Another Scandal in Bohemia (23 page)

“Is he really?” I asked as I trotted in her sturdy footsteps.

“My brother? Do not be foolish.”

“Easier said than done,” I muttered.

We ducked down a narrow, dark lane, then into one even slenderer and dimmer. We crossed a passage between two tall, cramped houses. Godfrey hit his hatted head on a low-hanging sign and cursed in what I hoped was a gentlemanly remonstrance.

Our guide giggled and waltzed on, her skirts flirting before us like a gingham-check flag of sanity.

At last we found ourselves in a tiny, deserted courtyard. Our guide retreated before we could bid her adieu. A figure detached itself from the dark wrapping of an inset doorway. The fellow from our hotel, still wearing the tinted glasses, though it was night!

Godfrey stepped manfully in front of me to confront this person, inadvertently treading on my toe. I swallowed a ladylike exclamation.

Here our voices were hushed, like the night. Distant revelry tinkled beyond this solemn courtyard.

“You have the book?” the man asked.

Godfrey nodded at me—I could barely discern the gesture in the dark—and I handed it to our... secret friend. He glanced at it, running his fingers over a few pages as if they were Braille and he was blind.

“This is the book. Then you are who you claim to be. See Werner at the Bank of Bohemia tomorrow. He will introduce you into the proper circles. As for improper circles”—here the husky, slightly accented English voice developed a sardonic tone—“I am to lead you to the areas of the Old Town where the Golem has been seen.”

“Oh,” I couldn’t help wailing. Er, saying.

The man turned on me with the swiftness of a serpent. “You believe in supernatural beings, Miss?”

“Only... angels.”

“The Golem is no angel, but a creature of solid clay and cruel justice and spilt blood.”

“You have seen... it?”

“No. But some in the Josef Quarter who are not known for lies or superstition claim to have seen him. Follow me, I will show you where, and then I will show you the way back to your hotel on the river.”

I glanced at Godfrey, seeing only a top-hatted silhouette bearing a cane. He took my arm, and we once again trod slippery cobblestones through the circuitous town, seeking a site where a legend had walked only lately.

Although the distance was not great, the district was ancient and its byways unwound in a corkscrew of high narrow streets. We were lost nine times over that night, and only the sound of our own footsteps kept us company.

I remembered visiting a gypsy fortune teller in this quarter with Irene, and light glowing through a skull-shaped lamp. I recalled palms glittering with gold and cryptic lines, and a fortune frighteningly apt given subsequent events: Irene would wed a man with the initial “G.”

She, her eloquent eyes still starred with visions of queenship and the King of Bohemia, thought of his middle name, Gottsreich. I knew Godfrey then, but could I have ever imagined that he would be the “G” of Irene’s fortune? So although I was not superstitious, still I knew that this quarter contained an uncanny portion of occult knowledge. Might not the remnants of a Greater Age of Faith, a medieval manikin formed from clay and the Cabbala still stalk these mean byways?

“Cheer up, Nell,” Godfrey said from behind me. “It is too much to expect that on our first night in Prague we shall be granted a glimpse of its resident demon.”

Of course he was right. Dear Godfrey, so sensible. No wonder he made the perfect partner for Irene, who was oft so insensible, or do I mean the ungrammatical “unsensible?” I will leave it to future readers of these diaries to decipher my meaning. As for me, Godfrey’s comment greatly reassured me. I was able to gaze around sagely when our guide stopped to point out the intersecting street where the Golem had first been spied in recent times.

“A cramped and narrow way,” Godfrey noted. “Even a man of ordinary height would seem taller there,”

He stepped into the byway as if to demonstrate. I caught my breath and stifled my warning cry. Perhaps it was blasphemy to mimic the Golem’s path.

But Godfrey was correct. He stood a solid six feet high, perhaps a shade more. In the confines of that cramped street, in the dark, he looked larger, taller, more threatening.

