Now the true horror began. Lying on my back, I couldn’t get my throat clear. I sputtered and gasped tiny breaths, but they came foaming back up on my lips. I was suffocating. I flipped my head from side to side, spitting out what I could, but it was no use.
And then Watson came walking in. The moment he saw me, he rushed over to the table. “Out of the hospital, into the infirmary …”
I tried to scream a warning but could only gurgle.
“He shouldn’t be strapped down this way. He can’t clear his airway,” Watson said, leaning down to undo the strap over my waist.
I hacked, grabbed a breath, and shouted, “Look out!”
It was too late. A fist cracked Watson in the jaw and sent him spilling to the floor.
“Welcome to Paris, Dr. Watson,” said the demon Holmes, who had stepped up behind him.
The two criminals stared down at the prostrate form. Holmes nudged Watson with his boot, got no response, and then kicked him in the side. Still, Watson didn’t move.
The demon squatted above Watson, rolled him over, and peeled back his eyelids. “He’ll be out for hours. Won’t remember a thing. Perfect.” He smiled up at his comrade. “I’d always known he had a glass jaw—spotted it in the gray vein along the left side of his face—but even I couldn’t have hoped for a one-punch knockout.” The other thug returned, and Holmes said to them both, “Take him down the hall, far enough that he can’t hear the screams. Guard him until I come.”
The two thugs stooped down, grasped Watson’s wrists and ankles, and hoisted him between them. “What if he wakes up and starts asking about his friend?”
“Put him off. The murder of Thomas Carnacki will be part of our larger case—the Mona Lisa Mystery.” The demon fondly brushed Watson’s bruised jaw. “Sleep well. When you awaken, the Louvre will have lost a million francs’ worth of art, and I—your old friend Sherlock Holmes—will be on the case!”
After his henchmen lugged Watson from the room, the demon turned and crossed to the table where I lay. He grasped the tabletop and leaned his manic face over me. “Hello, Thomas. At last, you arrived.”
I spat blood into his face.
The demon didn’t flinch, didn’t wipe it off, but simply let it drip from his fake mustache and beard. “I’m surprised how long it took you. A full week. I’d put every clue in the papers, every scrap of evidence you would need, day after day. I was starting to think you would never arrive. But now, the charade is over.” He peeled off the mustache and tugged off the beard and wig, and his face was once again the face of Sherlock Holmes—except for the blood that spattered his cheeks.
I coughed out another gobbet. “Holmes … Listen … Drive out the demon … Take your body back.”
He began to pace, a smile on his lips and a laugh deep in his throat. “Your friend is gone. I’m not Holmes. I’m not Moriarty. I’m not Jack the Ripper. I’m the Undying Evil that rides them. I’m a divine horseman.”
“You’re … what—?”
“It’s voodoo, Thomas. Voodoo!” He waggled his fingers beside his bloodstained face. “Voodoo mambos call the spirits of the dead the ‘divine horsemen.’ They enter people and possess them to live again. They ride people like horsemen ride horses. I’ve ridden so many.
“I was riding a voodoo mambo in Haiti when a ship’s mate named Enoch Jones killed her. I rode him back to London, where a Whitehall hooker named Martha Tabram plied him with rum till he died and then rolled him for his two months’ wages. I rode Martha for a long while until another sailor lad—John Harder—took us along George Yard and told me that the other men pushed him into it, said they thought he was homosexual, said he had to prove himself a man by laying a whore. He proved it, all right. Thirty-nine stab wounds proved it. And so I rode John Harder after that, and I made him into Jack the Ripper, and he killed and killed and killed.”
The demon glanced down at me, seeing that blood filled my mouth and tears filled my eyes and I was about to lose consciousness. He blinked once and then bent down and pressed his lips to mine and drank the blood out of my mouth. As repelled as I was, I could breathe again.
The demon licked his lips and said, “We love murder. It frees us to enter a new host. Our blood is the key. Sacrificial blood. When someone kills us, we can travel from victim to victor. We trade up. And even if we’re caught and it’s the noose or the blade, we just skip merrily from the snapped neck or the severed head into the trap man’s fingers or the axman’s arm.”
