Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (31 page)

And so we grappled, that great barbarous hulk of a man and I, as the
Duc En Fer
hurtled onward. We threw ourselves into a clinch, and as his hand sought my throat in order to obtain a stranglehold we both knew I would be unable to break, I fended off his arm with both of mine. His strength was just as appalling as I remembered. He bore down on me, and it was all I could do to keep him at bay.

We shuffled in circles on the cab as we wrestled, and I was acutely aware that I was being pushed inexorably outward, closer and closer to the roof’s edge. Torrance, with sadistic fire in his eyes, was giving himself the alternative of shoving me off, if for some reason he could not throttle me. I fought back but it was like battling a grizzly bear. I had the terrible sensation, not of simply being outclassed, but of being toyed with. My foe, this one-armed Goliath, was revelling in his superiority.

Yet, if I could not match him physically, could I not outwit him?

“Is it worth what de Villegrand’s paying you, Torrance?” I said through clenched teeth.

“Every penny – and there are plenty of them, believe you me. Money may not matter so much to a glossy-coated swell such as yourself, but for a bloke like me, coming from where I come from, it’s all that counts. It’s the difference between being somebody and nobody. I’m not fitted to scrabble around in the dirt all my life like some shoreline mudlark. I was made for better things.”

“But to conspire against your own country...!”

“England’s done nothing for me,” Torrance spat. “I don’t care if the whole damned place sinks into the mire, and every bloody Englishman drowns. Why should I? Long as I’m all right.”

We were now in such a position that Torrance had his back to the direction the locomotive was travelling in. I glanced ahead, gasped in alarm, and then dropped straight onto my belly, pressing myself flat onto the cab roof, hands over my head. Torrance didn’t even look over his shoulder but copied me without delay. It was pure instinct. If I was ducking in anticipation of an oncoming tunnel, then so must he.

I sprang to my feet in a trice, for there was no tunnel. Torrance rose too, realising he had been duped, but he was a split second behind me. As he hoisted himself upright, I kicked his arm out from under him. He collapsed awkwardly. His chin struck the coachwork, stunning him, and he sprawled. His legs swung out over space, and his own considerable body weight dragged him half off the cab roof. He groped with his arm, trying to gain purchase on the smooth metal. His expression was pure panic.

“Please!” he cried. “Please help me! You’re a doctor! Your oath!”

I moved to grab him. Perhaps I could have been a mite faster, I don’t know. Moments earlier this man had been hell bent on killing me, which would account for my hesitation. My incentive to go to his rescue was not great, especially as he would not have done the same for me had our roles been reversed.

At any rate, I did not reach him in time. His clawing hand slithered across the roof, and then it clutched empty air, and Abednego Torrance was gone, tumbling down the embankment at high speed like some piece of ghastly human jetsam. I saw him strike a wooden fencepost at the bottom, crown first, and lie still. It didn’t take a knowledge of medicine to tell that he had suffered the kind of injuries one does not recover from. His body was twisted and bent around itself, his head canted against his neck in a deeply unnatural manner.

There was no time to feel either relief or remorse. I could hear a commotion below me, the thump of blows, grunts of pain – Holmes in a frantic physical altercation with Gedge, Kaylock and de Villegrand. Abruptly the
Duc En Fer
braked. I was thrown off my feet. Locked driving wheels squealed across the rails, showering out sparks. I tottered backwards off the cab and managed somehow to land in the coal tender rather than on the ground. I lay there on that heap of fuel, dazed. The locomotive juddered like a stutterer’s tongue. I caught a glimpse inside the cab. Holmes was hauling back on the brake handle, pulling it fully round, while at the same time clutching Kaylock with an arm around his neck, using him as a human shield to ward off de Villegrand. Gedge lay unconscious on the footplate, half slumped against the water and steam injector levers.

The
Duc En Fer
grudgingly, grindingly came to a standstill, hissing like some monstrous serpent venting its frustration.

De Villegrand, the moment we halted, let out a similar infuriated hiss. As everyone recovered their equilibrium, he hurled himself at Holmes. Holmes thrust Kaylock to the fore. De Villegrand, without even pausing, drove his fists into his henchman.

