Sherlock Holmes--The Devil's Dust

by James Lovegrove

  “I bided my time, waiting for Wade to emerge again from the building. An hour later he did, and he appeared hardly more comfortable than he had when going in. On the contrary, his demeanour was now that of someone preoccupied, deeply worried.

  “I refrained from buttonholing him until he had gone some distance down the street. At the back of my mind lurked the thought that I was reading too much into his behaviour. This man had nothing to do with Silasville or Harry or any of it. He was merely some Fanthorpe functionary, fretful over some professional matter entirely unrelated to my business.

  “Nevertheless a feeling in my gut was telling me otherwise. I imagine, Holmes, that you do not pay much heed to instinct. It is all brain, brain, brain with you.”

  “You imagine wrong, Quatermain. Instinct is a powerful force. It is the unconscious mind’s way of nudging one in the right direction. However, it has no value if divorced from rigorous observation and testing.”

  “Well, at any rate, I obeyed mine. I approached the fellow from behind and tapped his shoulder. He was so startled, he practically jumped out of his skin.

  “‘You!’ he cried. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

  “‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘I am not here to hurt you.’

  “‘You knocked me down before. Do you mean to do it again?’

  “‘Not unless the situation warrants it.’

  “I spoke in jest, but the humour, grim as it was, was lost on him. ‘Do you work for Fanthorpe?’ he said, backing away, his lip quivering. ‘Are you some kind of enforcer?’

  “‘I have no connection with Fanthorpe whatsoever,’ I said. ‘I am an interested party, that is all.’

  “‘Interested party? And what is that supposed to mean?’

  “‘You tell me. Why are you so scared?’

  “‘Scared? I am not scared.’ His wide, bloodshot eyes and strangulated voice rather gave the lie to that statement.

  “‘You could have fooled me,’ I said. ‘You are as jumpy as a scalded cat.’

  “‘If I am, then it is none of your concern.’

  “‘I should like to think that it is.’

  “‘Think what you will, sir,’ said Wade, turning to go. ‘I want nothing to do with you, and if you are wise you will have nothing to do with me.’

  “I could not let it go at that. I grabbed him by the collar and swung him round.

  “‘Listen, and listen well,’ I said, looking him square in the eye. ‘I am a man in mourning. I have lately lost a son, my only child. I am convinced that Fanthorpe Overseas Ventures is in some way responsible for his death. At the very least, the Fanthorpe brothers may well know more about it than they are letting on. I have no idea who you are or what your role at the company is, but I am asking you – no, begging you – if you have any insight into its operations, if there is any conceivable way you can be of assistance, oblige me. I would not be importuning you like this, were I not at the end of my tether.’

  “He blinked at me, then said, ‘Yes. Yes, you are at the end of your tether. I can see that.’ He shot a glance right and left, debated with himself, and at last, with a sigh, bade me accompany him to a pub.

  “We found ourselves a quiet nook in the pub where we would not be overheard. Wade, having ordered himself a whisky, downed it at a gulp. It was the first of several he drank in swift succession.

  “‘You realise that, by taking you into my confidence, I may be placing you in jeopardy,’ he said.

  “I shrugged. ‘I fear no man.’

  “‘It is not necessarily a man that is the danger here.’

  “‘No?’

  “‘No,’ said Wade. ‘You told me your son has died. What was his name? Was it by any chance Harry Quatermain?’

  “‘It was,’ I said.

  “‘I thought as much. And you, therefore, must be Allan Quatermain, famous across all Africa as Hunter Quatermain.’

  “‘None other. And you?’

  “‘Bradford Wade is my name, but I am presently going by the alias of Inigo Niemand to all who do not know me. It affords a certain level of protection.’

  “‘Protection against what?’

  “‘Reprisals. Those who would silence me. Those who might wish me dead. I also have this.’

  “Opening his briefcase, he took out a fetish. It is probably the same one to which you referred a moment ago, Holmes.”

  “A wooden doll carved in the shape of an African warrior brandishing a spear?” said Holmes.

