The Dragon Turn

by Shane Peacock

  “It is my last request. I insist! In fact, if you do not allow this … I shall dispense with both you and Miss Doyle ahead of time.”

  Sherlock and Irene look at each other. She squeezes his hand.

  “But that shouldn’t be necessary. Miss Doyle shall sing! She must have her great moment! You will stay locked in here, Holmes, simply to ensure that you will not interfere. But I promise you, on my word and the word of Mr. Riyah …”

  “Absolutely,” says the other man earnestly.

  “That we will turn ourselves in to the police when the curtain falls.”

  “And your creature?”

  “What creature? Master Holmes, you are a fantasist, which is surprising, since I had heard you were so rational, so practical, and so scientific about everything.”

  How does he know anything about me?

  “There is no creature. Surely, the police saw that last time?”

  “I know you are harboring something.”

  “Of what sort? A dragon?” He and Riyah laugh out loud. Hemsworth stops suddenly and looks at Sherlock with a grin. “You are falling for my tricks!”

  “I don’t know exactly what it is that you —”

  “Well, if you don’t know, then you should not open your mouth! And besides, even if you were correct, is it a crime to keep a pet, however large or aggressive? I have transported many beasts from Africa, the Holy Land, and the Orient. I have sold them to respectable people here at home. That is not criminal activity. And it is not a crime to feed them, either.… There is no creature, anyway.” He gets to his feet. “Master Holmes, you may not find my word credible, considering what I did, but I say again: I promise you I will be available to the police when the show ends. I promise you! I did what I did for the right reasons, and I am willing to pay the price. I got everything I wanted.” The look on his face is earnest, and Sherlock, despite reservations, believes him.

  But that doesn’t stop Holmes from wanting to be sure, from seeking a way out of his tiny prison. The second that Hemsworth, Irene, and Riyah leave the room, locking it behind them, the boy is up and examining the door and its latch. But try as he might, he can’t open it from the inside. He employs his little wire and works on it for some time, but it seems to be constructed differently from a regular lock.

  He sits down at the chair Irene had been using and looks into the mirror. He fixes his hair, straightens his collar, knocks the lint from his shoulders, then looks at himself in both profiles and tries to figure out which makes him most handsome, most manly. “My nose is too big,” he says, fascinated as he watches himself speak. He turns his head a little bit farther in profile, so the nose looks smaller. “That’s better.”

  He sighs. So, Hemsworth admits it.

  Sherlock has come to the end of another case, not one he wanted to be part of in the first place. Despite his high opinion of his own intelligence, what he has accomplished while just a lad still amazes him. He must truly have a talent for this. And perhaps he has been fortunate. But he may not be if he tries anything like this again, before he is better prepared.

  He hears Irene’s voice. It begins to soar in the theater, the new opening for Hemsworth’s great show. He is taken aback by how beautifully she sings. Yes, that is the career for her. It is a song about magic, about dragons, and jealousy, and fame. He wants to see her sing it. It is ridiculous that he is cooped up in here. He goes back to the lock and tries it again but cannot spring it.

  Sherlock sits down with a thud. Time passes and he hears the music end for the first act. He paces during the intermission and then sits at the dressing table once more as the second act begins. He recalls that it is much shorter than the first.

  Looking at the boy in the mirror, he can see his mother’s eyes. “I keep putting people, people I care about, into peril.” He thinks of Irene, who cannot be for him, of Beatrice who perhaps should be, of Scuttle, who was almost fed, alive, to a vicious animal. “This life I am choosing can’t have many friendships, any love.” But even now, Sherlock Holmes feels a deep-seated fascination for the very danger he is worrying about. He can’t hold it back. He thinks of the beast in the basement. “I believe everything Hemsworth told me,” he tells his image, “because it makes sense. But why is he lying about the creature? Or is he? How else could His Highness have killed the Wizard?”

  He gets to his feet. The show will be done soon. What if Hemsworth is lying about tonight too? What if he is planning to slip away? I must get out of here.

