Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (16 page)

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.

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 Radames 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.

Cauchemar shoved it open again with a thrust of his fist, and out stepped Holmes, dusty and dishevelled but smiling.

“A brief but not unpleasant stay amongst the departed,” he said, “though I have no desire to make it a permanent condition until many years hence. Happily none of my fellow ‘guests’ had been too recently interred, otherwise the accommodation might have been far less congenial.” He brushed a cobweb nonchalantly from his sleeve.

“Good Lord, Holmes,” I said. “I thought we’d... I mean, you’d... Dash it all, man, I was certain I’d seen the last of you.”

“I am not that easy to kill. Note that well, Watson. I am as crafty as a cat and have almost as many lives. Baron Cauchemar.” He presented himself to the armoured goliath beside me. “I owe you a debt of gratitude for rescuing me. I would shake your hand, but I fear
my
hand would not survive the experience.”

Cauchemar gave something that approximated a bow.

“Glad to be of service, Mr Holmes. Now I must take my leave. I have been somewhat incommoded by the night’s events.”

“You mean your armour has suffered damage and requires repair.”

“That is so. It is not functioning at full capacity, and while there is little likelihood of it seizing up or overheating, I must nevertheless shut down the engine and overhaul the whole as soon as possible.”

“Understood. Yet I would wish to engage in further discussion with you at some stage, Baron. We are, at present, both pursuing similar goals, if from slightly different trajectories, and were we to pool our information, I fancy it would –”

Bang!

The sniper!

I had assumed, erroneously, that we were no longer at risk from our unseen marksman. I had imagined that he had fled the scene in conjunction with Torrance, Gedge and Kaylock.

The bullet, this time, was not directed at Cauchemar but at Holmes. Only by some miracle did it fail to find its mark. Possibly the haze of dust that still hung over the rubble-strewn graveyard foiled the assassin’s aim. A section of the frieze on the mausoleum wall disintegrated, just adjacent to Holmes’s ear. He and I both fell into a crouch and scrambled on hands and knees round to the other side of the stone structure.

“You told me it was going to be a long, arduous night, Holmes,” I said as we sheltered behind the mausoleum. “By God, you were right.”

“Sometimes I wish I weren’t,” replied he.

The bullets continued to come our way with monotonous regularity. The sniper had us pinned down. Aside from the mausoleum there was precious little cover immediately around us. If we moved from where we were, our would-be killer would have a clear field of fire. I attempted to deter him with a couple of shots of my own, but I was firing blind and my Mark III Adams did not have nearly the range of his rifle. I might as well have been peppering him with pebbles from a slingshot.

Baron Cauchemar again proved to be our salvation.

“Gentlemen, I can get you out of here.”

“That would be most welcome,” said Holmes.

Cauchemar enjoined us to go ahead of him. With him interposed between us and the sniper, we were more or less shielded from the gunfire. He herded us, much in the manner of a hen with her chicks, towards the hole he had created in the ground when staging his dramatic entrance. The aperture was partly filled with débris, but not to the extent of this being an obstacle. The sides were reasonably shallow-angled, too. Holmes and I slid down into it, our ears resounding to the gong-like chime of bullets striking Cauchemar’s back.

The last section of the descent was sheer. Pitch-blackness beckoned below. There was nothing for it but to throw caution to the winds and jump. Holmes leapt, and I, trusting in his judgement, did the same.

It was a drop of some ten feet onto flagstones. Ignorant as I was in regard to how far down I was falling, I landed awkwardly, jarring my heel. As I straightened, hissing in pain, Holmes’s hand reached out from the darkness and yanked me towards him. A split-second later, Baron Cauchemar thundered down on the very spot where I had been standing, missing me by a whisker. Had he plunged on top of me with his armoured bulk, there is no question which of us would have come off worse.

Holmes groped inside his coat to produce his pocket-lantern, but Cauchemar saved him the bother. A beam of light shot forth from a high-wattage electric bulb implanted beneath a panel in his chest. Its incandescence illuminated a catacomb with a low, vaulted ceiling.

“This way,” Cauchemar said, and in the absence of a viable alternative, Holmes and I did as bidden and followed him.

A tunnel had been bored through the catacomb wall, leading down into the earth at a gentle incline. We entered, I still limping somewhat on my sore foot. There was just headroom enough in the tunnel that Cauchemar could pass along it without bending.

“Your doing?” said Holmes to Cauchemar.

“These hands of mine make for efficient spades.”

“You are like some large steel-jacketed mole, burrowing.”

“It is one of my many attributes. Watch your footing.”

The tunnel floor was desperately uneven and treacherous with roots and loose rocks. Luckily, it did not go on for long. Within twenty paces we had arrived at its exit. An obnoxious stench told me all I needed to know about where we now were.

“The sewers,” I sighed. “Again.”

“You need not concern yourself, Dr Watson,” said Cauchemar. “An unpleasant environment it may be but you won’t be exposed to it for long. We don’t have far to travel.”

“That’s all very well for you to say, ensconced in all that armour. What I wouldn’t give for a pair of fisherman’s waders. And a muffler.”

“You’ll have to forgive Watson, Baron,” said Holmes. “He grows crotchetier with each passing year. I shouldn’t be surprised if one day soon he retires to Tunbridge Wells and spends the rest of his life penning choleric letters to the editor of the
Daily Telegraph
. What is it about domestic bliss that makes a man so intolerant of inconvenience and hardship? I suppose the clue is in the word ‘bliss’. That state makes all others dismal by comparison.”

“I say, old chap, that’s rather unfair,” I declared. “You must not bring Mary into this. If I am less than overjoyed about trudging through human waste, or catching a chill in a graveyard at night, or having some madman with a rifle try to take the top of my head off, that is entirely my own consideration. My marital status has nothing to do with it.”

“I am not decrying marriage, Watson, yours or anyone’s. On the contrary, marriage is a noble and necessary institution. It is not for me; but in most instances it is the making of a man. It transforms the callow, unruly youth into an upstanding, productive member of society. With that, however, comes a certain, shall we say, softening? The groom becomes the unwitting captive of his bride, and is tamed, like a circus beast. ‘I want’ becomes ‘yes, dear’. The growl of the bachelor diminishes to a miaow. It is as inevitable as it is regrettable.”