I sighed when he stepped from the shadow into the faint light of a distant lantern. Prague had no gaslights yet to dazzle the night shadows into daylight safety, and the narrow byways formed a stingy birth canal for the vastness of the night sky. Only a few stars at a time dared twinkle sparsely down on the old city’s inhabitants, like sparks glimpsed in a mud puddle.

Our guide marched on, deeper and darker into the poor quarter. Meager light seeped out of closed doors and shaded windows. Even the robust smells of the tavern district were gone. Who lived here, what they ate here, was a mystery.

I thought I heard the distant chime of crystals cascading from a skull-lamp’s lantern jaw, and coins clinking in a gypsy purse. I thought I heard footsteps hard behind me. Oh—Godfrey’s. I thought I heard mumbled words in a foreign dialect, and saw a clay tongue accept a small roll of mystical paper as a Papist takes the Communion wafer....

Oh, my imagination was wrought up! Why was I here, with Godfrey? Irene should be treading these dreadful cobblestones, with her hard head and her steel pistol to protect her, and Godfrey. And me!

She would laugh at my fancies. Godfrey would laugh. Our guide would laugh. I would laugh when I was safe at home with Lucifer curled at my feet and Messalina guarding the garden stoop and Casanova prowling his perch in the parlor and muttering Baudelaire....

Yet now I heard footsteps. They seemed to thunder in rhyme.

Fee, fie, foe, fum!

I smell the blood of an English mum.

Be she brave or be she yellow,

I’ll eat her marrow, for I’m a raw fellow.

Imagination. Fancy. Fright dreams. Nightmares.

Yet the footsteps came on, and our guide stopped, hushing us with a hand gesture.

We three halted against a house front. Godfrey’s hand tightened on my arm, as if he would never let go. His cane lifted. I saw its faint, faint shadow on the dimly lit cobblestones.

And then the steps. Slow. Heavy. Black as Bohemian lager in their advance. One. Two. Three. Four. Five... on and on, louder and louder. A shadow fell dark as pitch on the charcoal-gray canvas of the street.

It thrust to the third story, that shadow, preceding the one that cast it. I heard the rattle of chains, though I knew I would see no ghost, no Marley come to take us on a Christmas odyssey. There was no Christmas for this phantom so physically advancing toward us. Six. Seven. Eight steps. Louder, and now moans. Horrible, anguished, frustrated moans of one pent up for too long, for weeks and months and ages and eons. Nine. Ten. The steps were the slowing beats of my heart, which could only throb in time to the oncoming strides. Much slower, and it would stop, my heart, my hearing, and I would know nothing of what came toward us, and would welcome that surcease.

Eleven. Twelve. Like the Apostles. Thirteen. As is unlucky.

The maker of the shadow burst into the byway we occupied. I saw—no face. A blank face, worse than a doll’s, lacking all features save a general outline I longed to call a face. No expression, but the sound. The low, strangled, angry, hopeless moan. The huge feet, striding like an automaton’s. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Toward us, over us. Washing us like cold waves of imagination made incarnate. The Golem. I had seen It. Heard It. Feared It. Believed in It. At that moment, faith quavered before fear. I heard a metallic rasp. Godfrey’s sword. I saw a thin pin of darker shadow fall across that great, moving, mechanical Shadow.

And the sword hesitated. And the Shadow shuddered on. Past. Into memory. Into disbelief. Into rationalization. Into shivers and sobs.

“It’s all right, Nell,” Godfrey was saying, over and over, as if to convince himself. “It’s all right.”

Chapter Fifteen

HIS FRENCH CONNECTION

London, September 1888

“Bah!” said
my friend Sherlock Holmes as he pitched the
Daily Telegraph
Agony Column into a sagging tent on the footstool. “Crime has taken a holiday. No evil-doers of any imagination whatsoever remain in London. I edge more perilously close to boredom every hour.”

“What of the continuing atrocities in Whitechapel?” I asked in a mild tone.

