I drove and Holmes sat in the back, meditating or sleeping, I could not tell which. We passed three constables, but I did not stop. He bade me halt at a certain mews not far from Baker Street. “The cabman will be here in half an hour,” he said, as he tended expertly to the horse. “He has been paid in advance, and we need not wait.”
* * *
“I believe you must think me most utterly mad, Watson,” said Holmes, after he had exchanged his rough clothes for a dressing-gown, meticulously cleansed himself of dirt and spattered blood, fetched the Persian slipper in which he kept his tobacco, and settled back in his chair. “You have not loosened your grip on that service revolver of yours for the last hour. Your fingers must be cramped by now, you have been clutching it so strongly – Ah,” he said, as I opened my mouth to deny this, “no use in your protesting your innocence. Your hand has not strayed from the pocket of your robe for an instant, and the distinctive weight of your pistol is quite clearly evident in it. I may be mad, my dear Watson,” he said with a smile, “but I am not blind.”
This was the Holmes I knew, and I relaxed. I knew I had nothing to fear from him.
His hand hesitated over his rack of pipes, selected his clay-stemmed pipe, and filled it with shag. “Indeed, Watson, at times during these last months I would not have disputed it with you myself. It would have been a relief to know myself mad, and that all I have seen and conjectured to be merely the delusions of a maniac.”
He teased a coal out of the grate and lit his pipe with it. “To begin, then, with the missing corpse.” He puffed the pipe until its glow matched that of the fire behind him. “Or, perhaps better,” he said, “I should begin with the London cannonade.” He raised a finger at my imminent objection. “I have promised to tell all, Watson, and I shall. Pray let me go about it in my own way.
“My brother Mycroft,” he continued, “made a most interesting comment when I discussed the matter of the cannonade with him. He mentioned that when a highly-powered cannon is fired, an observer at the front lines ahead of the artillery and distant from the firing will hear a very distinct report at the instant the shell passes. This is the crack of displaced air. This report comes considerably in advance of the actual sound of the cannon firing. If our ears were but sensitive enough to hear it, he informed me, this report would be heard as two distinct waves, one of the air compressed by the shell, and another of the air rushing inward to fill the vacuum left behind it. An aeroship which traversed faster than the velocity of sound would produce a like crack, and, if it were large enough, the two waves would be heard as distinct reports.
“My brother discussed this only as an abstract but interesting fact, but I know him well enough to understand the meaning behind his words
“Taking this as a provisional theory, then, and judging by the fact that observers noted the timing between the two reports was briefer in the north than in the south of London, we find that the hypothetical aeroship must have been slowing down as it traveled south.”
“But Holmes,” I said, my mind in total consternation, “an aeroship? And one which moves faster than an artillery shell? No nation on God’s Earth could make such a thing, not to mention the impossibility of keeping it secret.”
“Precisely,” said Holmes. He took another puff from his pipe. “This brings us to the case of the missing corpse. I had been looking for a reason to investigate south of London, and the case presented by the two farm-hands was quite fortuitous in that respect.
“You know my method, Watson. It was unfortunate that the men in the original searching party had in many places quite trampled the tracks that I needed, but in the few places where they could be clearly distinguished, the tracks told a most puzzling story. Some animals had circled the hayrick, leaving tracks like nothing I had ever seen. I could make nothing of the footprints, save that one side was dragging slightly, as if one of the animals were limping. From the depth of the impressions they must have been the size of small dogs. What was most peculiar about the set of tracks was that the animals seemed to march in precision step. The strange thought occurred to me then, that the tracks of a single animal with eight or more legs might leave exactly such impressions. The steps led to the place where the dying man had lain, and circled about. Of outgoing tracks, there were only those of the men who had tended him and those of the searchers.
“I attempted to follow the tracks backward, but could follow back no more than a mile to where they emerged from a sheep meadow and were obliterated by the hoofprints of innumerable sheep. All that I could determine from this was that the animals had been severely panicked at some time in the last few days, running over and around each other and back and forth across the field.
“I turned my attention back to the impressions made by the dying man, and the tracks of the men away from the spot. I inspected the tracks of the unusual animal further. They were extremely strange, and in some ways rather insectlike. The animal’s tracks overlaid two of the other tracks, which I knew to be those of the men who had summoned me. Over these tracks, however, were those of a third man.
“I quickly determined these tracks to be those of the dying man himself. After the other two men had left, he had risen up and walked away, apparently carrying the strange animal with him.”
“My God, Holmes,” I interjected. The revolver lay forgotten in my pocket. “You can’t be serious. Are you suggesting some sort of voodoo?”
Holmes smiled. “No, Watson, I am afraid that it was something far more serious than mere superstition.
“The man had crawled on all fours for a few feet, then stood up and walked in a staggering, unbalanced stride. After a few unsteady moments, however, he found his feet and began to walk quickly and purposefully in a straight line. Soon he came to a hard-packed road, where his traces were obliterated by the traffic and I could track his movements no further. His aim, though, was quite clearly toward London, and this I took to be his goal.”
