The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls (29 page)

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Authors: John R. King

BOOK: The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls
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“It’s statues. The children’s game of statues,” the demon opined, cranking all the harder. “Fling a fellow onto the grass and see what crazy contortions he takes and when he freezes in some ridiculous pose, give him a name.”
I convulsed, my body arching up beneath the straps. “Anna! Anna!”
“That name’s already taken. You need something with Thomas in it. Let’s see … Not Doubting Thomas, no. Your fault is not doubt,” the demon said, cranking faster. “I will call you Believing Thomas!”
My feet and hands and head jangled with electricity. Charges gathered in my extremities and jagged through my torso. The white-hot energy converged on my heart. It struck.
I seized up. I was dying.
 
IT WAS just like my dream. I had ceased to be flesh anymore—wasn’t physical, but an ectoplasmic spirit. I seeped out of every dying cell in my body, gushed forth from every riven pore out into the air. I gathered myself in a cloud and looked down at my poor, electrocuted form.
How much better this was. No more pain. No more sucking wound to the chest. I felt so light. Flesh is heavy, tired, shot through with trouble, but I was done with trouble. I was done with fighting and breathing and heartbeating. How much better it was to drift upward.
Good-bye, then. Good-bye, earth.
A tunnel formed above me, leading up and away, and a light dawned at the end of it. I moved toward the light. I moved toward Anna. I could see her face now. Pain and hope warred on her features. She was not welcoming me.
Go back, Thomas. Go back. You have a body. Use it to fight him. You must go back and kill the Undying One.
“How?” I said. “He’ll just take me over, ride me until I’m murdered … .”
No he won’t. I’ll show you how. You must turn around. You must go back.
It’s hard to turn around, wherever you are, whatever you are doing. Alcoholics can’t turn around … opium addicts, prostitutes, crime lords, hit men … . Only one in a hundred can turn around, and that action is called repentance. But when a man is in the tunnel of light, heading toward beauty and out of horror, repentance feels like death.
Turn around, Thomas.
I repented of heaven and clawed my way back down that tunnel, away from the warm light and into the cold darkness. For her, I did it. For the one I was leaving.
 
