Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (30 page)

Cauchemar relented, accepting the sense of Holmes’s argument. “But if we just put down any old where, we will lose de Villegrand. We will never be able to catch up with him again in time. The Queen is as good as dead.”

“What if we bail out onto the
Duc En Fer?”
Even as the words passed my lips, I could scarcely believe I was uttering them. Was I mad?

The avid glint in Holmes’s eye told me that I was, but that he himself had run through all the possible scenarios and the one I had hit on was the only viable solution to our dilemma.

“Cauchemar,” he said, “do you still have sufficient command of this thing that you can pilot us over the train and we can climb out?”

“Probably not,” came the reply. Cauchemar consulted the dials and meters in front of him. “The envelope is compromised. Helium is escaping. The balloon is deflating rapidly. We have a couple of minutes’ buoyancy left, if that. Once it’s gone, I might as well be flying Westminster Cathedral. But,” he said with bright resolve, “I shall do my damnedest, Mr Holmes. For England’s sake.”

He addressed himself to the controls once more. I heard him talking in a faint voice, murmuring to the stricken airship as though it were a sentient thing. “Come on. I built you well. Stay alive just a little longer. You can do that for me, I know you can.”

The
Delphine’s Revenge
sluggishly responded to his manual ministrations, if not to his verbal cajoling. He managed to eke out enough speed from the airship to match that of the
Duc En Fer
. In moments, we had drawn alongside the locomotive, and then we were directly above it, and though I feared another salvo from de Villegrand’s artillery piece, it turned out that being in such immediate proximity to him was our salvation.

“He doesn’t dare take a shot at us,” said Holmes. “We’re so low that hitting us means we might come down on top of him. Point-blank, and his gun is useless. Ha!”

“But I can’t hold us in position for long,” Cauchemar warned. As if to underscore his statement, the
Delphine’s Revenge
jerked violently sideways. He counter-steered and succeeded in bringing us back to where we had just been. “So I would abandon ship now if I were you.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. I was already turning the locking wheel on the hatch in the gondola’s belly. No sooner did I have it open than I tipped the rolled-up rope ladder out. It unfurled, lashing and flailing.

“What about you?” Holmes said to Cauchemar.

“I have to play pilot. If I don’t keep the
Delphine’s Revenge
steady and on course, you and Dr Watson don’t stand a chance.”

“How will you follow us out, then?”

“I shall find a way. I’m armoured, after all. I can survive what you could not. Now stop nannying me and go!”

I must say I didn’t fancy essaying that ladder, so I was glad that Holmes seized the initiative and clambered down first. His body weight did much to quell its midair whipping and twisting. When I added mine, the ladder became more or less rigid.

Nonetheless we were barrelling along at something in the region of eighty miles an hour. Sheer speed drove the ladder back at an acute angle, and the hurricane-like force of motion did its best to blow Holmes and me off our perches. Every handhold and foothold had to be established with the utmost care. Our descent was as precarious as it was painstaking.

And all in order to climb atop a locomotive travelling at full pelt! I have surely performed crazier daredevil stunts in my time, but if so, I am hard pressed to think of one.

Then, to add to our woes, shots rang out. Torrance had hoisted himself on top of the artillery piece’s housing and was firing a revolver at Holmes and myself. We would have been the proverbial sitting ducks but, fortunately, the rope ladder was still swaying to and fro somewhat, and the flatbed truck was juddering along the rails, and the two things conspired to foil Torrance’s aim. His bullets whined past us but, thank God, all missed.

Holmes alighted on the
Duc En Fer
’s sand dome and grabbed hold of one of the valve rods that ran along its upper surface, securing himself.

I spidered my way down the last few rungs, ready to join him. It was a drop of a yard or so onto the locomotive. Before taking the plunge, I paused to glance up at the
Delphine’s Revenge.

No longer was it a sleek leviathan of the skies. The punctured envelope was puckered and sagging. There was a tattered hole where the shell had entered, with spars of twisted steel projecting outward like broken ribs. One propeller was almost entirely gone, its blades sheared off by de Villegrand’s first shot. The whole aircraft looked as though it was about to collapse at any moment, imploding in on itself. Cauchemar’s creation was in its death throes, yet still it forged dauntlessly on, nursed and spurred by its pilot.

