“Correct, and in that capacity he came to me last week to pick my brains. Wanted every bit of intelligence on the Singletons that I could provide.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” I said, unable to keep a note of incredulity out of my voice, “came to you for help?”
“I know. I know. Quite a turn-up for the books, eh? I will say, though, that it is not as if I am entirely without resources. Mr Holmes clearly seemed to feel that it was expedient to consult me rather than do the legwork himself, and in the event, I was happy to oblige. I thought that perhaps he could finally lay a finger on the Singletons in a way that we at the Yard had not been able.”
“Well, someone has certainly laid more than a finger on them,” I said.
Lestrade laughed mirthlessly. “You can see, now, why I wish to speak to your colleague. At the very least it would appear that he was at the scene last night when they were murdered. I simply wish to eliminate him from the list of potential suspects. That said…” Grimly he surveyed the carnage in the room once more. “A man who destroys his own accommodation for no apparent reason might equally be capable of cudgelling to death a pair of notorious crime lords. Don’t you agree, Dr Watson?”
I shook my head in the negative, but without conviction.
* * *
Lestrade left, having exacted from me a promise that I would send Holmes to him the moment my friend reappeared. I spent an hour or so putting straight what I could in the sitting-room, and then I settled down in my old armchair and resumed my wait. Evening came. Night fell. As the mantelshelf clock doled out the seconds tick by tick, my eyelids drooped and I sank into a doze. I awoke abruptly to find Sherlock Holmes leaning over me, staring into my eyes, and there was such abundant spite in his gaze that I was fair taken aback.
“Holmes!” I gasped. “Good heavens, you gave me a fright. I did not hear you come in.”
“That is because I spied a light in the window and reckoned I had an intruder,” barked Holmes. “I wished to surprise him, so made a stealthy entrance. What are you doing here, Watson?”
“What does it look like I am doing?”
“Keeping vigil against my return.”
“Precisely.”
“With your gun handy.”
I glanced down. My revolver lay in my lap, the fingers of my right hand loosely clasped around it. “You must realise,” I said, experiencing a small pang of guilt, “that I needed to be prepared.”
“Prepared in case of what eventuality?”
“You know what you have done. This room. The condition in which you left it. You cannot fault me for thinking that you have…” I hesitated, then steeled myself and proceeded. “Have taken leave of your senses.”
“And you intend to shoot me?” Holmes snapped.
“Not a bit of it. At the same time, were I called upon to defend myself…”
My friend snorted derisively and turned away.
“Holmes,” I said, rising. “Holmes, you must speak to me. What is going on? What has got into you? Come on, old man. It’s me. Whatever the matter is, you can share it with me. We can deal with it together.”
His back was still to me. His shoulders were hunched, and all at once his entire frame was wracked with tremors. I feared he was having a seizure of some sort, so strong did these convulsions become. I made a move towards him, hand raised solicitously, and then, on a sudden, he spun round.
It is hard to put into words the appalling alteration that had overcome him. His face was still appreciably that of Sherlock Holmes, but it was distorted to a hideous degree and radiated what I can only call pure evil. From the hellish glitter of the eyes to the cruel leer of the lips, it formed a satanic mask. There was nothing in it but contempt and hatred and every other vile passion to which the human condition is prey.
No less chilling was the voice that issued from that twisted mouth, a coarse, guttural croak quite unlike Holmes’s customary speaking voice.
“Point that gun at me, would you?” he snarled.
I perceived that I had unwittingly reached out to him with the hand that held the revolver. It did look to all intents and purposes as though I was aiming the weapon at him.
“N-No,” I stammered.
“Put a round in me, eh?” he growled on. “Send old Sherrinford Hope to oblivion?”
“‘Sherrinford…’?”
“Well, go ahead then, you blackguard.” Holmes stepped forward and pressed his breast to the muzzle of the gun. “There, I’ve made it easy for you. Straight to the heart. Point-blank. Can’t miss. Pull the damned trigger, why don’t you!”
