Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Kim Newman

  “Ah yes: a feint away from Afghanistan. A grand encirclement via the north pole.”

  “The Russians, Holmes,” Reed’s voice had frosted over, even as his cheeks warmed scarlet, “are always a potential regional threat; consequently we have an obligation to investigate. You are the pre-eminent investigator in her majesty’s service; ergo you will put the theory to the test. We’ve men and supplies at your disposal, but I have it from The Chamber itself that you are not to engage. Find out what the devil is going on. Find out the why, and the who, but take no chances. London wants you on the case, but they don’t want you harmed, or I shall answer for it.”

  “Indeed. So it is the great game of nations that brings me to your wasteland. I should have suspected no less.”

  Watson scowled at the memory. It was always difficult to interpret Holmes’ motives, or even accept the initial premise of any case at face value. Was it the government asking for Holmes’ assistance in this instance, or had he somehow engineered the invitation? Was Holmes truly acting in his capacity as special investigator for the empire, or did he have his own private reasons for pursuing the matter? Watson couldn’t say, but the mere fact of his speculation told him how far their friendship had evolved over the years.

  Watson’s back ached, and the occasional step was announced by a loud, sclerotic popping of his right knee. The air was not so frigid as it would have been in high winter, but it still clawed at his tobacco-coated lungs. And his shoulder of course — the one that had taken that Jezail bullet at Maiwand — that throbbed in echo to his laboured heartbeats. Shoulder, he chided himself ruefully. Be honest with yourself. Be as honest with yourself as you are suspicious of Holmes. That bullet took more than shoulder, and you know it.

  Holmes set a tireless pace, his long-shanked stride crunching rhythmically against hard-packed snow. Here and there, tracks were visible even to Watson, but Holmes did not trust to them alone. Now, out of sight of the constabulary, Holmes freely referred to the fourteen inch, cruel-looking Zulu blade with its elephant-tusk pommel and strange glyphs upon the steel. The metal glowed with an eerie incandescence, gently guiding Holmes towards his quarry with more surety than any tracker.

  Watson suppressed a shudder. Again the Zulu knife was leading them on; the knife that Murray had laid upon him after defeat at Maiwand; the knife that had stopped the bleeding of his open and failing heart, and made him whole again. The knife that had kept them hidden all during that nightmare retreat to Kandahar, with Afghan warriors harassing and killing at every step of those 314 infernal miles.

  “I dreamed of you,” Murray had said, on the night that Watson had cheated death through Zulu sorcery. “I brought this damned thing out of Africa … for you. I want no part of it, John.”

  Murray had given him the knife, and soon thereafter, Watson had begun dreaming of Holmes — seeing him clearly before even knowing his face or name.

  The injury, the long retreat, his honourable discharge … all in the service of delivering an arcane artifact to a total stranger who would one day become closer than family.

  Closer perhaps, but not nearly as familiar.

  “You’re brooding,” Holmes said, without looking at his friend.

  “I knew it was magic, Holmes, back at the settlement. Blast! Why the charade?”

  “Leadership, my good doctor, the men were terrified. Brandishing a sorcerous artifact might well have routed them. Nothing holds the line like the imposition of true reason. They heard me make order out of chaos, and were becalmed.”

  Watson snorted.

  “You’re in a mood,” Holmes observed.

  “It’s the forced march, I’m afraid. I’m feeling my age. We could at least have taken the sled.”

  Holmes smiled. “That’s not entirely precise, is it?”

  Watson scowled. “Damn it Holmes, I just … I do not understand why I can’t simply tell the truth in my accounts. Every time I recount how you glean facts from observing minutiae, or deduce conclusions from seemingly unconnected events, I feel a charlatan. It weighs on me, you know? You have a singular talent — a gift beyond all science — yet you insist on these elaborate, outrageous tales of deduction.”

  “Are they not popular?”

  “Yes! Yes damn it, they ARE popular, but that makes the lie all the heavier.”

  “Watson. There is no point in telling a truth to people who will not credit it. Look at Challenger’s nonsense: tales to amuse old ladies and young boys, or so they are perceived. By couching my exploits in the language of science, you do more good than you know. I daresay you are pivotal to the entire enterprise, Watson. Trust me. You serve a higher purpose.”