“You trade up … .” I repeated incredulously, only beginning to catch on. “Murder for murder … And when Moriarty killed Jack the Ripper—?”
“I rode Moriarty. How grand a ride it was! Genius. Until Holmes brought him down. Until Holmes made him the most wanted man in Europe. Then, where could I ride Moriarty? Where except to prison—? Unless …”
Horror overtook me. “You never wanted to kill Hotmes—”
“I wanted him to kill Moriarty!” the demon proclaimed. “I wanted to trade up, from the genius Moriarty to the greater genius—Sherlock Holmes!”
Suddenly, it all made sense. “You planned it all along.”
“Yes. I brought a knife to the falls and pulled it on Holmes and slashed at him. At the first chance, though, I let him knock it from my hand, hoping he would snatch it up and bury it in my heart. But no. The fool would not take an unfair advantage. He threw the knife over the cascade. Then we grappled, and I hurled myself backward to shatter my head against stone, but Holmes held on and slowed my fall and lost his balance and plunged over the falls. I watched him go, hoped he would survive, hoped I could fish him from the river and take him to an inn and force him to kill me so that I could enter him—but you and that Moriarty brat changed all my plans. I chased you, tried to catch you so Holmes could kill me—even caught him in an alley and pleaded for him to do so.”
I trembled. “But now you have his body. Now you have everything you’d been after.”
“He understands at last. My final foe knows the man who will kill him. Oh, it is so much sweeter to kill a man who understands than to kill a fool.” The demon lifted the exorcism machine from the black bag and set it on the table beside me. “And sweetest of all to kill a man with his own weapon.”
The demon knew everything Holmes knew—understood how the electric pentacle would form around my body, how it would drive my soul out of my flesh and kill me.
“Exorcise, electrocute, execute,” the demon said, punctuating the words with clicks of the alligator clips. One by one, he positioned them.
Metal teeth bit down on my toes and fingers and earlobes. I struggled against the straps, but they held firm.
“Do you want to know the truly delicious thing, Thomas Carnacki? Even if you somehow manage to escape and kill me, I will merely take over your body. Though I may die a hundred thousand times, I will live forever.” He shrugged. “Of course, you won’t manage to escape. You’re no match for Sherlock Holmes. And since that’s the case, well … it’s time for you to die.”
He cranked the handle of the generator. The rotor hummed, and sparks snapped. Energy poured through the black cables and jolted into my extremities—feet, hands, and head. Toes curled and soles arched, fingers clenched and fingernails cut into palms, jaw clamped tight and teeth clenched together and ground like rocks.
“It’s statues. The children’s game of statues,” the demon opined, cranking all the harder. “Fling a fellow onto the grass and see what crazy contortions he takes and when he freezes in some ridiculous pose, give him a name.”
I convulsed, my body arching up beneath the straps. “Anna! Anna!”
“That name’s already taken. You need something with Thomas in it. Let’s see … Not Doubting Thomas, no. Your fault is not doubt,” the demon said, cranking faster. “I will call you Believing Thomas!”
My feet and hands and head jangled with electricity. Charges gathered in my extremities and jagged through my torso. The white-hot energy converged on my heart. It struck.
I seized up. I was dying.
IT WAS just like my dream. I had ceased to be flesh anymore—wasn’t physical, but an ectoplasmic spirit. I seeped out of every dying cell in my body, gushed forth from every riven pore out into the air. I gathered myself in a cloud and looked down at my poor, electrocuted form.
How much better this was. No more pain. No more sucking wound to the chest. I felt so light. Flesh is heavy, tired, shot through with trouble, but I was done with trouble. I was done with fighting and breathing and heartbeating. How much better it was to drift upward.
Good-bye, then. Good-bye, earth.
A tunnel formed above me, leading up and away, and a light dawned at the end of it. I moved toward the light. I moved toward Anna. I could see her face now. Pain and hope warred on her features. She was not welcoming me.
