The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls (10 page)

Read The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls Online

Authors: John R. King

BOOK: The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls
5.14Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“You expect me to believe all this? Whenever you need an excuse, it’s father-this and father-that. You’re his puppet.”
“She is,” said a new voice: a man’s voice. I spun to see a living nightmare—the gunman leaning on his rifle-cane not five paces from me.
I cringed back, keeping my eyes on the man while I growled to Anna—“You led him to me.”
“No …”
“It was all a trap.”
“No …”
Her father advanced, his cane scraping the hardwood floor beneath the stacks. “Yes, Thomas Carnacki. It all was a trap, down to this very moment. But Anna didn’t know. She was simply the bait.”
“So—you’re going to shoot me?” I said, laughing. “You’re going to bring every person in this library running?”
Anna’s father shook his head slowly. “I build better traps than that.”
He lunged atop me, and something glinted in his fist. I felt a burning agony in my neck.
I staggered back, the man clinging to me, his weight riding on the thing in my neck. Anna tried to catch me, but her father landed on top of us both. He laughed bleakly. “This ice pick has poison on it, Thomas—a tree-frog neurotoxin from Brazil, given to me by Burckhardt.”
“No!” Anna screamed. She grabbed her father’s fist and tried to wrench the ice pick from my neck, but his fold was implacable.
My nerves jangled, but even as my body began to slump, I felt the generator wedged under my leg. With one hand, I grabbed the alligator clips, and with the other, I cranked the generator. Sparks snapped. I rammed the clips into my attacker’s mouth and cranked again. He lurched off me and staggered back, lips smoldering.
Anna yanked the ice pick from my neck and hurled it away. She stared in amazement and horror at her father. “I’m not your daughter anymore,” she yelled through her tears. “If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”
The man stumbled backward. His hand clumsily swept a pile of books from a shelf. Then, wordlessly, he stumped around the corner and out of sight.
Anna bent down over me and kissed my face. “Oh, Thomas.”
“You … you aren’t … on his side.”
She smiled sadly. “No … I’m with you.” A tear fell from her eye onto my cheek.
Something creaked. Anna looked up. Dust streamed from the top of the bookshelf as it tipped ominously toward us. Then thousands of books and the shelves that bore them came crashing down on top of Anna and me.
BURIED ALIVE
They were buried alive in books, Thomas and Anna. Or at least Anna was. For all she could tell, Thomas was dead.
Under an avalanche of books and shelves, Anna couldn’t move, couldn’t see anything, but she could hear nearby voices muttering in consternation. The library staff must have come running when they heard the crash, and there must have been patrons out there, too. It sounded as if they were simply standing and looking at the mess, not digging into it.
“Help! Help us!” she cried. Her voice was weak in the airless space, but she drew a long, ragged breath and shouted in French: “
A l’aide! Aidez-nous!”
The voices ceased.
“
A l’aide! Aidez-nous!”
A half-dozen people all began speaking at once. Footsteps approached. Men growled instructions to each other and then chanted,
“Un, deux, trois!”
and groaned. Wood creaked, and an incredible weight lifted off the pile. A low boom sounded as they righted the bookshelf again.
“Nous sommes là, en dessous!”
Anna called out, pushing weakly at the black mound of dusty volumes. Books cascaded down the outside of the pile and thumped on the floor, and hands began snatching them, lifting them, stacking them.
Someone grasped Anna’s shoulder and let out a shout. Others worked rapidly to dig her out. A pair of gendarmes arrived with a canvas stretcher slung between two long poles. “
Rien de cassé?”
Anna replied in French that she did not know if anything was broken. The gendarmes gently dragged her from the pile and slid her onto the stretcher. As they checked her head, neck, and arms, another pair of gendarmes arrived with another stretcher.
“
Il est là. Aidez-le!”
Anna pointed to the spot where Thomas lay, and the library staff and police set to work digging him out.
As they worked, one of them shouted,
“Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?”
and lifted a walking stick—her father’s gun. Anna nearly fainted to see it—but at least he no longer had it.
It was as much as she could bear. She laid her head down and nearly fell asleep. In time, rescuers dragged Thomas out of the book pile and conveyed him to the other stretcher.
“Est-il en vie?”
Anna asked, trying to see his chest rise and fall.
They told her that he was alive, but his pulse and breathing were weak.
“Il s’accroche!”
