Gedge and Kaylock had ceased digging while Torrance recounted his tale of woe. Now, they stopped leaning on their shovels and resumed using them.
“Professor Challenger,” Holmes mused softly. “I know of him. One of these days I’d like to meet the fellow – see if he’s half the objectionable braggart everyone makes him out to be.”
After several minutes, the blade of one of the shovels thudded against something hard.
“Think we found it, boss.”
“Dig around it, then. Ever so gently, mind.”
Gedge and Kaylock scraped and spaded. In short order they had excavated a wooden crate, which they heaved out of the earth by its rope handles. It looked heavy.
“There we are, my beauty,” said Torrance. He set down the lantern some distance from the crate, then knelt to prise off the lid.
“Any chance you’ll be able to make out what’s inside once he gets it open?” I asked Holmes.
He shook his head. “Not from this vantage point. I shall attempt to get closer.”
“Be careful.”
Holmes crawled forward on his belly, slithering slowly from the cover of one headstone to the next, making incremental progress towards the trio of ruffians.
Abruptly, Torrance jerked his head up.
“What is it?” said Kaylock.
“Hush! Did anyone else hear that?”
Holmes froze on the spot, pressing himself as flat as he could to the grass. I nosed the barrel of my revolver round the edge of the headstone I lay behind, steadying my wrist with my free hand and sighting on Torrance. It would be a tricky shot at this range but not impossible. Should he make a move in Holmes’s direction, I would drop him where he stood.
Torrance turned this way and that, ear cocked.
“You don’t suppose it’s Bar –” Gedge began, but Kaylock interrupted him.
“Don’t say it. Don’t say his name. It summons him, everyone knows that. He hears it and he comes, like a dog answering a whistle.”
“Will you both pipe down!” Torrance snapped. “I’m trying to listen.”
Seconds passed, each seeming a minute in length.
“Nothing,” Torrance said eventually, and I let out a breath I wasn’t even aware I had been holding. “Not like me to be so jumpy,” he added. “I forget that tonight I have a guardian angel watching over me.”
I took this to be an ironic reference to the monument beside him, the marble angel with its wings furled and head piteously bowed.
Torrance returned to prying open the crate, and Holmes, likewise, continued on his surreptitious serpentine course across the graveyard.
What happened next was of the nature of a phantasmagoria, and had I not been there myself and witnessed it in person, I doubt I would have believed it.
The ground burst open, erupting from below. Turf and soil flew into the air, raining down in clods in all directions. Headstones toppled and tumbled. It was like a landmine going off. The terrific jolt sent me sprawling onto my back. Holmes, nearer to the point of disturbance than I was, was hurled sideways by the force of it and thudded helplessly into the pedestal of a raised tomb.
From a crater in the earth, a shape arose, sturdy, black and intimidating. A revenant from the nethermost pit.
Baron Cauchemar was back.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF GOD
I was momentarily gripped by fear. All I could do was stare.
There he was, Baron Cauchemar. It was my first completely clear view of him, with no fog to blur and shroud him this time.
I saw those segmented limbs again, that torso made up of various cunningly interlocking metal plates. I saw also, now, how a kind of armature was affixed to the outside of each of his arms and legs, and how this armature, manifestly a means of reinforcement and mobilisation, consisted of rods and cogs that moved in perfect meshing synchrony.
I perceived other aspects of Cauchemar’s appearance that I had missed before. His hands were of exaggerated proportions, like huge gauntlets, and from the palm of the left there protruded a pair of spherical brass studs, not unlike electrodes. His back was humped, fitted with the housing for some sort of miniature powering furnace. Flames danced within, visible through small glass portholes, and steam purled out, expelled through louvred vents.
All this made him seem yet more monstrous and inhuman. Indeed, it crossed my mind that the Bloody Black Baron was no man at all, nor anything demonic, but in fact pure machine, a fusion of automaton and steam locomotive, built by some demented toymaker in a huge hellish workshop-cum-foundry and operated by internal workings I could only guess at, a brilliant profusion of cogs and levers.