Go back, Thomas. Go back. You have a body. Use it to fight him. You must go back and kill the Undying One.
“How?” I said. “He’ll just take me over, ride me until I’m murdered … .”
No he won’t. I’ll show you how. You must turn around. You must go back.
It’s hard to turn around, wherever you are, whatever you are doing. Alcoholics can’t turn around … opium addicts, prostitutes, crime lords, hit men … . Only one in a hundred can turn around, and that action is called repentance. But when a man is in the tunnel of light, heading toward beauty and out of horror, repentance feels like death.
Turn around, Thomas.
I repented of heaven and clawed my way back down that tunnel, away from the warm light and into the cold darkness. For her, I did it. For the one I was leaving.
AND SUDDENLY, I was back in my body, convulsing on the table. What horror! Voltage ripped my nerves. Blood boiled in my throat. Breath steamed in my lungs. What misery it was to be bound down to this table while the demon beside me cranked the engine of my death—
Bound down? But I was not. The belt at my waist had slid loose of the buckle.
It was Anna’s work, surely. She had freed my hands, had shown me the way.
I lifted my hands, clips still clinging to fingertips, and seized the demon’s wrists. The electric pentacle spread from my flesh to his. Galvanic energy surged up his arms to his shoulders.
The demon shrieked and tried to let go, but the sparking current enervated him. Blue charges danced across his chest and met over his breastbone and poured down his stomach and hips and back. The electric pentacle surrounded us both. It reached his toes and his fingertips and the bristling hair across his scalp.
I held on and kept cranking.
The demon seeped from Holmes’s pores, as if blood were being squeezed slowly out of his skin. Red protoplasm gathered in his eyes and sloshed from his mouth and rolled out of his nostrils and ears.
A crimson cloud formed above our heads. It boiled and coiled, eyeing us, wishing that it could dive down into our bodies, but the pentacles kept it at bay. At the edges of the cloud, dark tendrils hissed out into the air, dissipating.
The Undying Evil was dying.
“There’s no one here to possess!” I shouted victoriously. “And you can’t live in air.”
“I can live in anything human!” the spirit cried. It gathered itself and shot out through the air, coalescing around the human skeleton that stood on one end of the infirmary. Red energy mantled the bones and sank to their marrow and vanished.
I let go of Holmes’s hands.
He staggered back, eyes bleary, and looked around the room. “Where am I?”
“Let me loose!” I shouted, reaching up to undo the buckle on my chest.
Holmes shook off the funk that possessed him and lurched forward to loosen the buckle on my legs.
Even as he fidgeted with the strap, the skeleton in the corner pulled free of its stand and clacked down on the floor, facing us. Its jaw chattered, its hands rose in bony claws, and it stalked forward.
49
WHAT WOULD HOLMES DO?
I release the open buckle and stare at Thomas and then at the walking skeleton and wonder what Sherlock Holmes—what I would do at a time like this.
The answer is elementary: “Get him, Watson!”
50
PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS
The only thing more incredible than a walking skeleton was Holmes’s reaction to it. “Get him, Watson!” Though I was not Watson, I, happily, did know how to “get him.” I hefted the generator above my head and hurled it at the skeleton. The machine smashed the skeleton’s sternum, and the wires entangled its legs, sending it reeling.
“What are you doing?” Holmes blurted.
“The demon is bound to the physical form until its blood is shed,” I said, swinging my legs down off the steel table and standing shakily. “Luckily, this time, it has no blood. It can’t get out. We just have to dismantle it.”
“With what?” Holmes asked.
“With whatever comes to hand.” I pointed. “Chairs—”
Holmes grabbed a chair and brought it smashing down on the skeleton, separating the left ulna from its humorous and cracking all the left-side ribs.
“Belts—” I grasped the leather thongs that had been holding me and scourged the skeleton with them, seeing the buckles crack in the ribs and stick there. “Jars—”
Holmes darted to a nearby cabinet full of medical supplies, and from its innards he hurled jar after jar: cotton balls, swabs, gauze, tongue depressors, alcohol, iodine … . Only the last two caused much damage. The jar of alcohol caved three ribs, and the jar of iodine smashed heavily within the pelvis, cracking it in half and causing a leg to fall clean off.
