Becoming Holmes (11 page)

Sigerson Bell likes to teach his lad many different ways to defend himself. Though he has shown him the mysterious ways of Bellitsu, pugilism, and deft wrestling maneuvers, he sometimes surprises his charge with demonstrations of even stranger fighting resources.

“One must have a myriad of weapons at one’s fingertips,” the old man likes to say. “One must also not be afraid to inflict pain upon others who deserve it! Should you pursue this reckless crime-fighting ambition you have – and a fine one it is – you must enter into it armed like an Oriental ninja!”

The boy smiles as he remembers the war whoop Bell let out the day he told him that. The apothecary was standing in the laboratory, dressed in his leotards and the other startling pieces of his fighting costume, stripped to the waist of course, bent over, flesh hanging down like doughy stalactites, but a glint in his eye.

“Swordsmanship is a worthy addition to the Bellitsu and pugilistic skills I have instilled in you! And romantics like myself excel at it!”

With that, he had produced a sword from the fighting colors around his waist (given to him by the great pugilist Tom Sayers, “The Napoleon of the Prize Ring”) and brandished it in the boy’s face, inches from his nose.

“Sir!” Sherlock had cried, “for goodness sake, be careful.”

“A little too close-quartered for you, my young steed?” Bell had replied. “One must operate with precision at all times!” He then turned and sliced off the skull of one of the human skeletons that Sherlock had nailed to the wall the previous day. (The apothecary was notorious for destroying his bony corpses in displays of fighting prowess.) “But!” exclaimed the old man, dropping the sword to the floor. “But! But! But!” He whirled around and suddenly two long sticks, thick and round and as hard as steel, were in his hands. They were each about five feet long.

The broom in Sherlock’s hands this day in the suburban park is exactly that length.

“These, my young mercenary of justice,” Bell had continued, “are what we in the dark arts know as Swiss Fighting Sticks!”

“Dark arts?” the boy had queried.

“Sherlock, stay with me! Do not question the adornments, the flourishes I may add to my descriptions. Fiction contains the greatest truths!”

Holmes had had no idea what the old man meant by that, but he kept quiet. Bell began slamming the sticks together, wielding them in all sorts of ways and directions, and then pivoted and swung them toward a shelf filled with glass bottles. “Pin-point accuracy is the hallmark of the use
of Swiss Fighting Sticks. One must be able to swing at something and hit it upon the nose! Or miss by a quarter of an inch!” But then Bell swung at the bottles, a mighty swoop that cut the air with the sound of a bullwhip and would have killed a rhinoceros had it been standing in the shop (and the boy wouldn’t have been surprised to see one, one day) and hit the glass containers dead in their centers, sending them, and the shelf, crashing to the floor with the sound of two locomotives colliding.

It took several seconds for the sound to subside. The old man had stood there staring at what he had done for almost a full minute. The boy had not dared to utter a word.

“Well …” Bell finally said, looking sheepish, “one sometimes misses!”

But the apothecary then taught the boy to never miss. At first, he was shown how to use the Fighting Sticks to knock a lemon-flavored sweet from the old man’s mouth from a distance of five feet, and had several times loosened Bell’s teeth. But within a month the entire art had been added to his repertoire. Sherlock Holmes could swipe a pea from the top of the apothecary’s balding head … while wearing a blindfold.

The bee buzzes near the invalid’s veiled face. The young dustman steps forward, lifts his broom in a decidedly martial-art grip, hands exactly six inches apart, the business end of the weapon pointed directly at his target, and swings his
weapon at the bee, sweeping both it and the invalid’s veil across the footpath and thirty feet toward the flowerbed. The end of the broom, of course, does not touch the girl’s face, but passes a tiny fraction of an inch from her right cheekbone and her nose, lifting the veil away as cleanly as if he had delicately done it with a feather touch of his fingers.

The woman behind the wheelchair screams.

And when Sherlock Holmes looks at the face staring out at him from that chair, he nearly does too.

11
EVIL INCARNATE

S
itting before him is a monster. Or, at least, it is the face of a monster atop the body of a teenage girl. His father never allowed him to attend circuses and see the freaks in the sideshows, and since Sherlock left home he has never once succumbed to the temptation to visit the penny gaffes on Whitechapel Road in the East End where strange people are exhibited in back rooms, often presented as part elephant or crossbred with some other exotic animal.

“They are suffering from diseases, my boy!” Sigerson Bell once proclaimed. “We are not to gawk at them as if they were creatures from the Dark Continent.”

But the boy cannot help but “gawk” at this person, with a head twice the normal size, hideous growths ballooning from her forehead, skin like a crocodile’s, lips puffed and bloated, all framed with beautiful blonde hair, as blonde and glowing as Irene Doyle’s. Sherlock looks into the monster’s eyes. They stare back, blue like the June sky, filled with curiosity.

“You beast!!” cries the woman, rushing to pick up the veil.

But the boy cannot respond. He cannot offer his excuse: that he had been merely swatting at the bee, protecting the girl in the chair. Repulsed by the horrible face, standing there almost catatonic with shock, his eyes remain locked on her eyes, which now begin to smile back.

The woman retrieves the veil and knocks into the boy with a thump as she rushes past him. Then she snatches the disguise over the girl’s face again, screams at Sherlock once more, and wheels her charge away. They march back toward their street.