“Holmes,” I said, lowering the revolver, “I have no desire whatsoever to kill you. You need help, that is all. My help.”
“Holmes? Who is Holmes? Sherrinford Hope is the name. I told you that. And if you’re not going to kill me, then do me a favour and leave. Blast your eyes, did you not hear me? I said get out. Go! Now! Or I shall do to you what I did to the Singleton twins, and with no less relish.”
So saying, he snatched up the poker, which I had restored to its rightful position by the fireplace. He brandished it before my nose.
“How many warnings do you require?” he bellowed. “I shan’t ask you again. Go!”
I went. I had no choice. I was neither going to fight Holmes nor shoot him. The outcome of either course of action would have been to my detriment. I hastened out of the house, stricken with a mixture of panic and bewilderment. Making my way to Paddington through darkened streets, from pool of gaslight to pool of gaslight, I tried to fathom the nature of the phenomenon I had just beheld, and could not. When I arrived home, Mary discerned my agitation immediately but I could not bring myself to explain its cause. I hardly understood it myself. Sherlock Holmes appeared to have been taken over by someone other, an alter ego calling himself by the not dissimilar name of Sherrinford Hope. It was as though he had been possessed by a demon who was compelling him to commit heinous deeds. I went to bed, stomach churning, head racing. My dreams, when sleep finally came, were feverish. My world had been turned upside down. Nothing made sense any more.
Regardless, I returned to Baker Street the next day, resolved to beard the beast in its lair. This time I brought along my revolver deliberately, with forethought.
“Holmes?” I called out in querulous tones. “Holmes?”
A feeble reply of “Watson?” led me upstairs to Holmes’s bedroom. Still on my mettle, I nudged open the door. Holmes lay tangled up in the bedclothes, wan and pallid, skin slick with perspiration.
“I am ill,” said he, somewhat unnecessarily.
“You most assuredly are,” I said, putting a hand to his forehead. “You are running a high temperature. Let me fetch you laudanum.”
“No. No drugs. Tell me, what happened yesterday?”
“You do not know?”
“I remember… vague things. Fleeting impressions. Nothing of substance.”
“You do not recall destroying your room? Berating Mrs Hudson? Above all, the fate of the Singleton twins?”
“I – I thought it was a nightmare,” he said plaintively. “Was it not?”
“And Sherrinford Hope? Does that name ring a bell?”
“It sounds familiar.”
“Holmes, I cannot for the life of me diagnose what has befallen you. It is some crisis of the mind, that much is plain, and it seems to be something an alienist might well be able to cure. I know a couple of good ones. I can give you their names. I will even make the appointment for you. But, for the love of God, man, you must get a grip on yourself. You are in no end of trouble. Lestrade has you in the frame for the deaths of the Singletons, and you as good as admitted your culpability to me last night. Whatever is going on, it has to stop. Now. And that begins with me ministering to you.”
I made a cold compress for his brow, then went home to fetch my medical bag. Back at Baker Street, I found Holmes’s bed no longer occupied. The entire house was empty. During the half hour that I had been absent, my friend had absconded.
He had, however, left me a note.
Watson, do not seek me.
It will go hard for you if you do.
S.H.
The penmanship was palpably Holmes’s but more jagged and tortured than was his wont, the words seeming gouged into the paper rather than written. I had little doubt which “S.H.” – Sherlock Holmes or Sherrinford Hope – had been their author.
* * *
What had become of Holmes, I had no inkling, but over the ensuing days the newspapers provided possible clues as to his whereabouts and activities. Successive morning editions carried reports of the slaying of some noted malefactor or other. The serial larcenist Ezekiel Bodkin was found in Hyde Park, strangled to death. The drowned body of stamp counterfeiter Ned Phillips was fished out of the Thames by a ferryman at Gravesend. Lord Emanuel Grenville-Rushwood, whose Establishment credentials had protected him from prosecution for a string of offences against women, wound up impaled on the railings of his riverside mansion in Chelsea, having plummeted head-first from a fourth-floor window. Perhaps worst of all, Digby “Mayhem” Maynard, believed to be behind numerous armed robberies of jewellery shops in Hatton Garden, turned up in Trafalgar Square, beheaded and with a large diamond stuffed down his windpipe.