Now that I was married and residing in my own establishment, I took Holmes’s dramatic outbursts of despair in stride. I could afford to, since I could easily leave them behind for the more tranquil company of my dear wife Mary in peaceful Paddington.

Holmes cast himself across the chamber in one great lunge to stare gloomily out of the bow window, reminding me of a house-bound boy in need of suitable occupation.

“You know my opinion of that sad string of events, Watson. The Whitechapel Ripper is likely no more than a disenchanted ticket-taker seeking a bit of attention.”

“He has certainly achieved it.” I eyed the latest sensational sketches in the
Illustrated Police News
with a physician’s scorn for the crude anatomical renderings. “Surely the contradictory information about the method of slaughter intrigues even you. Call it mere ‘butchery’ if you will— God knows I saw enough of battlefield butchery in Afghanistan. Yet this Ripper fellow apparently possesses basic surgical skills. I find myself speculating on his likely history. A surgical apprentice perhaps, or a barber—”

“Soon you will be resurrecting Sweeney Todd, Watson!” Holmes twitted me from the window.

Yet I saw that my fumbling theories had lit embers of analytical fire behind the banked ash-gray of his eyes. He sighed and let the curtain fall back into place, a sign that he had seen no promising, agitated figure bustling along Baker Street to beg for his help.

“I do have one paltry request to consider a puzzle at present,” he added, still lost in the fog-bound view that acted as a mirror of his mood. “A communication of such insignificance arrived that I would use it to light my pipe were I not eager for any distraction.”

“Excellent,” I said, lighting mine and puffing away as regularly as the daily mail train, which habit I knew drove Holmes's more quicksilver temperament to abrupt and involuntary revelations. He could never tolerate life at a rhythmically steady pace, but thrived on the unannounced disruption. His thoughts must ever be drops of water sizzling on a hot griddle, always exploding into new and daring notions.

“This case would require a trip abroad,” Holmes said a bit too casually.

“Oh?” I had never ventured abroad with him, though crises took him there now and again, and he had never asked me to do so. Now that I was married, and newly married at that, the likelihood was even smaller.

A measuring glance darted from those lowered, lazily speculative eyes. “The matter is minor, but halfway puzzling. You’ve been reading the newspapers, Watson; anything strike your fancy that hints of oddities abroad?”

“Well—” I shook the papers in question and puffed a few more times to teach Holmes’s more mercurial temperament patience. “I find the revelation of this ring of Cuban counterfeiters rather intriguing.”

At the window, Holmes’s long, lean hand waved disparagingly. He did not trouble to turn. “Closer to home, Watson.”

I shook the papers until they rustled like Mary’s best taffeta petticoat, meanwhile raking the news columns in search of some outré event likely to have piqued Holmes’s always fickle interest. Matters of great political, or even criminal, moment seldom fascinated him; no, only the odd, telling fact or detail drew his formidable intelligence into its keenest state. As the most minuscule physical clue could solve a case for him, so the most trivial newspaper item might set him off as swiftly as blaring hunt horns trigger a pack of baying dogs.

I grasped at another peculiar item. “Here is a curious report! A medieval monster prowls old Prague, a Jewish demon called a Golem. Several eyewitnesses swear to seeing the creature on more than one occasion in the past few months—most recently an English barrister, only last week. The report offers no name, but if an Englishman claims to have seen the thing—”

Holmes made an impolite sound. “You know my opinion of what passes for the occult, Watson: fodder for the foolish. There is more seen on heaven and earth than has ever inhabited it. I would no more track this phantasm of a Golem than I would try to calculate the number of archangels doing a mazurka on the head of a hatpin. Does nothing in the multitudinous news from the globe over reach out and catch you by the lapels, dear fellow? Has all the earth been infected with the London malaise, so that decent people may now walk in a stultifying paradise free of crime and punishment? Perhaps I shall be forced to pursuing archangels and phantasms, after all.”