  Quatermain nodded. “It is a charm designed to ward off evil. In theory, he who bears it should be immune to the depredations of ghosts, demons and any number of other malign supernatural influences. Whether or not Wade fully believed that it would fulfil its intended purpose, the mere fact that he was carrying such a fetish was telling.

  “‘I purchased it from a witch-doctor outside Piquetberg,’ he said to me. ‘I know that, as a Christian born and bred, I should have no truck with this sort of pagan superstition. Yet if even half of what I reckon to be true is true, I would be mad not to take every precaution available, up to and including a talisman like this.’

  “‘And just what are you hoping the fetish will guard you from?’ I asked.

  “‘Black magic, Mr Quatermain,’ Wade replied. ‘Specifically, a pernicious evil known as the Devil’s Dust.’”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE DEVIL’S DUST

  Our footsteps had led us to the banks of the Serpentine. Around us, the park bustled. A pair of nannies pushed perambulators side by side, gossiping. A young boy in knickerbockers and a sailor hat scampered across the greensward, attempting to get a kite with a beribboned tail to fly while his mother looked on dotingly. A courting couple occupied a bench, oblivious to anything but the sweet nothings each whispered in the other’s ear. In the river itself, men in bathing costumes splashed about, enjoying what was possibly the last swim of the season with the water at an agreeable temperature.

  It all presented a delightful prospect: Londoners at their leisure.

  Yet Quatermain’s words seemed to cast a sinister pall over the scene, and my nape-hairs prickled as though wafted by a chilly gust of wind.

  “The Devil’s Dust?” I said, affecting scorn. “Preposterous name! What on earth is it supposed to signify?”

  “Death,” said Quatermain simply. “That is what it signifies. Horrible, painful death. The Devil’s Dust is a sorcerous concoction that leaves the victim choking, vomiting, wracked with agony. The innards bleed. The skin reddens. The face swells. Its only redeeming feature is that the end comes with relative swiftness.”

  “The symptoms you describe are applicable in the case of Bradford Wade’s demise,” said Holmes. “Tell me, would ‘Devil’s Dust’ by any chance translate into one of the African languages as this?” From his pocket he withdrew the scrap of paper he had found in Wade’s flat and gave it to Quatermain to read.

  Quatermain’s wrinkled brow furrowed into a scowl. “Who wrote this?”

  “Wade, as he lay dying. I surmised that he might have been trying to write something longer but succumbed before he was able to.”

  “You are right. Uthuli is Zulu for ‘dust’, and the ‘L’ could indeed be the first letter of lukaDeveli, meaning ‘of the Devil’.”

  “Then the import behind the words becomes apparent,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Holmes. “Wade was not attempting to identify his killer, which we touted as one possible theory. Rather he was attempting to identify the method by which he had been killed.”

  “According to Wade,” said a grim-visaged Quatermain, “Uthuli lukaDeveli – the Devil’s Dust – was how Harry came to be killed too. Wade told me that he arrived in Silasville to conduct a regular site inspection two days before Harry showed up. He had not visited the place before, having been employed by Fanthorpe for a little under a year, but he knew of Silasville’s reputation. It was notorious as one of the worst-run, most unruly mines on the entire continent. He saw no sign of that himsel
f, however. Everything seemed perfectly orderly to him.”

  “The Fanthorpe brothers assured us that a new leaf had been turned over at Silasville,” said Holmes. “It had put its dark times behind it.”

  “That was the impression Wade had too, at least to begin with. The site foreman, a Boer called Marius van Hoek, boasted to him that there had been no untoward incidents at the mine for eighteen months – none worth reporting, at any rate. Productivity was up, Van Hoek said, and while there had been the odd accident, even a death or two, the rate was not above the statistical mean. Wade’s own researches confirmed it.