  He reminds himself that there are still many other things unsolved about this case — who is Mr. Riyah, for example, and where, exactly, is Mrs. Nottingham? Even if Hemsworth does turn himself in, will he reveal everything, or does he even know where his former wife is? Will Riyah vanish again, and will the “dragon” magically disappear too?

  There is even something unsolved about this very room. He looks around. Riyah was in here, he is sure, both the first time he and Irene visited, and the time they came back. Why was he hiding? What is his role in all of this? Did he have a reason to hate Nottingham too? Significant enough to help murder him? Sherlock doesn’t care what Lestrade says, the “old Jew” was in here. The police must have missed something when they searched the room. A Hemsworth trick was at work.

  He surveys his surroundings. The curtain, behind which Sherlock thought Riyah hid, is gone, and a blank wall remains. He thinks of Bell saying that magicians don’t perform real magic. There is always a rational solution to their mysteries. The room is small, containing just the two dressing tables with mirrors, a settee for guests, and a clothing rack where various costumes are hung. Riyah could not have hidden behind the rack: none of the costumes touch the floor, so his feet would have shown beneath them. The boy examines the walls. He runs his hands along them from top to bottom and side to side, covering every inch. All four are solid.

  Be rational, be practical. If Hemsworth and Riyah could find a way through any of the surfaces in this room, which one would they choose? The walls? Why? They simply lead to other rooms. The ceiling? Maybe, but it would just take you to the roof. The floor? Of course … the floor! There is a rug on it, covering almost the entire surface, hiding any exit. And what is beneath it? The basement … where the beast is held! It’s perfect. Sherlock gets onto his knees and rolls the rug back, then examines the floor as carefully as he can, nose close to it, eyeing the edges of every board, wishing he had Bell’s spyglass. He is almost done when he finds two boards cut slightly shorter than all the others, near the wall, to the right as someone enters the room … to the right … that’s the same direction one must go to pass along the hallway to the staircase that leads down to the part of the basement that is under the stage.

  But it’s no use. The boards aren’t loose. The gap between them and the others is infinitesimal — he can barely get his fingernails between them. They won’t budge.

  Sherlock stands up. He isn’t sure what to do now. Will I have to wait here until the show is over? What if I am being played for a fool and all is lost? He thinks of what His Highness said to him … “You are falling for my tricks.”

  He sits at Hemsworth’s dressing table this time. Never give up. He looks down at the table top. What did Irene and I used to say? “We need to eliminate the things that couldn’t possibly have happened, and work on the things that are most likely.” So, the answer isn’t in the room’s surfaces. Where else could it be? He examines the dressing table and realizes that the top opens. Inside, he sees tubes of stage makeup in piles. He shoves them back, seeking the bottom of the drawer. There is a book down there. He looks at the title … The Existence of Dragons! He opens it. Blank pages. He flips through them, all the way to the end. The book is nailed down and after the last page, it is just a frame. Right there, in that frame, a small lever sticks up. His Highness has such flair! Sherlock glances under the desk and sees a column attached to it, connecting it to the floor. He looks at the lever again, and pulls on it. It won’t move. He pulls it harder. It snaps do
wn and he hears a whirring sound behind him. He turns around.

  The two short floorboards near the right wall are sliding back!

  In a flash, he is stepping beneath them. His feet come to rest on a false floor in a narrow tunnel, about a yard high and wide. He has to go down on his hands and knees to get his head beneath the floor but when he does, he sees that the passage leads to the right, at a slight angle … in the direction of the basement room.

  He crawls forward and soon wonders exactly where he is: perhaps moving below the other dressing rooms now. It isn’t far from Hemsworth’s location to the basement door at the end of the hallway, maybe forty or fifty feet. After he has crawled about half that distance, he hears something. It is coming from above. He rolls onto his back and looks up. He can see through a half-inch crack in the floorboards, directly into another room. He squints. Someone is in there, getting dressed. When he focuses, he can tell it is Venus … her entire body from the waist up is clearly visible in the crack … and she isn’t getting dressed … she’s undressing. He gawks at her. She is wearing her skimpy, nearly see-through muslin costume, much of her body exposed. He notices her out-of-doors evening clothes lying on a table next to her. She is indeed a magnetic woman, even more so than usual at this moment, while slipping off her clothes. Sherlock can’t take his eyes from her. He knows he shouldn’t be looking. But he is fighting his fifteen … nearly sixteen-year-old chemistry. She has no way of knowing he is here. I can watch. No one would know. She won’t know. She is peeling off the muslin, her beautiful dark skin showing on her lithe arms and slim neck … a vision. Sherlock sees the top of the white underclothing that covers her chest. She is about to take that off too.… He clenches his teeth, summons his strength, and finds his sense of right and wrong. No one would know … except me. He turns his eyes away, rolls over, and moves on.