  Watson glared. It was not the first time Holmes had deflected him from this topic.

  “Could all this possibly be the Russians?”

  Holmes barked laughter. “It may well turn out to be Cossacks, though I wouldn’t lay odds on it. No Watson, there is a great game being played here, but I do not think the players are kings and earthly governments. I have never felt the pull of the blade as strongly as I do now. Something massive lurks in the distance Watson, I feel it!”

  Holmes’ eyes shone, catching the dagger’s light, and Watson swallowed. The dagger had used them both — Watson as a messenger, and conveyance from Africa to England via Afghanistan; Holmes as an agent — but for what design, the Doctor had never been able to conceive. Were the horrors all connected in some way — all the stories he had retold as logical puzzles — could they be sewn together into a larger tapestry if the real details were laid out plain?

  Watson simply didn’t know. He was complicit in an elaborate ruse, the truth of which made no sense, and the lies of which proved best-sellers. In the end, he had to do what he had always done: trust Holmes. A hard thing to do, made harder with each passing adventure.

  They soldiered on, passing from ridge to ridge at a steady pace. A gloom had descended upon Watson: too much mention of Afghanistan with its horrors both human and supernatural. Holmes for his part hummed as he strode, drifting from classical passages to music hall refrains as his mood dictated. With the dagger feeding him, drawing him on, he seemed to pulse in sympathy with its hellish glow. Cocaine had always seemed to Watson an appropriate metaphor for what the dagger did to Holmes.

  With the sun sliding inexorably into the ice, and the indigo shadows growing longer around them, Holmes and Watson topped a gentle slope and dropped immediately to prone positions. Holmes grinned too hard and too wide, his eyes dancing. Watson sucked in his breath, squinting his eyes against the cold. His vision was not what it once was, but it wasn’t the clarity of what he saw that made him doubt his senses — only the sheer improbability of the hulk in the distance.

  It was a galleon — shattered and ragged and black against the ice — which listed a quarter turn on its starboard side. She was three-masted, Spanish hulled, and a gigantic gash split her side, half filled in with blown snow. She was an old ship, probably three, four hundred years out of date — one of the great Atlantic deep-sea traders the Dons had used to empty Mexico of its gold.

  Men moved upon the derelict’s frozen and desolate decks, shuffling and battening down against the coming night. They had built and added onto the existing structure of the ship, ramshackle constructs, like webs stretched between rotted tree trunks. Canvas lean-tos and wooden sheds broke up the nautical lines of the once-proud vessel; hanging lanterns illuminated the scene in a hard yellow light.

  “Our quarry, Watson,” Holmes breathed.

  The doctor shifted his position, wincing in discomfort. “They have the advantage of us, Holmes.”

  “We shall see. You’re a fine hand with the service revolver, but how are you with the rifle?”

  “Respectable, I daresay. But Holmes…”

  “They are vermin, doctor. We shall show no mercy.”

  Watson thought of the hunting camp they had left behind; saw red-coated bodies slumped in their lines at Maiwand. He swallowed, and his throat was dry.
r />   “Do we offer battle, or attempt a skulk?” Watson asked.

  “There is a captive in the game,” Holmes replied. “Perhaps dead already, though likely not. These reavers will fight to keep what they’ve shed so much blood to take. And if they fight, I would rather meet them out here, than in there.”

  Watson grunted, rising to one knee. The resulting pop was so loud, it almost sounded like the first gunshot. He slung the Enfield off his shoulder, and withdrew ammunition boxes from the cavernous pockets of his parka. He tilted the rifle up and let loose a shattering salvo into the twilight, the frozen air lending a sharpness to the retort that hastened its shriek across the ice.

  Instantly, pack-dogs yelped and howled; men on the ship whirled and stood motionless, astonished at the presence of intruders. The amazement passed, and Watson saw the figures vanish into the ship’s hold like a swarm of cockroaches to stream out onto the snow from the jagged tear in the ship’s hull. Eight dark-cloaked figures fluttered in the distance, running full-tilt towards the duo like great rushing bats just skimming the surface of a great frozen lake.

  Watson nestled himself soundly on one knee, slowing his breathing.

