by Cavan Scott
Indeed, at this precise moment, when he turned to face the inspector and presented me with the back of his head, the urge was all too great. Thankfully, the impulse brought a smile to my lips rather than a swing to my arm. Intolerable or not, this was exactly why I had spent so many years in Holmes’s company. The thrill of the hunt.
“I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you,” Tovey told Holmes, “other than that I think you’re right about a woman having been here.”
Before Holmes could respond, I stepped forward, having made a quick assessment of the room myself. It was as dirty as the previous chamber, save for one small detail.
“There are sheets on the bed,” said I, “although that in itself is not enough to suggest that the occupant was a woman, Inspector.”
“No,” Holmes agreed, flaring his substantial nostrils, “but the odour from the sheet makes such a conclusion more likely.”
He bent over, leaning on the bed, and inhaled deeply. “Notes of orange blossom and sandalwood, with just a hint of jasmine.”
“I don’t know about all that,” Tovey said. “But it certainly smells like a woman to me. Bought something similar for Mrs Tovey a few years back. Narcisse Black, or some such. Wedding anniversary. Gave me a right rollicking when she found out how much it cost, she did.”
“So our lady has no problem living in such squalor,” Holmes said, turning around to take in the rest of the room, “but still strives to maintain standards. The sheets, while not exactly fresh, are cleaner than the mattress they cover.”
“And she still wears scent,” I added.
“Which may or may not cost a pretty penny.”
“But if she can afford expensive perfume, why live in a place like this?”
Holmes’s eyes locked onto a small detail on the floor. Recognising the look, I stepped aside, allowing him to pounce on whatever had attracted his attention.
“What is it?” Tovey asked, but I too had noticed the tell-tale marks splattered across the floor, minute but still visible.
“It’s blood, isn’t it, Holmes?” I asked.
CHAPTER NINE
A CHARNEL HOUSE
“Unfortunately, yes,” came Holmes’s reply. “And recently spilled too. See? It fell on the dust, rather than being covered by it. But where, or whom, did it come from?”
“Our perfumed lady?” asked Tovey.
“Perhaps,” Holmes said, prowling across the floor on his hands and knees like a cat. How I envied his suppleness, even if he was crawling around in the dirt.
“There,” he said, springing back to his feet and charging out of the room.
“There’s more?” I asked, following him into the corridor. Holmes had his magnifying glass out now, sweeping it across the floor.
“Only a few drops,” he responded, “but yes. The beginnings of a trail.”
He hurried further down the corridor, finding more traces, which he announced with some excitement were increasing in size. Only Sherlock Holmes could become so enthused about drops of blood, and yet my own heart was racing as he swung open a set of double doors at the end of the corridor.
The scene that greeted him made even Holmes stop in his tracks.
“Good Lord,” said I as I joined him, pausing to stop the door from slamming into Inspector Tovey’s face as he hurried in behind us.
There was blood everywhere. Splattered on the floor, sprayed across the once-white tiles of the wall, dried where it had pooled beneath the rusted metal base of a table at the centre of the room.
And then there was the offal. My gorge rose in my throat as I walked towards the table. To its left, lay an overturned metal bin. I could tell from the reek what I would find inside.
“An operating theatre?” said Inspector Tovey from the door, his voice but a whisper, not out of respect, but disgust.
“More like a charnel house,” I replied, slipping the end of my cane into the overturned bin and lifting it back onto its base.
The meat inside was lousy with maggots, wriggling white against the slimy black of the decaying flesh.
“The contents, Doctor,” Holmes asked, as he stalked slowly around the room, his thin head turning to take in every depraved detail.
“Viscera, most probably human,” I said, my voice thick. “Intestines, liver, kidneys—”
I had to break off, for fear of gagging. Understand that I am not a squeamish man. I have seen plenty of operating theatres in my time. Sterile. Clean. Stinking of disinfectant and bleach. Not this place. The inspector had mentioned butchery in the pathologist’s lab, but even the most slovenly of butchers would have struggled to stomach the conditions of the room. The dirt, the mould. The stench of offal and stale bodily fluids.
My horror was only intensified by the floodlights that cast the abominable contents of the room into stark relief, as if it were a tableau in one of the sensationalist waxwork emporiums that had sprung up following the exploits of Bloody Jack thirty years earlier.
“What kind of man could operate in such a room as this?” Tovey asked.
“If it was a man at all,” said Holmes, who had ceased circling the room and was now crouched down beside the operating table. “More footprints in the blood, and this time there is no doubt. A woman.”
Steeling myself, I walked over to join him and could not help but gasp. The footprints were dainty and thin, but not those of a shoe.
“She walked through all this barefoot?”
“This is a woman who sprays herself with perfume and covers filthy mattresses with cotton sheets to effect a semblance of normality. We know that she owns shoes. Perhaps she prefers not to soil them. Whatever happened to Samuel Pike, I would suggest that you have discovered more of him in that bin.”
“A severed hand discovered near this bloodbath?” I said. “It would be naive to pray that this is all a coincidence.”
