’d been doodling it all over my walls, my books and myself during my most recent period of recovery from grievous wounds. (I get those a lot.) It had been much on my mind, but I could never say why. Had it been an idea of my own, or something one of the voices had said to me, or an old idea that—just upon the cusp of your forgetting it—struggles to make itself remembered once more? It was an uncomfortable remembrance and I chided myself for not knowing more about it.
“Um… but you lost the medallion?” I asked.
“No! It was stolen from me!”
“By whom?”
“A thief!”
“You don’t know which one?”
“No! And I can’t die until I do! I need to have that back, Mr. Holmes. To have held it, to have begun working with its powers… and then to lose it? No! Intolerable! Owning it, Mr. Holmes, does not assuage the need for it. It feeds that need. How can I have come so close? How can I have held the answer to all my problems in my very hands and yet have been robbed of the opportunity to unlock all its secrets and apply them? But I had learned enough! Enough to find other objects, other skills and use them to chase my dream!”
“Ah! So that’s how you became—” I waved my pipe stem at his mummified body and his mighty boosh of skull-decked hair “—whatever this is.”
“I learned to take souls, Mr. Holmes, to extend my own life. Now, the cost of doing it is this: the taken soul is ever with me. A part of me, in a way. But what was that to me, whose chief complaint had been loneliness? Here, at last, was a way to make a family! To gather to me the others who shared my burden: the unwanted, teased, forgotten and cast-off red-headed men!”
“Not the women?”
“No! They don’t suffer as we do! I don’t know why, Mr. Holmes, but people seem to think of red-headed women as… somehow… cute! But we! The men with the same affliction! Oh, how they hate us!”
“Hmm… I’ve just realized… the answer to Watson’s earlier question is: both! You are the red-headed sucker of red-headed souls. Well played, Mr. Hopkins! Double points.”
As I watched him work his way to a fever pitch, I began to realize our discussion was drawing to a close. It had been a nice time. A fine pipe. But I can’t say the turn was unexpected. It’s how these things usually go. We are lonely creatures, we users of magic. Each of our paths is unique and sets us aside from the body of common men. How few are our chances of explaining our labors and ourselves to someone who could understand. Thus, we often say more to each other than might be advisable. Yet, how must these things always end? I was an intruder, as Mr. Hopkins had pointed out. Moreover, I was not a red-headed gentleman and therefore unworthy of inclusion in his gestalt. I was a threat to his plan to ease his pain and one need only look at his choice of hair adornment to realize he was certainly capable of murder. Grateful as I was for his knowledge, sympathetic as I might be to his plight, I knew what was coming. I needed a plan.
Oh! And I had one! As it turned out, I had accidentally been rather clever. I began, as subtly as I could, sneakily and magic-o-
quietly, concentrating on Watson.
“I will feast this very night!” Mr. Hopkins cried, eyes alight with eagerness, hands bent like claws beneath his billowing hair. “I’ve still got my money, Mr. Holmes! I’ve still got my agents! I’ve hired a brilliant young man named Clay to bring me a red-headed gentleman to feed upon!”
“Oh? You mean Jabez Wilson? He’s not coming.”
“Eh?”
“Watson and I… we warned him off.”
“You did what?”
“Well, he was a client of ours. We were bound to protect him.”
The color I held in my mind was not orange, as most red-heads truly are. It was not that whitish pink that sometimes comes with age. No, this was red! Red like living blood. Red like that fish I forget the name of… you know the one I mean.
“And really, Mr. Hopkins… all this murder? Tut, sir! Tut!”
He turned on me with pure vengeance in those burning eyes.
“And Watson, especially. He’s got a vested interest in bringing you down. It’s no good to a man like him, letting a red-headed soul-sucker run around loose.”
“What do you mean? Wait, is he…?”
“Eventually, he might find himself in your little family, so you can see why he might wish to—”
“Clear off him! Clear off!” Hopkins yelled to his skull/hair/spiders, a few of whom were walking on Watson’s face and body. As they skittered aside, he approached and declared, “We shall see if he is worthy of inclusion! I am the judge and master of the League of Red-Headed Men, and I shall… Oh… oh, by God… he’s wonderful!”
Ezekiah lifted Watson tenderly into his arms (and hair tendrils…) and caressed the newly magic-reddened head of hair I’d given him. I saw Hopkins tug at it a few times, staring closely to determine if this were merely dye or the finest, reddest hair he’d ever seen. To help him make up his mind, I mentioned, “We used to make terrible fun of him.”
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