“Out of my way!” he yelled, subjecting the hapless lackey to a tempest of blows. “Incompetent!
Débile!
You’re no good to me any more, and I’m damned if you’ll be any good to him.”

Kaylock caved in under the furious onslaught, protesting and mewling. A brutal, bone-crunching
savate
kick to the skull left him just so much inert weight, more than Holmes could usefully support with one arm, so my friend was obliged to drop him.

Now it was just Holmes facing de Villegrand in the stationary locomotive, with me looking on from the tender.

“You haven’t won,
monsieur le détective privé,”
said the vicomte.

“It rather looks to me as though I have,” came the reply. “There are two of us and one of you, and Watson and I will prevent you from restarting this locomotive even if it kills us.”

“Hear, hear,” I said. “So give up now, de Villegrand. It’ll go hard for you otherwise.”

“Who said anything about restarting it?” said the Frenchman. “How little you know. The
Duc En Fer
may look like an ordinary railway engine, but trust me, it is not. It has, shall we say, hidden depths. Behold.
Voilà
!”

De Villegrand reached for a control device I did not recognise. I cannot confess to being any kind of expert on steam locomotives, but this particular large red lever, situated up among the valve stopcocks, served no obvious function that I could see.

No sooner was it pulled, however, than the
Duc En Fer
began to vibrate and shake from stem to stern.
Something
was happening, that was for sure.

Holmes, whether or not he had any clearer idea than me what de Villegrand had initiated, looked alarmed. “Watson, I recommend we get off this thing – now!”

De Villegrand chortled. “Yes,” he crowed. “Get off. Go. Shoo,
rosbifs!
Go and stand helplessly by as the future takes shape before you.”

I scrambled off the tender, dropping onto the trackside. Holmes joined me there, leaping down from the cab. We backed away from the locomotive, which was now, as far as I could judge, starting to break apart. Segments of the boiler were separating from one another. The pistons were parting company with the wheels and sweeping outwards.

Had de Villegrand triggered some sort of self-destruct mechanism with that lever?

No. I swiftly realised he had not.

In fact, the very opposite.

Even today, I can feel the incredulity I felt then as the
Duc En Fer
somehow disassembled itself and put itself back together in a new form. Individual sections of the locomotive articulated outwards, folded, shifted, dovetailed, slotted into fresh positions. Jointed shafts extended and contracted. Cogs whirred and meshed. Bits of the engine’s innards were briefly exposed then hidden again. The
Duc En Fer
underwent a kind of auto-dissection, jumbling up all its parts and re-gathering them in a wholly different configuration.

“What in the world...?” said Holmes. It was rare to hear him so astonished, to see him so clearly awestruck. His customary diffidence had deserted him. He, like me, could only look on at the locomotive’s metamorphosis and marvel and quail.

Up it rose, from prone to erect. The driving wheels and chassis became legs. The boiler became a torso. The cab surmounted the whole thing like a head. The coal tender tipped up, emptying its contents down a chute and becoming a back and shoulders. The pistons shot down to serve as arms. Each was tipped with one of the bogie frames, which had broken down into a set of finger-like rods, the little wheels serving as knuckles.

In all, it stood some thirty feet tall, a humanoid giant which had a minute ago been, to all appearances, a simple steam locomotive. The alteration from one state to another was complete, and now, with an eerie creaking and clanking, this fearsome, transformed
Duc En Fer
turned towards Holmes and myself.

De Villegrand leaned out from the cab and yelled down, “Do you see? This is what I had up my sleeve. How pathetically small you both look. And how emasculated. French knowhow! French genius! This is why my country will always be superior to yours. This is why the world deserves to belong to France and France alone.”

“I am impressed, I admit,” Holmes shouted back. “It just seems a shame to me that your ambitions are so limited.”

“Limited? What are you saying? Absurd! How can ruling the entire world be a ‘limited’ ambition?”

“Think of what else you could achieve with this brilliance of yours,
monsieur le vicomte
. The benefits you could bring to all of mankind. You have the wherewithal to usher in a technological golden age, an age of wonders, single-handedly. But no, all you think of is domination and conquest. Petty aims for one so gifted.”