“Coincidence is rare, Watson. Unfortunately, depravity is not. And that is exactly what we have here. Something sinful.”
“Says the only atheist in the room.”
“Says the man who may not believe in God, but has no doubt that devils walk the earth, be they demons of flesh and blood, rather than fire and brimstone.”
“I’ve seen enough flesh and blood for today, thank you very much,” said Tovey from behind us. The policeman was crouched in the corner of the room. “And bone, for that matter.”
“Bone?” Holmes enquired, as we crossed over to the inspector, taking special care not to step in the dried blood around the operating table.
“Never seen anything like this,” Tovey said, standing so we could see what he had found, “and I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my time.”
The corners of the room were in shadow, the floodlights having been angled to illuminate the operating table. Holmes pulled out Tovey’s torch and directed the beam downwards. A length of white bone shone back at us, reflecting the glare. Like everything else in this place, it could only be described as wrong.
I reached into my coat pocket to retrieve my leather gloves and, putting them on, picked up the bone, turning it over and over in my protected hands.
“Intriguing,” I said, walking back into the gleam of the floodlights. “It’s a fragment of clavicle.”
“A shoulder blade?” asked Tovey.
“No, the collarbone,” I replied, indicating the position of the bone on my own shoulder. “It belonged to a child, eight or nine years of age judging from the size, but…”
My voice trailed off as I continued to turn the bone over and over.
“Watson?” Holmes prompted.
I looked more closely. “It’s covered in some kind of growth, almost like a fungus. No, that’s not right. It’s a solid plate, running its entire length, growing out of the bone itself.”
“But made out of what?” Holmes asked. He had returned the torch to his pocket and was holding out his hand expectantly.
I passed the puzzling object to him. “I would say more bone, if I didn’t know better
.”
Before Holmes could respond there was a thud from outside, the unmistakable sound of the stairwell’s double doors slamming shut. Someone else was in the building.
Holmes and I glanced at each other, before the detective thrust the curious bone back into my hand and started for the door.
“Holmes,” I hissed. “Wait!”
My friend raised a silencing hand and, stopping at the doorway, listened.
There was a crank of a lever and every light in the building went out, plunging us into darkness.
“The generator,” cried Holmes, and before I could stop him, he had clicked on the torch and was halfway up the corridor. Tovey rushed past me and, slipping the bone into my pocket, I followed suit, both of us trying to catch up with Holmes.
He had paused, just before the generator room, with his back to the wall and the torch angled down. He silently indicated that he would go first, but Tovey was having none of it, his Webley revolver held tight in his right hand. Nodding, Holmes handed over the torch and prepared for the inspector to strike.
With surprising grace for one so large, Tovey swung around into the room, his gun raised in one hand and the torch in the other.
I expected him to shout a warning, or at least to continue into the room, and therefore was unprepared when he didn’t move at all.
“Empty,” he reported a second later, relaxing his firing arm.
“Then who turned off the generator?” Holmes asked, as we entered.
“Could it have broken down?” I enquired.
Holmes examined the device. “After we heard the doors, Doctor? What was that you were saying about coinc—”
The door slammed behind us, causing us all to spin around. In the light of Tovey’s torch, I rushed forward to grab the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge.
“We’re locked in,” I gasped.
“There was no key in the door,” Holmes insisted, pushing me aside to try the knob himself. He pulled, but produced the same result, although his reaction was more rational than my emotional outburst. “The wood has warped,” he concluded. “It’s jammed in the frame, that’s all.”
“Let me,” Tovey said, pocketing his gun and handing me the torch. He braced his left hand against the wall and grasped the doorknob in his right. He yanked once, twice, and with a squeak of twisted wood, the door opened on the third attempt. He was out in the corridor in an instant, his gun back in his hand. I moved to turn on the generator, but Holmes stopped me.
“Keep the lights off,” he hissed.
“But we won’t be able to see!”
“Then neither will our assailant, Watson.”
There were crashes from down the corridor, in the direction of the operating theatre.
“The torch, Watson,” Holmes ordered.
“I thought you wanted it dark!” I said, offering the torch to him.
“Just hand it to me,” he said, snatching the torch to shine its light down the corridor. The doors to the operating theatre were closed, although it was clear from the racket that someone was tearing the place apart.
“What should we do?” I whispered.
“Change our mind,” came Holmes’s response.
“Head back outside, you mean?” asked Tovey, his gun pointing directly towards the door.
“You would never forgive me, were I to do such a thing,” said Holmes, disappearing into the next room. He returned a moment later carrying the table leg I had spotted earlier. “No, I mean, about the lights. Watson, when I indicate, throw the lever.”
“Of course, but—”
A hand was raised in the air, another call for silence. Holmes crept forward, the table leg held in front of him like a rapier. What was he planning to do? Throw open the doors and attack whoever was on the other side with a scrap of broken furniture? Still, I had seen what damage he could inflict with an umbrella. The table leg appeared considerably more solid.
As Holmes inched towards the doors, whoever was on the other side continued their act of vandalism, and I winced as I heard the metal bin kicked across the floor, imagining its grim contents slopping across the tiles.