AND SUDDENLY, I was back in my body, convulsing on the table. What horror! Voltage ripped my nerves. Blood boiled in my throat. Breath steamed in my lungs. What misery it was to be bound down to this table while the demon beside me cranked the engine of my death—
Bound down? But I was not. The belt at my waist had slid loose of the buckle.
It was Anna’s work, surely. She had freed my hands, had shown me the way.
I lifted my hands, clips still clinging to fingertips, and seized the demon’s wrists. The electric pentacle spread from my flesh to his. Galvanic energy surged up his arms to his shoulders.
The demon shrieked and tried to let go, but the sparking current enervated him. Blue charges danced across his chest and met over his breastbone and poured down his stomach and hips and back. The electric pentacle surrounded us both. It reached his toes and his fingertips and the bristling hair across his scalp.
I held on and kept cranking.
The demon seeped from Holmes’s pores, as if blood were being squeezed slowly out of his skin. Red protoplasm
gathered in his eyes and sloshed from his mouth and rolled out of his nostrils and ears.
A crimson cloud formed above our heads. It boiled and coiled, eyeing us, wishing that it could dive down into our bodies, but the pentacles kept it at bay. At the edges of the cloud, dark tendrils hissed out into the air, dissipating.
The Undying Evil was dying.
“There’s no one here to possess!” I shouted victoriously. “And you can’t live in air.”
“I can live in anything human!” the spirit cried. It gathered itself and shot out through the air, coalescing around the human skeleton that stood on one end of the infirmary. Red energy mantled the bones and sank to their marrow and vanished.
I let go of Holmes’s hands.
He staggered back, eyes bleary, and looked around the room. “Where am I?”
“Let me loose!” I shouted, reaching up to undo the buckle on my chest.
Holmes shook off the funk that possessed him and lurched forward to loosen the buckle on my legs.
Even as he fidgeted with the strap, the skeleton in the corner pulled free of its stand and clacked down on the floor, facing us. Its jaw chattered, its hands rose in bony claws, and it stalked forward.
WHAT WOULD HOLMES DO?
I
release the open buckle and stare at Thomas and then at the walking skeleton and wonder what Sherlock Holmes—what I would do at a time like this.
The answer is elementary: “Get him, Watson!”
PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS
T
he only thing more incredible than a walking skeleton was Holmes’s reaction to it. “Get him, Watson!” Though I was not Watson, I, happily, did know how to “get him.” I hefted the generator above my head and hurled it at the skeleton. The machine smashed the skeleton’s sternum, and the wires entangled its legs, sending it reeling.
“What are you doing?” Holmes blurted.
“The demon is bound to the physical form until its blood is shed,” I said, swinging my legs down off the steel table and standing shakily. “Luckily, this time, it has no blood. It can’t get out. We just have to dismantle it.”
“With what?” Holmes asked.
“With whatever comes to hand.” I pointed. “Chairs—”
Holmes grabbed a chair and brought it smashing down on the skeleton, separating the left ulna from its humorous and cracking all the left-side ribs.
“Belts—” I grasped the leather thongs that had been holding me and scourged the skeleton with them, seeing the buckles crack in the ribs and stick there. “Jars—”
Holmes darted to a nearby cabinet full of medical supplies, and from its innards he hurled jar after jar: cotton balls, swabs, gauze, tongue depressors, alcohol, iodine … . Only the last two caused much damage. The jar of alcohol caved
three ribs, and the jar of iodine smashed heavily within the pelvis, cracking it in half and causing a leg to fall clean off.
The skeleton teetered and toppled, crashing onto the tile floor. More bones shattered and scattered from the twitching figure.
“What else?” Holmes asked, hands raised, eyes scanning the room for other weapons.
“Shoes,” I suggested, stomping on the skull. My foot caved the cranium. I then kicked the remainder of the skull down onto the spine. Bone flexed and shattered, the neck snapped, and ribs cracked away all down the back. The skeleton was in pieces, with just one leg and two arms and no ribs. I took care of the rest of the ribs by jumping up and down on them, like a child stomping autumn leaves.
It was a dance of joy. Every fracture, every hunk of bone, meant that the Undying Evil was trapped in smaller and smaller chunks, for all eternity.
Holmes joined me in my mad dance, and between the two of us, we stomped the faceplate down to fragments and snapped each leg and arm bone thrice over. In the end, the demon lay in a few large chunks, hundreds of shards, and a small pile of bone dust.
“Now, to contain this stuff,” I said as we stopped our dance. There was a dustpan and broom in one corner of the infirmary, and I went to get them. “Holmes, did you see any empty jars in that cabinet?”
He crossed to it and came back with two large, empty jars, one labeled “Cotton” and the other labeled “Sheep Stomach.” “How about these?”
“Fine, fine,” I said as I swept the fragments of the demon onto the dustpan. Holmes set down the jars and prowled around the periphery, hunting up any fragments that had traveled farther afield. It wouldn’t do to have the infirmary of
the Louvre haunted by an Undying—albeit impotent—Evil. In the end, we had filled both jars to their plugs, and I wrapped them in a bedsheet to keep them from shattering and slid them into Watson’s surgical bag.
“Watson!” I exclaimed in sudden dread.
“Watson?” Holmes echoed.
“Damn it. He’s in with those two thugs.”
“Dr. John Watson? Here?”
“You really don’t remember, do you? Yes. Watson’s here, captive of those two henchmen you rounded up. We have to rescue him. Where’s the mustache and beard?”
Holmes stared blankly at me. “Henchmen?”
I pushed past him and stalked the floor, looking for the fake hairpieces. They were scattered, marked with the tread of our shoes, crinkled up with dried blood. “It’s no use. If we had your disguise, you could just tell the thugs to let him go. But if they see you without your disguise—”
“I don’t want Watson to see me yet. Not this way.” Holmes looked into my eyes, and there was something frightened in his expression. “My mind isn’t my own. I don’t
trust
it.”
I understood. “When Sherlock Holmes doesn’t trust his own mind, he’s not Sherlock Holmes.” I crossed to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out into the hallway. It was empty, but I heard a crash and boom. Flinging the door wide, I stepped into the hall and was greeted by a muffled shout and the thud of someone crashing to the floor. “Watson needs me.”
Gritting my teeth, I strode down the hall. I was hardly fit for another fight, but what choice did I have? Halfway down the hall, I realized I still carried the broom. Well … I needed some sort of weapon … and this was better than nothing.
I reached the door and tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. A pleading wail came from within. I reared back and kicked the door just beside the handle and was rewarded
with a shattered lock and splintered wood and a door flying inward to reveal a scene of complete carnage.
The small room had been a custodial closet, with mops and buckets, brooms and tools and a wide utility sink. Now, every mop and boom was broken, every bucket staved. The tools lay scattered across the floor beside an unconscious figure, and another bruised and bloodied man was stuffed in the utility sink.
In the midst of all this wreckage stood Dr. John Watson, one side of his jaw swollen and his eyes blazing. He held a broken broomstick high overhead, ready to bring it down on me. His hand paused, and he returned my look of amazed shock.
“You’re alive!” we said simultaneously.
Watson lowered his broomstick, and I proffered the one that I carried. “Looks like you need to do some cleaning up.”
He didn’t take the broom or the joke, his eyes still wary. “What about the ringleader? Where’d he get off to?”
“We had a fight of our own,” I said. “It turned out in much the same way. I’ve gotten the mastermind all bottled up, though I’d better get back to check on him—and to summon the police. Can you keep these two … subdued—?”
“Of course,” Watson said. “The rough work is done.”
 