Listening to his narrative I had completely forgotten the events of the previous night, the slain streetwalkers, and my suspicion of Holmes.
“At this point,” Holmes continued, “I knew that I needed to consult an expert. Mr Wells, of whom I spoke earlier, was that expert, and I could not have asked for a better source. We discussed the possibility of life on other worlds. Mr Wells offered the opinion that, since there are millions upon millions of suns very much like our own Sun in the sky, that certainly there must be other intelligences, and other civilizations, some of which must be as far beyond ours as our English civilization is beyond that of the African savage.”
“Then you take this strange aeroship to be a vehicle from another world?” I asked. While I had heard such ideas discussed in popular lectures on astronomy, I had, heretofore, always dismissed these as purest fancy.
“A provisional hypothesis, to be confirmed or forgotten as further data became available. I went on to ask Mr Wells whether such citizens of other worlds might be human in shape and thought. At this suggestion he was most frankly contemptuous. Such beings would have no more reason to be shaped in our form, he said, than we in that of an octopus or an ant. Likewise they might take no more notice of our civilization and our morality than we take of the endeavors and ethics of an ant hill.
“This I had already surmised. I turned the talk to biology, and without tipping my hand, managed to steer the conversation to the unusual life-cycles of other species. One in particular he mentioned struck my attention, the life-cycle of the ichneumon, or solitary wasp.”
“Really, Holmes. Wasps? I do believe that you are toying with me.”
“I wish that I were, my dear doctor. Pray listen; all of this is germane to the subject at hand. The ichneumon wasp has a rather gruesome life-cycle. When the female wasp is ready to lay eggs, it finds and stings a cicada, often one much larger than itself, and then deposits its egg inside the body of the paralyzed but still living insect. This insect then serves as sustenance for the hatching larva, which forms its home within the
living insect, having the instinct to avoid eating the essential organs until the very last, when it is ready to exit into the world to lay eggs of its own.
“This was enough for me to frame my provisional hypothesis. I believed that some strange being from the aeroship had not merely met the fatally injured man, but crawled inside his body and taken control of his gross physical function.
“I was struck by one fact. Of all the people that this . . . alien . . . might have met, it was a dying man who he – it – actually chose. Clearly, then, the . . . thing . . . believed itself unable to subdue an uninjured person.”
“I must confess, Holmes, if I were asked to prove your sanity, this story would hardly bolster your case.”
“Ah, Watson, always the practical man. Permit me.” He got out of the leather chair, crossed the room to where he had put down the leather satchel, and laid it on the table in front of me.
I sat paralyzed. “I dare not, Holmes.”
“Your courage has never failed you before, my friend.”
With a shudder I touched the satchel, and then, steeling myself, opened it. Inside was some object covered in streaks of gore. I didn’t want to look, but knew that I must.
The two eggs inside were of a translucent purplish white, large as a moderate-sized mango, and slick with a film of blood. Within each one a monstrous coiled shape could be discerned. No Earthly animal ever laid such an egg, of this I was sure. More horrible than the eggs was the other thing. I shuddered and looked away. It was something like a giant prawn, and something like some jungle millipede, with dozens of long barbed feelers and multiply-jointed appendages bristling with hooks and spines. Its head, or what passed for a head, had been nearly severed with a knife, and the wound exuded a transparent fluid rather like whale-oil, with a sharp and unpleasant odor similar to kerosene. Instead of a mouth, it had a sucking orifice rimmed with myriad tiny hooked teeth.
“This is what I removed from her body,” Holmes said.
I looked up at him. “My God,” I whispered. “And she was not dead?”
“You asked that question before. It is a question of definitions, Watson. All that was left alive in her body was the thing that you see. By removing it, did I kill her?”
I shuddered again, and slammed the satchel shut with my eyes averted. “No.” I stood for a moment, trying to regain my composure. “But why Whitechapel?”
“What you saw was a juvenile,” said Holmes. “The adult would be much larger. I would not know if it is intelligent, or what we call intelligent, but it is at least very clever. Why Whitechapel? Think, Watson. It had eggs and juveniles it must deposit into a living body. But how is it to approach a complete stranger, embrace him – or her – closely enough to do it? Ah, you see the picture. It was the perfect place for the thing, Watson; the only place where it could do what it needed.
“I studied the East End in minute detail, tracing the path of the mysterious stranger. Again and again I was too late, sometimes only by minutes. I removed the juveniles from the corpses out of necessity. I say corpses, Watson, for although they still walked upright they were already dead. Had I not killed them, they would have gone to cover until they were mature. I could find the one, I knew, only by concentrating on the one trail. Even then it would be a near thing. Two of them, and I were lost.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“And tell them what? To start a man-hunt for a thing they can only find by ripping open bodies?”
“But the letters? The ones from ‘Jack the Ripper’ – did you write these?”
Holmes laughed. “Why should I need to?” he said. “Fakes, forgeries, and cranks, every one. Even I am continuously amazed at how many odd people there are in London. I daresay they came from newspapers hungry to manufacture news, or from pranksters eager at a chance to make fools of Scotland Yard.”
“But, what do we do?”
“We, Watson?” Holmes raised an eyebrow.