Only then did she notice that Thomas still clutched the strange contraption that he had used to shock her father. The gendarmes tried to wrest it away from him, but Thomas held the thing in a death grip. They gave up, grimly discussing where to take the two injured people.
“
Au Sanatorium Prefargier,”
Anna told them, “
vite!
”
VISIT FROM AN OLD FRIEND
I
’m buried alive, can’t move—can hardly breathe. But I’m not buried in earth. If this were earth, it might have been an accident, some cave-in. I’m buried alive in cloth—a straitjacket.
I’m a captive.
“Hello, Harold Thomas—or is it Harold Silence?”
I hear the words but can’t see who speaks them. I see only the white-painted rafters above me, occasional gables poking through to show a sky cluttered in clouds.
Is this a hospital?
“You look miserable, my friend.” A dark figure enters my line of sight—a tall man with an expression that combines snarl and smile. He stands over me. “Do you know who I am?”
His face makes fear skitter across my back. It’s a face I’ve fixated on, one I should know. “I don’t …”
His smile only widens. “Do you know who you are?”
This is a brutal question. I can’t see myself, can I? How could I know who I am? Unfair. “No.”
The man stoops over the bed and sets his hand gently on my forehead. He pats me as if I were a dog. “My dear, dear boy. Your head isn’t what it once was. That great bump. Not so much here, but”—he shifts his hand to the side of my head, to a swollen mass beneath bandages—“here.”
Pain stabs through my skull. I recoil in the straitjacket and shiver away from him beneath the straps of the bed. “Don’t touch it! Don’t!”
Again the smile, that brutal smile. The man pulls his hand back from my head and sits slowly in a nearby chair. “Yes. That is the problem. This brain of yours. Empty. It’s not what I paid for. It’s the attic without the treasure … .”
“Who are you?”
“How awful. You really don’t know, do you? Tragedy! It’s as if the library of Alexandria had burned!” The playfulness drains from his eyes, and rank resentment takes its place. “It
did
burn, my friend. That library, with all the wisdom of the ancient world—that goddamned library is gone. Gone! And your goddamned mind is gone, too. All that you knew, all that you were—gone, except this pathetic, festering hunk of meat … .
“I wanted you whole. It was part of my grand calculation. You destroyed me at the height of my powers, and revenge demands that I destroy you at the height of yours. Equations must equate, my friend … my pupil. But truthfully, you were never my equal, ergo any expression that equated us was an a priori falsehood. So if Burckhardt can’t fix you, I shall have to settle for finishing what little remains … .”
“Nurse! Nurse!” I cry. This must be a hospital, and there must be a nurse.
“Don’t bother. Burckhardt is a friend of mine—well, he’s a man I’m blackmailing. And the difference between a friend and a man who is blackmailed is that you can control a man who is blackmailed.” He pats my shoulder. “The nurse won’t come, either. It’s just you and me now. And in an hour, it’ll be just you and the incinerator.”
I don’t want to die, but how can I save myself, strapped down as I am? I stall. “My mind is not entirely blank. There are many things I know about you.”
His eyebrow twitches. “Truly? Do tell.” He is unsettled. The eyebrow tells it. Let’s see what else I can make twitch.
“You are a brilliant mathematician … a professor—the greatest teacher I ever had.”
“Flattery can’t save you,” he says, but his eyelids are straight lines, and I know that he believes everything I’ve said so far.
“But the fawning, cloying admiration of your colleagues was an annoyance. They kept you from achieving what you could. They grasped the hem of your robe, begging you to pour your knowledge out into them, but in truth, they were holding you down.”
His eyes drift from me, seeing things elsewhere. I look to his right hand, with its callus where the stylus would rest, with its shivering as if it had written a million words, all ignored.
“Your research had gone beyond them; you discovered equations that would save every one of us, every last mother’s son—but some people misunderstood. They thought your calculations were immoral.”
His jaw moves, and I see the word
yes
on his lips.
“And so, at last, you were forced out from among them. You’d gone as far as they would let you go, as far as mortal creatures would allow. Their laws were made for their own kind. Their morality was fashioned to control the rabble, not a man like you—not an immortal man. And so you experimented in ways that other men would abhor. You made advances that they could never recognize.”
A faint sweat dapples the professor’s brow.
“And you would have continued on this path, this trajectory that would carry you out of the world and among the stars—except that there was someone who wouldn’t let you.”