  They had a good two hundred yards or more to clear to his position, up a gentle, but long incline. Not a rifle amongst ‘em, Watson thought. Not even a bow.

  They were all as good as dead, every man jack of them.

  KRAK! The Enfield slammed against Watson’s shoulder and he saw a figure jerk and drop backwards as though clothes-lined by an unseen wire. His accomplices rushed on, plunging forward as Watson ejected the cartridge and calmly reset the bolt. He had been modest in his self-assessment: he was a dead shot over the killing range of the Enfield. He’d proven it many times over the years, though his skill rarely made the written accounts. “It must be brains over brawn; science over force that forms the thrust of these tales,” Holmes would frequently emphasize. It would never do to mention the blood Dr. Watson had been obliged to spill, on top of everything else.

  KRAK! Watson recalled the ragged line at Maiwand: volley fire shredding howling ghazis on the approach.

  KRAK! The tips of his fingers singed by the scorching heat of the chamber as comrades fell, and ragtag squares formed in doomed isolation.

  KRAK! He’d killed men at Maiwand with this same lethal precision, and none of them, he knew, so deserving as the ones he claimed today.

  KRAK!

  KRAK!

  KRAK!

  He’d missed once and two men kept up their headlong pace, now less than a hundred yards from him. Blinking to refocus, operating in strict military cadence, he ejected and reloaded, brought butt to shoulder … and froze, momentarily stunned by what he was seeing.

  One of the downed had risen, was shaking off the shot, and was staggering forward once again! Another man Watson had sworn he’d hit square to the left side of the chest got to his knees, and reeled to his feet to renew his lurching advance. They were slowed, but those who had gone down now rose again, forcing the doctor to hasten his tempo.

  He put another round into the first man he had downed, and another into the second. He shot the third man’s thigh and dropped him again, only to watch him writhe, roll, rise and now walk forward. The hackles on Watson’s burly neck rose, and he knew it wasn’t from the cold. “Good Lord,” he whispered, awe-struck.

  “Indeed,” Holmes countered.

  The reavers had closed to within twenty yards.

  Holmes grinned, and lunged forward, a canine snarl rippling his thin lips.

  Watson had seen Sherlock Holmes close for hand-to-hand on many occasions, knew that his friend had made no little study of the combative arts, but the chilling efficiency and balance of the man routinely amazed nonetheless. He was wiry-strong, and naturally agile, but these components amplified by the dagger’s eldritch energy made Holmes a thing of slashing lethality. And even without Zulu magic, no man alive was better at obtaining and keeping initiative. Holmes’ judgment of distance and timing were exquisite.

  Holmes bent low, put his shoulder into the first man’s hip, using his own momentum to hoist him up and over in a tumble of seal skin cloak and hide-bound legs. The second man rushed in with a thrusting harpoon in both hands, but his angle was bad, and Holmes had position. He swept the point aside with his left forearm, and walked his man onto the point of the Zulu knife — the broad, killing blade sighing into the man’s ribcage as though pushing through dense, wet clay.

  The tribesman’s hood fell back, and Watson felt a thrill of fear pulse down his spine at the sight. The man was native, distant kin to those butchered some leagues to the south, but his face was a feral, twisted parody of theirs, and his eyes shone an impossible robin’s-egg blue. He clutched at his wound and slid off the blade, falling back onto his shoulders, his knees bent beneath him. Though he bled from a bullet wound in his chest, it had taken an African dagger to end the unspeakable life of this hellbound slayer.

  Holmes whirled as the first man closed again, the tribesman’s face grotesque with hate. The man had produced a rust-encrusted rapier, of all things, holding it as one might hold a simple club. Holmes sidestepped awkwardly, stumbling as snow bit at his calves, but he recovered nicely, drawing the keen edge of his blade across the man’s jugular from an oblique angle. The native pitched face-first into the snow, hands clawing at his throat as his eerie life bled out crimson against the crisp, pristine white.

  From there, Holmes pressed his attack to the others, but found that Watson’s bullets had done most of the work after all. Incredibly, the wounded had dragged themselves up that sweeping ice hill, lungs collapsed or thighs belching blood from throbbing arteries. They clung grimly to savage life, and their faces bespoke the same dark, malicious energy upon which the first two had drawn.