“Surely you wouldn’t think that, now that I know the danger, I would let you continue alone.”
“Ah, my good Watson, I would be lost without you. Well, I am hot on its trail. It cannot elude me much longer. We must find it and kill it, Watson. Before it kills again.”
By the next morning the whole episode seemed a nightmare, too fantastical to credit. I wondered how I could have believed it. And yet, I had seen it – or had I? Could I have deluded myself into seeing what Holmes had wanted me to see?
No. It was real. I could not afford to doubt my own sanity, and hence I must believe in Holmes!
In the next few days Holmes went back to his daytime reconnaissance of the East End, mapping the way buildings abutted and how doorways aligned with alleys, like a general planning his campaign, stopping for conversation with workmen and constables alike.
On the third day, my business in town kept me late into the evening. At the end of it, it was almost certain that I had purchased a practice, and at a price which I could afford, but the sealing of the deal required an obligatory toast, and then there were more papers to be inspected and signed, so that all in all, it was well past ten in the evening when I returned to Baker Street.
Of Holmes there was only a note: “I have gone to see the matter to its conclusion. It is better that you are out of it, and I shall think no less of you if you stay. But if you must follow, then look for me near the blind court at Thrawl Street.” I read it and swore. He seemed determined to leave me out of this adventure, no matter how dangerous it was for him alone. I snatched my greatcoat and hat from the hall stand, fetched my revolver out from the drawer where it resided, and went out into the night.
It was the night of the great carboniferous fog. The gas-lights were pale yellow glimmers that barely pierced the roiling brown stink. The cab I hailed almost ran me down before seeing me in the street in front of him.
The fog in Whitechapel was even thicker and yellower than that of Baker Street. The cab left me off in front of the Queen’s Head pub, the cabbie warning me of the danger of the neighborhood. The blind court was one which was being resurfaced by the MacAdam method, in which the street was covered with liquid tar, and a layer of gravel rolled into the tar surface. The process results in a surface which is even and far easier to repair than cobblestone. I can see the day when all of London will have such smooth quiet streets.
Earlier Holmes had talked with some of the workmen as they rolled the gravel. Now they were long gone. The half-full cauldron of tar was still at the corner of the alley. Although the oil-pot which heated it to boiling had been removed, the cooling drum of tar still gave out quite a bit of heat.
Three unfortunate women had lit a small fire out of wood-scraps and huddled between the warm cauldron and their fire, with their hands toward the tiny fire and their backs against the cauldron for warmth. The glow of the fire gave a luminous orange cast to the surrounding fog. A tiny pile of additional wood scraps stood waiting to keep the fire going for the rest of the night.
Holmes was nowhere in sight.
The women spotted me looking at them, and whispered amongst themselves. One came up to me and attempted a smile. “Care to spend some money and buy a poor unfortunate a drink, dearie?” She tossed her head toward the end of the street where the pub was invisible in the fog, and at the same time flicked her skirt in such a way as to allow me a clear view of her bare ankle.
I averted my eyes. “I’m looking for a friend.”
“I could be a friend, if you wanted me to.”
“No. I don’t need . . . that sort of comfort.”
“Oh, sure you do, dearie.” She giggled. “All men do. ’Sides, I h’aint even got money for me doss. Surely a fine gent like yourself has a shilling to spend on a poor lady down on ’er luck, hasn’t he? Sure ’e does.”
I looked at her more closely, and she preened for my inspection. She might have been a rather pretty woman, striking if not actually beautiful, if she had been given the chance. Instead I saw the lines on her face, the threadba
re bonnet she wore, and the unmistakable signs of the early stages of consumption. Such a woman should be resting in bed, not out standing in the chill of a night such as this. I was about to speak to her, to invite her into the public house for the drink she requested, for no other reason than to get her out of the chill and away, perhaps, from the monster that stalked the fog-shrouded night. I could wait for Holmes as well in the pub as in the street.
As I was about to speak, I heard a man approach from the blind end of the court, although I had seen no one there previously. I started to call out, thinking it must be Holmes, but then saw that, while the man was quite as tall as Holmes, he was much bulkier, with a considerable paunch and ill-fitting clothes. As he passed, another of the women smiled at him and called a greeting. He nodded at her. As she put out her arm for him to take, he dropped his hand to the buttons of his trousers. I looked away in disgust, and as I did so the woman who had spoken to me slipped her arm around mine.
I had lost track of the third woman, and was as surprised as the others when her voice rang out from behind. “Stop, fiend!”
The voice was calm and authoritative. I looked up. The woman was holding a revolver – Holmes’ hair-trigger revolver – in an unwavering grip aimed at the man’s head. I looked closely at her face and saw, beneath the makeup, the thin, hawklike nose and the unmistakable intense gaze of Sherlock Holmes.
The other man swiveled with surprising speed and sprang at Holmes. I pulled my hand loose from my lady companion and in an instant snatched my revolver free of my pocket and fired. Our two shots rang out at almost the same instant, and the man staggered and fell back. The two bullets had both hit above the left eye, and taken away the left half of the cranium.
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