Sixteen or seventeen years old; right arm and leg horribly deformed too; left leg incapable of movement. She is –

But he can’t go on. He can’t analyze this person. He doesn’t have the heart. He pities her from the bottom of his soul. The deformities sear into his memory as he remains rigid, standing in exactly the same position he was in the instant the veil came off. That face will wake him up at nights. It is a complicated reaction. He sees those eyes too – their curiosity and their smile.

He shakes himself from his haze and turns back toward the street.
I must apologize
.

There is no sign of them, either here or in the distance. As he stumbles out of the park, he realizes that he must have been standing there for a very long time. He wonders what, in God’s name, he can say to them.
I must tell them the truth. They need to know why I was here. They deserve to hear it. I must come clean
.

When he first sees the house, the door is closed and all appears quiet. But as he reaches the walkway, he hears voices.
They are raised. One belongs to the woman and the other seems familiar. He moves closer.

Grimsby!

“How did you get in here?” He hears the woman cry. “Who are you?”

Grimsby’s long response is muffled. Sherlock can only hear parts of it.

He must have been waiting for them at their door!
The other man, this woman’s man, obviously isn’t here.
He must have gone out while we were in the park
. Did Grimsby know he would be away at this hour? He has the woman all alone in there and is beginning to shout at her.
Grimsby isn’t just a villain; he’s a coward too!
Sherlock had been trying to summon the courage to knock on the door but now he bursts in.

“I shall be wanting two bob a week for meself!”

“But I can’t pay you that! We can’t afford that!”

The detective in Sherlock stops him just inside the door. The other two are yelling so loudly now that they don’t hear him enter. He is in a tiny vestibule, a few out-of-doors clothes hanging on hooks in an open closet to his right and a narrow wall blocking the next room, the parlor, from view. Grimsby and the woman are in there, embroiled in their argument, unaware of his presence.

You must listen. Learn. This might unlock everything
.

“Ask Stonefield for the money, woman.”

“He won’t give it to me.”

“Yes, ’e will. You keep ’is secret; ’e is much obliged to you. I knows ’uman nature and I knows folks pays for what
they must ’ave, for what they wants. Just asks ’im for a raise in what ’e pays you.”

“I will not! I will expose you! Blackmailer! I will notify the police!”

“You ain’t listening, is you? I told you, your guvna’ ’e don’t want this ’ere situation to get out, so ’e pays me boss what ’e must.” Then Grimsby’s voice drops, almost as if he is talking to himself. “Me boss sent Crew ’ere yesterday and I followed ’im I did, on the quiet. Taught well, I was.” His voice rises again. “So, now I knows.”

Yesterday
, thinks Sherlock.
The only day I didn’t come here. Crew was sent to see if I was on the trail. What would he have done if he’d found me?

“Sir Ramsay pays the man you work for?” says the woman. “Some scoundrel?”

“It’s not in coins.”

“Then, in what?”

“Never you mind in what. I wants two quid from you and your ’usband, starting Monday next. Or I tells
The News of the World
. No more questions.”

Husband. That man is her husband
.

“But I can’t ask Sir Ramsay. He has been through so much. He and the Missus! Have pity!”

“Pity on the rich? Me?” Grimsby lets out a horrible giggle.

“He loves her. He loved the other one too!”

Loves her? The other one too?

“I ain’t ’ere on a mission of charity or to ’ear the sob stories of the privileged. Now you do as you is told or your master’s secret will be public knowledge.”

“Leave this house immediately!”

Sherlock hears a struggle and the woman begins to scream. He also hears a garbled sound, the pitiable cry of a teenage girl, terrified but wordless.

Holmes springs into action. He darts out of the vestibule and into the parlor. He sees the woman and Grimsby grappling with each other. He attacks the rascal from behind, gripping him in a lock that drives his forearms down and against his hips, and pulls him away from woman, releasing her. But Sherlock doesn’t stop at that. He is incensed. Locking Grimsby so tightly that he almost cracks his ribs, he effects a Bellitsu move, placing his right foot in front of his opponent’s, twisting him violently and sending him sailing backward over his own upper thigh and hips. The startled little man lets out a cry as he crashes down onto his head and shoulders in the parlor and rolls all the way into the tiny back kitchen. Holmes is at him in a flash. Grimsby leaps to his feet, his little hands balled in fists. The woman lets out a scream. As Sherlock nears his enemy, he sees that the girl in the wheelchair is right there, inches from the blackguard, near the top of the stairs to the cellar. Holmes wants to kill him now; failing that, he wants to maim him for life. A hatred for Grimsby and Malefactor and for the man who killed his mother and for everyone who brings evil and hatred and injustice into the world rises up in him. He hates the fact that the poor girl sits in that wheelchair, disfigured and crippled. His eyes are on fire, the veins pop out on his neck and forehead, and he flushes red.
The time has come
.

But the girl in the chair is in his line of vision, behind
Grimsby. Her veil is off and she holds her hands in front of herself in shame, terrified, sobbing, her shoulders heaving. Those blue eyes peek out from between her fingers, catching sight of Sherlock. When their eyes meet, hers turn hopeful.

He cannot hurt anyone in her presence, not even this devil. The woman sees Sherlock clearly now.

“Why, you’re the dustman!” she says.

But Holmes is glaring at Grimsby.

“Villain!” he cries.

“ ’Ow did you find this place ’olmes? You is an arse, but you ain’t without wits. I –”

“Out from here, you wretch! Now!”