All of the above individuals had been the subjects of investigation by Holmes, as enumerated earlier in this narrative. It was Bodkin who had been in the habit of leaving a raven’s feather behind at every house he burgled, a kind of calling-card, and also of taking a single item of no intrinsic value such as a paperweight or a pair of spectacles or, as in the latest instance, a logarithmic slide-rule, in order to sow confusion among both the victims and the investigators of his crimes. As for Phillips, his sheets of Penny Reds were famous for being indistinguishable from those produced by the Royal Mail, but Holmes had been convinced that he had established a means of identifying them as fakes – subtle differences in the printing presses’ distribution of ink – and hoped thus to be able to supply incontrovertible evidence that would guarantee the counterfeiter’s downfall.
Lord Grenville-Rushwood, meanwhile, had been flaunting his roguery for years, all but defying the police to bring him to justice, and Holmes had been painstakingly assembling a case against the aristocrat which would be so watertight, not even the most compromised judge could throw it out of court. Maynard, for his part, had made a misstep, according to Holmes, by stopping to have his boots cleaned shortly after his most recent raid, for the shoeshine boy had noted the miscreant’s false leg and also the clay adhering to his soles which was specific to north London, both observations together being sufficient, apparently, to secure a conviction.
Add to this tally the Singleton twins and their savage, ruthless treatment of Inigo Davis – who had cleared out the home of the opera singer Madame Navarre of all its valuables – and you ended up with the entirety of Holmes’s current caseload, save for the mystery of the poisoned antimacassar murders. In every instance the affair could be considered solved, or at any rate brutally resolved.
Only I, however, could make this connection, for only I was privy to the ins and outs of Holmes’s professional dealings. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was going about methodically and systematically eliminating the perpetrators of the various crimes that were at present under his purview. He was not allowing any of them to face trial. He had determined their guilt and was summarily executing them.
The horror of this knowledge was quite debilitating. I had no idea which way to turn. Should I go to Lestrade and confess all? That would be a rank betrayal of Holmes, yet it was also the ethical course to take. But even if the police set to pursuing him, would they ever catch him? Surely he could outwit them at every turn. And anyway, if Sherlock Holmes had elected to rid the world of some of its less desirable denizens, should I not be applauding him in that endeavour rather than hindering him?
Then, of course, there was the consideration that by interfering I might make myself – and indeed Mary – the target of Holmes’s ire. I could hardly forget the sight of that “Sherrinford Hope” persona which had manifested itself at Baker Street. It seemed more than plausible that that creature of wrath, if I provoked it, would have as little compunction about despatching me as it had had about despatching the Singletons, Bodkin and Grenville-Rushwood, inter alia. The warning in his note – “Do not seek me” – seemed one I would do well to heed.
My paralysis of indecision might have lasted I know not how long, had I not been visited at my house late one evening, nearly a week after my last, terrible encounter with Holmes, by a certain Dr Henry Jekyll.
* * *
Dr Jekyll was not unknown to me, at least by reputation. He was well liked in medical circles, famous for his gentility and generosity of spirit, and although a couple of decades my senior, he and I had mutual friends, all of whom had spoken favourably of him within my hearing and lauded him as a man of taste and a bon viveur. Certain rumours circulated around him that he had had a wild youth and moreover that he espoused a specific theory about the duality of man: how there were two selves contesting within each of us, one good, one evil, and how this conflict seemed irreconcilable and led only to misery. I myself did not put much store by these musings, and there were some in the psychology field who pronounced them reductive and heretical, yet Jekyll maintained them steadfastly and devoted much of his time to attempting their proof.