“Holmes,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, “he’s sitting in a massive walking automaton that looks like it could make mincemeat out of us. Best not to bait him, eh?”

“I’m not baiting him, Watson, merely trying to talk some sense into him.”

“I think he’s gone beyond sense.”

“But what else have we got? He’s unassailable up there.”

“It
will
be a golden age, Monsieur Holmes,” de Villegrand insisted. “That is surely what is coming. But it will be an
age dor,
a uniquely French golden age. There is no nation better suited to run the world. We boast the finest poets, philosophers, artists, scientists and, yes, inventors. All that piffle I told you about the greatness of Great Britain – pah! Nothing your race has to offer is the equal of anything mine has to offer. You will learn that. Once your Queen is dispatched, your country will be in disarray and ripe for takeover. French troops will swarm across
La Manche
and occupy. It will be touted as the decent thing to do, the act of a Good Samaritan coming to his neighbour’s rescue. You will welcome us with open arms – anything to quell the anarchy you will have descended into. The Tricolore will be hoisted above Buckingham Palace and Westminster, and soon the pattern will be repeated elsewhere. America, Russia, even the prodigious Germany will succumb, especially with weapons of my devising at our military’s disposal. This is just the beginning.”

“You’d better hurry, then,” said Holmes. “The Royal Train is out of sight. You’ve some ground to make up.”

“This evolved
Duc En Fer
is faster than its other incarnation. I put the feet on the track like so...” The giant automaton’s wheel-feet went from flat, like snowshoes, to vertical, like ice skates, as de Villegrand lodged one on each rail. “I run.” The legs scissored back and forth, and the entire body moved a few yards. Steam purled from the funnel, which was now protruding from the thing’s back. “I can achieve a good hundred miles an hour when I get up to full speed. I move like a skier, gliding along.” He reversed, drawing level with Holmes and me again. “So I am not worried about the Royal Train, no. I can afford to let it travel a little bit further ahead. I have time.”

“Time to do what?” asked Holmes, and we both wished he hadn’t.

“To kill the two of you,
naturellement
,” said de Villegrand. “You have been remarkably persistent opponents, and remarkably annoying ones. My conservatory anti-burglar mechanism failed to put an end to your snooping. I shall rectify that now. I cannot let you live to plague me again in the future. You have been pestilential like flies, and so, like flies, I shall swat you.”

One vast metal hand rose into the air, furling into a fist.

“Holmes?” I said in a faint voice. “Should we run?”

“Watson, I believe that would be a capital idea.”

We about-turned and ran. The
Duc En Fer
’s fist came down behind us like the hammer of God. It missed, but the impact knocked us clean off our feet. We fell prostrate on the ground but were up and running again in a flash.

De Villegrand’s automaton stepped off the track, its wheel-feet reverting back to horizontal. It charged after us, each footfall sounding like Judgement Day.

“I will stamp on you!” the vicomte screamed. “I will crush you like cockroaches!”

All Holmes and I could do was keep running for our lives. We were in a cow pasture. There was little cover available, just the odd hawthorn bush or stunted tree. However, we could see an isolated wooden barn ahead on the far side of the field. Taking shelter there might save us, assuming we could outpace the metal behemoth pursuing us.

Closer the barn came, but closer, too, came the
Duc En Fer.

“He’s gaining!” I cried.

“No need to state the obvious,” said Holmes. “Save your breath.”

We had perhaps one hundred yards of open ground left to cross. We were sprinting flat out. My lungs heaved and burned. My leg muscles ached searingly. Twenty seconds to go, and the thunderous stomping of de Villegrand’s manmade titan was ringing in my ears, filling my entire world.

We weren’t going to make it.

Then I heard another kind of stomping, matched by a familiar
psssh-pah, psssh-pah.

I dared to look sidelong, and there, coming at us from right angles on a course to intercept, was Baron Cauchemar.

He bounded across the landscape with his lolloping, piston-heeled gait, and he scooped Holmes up in one arm and me up in the other just as the
Duc En Fer
sent a fist down to pound us into the earth.

Cauchemar tucked round us, somersaulted, and rolled to a halt. He released us and straightened up.