No sooner had the idea suggested itself than I dismissed it. Holmes was right: this was surely just an extraordinary, steam-propelled suit of armour, a “mechanised carapace” as he put it, with a human wearer inside – a pilot, one might call him.
Holmes!
In my dazed, amazed state, I had neglected to think of my friend, who had been so violently catapulted aside by Cauchemar’s spectacular arrival from underground.
I scrambled over to where Holmes lay. He was semi-conscious. I patted his cheek a few times to bring him round. He moaned, eyelids fluttering.
Meanwhile, Cauchemar took a couple of steps towards Torrance, Gedge and Kaylock. They three were in various states of fright, Gedge and Kaylock most of all. Gedge quailed and Kaylock quaked as the baron thumped over to them.
Then – perhaps the most remarkable thing of all – Cauchemar spoke.
“Abednego Torrance. I have come for you.”
The words came out in a dull resonant rasp, as though intoned through a long hollow tube.
“This must end. You betray your own country. There will be no more hiding from me. Prepare to atone for your sins.”
Torrance responded with a defiant snarl. “I have wounded you once already, and escaped your clutches. I shall again. If there’s anyone who’s facing a reckoning tonight, it’s you, you jackanapes.”
Cauchemar appeared taken aback, this not a reaction he was expecting.
Then a shot rang out, the boom of a powerful rifle.
Cauchemar reeled. The round had caught him in the back of the head. Knocked off balance, he sank to one knee. The rear of his helmet now bore a deep dent.
A second shot clipped his arm, the bullet whining off to take a gouge out of a headstone. Cauchemar lumbered round, scanning for the source of the gunfire. From the angle of the shots, the sniper had to be firing from the rooftop of a nearby house that overlooked the graveyard, but which rooftop, I could not determine; neither could Cauchemar.
By now Holmes was back in the land of the sentient, more or less.
“Someone is besieging the baron,” said he, thickly. “This has been an ambush.”
A third shot found its mark dead centre of Cauchemar’s face. Astonishingly, the baron keeled over, like a tree felled.
“Heavy-calibre, high-velocity,” said Holmes. “The bullets might not penetrate his shell but the force alone is enough to stun him.”
“But who?” I said. “Who is this sniper, this ‘guardian angel’ of Torrance’s?”
Holmes did not have leisure to answer, even if he knew.
Torrance tore the lid off the crate, and from inside produced a stick of dynamite. He lit the fuse and tossed it at the supine Cauchemar. Before it even landed, he had fished out another stick and was lighting that one too.
Gedge and Kaylock scurried for cover as the first stick detonated.
Cauchemar managed to regain his senses in the nick of time. He dug his heels into the ground, and his armour’s feet shot out, extending hydraulically from his legs. This propelled him several yards across the grass, so that the dynamite, which had been lying right next to him, blew up nothing but earth.
The next stick came fizzing through the air at him, tumbling end over end.
Miraculously, Cauchemar swatted it aside with a sweep of his arm, like a batsman ret
urning a skilfully delivered googly. The dynamite spun towards Gedge and Kaylock, who were huddled together beside the church. They both ducked behind a buttress, which bore the brunt of the blast and saved them from harm.
Baron Cauchemar rallied, leaping to his feet with a clanking of metal and a great rushing hiss of steam. His glowing eyes, I now perceived, were circular lenses set into his mask and illuminated from within. One of the lenses had been cracked by the second gunshot. Through them, a pair of only-too-human eyes peered out, seeking Torrance.
A slew of rifle rounds thudded and whacked into Cauchemar’s chest. He staggered backwards under the onslaught, unable to catch his balance. No sooner had he recoiled from one bullet than another smacked into him. The sniper, I concluded, must be using a bolt-action repeater in order to be able to deliver such rapid fire, perhaps a Lee Metford or a Lebel.
Cauchemar was driven against the flank of the church by the volley. This seemed to be what the sniper, clearly a crack marksman, intended, for no further shots came the armoured giant’s way.