The professor shakes himself like a dog flinging away ditch water. His eyes focus on me, and his lips purse in satisfaction. “This isn’t memory, is it? You don’t know any of these things. You’re fishing. It’s deduction—your famous capacity for deduction.” He laughs again. “You don’t
know
me. You simply
read
me.” He leans forward. “Well, I don’t have to read you because I know you. And let me tell you about yourself.”
“Please,” I said.
“You are a strange little man. You have not completed a degree, though you pretend to have extensive knowledge in your fields of study. You are not an officer of Scotland Yard, though you plague them incessantly with your crime-fighting theories. You are not a musician, though you scrape at a violin at every chance. You are not a lothario, though you have saved many women and keep the intimate company of one man.” His face is very near my own now, very large and threatening. “I could spend all day listing what you are not, but I would have a very hard time telling you what you are.”
“I am your enemy.”
The man withdraws his face from mine and nods deeply. He pauses to take a breath, an indulgence that tells me I have struck on a core truth. “You are my enemy,” he repeats, and his hand rises above me, holding an ice pick. The shaft is stained red with a purplish liquid that glistens on the point of the tool. “You are my enemy. Nothing else matters—my name, your name … . It matters only that we
hate each other, that we fought valiantly one against the other—and that I won.”
He lifts the ice pick high above his head and then brings it down furiously to skewer my neck.
ADMITTED AGAIN
The gendarmes lifted the stretchers from the wagon and carried Anna and Thomas up the steps of the Prefargier Sanatorium. They entered a receiving room that smelled of camphor and rubbing alcohol, and Anna coughed into her hand. At the center of the room sat an elderly nurse at a desk. She looked up in alarm, set down the charts she had been completing, and bustled toward the new arrivals.
“Tell Dr. Burckhart that Anna Schmidt has arrived,” Anna said, but the nurse simply held out a warning hand before her.
In German, the nurse greeted the gendarmes and asked them rapid-fire questions about the patients, how their injuries had been caused, who was in worse shape … . The gendarmes gabbled out answers, and the nurse guided them to the surgical theater.
As the door barked open, Dr. Burckhardt started out of sleep in his wingback chair. He lurched up and crossed toward the patients. His eyes leaped between the stretchers, and his hands twitched excitedly. He directed the gendarmes to drape Anna’s stretcher across one examination table and Thomas’s across the other.
“
Was ist das?”
Dr. Burckhardt murmured, lifting the generator.
“Mein Generator?
”
“
Es ist der Mann,”
the nurse said, tapping the bandages on Thomas’s shoulder. She glanced at the other stretcher.
Burckhardt toddled up to Anna and looked down avidly, naked desire in his eyes. He began probing her head, neck, and shoulders for injuries. “
Guten Tag.”
His hands moved downward.
“English, please,” Anna said.
“Good afternoon, Miss—”
“Schmidt,” she replied sharply. “Anna Schmidt.”
He drew his hands off her hips, where they had lingered a moment too long, and he took a step back. “I—I … you’ve grown so much in the last two years, Anna. You’re a woman.”
She sat up and slipped her feet over the edge of the table. “My father sent me.”
“Your father.” Dr. Burckhardt blanched, but a weak smile squirmed on his lips. “Interesting …”
Anna slowly dragged one of the straps loose from the examination table. “He wants the antidote to the tree-frog neurotoxin.”
Dr. Burckhardt took another step back. “Antidote?”
“Give it to me.”
Burckhardt glanced at the nurse, who nodded once grimly. “Well—er—your father is, actually, here right now, and we’ll need to clear it with him first.”
Anna lunged, whipping the table strap around Burckhardt’s neck and drawing it tight. He shrieked. She twisted the strap and cut off the sound. “You can breathe again after Thomas has been given the antidote.” Anna glared at the nurse. “Get it!”
She looked a question at Burckhardt, and he nodded in red-faced exasperation. The woman crossed toward a large pharmaceutical cabinet with many drawers. Her finger wandered
the cards on the front of the drawers until she found the right one. Then she drew it open and pulled out a small vial. “It may be too late.”
“For the doctor’s sake, it better not be. Give it to my friend. And if Thomas dies, Burckhardt dies.”
The nurse shot a piercing look at the doctor, who struggled, purple-faced, in Anna’s grip. He held out imploring hands. Giving a great sigh, the nurse replaced the first vial and pulled out a different one. Then, going to Thomas, she poured the liquid into his mouth.