  “‘What I did notice, though, Mr Quatermain,’ Wade said, ‘was a distinct unwillingness amongst the miners to talk to me. Each I approached affected to be too busy to spare me the time. One lot were sitting round a fire after nightfall, eating supper, seemingly idle, but as soon as I turned up, without a word they all set down their dishes, stood and left, dispersing in different directions. It did not take me long to figure out that the picture at Silasville was not as rosy as Van Hoek had painted. Something was awry. The workers were cowed, reluctant even to look me in the eye, let alone be interviewed. What had them so browbeaten was hard to determine. I cannot say that relations between them and the management were cordial, but neither was there any obvious antagonism directed one way or the other. With the miners it was more a case of obedience – the cringing, craven obedience of a dog that has been beaten so frequently by its master that all the fight has gone out of it and it knows nothing except how to behave.’

  “Then,” Quatermain continued, “who should come ambling along into this uneasy milieu but my boy Harry, all fresh-faced optimism, with his retinue of waggoners and riders and bearers. He set up camp outside the town and ventured in alone. Wade learned of his presence when he overheard a couple of the miners speaking excitedly about ‘the son of Macumazahn’. The majority of them were Zulus, while the rest spoke Fanagolo – a pidgin of Zulu favoured by miners – so that they could all communicate with one another. Wade was not fluent in the Zulu tongue but had picked up enough to get the gist. He knew, too, who Macumazahn was. My fame is widespread across Africa. Wade was curious to meet Harry, but that was not to be, for Harry was in Silasville for only a few hours before he abruptly vanished.”

  “Vanished?” said Holmes.

  “I cannot specify how, or where he got to, for the simple reason that Wade himself did not know. All he knew was that everyone had been discussing Harry Quatermain, son of Macumazahn, and then all of a sudden everyone was not. A veil of silence had fallen over the town. Harry was nowhere to be seen. Nobody was even mentioning him. It was as if he had never been there.”

  “How singular.”

  “Then, the following morning…”

  Quatermain paused. It was clearly a struggle for him to say what he said next.

  “The following morning, Harry’s corpse was found lying in the street. Left there like… like litter. Like a piece of wax-paper wrapping someone has thoughtlessly discarded. That was when Wade heard the first fretful mutterings amongst the workers. The state his body was in was one they seemed to know only too well. ‘Uthuli lukaDeveli,’ they said to one another in hushed tones, rolling their eyes and wringing their hands. ‘Uthuli lukaDeveli.’ There were marks upon Harry, signs, clear indicators of a specific cause of death. Blood. Vomit. Puffed-up face. Redness of the skin.”

  “The Devil’s Dust had been used,” I said.

  “By cautious eavesdropping Wade was able to glean that Uthuli lukaDeveli was some form of black magic, and he would of course gladly have pooh-poohed the whole idea as nonsense, the kind of native mumbo-jumbo that no white man should ever take seriously.”

  “And rightly so,” said Holmes. “There is no such thing as magic.”

  “Really?” Quatermain’s eyes took on an obscure, ruminative cast. “Let me tell you, Holmes. I have seen things, many strange and inexplicable things, in my long lifetime. I have seen an infant slain by a kiss. I have seen an orchid eight feet in diameter that was worshipped as a god. I have seen a man haunted by the ghost of a foe slain in battle, so tormented by this shade that he had become a shell of who he used to be, practically a ghost himself. I have seen the image of a monstrous creature, half man, half ape, conjured up from the embers of a fire by a wizard. I have met the queen of a lost race dwelling in catacombs beside a ruined ancient city, a woman blessed – or perhaps cursed – with not only unearthly beauty but immortality. All these experiences have led me to the inescapable conclusion that there is more to life than simply that which we can touch and hear, see and smell. There are mysteries that cannot be rationalised away. There are people gifted with powers beyond our mortal ken. And there is, yes, magic.”

  “Well, certainly there is,” Holmes said, “if one attends the splendid shows put on by Maskelyne and Cooke at the Egyptian Hall.”

  “Holmes…” I said, shaking my head in despair at his flippancy.

  “I am not talking about stage conjuring, Holmes,” said Quatermain, “and you know that full well. I am talking about witchcraft. The dark arts. The ability to exert an influence upon others from afar, to use potions, powders and spells for eldritch ends, to divine the future in visions and portents, and much more besides.”