When Jekyll came to my door and introduced himself, he cut a less imposing figure than my imagination had drawn, based on the accounts of others. There were suggestions of stylishness in his dress, and his large frame betokened a life well lived; but he bore a haggard demeanour, and his unshaven cheeks and sunken eyes spoke of sleeplessness and acute anxiety, as did his habit of repeatedly casting looks over his shoulder, which persisted even after I had invited him indoors and set him down in the drawing-room with a glass of sherry in his hand.
Barely had I begun to enquire to what I owed the honour of this visit, than Jekyll blurted out, “You must help me, Dr Watson. I am in grave peril. You, I believe, are the only person who can possibly forestall my doom. I have made a grievous error of judgement, and the consequences may be fatal.”
“Slow down, old fellow,” said I. “You are not making sense.”
Jekyll did his best to compose himself. “You are a friend of Sherlock Holmes.”
“I may lay claim to that accolade.” I resisted the urge to append the adjective “dubious” to the noun.
“You work closely with him.”
“At times.”
“You have influence over him?”
“It is hard to say. I try to mitigate his somewhat less desirable traits.”
“Could you shield me from him, were he to attack me?”
I felt a prickling of the nape hairs. “Has he threatened you?”
“I am undoubtedly in his bad books, and I am afraid that, if I do not comply with his wishes, the consequences may be dire.”
“What have you done to merit his displeasure?”
“Refused him that which he craves.”
“Namely?”
Jekyll let out a deep, sighing breath. “You are aware, I take it, of my postulation that man is a twofold being.”
“I am.”
“What if I told you that I have taken that concept out of the realm of hypothesis and into practicality?”
“Explain.”
“I have, Dr Watson, developed a chemical compound – a potion, if you will – which is capable of separating one side of the psyche from the other. It is the result of years of research, and my aims have always been noble, I must insist upon that. My goal has been to eradicate the dark half of human nature so that the light half might be free to prosper. Unburdened of the anchor that drags each of us down, we may rise ever higher, enjoying lives of contentment and fulfilment. All that has been lacking, for me, is the will to test the drug upon a subject. I have considered taking it myself, but a failure of nerve has time and again s
tayed my hand. Then Mr Holmes appeared.”
“Holmes… drank… this potion of yours?”
“He knew of my work. He told me he was all too conscious of the darkness within him. He said he believed that by shedding it, he might pursue his labours with a clearer mind and a sharper focus. He had his demons, he said, and though he had learned to quieten them with cocaine, still they bedevilled him. The villains he faced almost daily presented him with a cracked mirror, an image of himself as he could be if he allowed his basest aspects to gain the upper hand. He spoke of a cruel streak in his nature, a chronic, deep-seated antipathy, which led him sometimes to despise all mankind for its brutishness and stupidity, and at other times prompted him to sink into despondency and ennui. In its absence, he thought he might function altogether more efficiently and accomplish twice as much.”
“My God,” I said. “And you concurred?”
“His argument was forceful,” said Jekyll. “More to the point, here was the great Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective hallowed throughout London and beyond for his achievements, asking me to enhance his prowess. It seemed the perfect opportunity, a confluence of need and wish. How could I say no?”
“How could you say no to exposing Holmes to an untested compound, of whose efficacy you were unsure, let alone the side-effects?” I said. “Very easily, I should have thought. Nonetheless you did, and it is fair to say that the results were not what you might have hoped for.”
“Alas, no.”
“Holmes has embarked upon a killing spree, did you know that, Jekyll?”
The other gave a shamefaced nod. “I suspected as much. I read the papers.”
“He has singled out criminals as his quarry. We have that to be thankful for, I suppose. Still, there is blood on his hands. Or rather, on Sherrinford Hope’s hands, for that is what he has taken to calling his other self.”
“Yes, his dual personality has become bifurcated, one half shearing off from the other. All his energies go into the Hope identity, leaving the original Holmes identity, when it reasserts itself, enervated and feeble. Soon, I fear, the Holmes identity will be subsumed completely. Hence I have refused to manufacture any more of the compound for him.”
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 8