WE HIT the papers one last time—Watson and I. Holmes ducked out of the whole affair, evading the police and the reporters and avoiding the notice even of his erstwhile partner. Still, Watson and I took our moment to bask in the acclaim of
Le Temps
:
NEW CRIME DUO FOILS LOUVRE ROBBERY
Yesterday, two men from London foiled a plot to steal some of Paris’s greatest treasures. The first man, Dr. John Watson, is the one-time companion and chronicler of the deceased
Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Watson joined forces with a Cambridge student named Thomas Carnacki. Carnacki was recently touted as an underling of crime lord James Moriarty, but in fact he is a British agent who was working undercover to clean up the remains of the Moriarty gang. Together, the two men caught a ring of thieves intent on stealing no less than the
Mona Lisa.
“They had an elaborate plot,” Dr. Watson outlined, “replacing the lock on an outside door, gaining positions on the museum guard staff, and using the infirmary and a custodial closet as their base of operations.”
The thieves planned to steal the greatest treasures of the museum, including paintings by Titian, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio. Though the plan originally involved only grand larceny, it evolved to include murder.
“They found out about us,” Carnacki said in his sickbed. He is recovering from a stab wound to the chest. “They ambushed us on the museum floor in broad daylight. They tried to execute us.” When asked why the men hadn’t succeeded, Carnacki indicated, “We’re better fighters.”
Watson and Carnacki handed two of the three thieves to police, though the ringleader escaped. The amateur crime fighters described this third man as tall and lean, with white hair and a white mustache and beard. The Metropolitan Police Force is busy combing the city for the man.
Their search began at a garret apartment near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where Carnacki showed the police a map of Paris on which the gang had pinned all the major crimes of the last two months. Police describe the map as a “godsend,” and they anticipate using it to break numerous criminal networks throughout the city.
Though Watson and Carnacki saved priceless artworks and helped police mop up crime in Paris, they deny claims that
they will form a new detective partnership. “I’m no Sherlock Holmes,” said Thomas Carnacki.
Watson had his own reasons for parting ways. “I have been eternally blessed to have known and worked with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and his loss is one that I will never recover from—nor will London. Instead of playing about at a business that was most serious to Holmes, I would rather confine myself to helping my patients live long, happy lives.”
OF COURSE, for the papers, it was all crooks and detectives, villains and heroes—and I must confess that our adventures had been dramatic if not melodramatic. But only after the flash powder had ceased its lightning and the public had ceased its thunder did I have a moment to realize all I had lost.
 