  In another twenty feet, the passage comes to a dead end. But when he presses on the little, cut out section of wall in front of him, it pushes open. He is at the landing on the staircase, above the basement at the end of the hallway.

  Once again, he hears something hissing and thrashing below … something large.

  SHOWSTOPPER

  Holmes descends the stairs in the direction of the sounds. He can hear the band in the orchestra pit to his right, the audience reacting out in front of it, and Hemsworth’s voice, as clear as a bell.

  “This is the night of nights for our show.”

  Our show? Has he ever called it that before?

  “This is the greatest night of magic in the history of the London stage, in the history of magic anywhere! On this first day of September 1869, we will shock the world!”

  He was always a humble man. He won’t be so proud when he is sitting in jail awaiting his justice!

  Sherlock has reached the bottom of the stairs. He takes a few careful steps and sees a cage, about twenty feet away, barely discernable in the darkness, about the size of the one used for the dragon on show nights. Something is inside, making that hissing sound, and thrashing about. But he can’t figure out what it is, yet. He edges closer. It lunges at him … and he sees it!

  A gigantic lizard! A monstrous reptile!

  It snaps at the bars of the cage, just inches from the boy. Its big face is confronting him, eyes as black as a crow, huge, razor-sharp teeth bared. Sherlock jerks back and its forked tongue snakes out almost a foot, nearly touching his cheek. Several feet away, in an instant cold sweat, he stares at it in disbelief. It had reared up, but now it drops down again, coiling itself as if to make another lunge. Green-gray, with a six-foot-long body and a four-foot tale, it looks heavier than a fully grown man. There are fake wings attached to its back, where it can’t reach behind and rip them off. It wants to kill me. But Sherlock can see, up this close, that its legs are shackled. Thick ropes, like those used to moor an enormous ship, hold the lizard to the back of the cage. That’s why it can’t get at Venus.

  Where, in God’s name, did Hemsworth find this creature? Deep in the jungles of Africa? In the deserts of the Holy Land? On a distant island in the Indian Ocean? Sherlock remembers Bell telling him that there may be dinosaur-like beings somewhere on earth, and that there is more in this world than is dreamt of in his imagination. There certainly is.

  “Dragon, are you ready?” says a voice in a whisper.

  Sherlock starts and freezes, then silently slips away in the darkness and plasters himself against a wall a few carriage lengths away.

  It is Riyah. He is holding a small lantern, directed at the ground, so he can find his way. He carries an axe in his hand. He drops it near the big ship ropes. His voice sounds different. It is rich and mellifluous, almost theatrical, even as he whispers. There is absolutely no hint of a German accent.

  “This is our big night, our special night,” he says to the beast, keeping his voice low. “You will have to wait a little longer this evening, dragon. But it will be worth it. You will get your prize onstage this time. Yes, you can have it tonight!”

  The voice sounds vaguely familiar. He imagines it at full volume. It is beginning to dawn on Sherlock whom Oscar Riyah may be, and the possibility is startling him right out of his trousers. It can’t be!

  “Come here!” he hears Riyah hiss. Sherlock looks toward the little spotlight the lantern is casting in the darkness. Riyah has Venus in his filthy hands. She has gotten here so quickly! It is difficult to see her face, but it is obvious, even from where he is, that white makeup has been applied to every inch of her skin that is visible, and there is a good deal of that. She has a crown on her head, the purple Egyptian robe too, though it is wide open, displaying that skimpy muslin outfit underneath, nearly see-through, showing much of her body, and fitting tightly to her shape. Her hands are tied behind her back now, her eyes blindfolded, her mouth gagged. She struggles against him. Why is he doing this? They are backstage and the audience can’t see her! She knows what she has to do. Why does he have to force her? Does it really scare her that much? But she told me that she didn’t even see the dragon, and didn’t seem to care about it.