  “I have long held the view that if a phenomenon may not be empirically proven, it is almost certainly a false reading,” said Holmes. “Moreover, it will yield its truths to scientific analysis once sufficient time and attention have been brought to bear.”

  “We shall just have to agree to differ on the subject. Perhaps, when you are older and have travelled more, you will come to appreciate how wild and weird the world can be. For now, it will have to suffice that at Silasville something uncanny was at play, at least as far as the miners were concerned. As far as Wade was concerned, too. The mumbling terror he saw around him was deep-rooted. It stemmed from bitter experience. The miners had seen others perish from the effects of the Devil’s Dust before, that much was apparent. Harry was just the latest in a series of victims. As one of the miners said within Wade’s earshot, ‘He has caused offence and was struck down by Uthuli lukaDeveli. A white man! Not one of us, one of them. Who is safe now? Who dares raise his head and speak his mind if even a white man may be attacked?’”

  “The Devil’s Dust, then, whatever it might be, sorcery or not, was being used as a kind of disciplinary instrument,” said Holmes.

  “Wade drew the same inference. The Devil’s Dust was responsible for the ‘perfectly orderly’ atmosphere he noticed when he first arrived. It would only have required the deaths of one or two troublemakers from the Dust to set the example. After that, you would have no problem making the workforce toe the line. The threat of Uthuli lukaDeveli, the mere fact of its existence, would be enough.”

  “Domination by fear. A much more efficient regime than beatings and shootings. Much less of a drain on manpower and resources. Wade, I presume, went straight to Marius van Hoek to demand elucidation. As a diligent site inspector he could do no less.”

  “You are correct in your presumption,” said Quatermain, “and it was a decision he would quickly come to regret. Van Hoek’s response was as blunt as it was hostile. He told Wade he should forget anything he had seen or heard. If he knew what was good for him, he should leave Silasville forthwith and tell their paymasters in London precisely nothing about the incident.

  “‘I wish this had not happened,’ Van Hoek said, and Wade sensed that he meant it. The Boer was chagrined and also, it would seem, vexed. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘what’s done cannot be undone. It can only be disregarded. Do you understand, Mr Wade?’

  “Wade understood only too well, and he cleared out of Silasville that same day. I do not blame him for that.”

  “Neither do I,” said I. “It was not cowardice, only common sense.”

  “Yet his sense of duty – of simple moral decency – would not allow him to ignore what he had witnessed. He went to the nearest port with a vie
w to securing a berth aboard the first available packet steamer to England and conveying his findings about Silasville directly to the Fanthorpe brothers. Along the way he bought that fetish of his, just in case. He said he felt a deep, ineluctable dread the entire voyage, not aided by a vicious storm in the Bay of Biscay. ‘It was as if doom was dogging my footsteps, Mr Quatermain,’ he said. ‘As if, even though I had fled Silasville, the dire spectre of death I had stumbled upon there were pursuing me. I hardly slept or ate. I was jumping at shadows. During the storm I was convinced the ship was about to go down, and I believed that somehow whoever was behind your son’s death had whipped up this tempest by necromantic means, with the express intent of drowning me. It sounds absurd, but it felt quite logical at the time.’

  “He looked around the pub where we were sitting. It was as pleasant and mundane a drinking establishment as you could hope to find, but I could tell that Wade was incapable of perceiving it as such. To him, menace lurked in the varnished wooden countertops, the etched window glass, the ceramic handles of the beer pumps, even the placid, beefy features of the publican.

  “‘I cannot shake the impression,’ he went on, ‘that I am still in danger, here in London. Hence I have taken lodgings where nobody knows me, and I refuse to show my face outdoors for long. I have even adopted a false name. As Niemand, I am nobody, and that suits me for now. If people are looking for somebody, then they are not looking for nobody.’

  “He seemed obliquely pleased with this little bit of wordplay, but he was by then on his fourth or fifth whisky.

  “He proceeded to tell me that it had taken him several days to pluck up the nerve to face the Fanthorpe brothers and inform them about Harry Quatermain and the Devil’s Dust. He might have found his courage sooner had he not had all those interminably long weeks of sea voyage during which there was little to do but stew in his cabin.