What did come his way was a bundle of dynamite sticks from Torrance, the lit fuse sizzling with barely an inch left to go.
“Watson!” Holmes cried out. “Look out! This is not going to end well.”
The dynamite went off with one of the loudest bangs I have ever heard – louder even than the bomb at Waterloo Station.
Cauchemar was slammed against the church by the explosion, with such force that his body was partially embedded in the stonework.
The inevitable ensued.
That church was already a teetering, enfeebled edifice, barely able to remain upright unaided. The dynamite, and Cauchemar, proved the last straw as far as it was concerned.
A deep, aching rumble reverberated through the venerable building, a cavernous groan as of a leviathan in distress. The fissures which crazed the stonework all over widened and lengthened, joining up, multiplying. Tiles slithered down from the roof, shattering as they hit the ground, a hailstorm of slate. Gargoyles plummeted from the sky like pheasants at a shoot. The church shuddered along its entire length, from narthex to sacristy. Stained-glass windows burst outward in sprays of many-coloured shards.
Gedge and Kaylock were showing a clean pair of heels, haring away from the scene. Torrance was not far behind them.
Holmes and I were likewise on our feet and making good our escape, in a different direction. Holmes, however, had not yet fully recovered from having the wits and the wind knocked out of him, and I was obliged to support him. Hence our progress was not as fast as that of the three ruffians.
The rumbling intensified. I glanced over my shoulder, and what I beheld all but unmanned me.
The bell tower was crumbling, along with the rest of the church.
Holmes looked round too.
Before our very eyes, the entire tower sheared loose and tipped over.
Straight towards us.
“Watson! Move!”
Holmes gave me an almighty shove from behind. I stumbled forwards and fell headlong onto the grass. Behind me came the thunder of countless tons of limestone and mortar succumbing to gravity and plunging to earth. It was as though the fist of God Himself had descended from the heavens to punch the ground.
I thought the cracking and crashing and roaring would never cease. I was quite convinced that, at any second, some chunk of tumbling masonry would land clean on my cranium and that would be the end of me. I covered my head with my arms, for all the good that might do. I heard a man screaming and belatedly realised that it was me.
That I could hear my own voice at all was an indication that the tumult of the church’s collapse had died down. I stopped screaming. I lay for a long while, scarce able to believe that I had survived and, what’s more, was intact.
Rising to all fours took an almost superhuman effort. My limbs felt nerveless and numb.
The air was clogged with a haze of dust. The moonlight showed that little remained of the church, just a few truncated pillars and the corner of one transept, like the ruins of an ancient Roman temple. All else was merely a field of formless rubble.
Nothing moved. Nothing stirred.
“Holmes?” I said, my voice sounding hopelessly small after the devastating cacophony just past.
“Holmes?” I said again, a little louder and a lot more plaintively.
“Holmes!” I shouted.
No answer. No sign of him.
Holmes was lying somewhere under all that débris.
My friend was dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“THE FATAL STONE NOW CLOSES OVER ME”
Now, I am not going to maintain the pretence here that Holmes really was dead. What would be the point? Of course he was not. I ended the foregoing chapter on a note of dramatic suspense because that is what I have been wont to do in these narratives of mine. Old habits are hard to shake. Even when writing for no audience but myself, I still feel the need to incite a theoretical reader to read on.
In those dreadful minutes after the church in Stepney came down, however, I was quite firmly of the belief that Holmes had perished. There was no earthly way, to my mind, that he could have withstood having a significant portion of an ecclesiastical edifice dropped upon him.
What made my distress yet worse was the knowledge that Holmes, by shoving me forwards, had saved me. He had bought my life at the expense of his own. I did not deem this a fair exchange.
I began combing through the rubble, heaving aside the largest lumps I could manage. I knew it was in vain, but I had to act. I had to do something, however futile it might seem.