  Riyah takes her around to the front of the cage, opens a door there and shoves her in, securing the door behind her with a small lock. It will hold her in, but not the dragon: another reason it is shackled. She clings to the bars at the front of the cage, as far away from the beast as possible. It comes forward a foot or so, its big front claws moving up onto a short ramp between them, elevating the front of its body, making it look more like a slightly upright dragon, than a huge, low-to-the-ground monitor lizard. Very clever. But it can’t get any closer to her. It darts its forked tongue in her direction.

  Sherlock thinks again of how quickly Venus must change from one outfit to the next. She is an efficient, seasoned professional. But then something else occurs to him. He remembers the riveting sight of the beautiful “African princess” undressing in her room. Beside her, on a table, he had glimpsed her outdoor clothing. That, obviously, was what she was about to put on … not what she is wearing now in the cage. He realizes, too, that because he had been so enthralled by her beauty and the excitement of the moment, it hadn’t even dawned on him that it made no sense for her to be taking off that nearly see-through outfit. Taking it off! How could she have been taking it off … if she was about to wear it under the robe inside the cage?

  Sherlock moves as fast and as silently as he can back to the staircase and up it. He opens the little door at the landing and gets down into the passageway, scurrying back along it on his hands and feet until he comes to Venus’s room. He turns over and looks up. She is still there! And fully dressed in her outdoor clothing, Juliet again, sticking the last pin in her hat! She vanishes from his sightline toward the hallway.

  She isn’t the princess in peril! It isn’t her in the cage! But then … who is it?

  Sherlock rushes frantically back down the passageway toward the landing. When he opens the little door and stands up, he can’t see the spotlight near the cage. Riyah has disappeared. Then he hea
rs Hemsworth’s baritone booming in the theater, sounding excited.

  “I told you this was the night of nights for magic!”

  Sherlock spots Riyah, racing up a series of winding stairs against the wall on the other side of the room, spotlight bouncing in front of him. Those stairs go up to the stage. Riyah is throwing off his greatcoat, revealing a glittering costume, pulling off a long-haired wig, ripping away his beard, putting on his spectacles.

  “I am going to bring to conclusion, right here on our stage tonight,” exclaims His Highness, “the greatest illusion in the history of the world. They said I murdered the Wizard of Nottingham. I did not. Tonight … I shall … BRING HIM BACK TO LIFE!”

  Riyah is Nottingham!

  Sherlock hears the audience gasp. The Wizard is standing before them, returned from the dead, emerging out of darkness at the wave of His Highness’s hand. Hemsworth, indeed, did not murder his rival. He has been working with him. Those bits of flesh came from an animal. “You are falling for my tricks,” that was what His Highness told him. Now Sherlock knows what it really meant. But it wasn’t just a trick, it was an elaborate web of tricks, focused on manipulating public opinion, on employing Sherlock Holmes and Irene Doyle and Inspector Lestrade and the Metropolitan London Police Force and every newspaper in the city … as actors in the illusion. It was coughs and fluttering curtains and secret chambers; it was adjustable hats marked with initials. The audience is thundering its applause, stamping its feet. Nottingham has been using Hemsworth and his creature to perform his greatest trick. They both have their revenge.

  But when Sherlock thinks of that word he thinks of Venus’s verbal portrait of her boss, the one she painted on the streets that night not long ago. She said he was a beast, cruel and vicious, intent on fame, and that Nottingham was just as bad. He thinks of what she said about the woman who left both of them: that she was a free spirit, that she seduced Nottingham, and then found others more desirable than the Wizard. She has a weakness for men. She crossed these two proud men publicly … they, whom no one should cross. Holmes thinks of Juliet saying that Hemsworth often spoke of the gruesome ways he would like to murder his philandering former wife.