The skeleton teetered and toppled, crashing onto the tile floor. More bones shattered and scattered from the twitching figure.
“What else?” Holmes asked, hands raised, eyes scanning the room for other weapons.
“Shoes,” I suggested, stomping on the skull. My foot caved the cranium. I then kicked the remainder of the skull down onto the spine. Bone flexed and shattered, the neck snapped, and ribs cracked away all down the back. The skeleton was in pieces, with just one leg and two arms and no ribs. I took care of the rest of the ribs by jumping up and down on them, like a child stomping autumn leaves.
It was a dance of joy. Every fracture, every hunk of bone, meant that the Undying Evil was trapped in smaller and smaller chunks, for all eternity.
Holmes joined me in my mad dance, and between the two of us, we stomped the faceplate down to fragments and snapped each leg and arm bone thrice over. In the end, the demon lay in a few large chunks, hundreds of shards, and a small pile of bone dust.
“Now, to contain this stuff,” I said as we stopped our dance. There was a dustpan and broom in one corner of the infirmary, and I went to get them. “Holmes, did you see any empty jars in that cabinet?”
He crossed to it and came back with two large, empty jars, one labeled “Cotton” and the other labeled “Sheep Stomach.” “How about these?”
“Fine, fine,” I said as I swept the fragments of the demon onto the dustpan. Holmes set down the jars and prowled around the periphery, hunting up any fragments that had traveled farther afield. It wouldn’t do to have the infirmary of the Louvre haunted by an Undying—albeit impotent—Evil. In the end, we had filled both jars to their plugs, and I wrapped them in a bedsheet to keep them from shattering and slid them into Watson’s surgical bag.
“Watson!” I exclaimed in sudden dread.
“Watson?” Holmes echoed.
“Damn it. He’s in with those two thugs.”
“Dr. John Watson? Here?”
“You really don’t remember, do you? Yes. Watson’s here, captive of those two henchmen you rounded up. We have to rescue him. Where’s the mustache and beard?”
Holmes stared blankly at me. “Henchmen?”
I pushed past him and stalked the floor, looking for the fake hairpieces. They were scattered, marked with the tread of our shoes, crinkled up with dried blood. “It’s no use. If we had your disguise, you could just t
ell the thugs to let him go. But if they see you without your disguise—”
“I don’t want Watson to see me yet. Not this way.” Holmes looked into my eyes, and there was something frightened in his expression. “My mind isn’t my own. I don’t trust it.”
I understood. “When Sherlock Holmes doesn’t trust his own mind, he’s not Sherlock Holmes.” I crossed to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out into the hallway. It was empty, but I heard a crash and boom. Flinging the door wide, I stepped into the hall and was greeted by a muffled shout and the thud of someone crashing to the floor. “Watson needs me.”
Gritting my teeth, I strode down the hall. I was hardly fit for another fight, but what choice did I have? Halfway down the hall, I realized I still carried the broom. Well … I needed some sort of weapon … and this was better than nothing.
I reached the door and tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. A pleading wail came from within. I reared back and kicked the door just beside the handle and was rewarded with a shattered lock and splintered wood and a door flying inward to reveal a scene of complete carnage.
The small room had been a custodial closet, with mops and buckets, brooms and tools and a wide utility sink. Now, every mop and boom was broken, every bucket staved. The tools lay scattered across the floor beside an unconscious figure, and another bruised and bloodied man was stuffed in the utility sink.
In the midst of all this wreckage stood Dr. John Watson, one side of his jaw swollen and his eyes blazing. He held a broken broomstick high overhead, ready to bring it down on me. His hand paused, and he returned my look of amazed shock.
“You’re alive!” we said simultaneously.
Watson lowered his broomstick, and I proffered the one that I carried. “Looks like you need to do some cleaning up.”
He didn’t take the broom or the joke, his eyes still wary. “What about the ringleader? Where’d he get off to?”
The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls Page 27