Lights had come on in various of the nearby houses, and a furore arose. People shouted from their windows, demanding to know what had transpired. I called for help but got no response. Londoners had become fearful: of bombs, of one another. The locals were more than eager to know what had disturbed their sleep but less than eager to sally forth from their homes and find out for themselves.
After several minutes I took a rest, worn out, my arms and back aching. A sense of desolation broke over me. I began to weep. Sherlock Holmes was dead. How to break the news to the world? I could scarcely accept it myself.
Then came the clatter of stones shifting. To my left, where the main body of the church had stood, the surface of the rubble was moving. Someone beneath was trying to claw their way out.
“Holmes!” I exclaimed, transported by a surge of joy and relief.
I hurried over in order to help. Before I got there, however, the rubble burst open and up rose a tall, imposing silhouette.
Baron Cauchemar stood, shaking the last few fragments of masonry from his shoulders. His armour bore several deep scratches and scrapes, which in tandem with the pockmarks left by the sniper’s bullets made him look, for the first time in my experience, truly vulnerable.
His head swivelled towards me.
For a moment I thought he was going to go on the offensive, and in my ecstasy of grief, having just had my renewed hopes of Holmes’s survival dashed, I honestly did not care if he did. With my best friend and one of the greatest men I had ever known dead, what did it matter if I lived? A world without Holmes was a world depleted, a world benighted, a world hardly worth being in.
“Go on then,” I said to Cauchemar. “Get it over with, if you’re going to. What’s the use? Your armour protected you, while Sherlock Holmes is crushed. Where is the justice in that?”
It was then that the smallest, faintest of sounds reached my ears. A voice which I had despaired of ever hearing again was calling to me, as though from miles distant.
“Watson,” it said. “You buffoon. I am fine. A little stifled, perhaps, but on the whole hale. Possibly you could see your way to unearthing me...?”
“Holmes!” I began to search frantically, Cauchemar all but forgotten. “Where are you? Keep talking.”
Holmes went one better and began to sing. I recognised the tune as ‘La fatal pietra sovra me si chiuse’ from Aida, the aria which Radame
s launches into just after he has been buried alive in the crypt below the temple of Vulcan. I burst out laughing at the ironic absurdity of this. Trust Holmes to make light of so dark a predicament.
Following his voice, I discerned that he had somehow contrived to take refuge inside a small mausoleum. The entrance, however, was blocked solidly by a heap of broken masonry, several lumps of which were as big as boulders.
I outlined the problem to him. “There isn’t a hope of me lifting any of it away. That will require a block and tackle, along with several men. You must hold on. I’ll fetch help.”
“I fear, Watson, it may not arrive in time. The supply of air in here is limited and diminishing fast. Can you think of something else? Perhaps Torrance’s dynamite.”
“That is buried too, and I have no idea where.”
“Oh dear. Things do look bleak, then.”
“Wait! There is something we can try.”
I turned. Baron Cauchemar was still standing where he had arisen. He was busy extricating a lump of stone that had become wedged between his armour and a part of the surrounding armature.
“Cauchemar,” I said, “listen to me. I don’t know who or what you are, or what motivates you, but you have shown yourself to be an enemy of the forces of evil. In that mausoleum lies another enemy of the forces of evil, trapped and in danger of suffocation. You have the power to free him. I beg you to do so.”
Cauchemar surveyed me through his eye lenses. Then said, in that weird, vibrating voice of his: “I was wondering when you’d get around to asking, Dr Watson. Step aside.”
He crunched across the rubble to the mausoleum and bent to the task of removing the débris that blocked the doorway. With little apparent effort, he single-handedly hefted masses that a dozen men would have struggled with. Cogs whirred and steam hissed as he toiled. I looked on with no little awe, while a part of me kept asking the question: how come he knows my name?
Soon the work was done. The mausoleum door was fully exposed. It was made of copper that had turned turquoise with oxidisation. Holmes must have dived through after pushing me out of harm’s way, then slammed the door shut behind him so as to keep the avalanche of chunks of the bell tower from following him inside.
Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares Page 12