I should not have hesitated, for as I watched, the
Delphine’s Revenge
shuddered horribly and its envelope suffered a sudden, catastrophic loss of integrity. It had had enough and could take no more. The balloon crumpled, as though a gigantic unseen hand were crushing it, and the gondola became just so much dead weight, with only momentum keeping it in the air.

The shock transmitted itself along the rope ladder, which seemed to convulse under me. I lost my grip.

Then I was falling, and all I could think, as I fell, was that this was a deuced stupid way to die, but at least it would be quick and I probably would not feel a thing.

What I did feel, in the event, was a hand clamping about my wrist, a set of fingers digging into my flesh with considerable wiry strength.

Then I swung and slammed chest-first against the locomotive’s flank. The wind was knocked out of me.

“Watson!” cried Holmes. “I have you, but I cannot hold you for long.”

I dangled there, suspended from Holmes’s grasp, heaving for breath. The
Duc En Fer
’s pistons pounded back and forth beside my shins, like the arms of some mighty metal boxer. The cinder path raced by below, mere inches from my toecaps.

“Watson!” Holmes yelled, louder than before. “If you do not help me, I will drop you. For God’s sake, focus, man!”

A bullet zinged past my ear, so close that I swear I felt the shockwave of its passage.

Nothing galvanises a fellow quite like having his brains nearly blown out. I reached for the valve rod, which was just within my grasp, and by dint of my own efforts and Holmes’s, I managed to scramble onto the boiler’s summit. I knelt, breathless, the hammering of my heart louder than the clatter of wheels on rails.

“Thought you were a goner there, old chap,” said Holmes.

“So did I,” I gasped.

“Now, you get your breath back. I’ve an appointment with a train driver about an emergency stop.”

He set off in the direction of the cab, crouching low, arms outstretched against the locomotive’s rackety sway. Torrance, meanwhile, was squatting on the coal tender. He was reloading his revolver, a tricky business if you have only one arm. He gripped the gun between his knees, using them like a vice while he fed bullets into the cylinder one after another.

I decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. I drew my revolver and cocked the hammer.

At that moment, the
Delphine’s Revenge
emitted one last dire groan overhead and came crashing down.

It landed, whether by luck or calculation on Cauchemar’s part, atop the artillery piece. Airship and gun became entangled with an ear-shredding shriek of metal twisting against metal. Under the sudden imposition of additional weight, the entire train shook tumultuously. I feared a derailment was about to occur and every one of us was about to meet a horrible, mangled demise. I clung on for dear life, as did Holmes.

The screeching and rending continued. The gondola’s aft end was impaled on the gun barrel. The other end swung out and down, until the hull of the thing was dragging on the ground. We were travelling along a raised section of track that cut through farmland, and the gondola ploughed the earth of the embankment, kicking up great churning waves of sod and soil. The deflated balloon was coming to pieces at the same time, individual ballonets bursting and ripping. The
Delphine’s Revenge
was being dismantled before my very eyes, shaken to pieces, flayed. Bits of it went sailing off down the track and bounding across the fields.

With the airship acting as a kind of anchor, the flatbed truck began to slew, then all at once it jumped the track and was jolting crazily along behind the locomotive at an angle. It leapt and bucked as the wheels on one side of it rode the sleepers while those on the other side sheared through cinders and earth. I could feel the
Duc En Fer
being pulled backwards and sideways, struggling to stay on the rails itself. Holmes and I were completely helpless, like ticks riding the back of a runaway horse, with no choice but to pray it didn’t slip and roll over.

Then an immense lurch. The
Duc En Fer
broke free of its stricken item of rolling stock and went rocketing forwards, more or less smoothly again. The locomotive and the truck had become uncoupled, I assumed thanks to the latter’s torquing, skewing action.

Together, airship and truck plunged headlong down the embankment and collided with a solitary oak. The huge, venerable tree exploded into a million fragments, reduced in an instant to so much tinder. The
Delphine’s Revenge
and the artillery piece did not fare much better, both disintegrating on impact. Débris fanned in all directions, and there was an almighty
whump
as the cache of shells detonated. A fireball the size of a five-storey house billowed up into the sky, its brightness momentarily eclipsing the red flare of the setting sun.