Anna loosened her hold on the strap, letting Burckhardt gulp a bit of air. He tried to scramble away, but she pulled him back. “Grab another one of those vials, nurse—no tricks—and then show me where my other friend is.”
“Your other friend … ?”
“The patient who arrived with Thomas here—the man my father is so interested in.”
The nurse returned to the pharmaceutical cabinet and lifted another vial from the same drawer as the last. “Good girl. Now, I’ll follow you. And if either of my friends dies, Burckhardt dies.”
The nurse gave a perfunctory nod, palmed the antidote, and stalked from the surgical theater. Anna followed, keeping Burckhardt in front of her like a dog on a leash. She couldn’t walk him through the hospital that way, so she snatched up a scalpel and slid the knife into the small of Burckhardt’s back. Dragging the strap off his throat, she said, “Try anything, and I’ll carve out your kidney.”
Burckhardt nodded, the motion making beads of sweat cascade down his forehead. With a shambling step, he followed the nurse out of the surgical theater and into the receiving room. Patients waiting for admittance looked up hopefully as Burckhardt entered. He gave them a corpulent
smile and waved as the scalpel drove him after the nurse into the violent ward.
Silence wasn’t the only one bound down in that place. Beds lined either wall, and in each bed lay a patient in straitjacket and straps. They were belted down as if they were cargo instead of people. The nurse walked with a metronome gait between the beds until she reached the fifth one on the right. There lay a tall, thin man in a cloth cocoon. It was Silence, with his long face and hawklike nose, his narrow eyebrows and great lantern eyes. But those eyes were empty. Dead. Anna glanced down from his face, seeing a little red spot on his neck—a wound just like the one Thomas had.
“It’s too late,” the nurse said sourly.
“It can’t be.” Switching the knife to Burckhardt’s throat, Anna reached down to Silence. His skin was still warm, and faint breath ghosted through his cracked lips. “Give it to him! Give him the antidote!”
“For God’s sake, give it!” Burckhardt growled tightly.
Grimacing, the nurse popped the cork from the top of the vial and dumped the antidote into Silence’s mouth.
Anna watched, fearful, wishing the blue cast of Silence’s face would fade to pink, but there was no sign of life returning.
“It’s too late,” the nurse repeated.
“Shut up!” Anna commanded. The scalpel trembled in her hand, nicking Burckhardt’s neck.
It can’t be. It can’t be
. All her thought had been bent on this moment, on undoing the things that she had helped her father do. But if Silence died after all …
“Damn you!” Anna thrust Burckhardt away across the floor and stooped to cut loose the straps that held Silence.
They popped one after another, and she flung them aside. “Get up, Silence! Get up!” The scalpel made swift work of the straitjacket as well. She dragged back the last bindings, but the man lay in his bedclothes as if he were a corpse wrapped in cerements. “Damn you.”
“Vermin!” the nurse growled as she yanked a strap tight around Anna’s throat. “Here’s your medicine!”
“Good! Good!” Burckhardt declared, rubbing his own neck. “Finish her, if you wish. Her father has given her over. The orderlies can carry all three of them down to the incinerator.” He flashed her a furious smile, turned, and ran for the door.
The moment he reached it, though, Burckhardt stiffened like a board and fell back, toppling slowly. He crashed to the ground, and out stepped Thomas Carnacki, shaking his hand as if his knuckles hurt.
“I’ve wanted to do that for two days.” He stepped over the unconscious Burckhardt.
“Not a step closer, or I’ll kill your girlfriend,” the nurse shouted. She wrenched the strap tighter around Anna’s neck.
Thomas halted, hands in the air and eyes wide with dread.
A sudden clang came from behind Anna, as if a cowbell had struck the nurse’s head. She teetered for a moment, lost hold of the strap, and crumpled to the ground. Anna turned to see Silence standing there, smiling, a bedpan lifted high in one hand.
She returned his smile. “I’m glad to see you’re back.”
He shook his head bleakly. “I don’t know who I am.”
“As I said …”
Thomas hurried through the ward to reach his companions.
He still carried that ridiculous contraption beneath his arm. “Well, let’s get him dressed and get him out of here,” Thomas said. “I know a place where we can catch a train—for cheap.”

Other books

Geist by Weldon, Phaedra
New Beginnings by Laurie Halse Anderson
Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe by Three at Wolfe's Door
5.5 - Under the Ice Blades by Lindsay Buroker
HTML The Definitive Guide by Bill Kennedy, Chuck Musciano
Scorpion by Kerry Newcomb