SHE LAY within the gray walls of Perè Lachaise cemetery. It was in the days when poor folk still could be buried there, before Oscar Wilde and dozens of others made it a dying ground for the elite. Anna was allowed in, though her notorious father had been denied. He had been cremated, his ashes stored among thousands of other urns in a vault for criminals.
Even though Anna had rated her own plot, it was perhaps the smallest plot in the place. The mound of dirt atop her body was barely two feet wide and six feet long—I know, for I paced it out. I wondered if they had even given her a coffin. And her headstone was small and round, a baby tooth perched temporarily between all those adult monuments. It said simply “Anna Moriarty 1872–1891.”
“Anna, I’m sorry.”
I told myself that she was in a better place. I’d even seen her there and would have joined her except that she sent me back. Anna lived now in the realm of spirit, while I was stuck in the world of flesh.
I stayed by that spot for hours. I sat on the crypts beside hers, even lay down on one sarcophagus and slept. Of course, the family of the man entombed there might have been offended, but on the other hand, that same family would mourn while standing atop my Anna.
I remembered her bonnet and her blue dress and the basket with bars of cheese shining like gold. I remembered her haunted eyes when she returned to me in the library in Bern, her blond braids hanging down beside her face as she told the story of her father’s life. The child of two geniuses—Anna had so much left to do with her life, not the least of which was to love me.
Then I heard in my mind, like the whisper of a pen signing a signature,
I’m not done.
Her work wasn’t finished. After all, it was because of Anna that I lived—and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, too. It was because of her that the Undying Evil that had created Jack the Ripper and the Napoleon of Crime was trapped forever. Anna had shown me the way, and she would keep guiding me. In little ways and large, she would be with me.
I got up from the sarcophagus, brushed grave dirt off my clothes, and said, “Thank you.”
At last I could leave her grave behind. Anna was going with me.
 
SHERLOCK HOLMES sighed, letting the latest issue of
Le Temps
slump down into his lap. We sat in our small rented rooms on the Left Bank, and below our second-story window, an open-air market rumbled and rattled. It seemed to be giving Holmes a headache. I had wondered whether this location would be too noisy for him as he recovered his mind, but I couldn’t resist the bustle of it, the young philosophers and poets and artists roaming the streets at all hours, the partial
views of the Seine and of Notre Dame. Besides, it was the only place I could afford, drawing the last money from my university account.
This afternoon, though, the agitation beyond the windows seemed to be getting to Holmes. He rubbed his forehead with fingers stained by newsprint. “It’s such a struggle to read French.”
I glanced toward him from my perch beside the window and laughed. “You seemed to speak it fluently when you had a demon inside you.”
Holmes shot a look of annoyance my way. “It’s just that sort of comment that will keep me from ever getting my mind back.”
“What sort of comment?”
“‘When you had a demon inside you.’ That sort of comment. It’s nettling enough to have whole sections of my memory blacked out, erased by amnesia, without your turning it into voodoo.”
I was shocked. “It
was
voodoo.”
“It was amnesia, pure and simple!” he pronounced. “It was a physical reaction—like dropping a perfectly tuned violin and picking it up to find that all the strings must be retempered.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t just amnesia. You remember Anna, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. Anna Moriarty. Daughter of James Moriarty.”
“You remember our whole adventure with her, from the morning she fished you from the Reichenbach River to the morning we reached Paris, yes?”

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