  The dagger took each in turn: one touch of it, so long as it drank of their blood, was all it took to still them. In moments, Holmes stood alone, chest heaving, breath condensing fog-white in the Arctic air. Watson closed from a respectful distance, eyeing his friend warily, noting the barely contained bloodlust in those usually reserved eyes.

  “Holmes?” Watson said from fifteen feet away, not pointing the rifle at his friend directly, but holding it at the ready nonetheless.

  Holmes nodded, panting. “Fear not, doctor. I am in complete control of my faculties.”

  “Grand,” said Watson, not comforted by the fact that he needed to be told.

  Holmes smiled. “Shall we?”

  They stepped their way to the galleon, Watson noting eight fallen foes en route. Poor devils, he thought. He could not help but feel that ending them had saved them somehow, from something darker than death.

  And then a thought unbidden: would Holmes not also be saved thus?

  Watson clenched his teeth so hard, he heard them squeak in his head.

  At the gaping maw of the hull breach, Holmes stopped, resting a foot against the lowered shards of shattered planks like so many broken teeth. Watson crept close, peering in around Holmes’ shoulder, sensing large crates just out of sight in the gloom, and smelling a peculiar, vaguely familiar reek. Shouldering the Enfield, Watson prepared his service revolver, and whispered: “Ready.”

  Holmes eased himself into the ship with a lithe, silent cat’s step, and Watson followed with the scrabbling grace of a bulldog charging a hedge.

  The ship creaked and groaned under its own shifting weight, making Watson flinch at the erratic noises. Dim arctic light spilled in between gaps in the ancient planks, or through the massive puncture, turning absolute darkness into a frigid murk. Snow ground beneath their boots for a ways, then wood alone sounded out. Wooden crates lay in haphazard piles, worrying Watson with their proximity. Anything could be lying in the shadows, hidden from sight — just waiting for them to pass.

  Inching forward, Holmes made the bulkhead door, sheathing the knife to work the portal with his gloved hands. “Heat,” he murmured, glancing back at Watson, and gesturing at the sliding bolt that held the door fas
t. Slipping the latch back, Holmes shouldered the door open, and both men were instantly met by a fetid, sweltering breeze drenched with the odor of rotted vegetation, dank soil, and endless rain. It was downright tropical, that wind. Watson placed the smells, the temperature, and the humidity as something more Caribbean than Arctic in derivation.

  A small access corridor cut longitudinally across the length of the ship, leading to darkened stairwells at both ends. Before the intruders, and slightly to the right, another bulkhead door led into what Watson supposed would be the cargo-hold proper. He grunted, and lifted the pistol off his hip, edging in front of Holmes to take the lead. With the clear view, he could see a pale, feeble light shining around the edges of the door. “Shoot to kill,” Holmes whispered from very close behind. “This will be hot work at close quarters.”

  Watson heard the oily rasp of the knife being drawn from its sheath, and the sound made him think of Indian cobras.

  Watson approached the portal, braced his legs wide as if in a scrum. He tried the knob and found it sticky, but unlocked. Turning it, he shouldered the door in and crouched down, blinking as a gust of air hit him in the face as though he’d just opened a baking oven.

  Hanging seal-oil lamps cast even, gentle light around a large room, and Watson’s mind reeled at the sight. Chests of doubloons and small ingots of gold lay open, or in smashed piles of wood and metal. Light caromed off emeralds and rubies set in rings and bracelets; turquoise and silver belts and bangles lay in casual heaps. It was all the wealth Watson could have imagined in three lifetimes of adventure, but he barely registered the opulence, so thunderstruck was he by the room’s other contents.

  The floor was overgrown with moss and a thick, spongy loam. A great tree trunk pushed up out of the floor and thrust up through the roof, presumably spreading out amongst the upper decks. And at the base of the tree lay an altar of human skulls, bracketed and reinforced with golden framing. A large gong stood off to one side, its face engraved in the style of the Aztecs to reveal a circular procession of creatures real and imagined. As Watson’s eyes scanned the room, Aztec fixtures and carvings, furniture and treasure littered the scene: looted, and herein preserved before they could have been melted down and recast in Spanish forms.