Holmes reached the double doors, but did not open them. Instead, he slipped the table leg between the door handles to lock them in place, and called over his shoulder. “Now, Watson!”
I rushed back to the generator and threw the lever, the dynamo spinning back into life. The lights flared on, both in the corridor and, I could imagine, in the operating theatre itself.
The noises from the room ceased immediately.
I returned to the corridor as Holmes addressed the invader through the door. “Now, listen to me, whoever you are. We are armed and will not hesitate to fire.”
As he spoke, he nodded towards Tovey who, Webley outstretched, was inching towards Holmes’s position. I followed, wishing that it were my service revolver I clutched in my hand rather than my cane. Still, I would do some damage with it, if required.
“You are surrounded with no way out,” Holmes continued, “so tell us who you are, and what you are doing here.”
There was no response. No noise at all.
Then an attempt was made to force open the doors, which caught immediately on the table leg. My cane came up further, Tovey freezing where he stood. Our prisoner, as that is exactly what he had become, tried again, rattling the doors before falling silent once again.
We stood there waiting, minutes seeming to stretch into hours. My ears strained for any indication of activity behind the doors, and I became acutely aware of every sound: the growl of the generator in the room behind us, punctuated by sparks of electricity; the cry of a distant gull in the skies outside; the wind whistling past splintered window frames. Even the sound of my own watch seemed impossibly loud, as if we were inside a clock tower, the march of the second hand reverberating through the air.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
And still nothing. Holmes stood as still as a statue, waiting for a response.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
The response came. A great weight threw itself against the doors, snapping the table leg in two. In an instant there was confusion and panic. Holmes cried out in pain as he was pinned between the opened door and the wall, his head cracking on the exposed brickwork.
The figure that had burst from the operating theatre didn’t stop as Holmes slid to the wall, momentarily dazed.
“Stop, or I’ll fire,” Tovey yelled, but the juggernaut ignored the warning. In the glare of the electric light, I caught a glance of pallid skin, long lank hair and a snarling mouth, but what truly shocked me was the size of the brute.
He must have been eight feet tall.
This wasn’t a man. It was a monster.
CHAPTER TEN
DEVIL IN THE DARK
Inspector Tovey gave no further warning. His Webley spoke twice, its harsh report like cannon fire in the oppressive space.
The giant didn’t go down. He flinched at least, the bullets thudding into his broad shoulder, but only growled in response; a deep, guttural noise, not of pain but of anger. With one stride he was upon Tovey, bringing back a club-like arm. I cried out an impotent warning, for the monster had already backhanded Tovey across the face. The inspector’s head snapped around with such severity that I feared that his neck had been broken like a dry twig. He was lifted from his feet and sent, despite his great bulk, sailing through the air like a paper doll caught in a gale. His weight became obvious again only when he crashed bodily into the wall, a plume of shattered plaster and dust billowing out from the impact.
Now it was down to me, the only one of our band still standing. Screaming a primal battle cry, I rushed forward, cane raised. The monster was coming right at me, but I cared nothing for the danger. I brought my stick down hard, its length smacking against his barrel chest. The regimental head of the cane, polished to within an inch of its life, was ornamental no more. It struck hard
against his prominent cheekbone like a cudgel, and I fancied that I heard a painful crack. The man may have stood a good head and shoulders above me, but I was determined to bring him down, for Holmes and Tovey. Yesterday Holmes had proved that age need not equate with frailty. Now was my chance to show my mettle.
Or so I hoped.
The reality of the situation was somewhat less heroic.
Striking the brute was like trying to demolish a brick wall using a length of reed. To my dismay, the force of the blow snapped the shaft of my stick against the man’s chest, the wood splintering. I had little chance to mourn my faithful cane. Before I could react, an enormous hand was around my neck and I was being lifted from the floor. I clawed at my assailant’s thick forearm, my fingernails catching on the thick weave of his jacket. It was useless, the muscles beneath the fabric like stone.
My feet waved in the air as if I were a toddler plucked from the ground by an adoring father, and yet there was nothing paternal about this embrace. I gasped for breath, staring into the snarling face of my assailant. My vision was already blurring, but I could make out the deep-rucked scars that scored his sallow features. His heavy brow was furrowed beneath a thick curtain of greasy hair, so black that it was almost obsidian. And then there was the eye, glaring out from beneath the unruly fringe. Never had I seen an eye like it; bloodshot to such an extent that the sclera was a whirlpool of broken veins swirling around a watery yellow iris. At its centre lay the fiend’s pupil, a mere pinprick, devoid of light or reason. Inhuman. Abhorrent.
It was almost a relief when dots clustered in front of my own vision, blotting out the world. As my breath rattled in my crushed throat, I could only curse the fact that this abominable face would be the last thing I ever saw.
Then, with a shout and a dull thud of fist against flesh, I was saved, snatched back from oblivion for a short while at least. My release was not peaceful, the gruesome goliath losing interest in my murder and tossing me aside like a discarded plaything. I landed heavily on my shoulder, the pain immediately dulled as my head met the floorboards, and the world flared white all around me.