Baron Cauchemar. Had he still been aboard the airship? If so, armoured or not, I could not see him surviving such a fiery apocalypse.

We had just lost our strongest ally, our one uncontestable advantage over our enemies.

However, in the credit column, to offset that debit, we had destroyed the artillery piece, which de Villegrand had surely been meaning to use to bombard the Royal Train. His scheme, therefore, had been thwarted. And de Villegrand himself? Was it too much to hope that he had still been on the flatbed truck when it came off the track? Could he have been incinerated along with Cauchemar, the two antagonists fatally consumed in the same conflagration?

The answer, regrettably, was no. At the rear of the coal tender, de Villegrand’s head popped up. He hauled himself up, joining Torrance on the piled coal. He looked unkempt, ruffled, murderously aggrieved. I realised he must have performed the uncoupling himself, saving the locomotive by sacrificing the truck.

Now it was him, Torrance and the two other accomplices, versus Holmes and myself.

I did not like those odds.

De Villegrand snatched Torrance’s revolver and bullets from him, not happy how long it was taking the one-armed man to load the gun. He finished the job swiftly, and snapped the cylinder into place with a flick of the wrist.

Holmes, by this time, was at the cab, clambering down the side of it in order to get in. His plan, I took it, was to assume control of the locomotive and bring it to a halt. That meant overpowering Gedge and Kaylock, but I reckoned that in a fair fight, with his
baritsu
skills, he was up to the task.

De Villegrand did not wish it to be a fair fight, though, and took aim at my friend. I, in turn, levelled my revolver at the Frenchman and fired off what I am going to call, with pardonable modesty, the shot of a lifetime. Given that I was on a speeding locomotive, I would have been lucky to place my bullet anywhere near its target. That I managed to blast the revolver out of de Villegrand’s grasp was little short of incredible. It is a feat I doubt I could repeat ever again, yet on this occasion providence, some might even say a higher power, smiled on me.

His gun gone, lost over the side of the tender, de Villegrand reared up with a growl of fury. He gesticulated at Torrance, instructing him to take care of me. Over the clamour of the engine I just made out the words “Kill that wretched -!” accompanied by a highly degrading epithet. Torrance obediently lumbered towards me, leaping up off the tender onto the cab roof. De Villegrand himself went after Holmes, scuttling across the heap of coal and down into the cab interior.

I could not leave my friend to fend for himself against
three
ruffians, especially when one of them was the vicious,
savate-
savvy vicomte. I headed rearward. Torrance moved to waylay me. With a grimace of resignation, I aimed my revolver at him and pulled the trigger – only to hear the dispiriting click of a misfire.

I pocketed the gun, knowing Torrance would never allow me the luxury of checking the firing pin or the mainspring or fishing some tiny foreign object out from between the hammer and the frame. The same higher power that had smiled on me a moment ago had abruptly and capriciously turned its face away.

He stood erect on the roof of the cab, fist clenched, legs splayed to brace himself. Through his beard, his grin was coldly gleeful.

“Gun failed, eh?” he crowed. “How unlucky for you. I shall make this quick. Wouldn’t want you to suffer any, would I? Then history will celebrate me doubly, first as the man who aided in the death of an entire royal house, but also as the man who did away with the companion of the poxy meddler Sherlock Holmes.”

“Better men than you have tried,” I said. “Men with a full complement of limbs.”

“Oh, I’ve never let a small thing like a dismemberment stand in my way, Dr Watson. Look at me. I’ve more vigour in my right arm than most men have in both.”

I could not deny that. I had seen the evidence with my own eyes a number of times, and indeed felt it when he throttled me nearly to death at the docks in Shadwell. Yet I maintained my pose of grim bravado, hoping I sounded more courageous than I felt.

“I am an ex-soldier,” I said. “You will find me more of a challenge than, say, a drugged Chinese girl.”

“I didn’t the last time,” Torrance said. “Let us put it to the test again, shall we?”