Becoming Holmes (26 page)

How many layers of bodies are beneath me?

But he cannot allow himself to be preoccupied with such terrors. He must be alert. Crew could appear from behind from anywhere at any second.
He would enjoy murdering me here
. The bushes and trees, many of them dead, block his view of the crypt up ahead, though he sees parts of it, its white marble-like walls shimmering in the moonlight. Sherlock’s footfalls seem to strike the ground with great
volume, even though he is walking as slowly and gently as he can, his head on a swivel. It is difficult for him to believe that he is actually here. His heart keeps pounding.

He approaches the crypt without being attacked. As he nears, the whole building – which he can see now is circular and about thirty or so feet in diameter and not as tall as he is – comes fully into view. He thinks he can hear sounds coming from inside, though they are faint.

His footfalls seem to resound even louder throughout the quiet graveyard. He moves at a snail’s pace, taking forever to come right up to the crypt. When he finally arrives, he can see its thick wooden door, like an entrance to a dungeon. It is sealed shut, likely locked from the inside, and a keyhole is evident.

How do I get in? Should I even try? The evidence is in there. I must
.

Sherlock Holmes moves around the circular building, his fingers on the cool surface, feeling it, wondering what to do next. He knows what to look for once he gets inside.
But how in the world do I accomplish that?
He could pick the lock, but he would risk being heard.

As his fingers glide silently along the wall, he feels something unusual. Exploring it more thoroughly, he realizes that it is a hole, about the size of his hand. When he looks down, he sees a slight light coming from it, and when he lowers his face and puts his eye to it, he can see inside the crypt!

What he sees takes his breath away. It is bizarre almost beyond description.

The interior of the building is dug out, so its floor is a good seven feet below ground. Crew is lying on a marble slab that appears to be his bed. He is naked. But he is partially covered up … by snakes. Holmes’s eyes bulge. There must be at least five of them, big ones, crawling all over the fiend, wrapping themselves around his neck, his midsection, his legs and feet. One even grips his head near his eyes. When Sherlock adjusts his view, he can see four or five more slithering about on the spare marble furniture, hissing and rattling, forked tongues darting out, some pursuing rats the size of small pigs, seizing them to squeeze them to death or bite them with their fangs. There are lizards and frogs too, some convulsing on the floor from snake venom. Crew is on his back, staring up at the ceiling in a sort of frenzy, saying things that Sherlock can’t make out. He seems to be talking to them, as if they were pets he is controlling. The snakes are remarkable colors, bright gold and green and black, with ingenious patterns on their skin. They vary in size from little ones no more than a foot or two long to massive cobras of stunning girth and length. One, which he recognizes as an anaconda from an illustration he saw in a book about the Amazon River, is wrapping itself around Crew’s chest (to his ecstasy) and looks to be nearly a foot thick. Its length is hard to estimate from where Sherlock watches; much of it is out of sight. It is so big that it seems like some sort of monster from the imagination of a sensation novelist.

Sherlock is reconsidering the idea of entering the crypt. The size and appearance of that giant snake literally staggers him, and he steps back from the hole. When he does, his
foot connects with a skull behind him and he falls on it. It explodes beneath him like a gun going off. All that is left of the human being is dust.

Holmes leaps to his feet.
Could Crew have heard that?
He doesn’t dare to even put his eye back to the hole. But he doesn’t want to run away. Nothing has been proven yet. If he gives up now, all will be lost. He moves around the outside of the crypt, farther away from the hole and the entrance. His breathing becomes louder. It is like a bellows fanning flames.

When he reaches the opposite side of the building, he stops and stands very still. He listens intently for noises in the night. His hands shake as they rest on the crypt’s marble exterior. Then he hears something. He listens again.
Footsteps!
He turns in their direction.

But sounds are difficult to locate in this unearthly graveyard. And at that instant, someone comes from the opposite direction and seizes him from behind. Just before he feels a shooting pain in his neck, one that paralyzes him from head to toe, he glimpses Crew’s ugly head inches behind his own, breathing on him, uttering little whining sighs. One of his big hands is wrapped around Sherlock’s neck. He can feel the villain’s heart pounding against his back. It thumps at a disarmingly slow pace, like the beat of a cold-blooded reptile.

Holmes has never been this terrified. But he cannot move, cannot even consider a Bellitsu maneuver. His opponent knows his capabilities and has neutralized them.

Crew begins lugging him back toward the entrance, to take him down into the crypt … with the snakes.

24
SATAN AND HIS FRIENDS

C
rew seals the door behind them. They descend wide stone stairs into the crypt. It feels hot and muggy inside. Thick webs line the ceiling, spun by spiders the size of fists. There is a fire blazing in a marble hearth, a few tropical plants, and a little pool with thick, putrid water. It smells of snakes and their refuse.

Sherlock cannot move a single muscle. His opponent has his thick fingers on a nerve in his neck that is being squeezed so hard that the effect is paralyzing him. Crew pulls Sherlock over to the marble bed and throws him onto it. Holmes’s head cracks against its hard surface. He lies flat and is barely able to look up. When he does, everything is blurry.

“Sherlock Holmes, good fighter,” says Crew. He embraces him for a moment, feeling him, caressing his arms with his hands. “Ah,” he hisses and slightly smiles. He steps back, still a little cautious, and picks up a small pistol, a derringer, from a marble table near the bed that has legs carved with images of snakes. He trains the gun on Sherlock and walks backward, never taking his eyes from him.

Holmes has only heard him speak once or twice, and even then he had just uttered a few words. The sound of his
voice still amazes the boy – high-pitched and whiny, very nasal, so tiny a voice for a big, tough, young man. It is almost childlike. The fiend is hesitant when he talks, as if he understands not only how embarrassing his tone is but also that he is terribly inarticulate. Crew has little interest in communicating with others, so he hasn’t cultivated that skill in the least.

“Good fighter,” he says again and turns, muttering to himself, “must be careful, keep him down.”

He is examining his snakes.

Sherlock manages to raise his head and looks toward them. In a fog, he sees that they are coiled on the floor and around the plants and lounging in the scummy little pond.
He must have pulled them off the bed before he rose and went upstairs to catch me
. He looks at Crew. His sole clothing is a pair of dark trousers, which he must have hastily pulled on. His bare upper body is as white as the marble in the room. There are rings of fat around his middle. His skull is wide in the jaw and narrow in the upper area. There is a blank look on his face.

“Choose one,” says Crew to himself, “for Sherlock Holmes.”

If this were Grimsby, if he had Holmes at his mercy in this way, he would have been excited beyond description. But Crew looks like a clerk in a bank doing his job. He is choosing a snake to murder Holmes.

Sherlock wanted
most
of this. He wanted to be in Crew’s lair so he could see all the snakes. But he hadn’t thought he would be lying on this marble bed, woozy and weak, with the slithering creatures between him and Crew,
his enemy holding a gun. Holmes cannot get at his target. He cannot apply his Bellitsu or even the horsewhip he has concealed on himself for this night’s dangerous assignment.

“Biters?” says Crew as if he were a mere chicken farmer considering the method he might employ to butcher a hen. He scratches his chin, then picks up a long wooden stick with a metal pick on the end and looks at Sherlock with cold eyes that express no emotion. “Eight poisonous biters,” he adds, for his victim’s information. “First, I present the Black Mamba!”

He points the stick at a frightening green and gray snake more than ten feet long that is emerging out of the scum pond.

“Very deadly, venomous, found in Africa, lovely name.” The snake coils around his stick as if in affection for him, but he gently shakes it off.

Holmes watches it, terrified.

“The Sidewinder.” Crew points to another snake, a creamy colored little devil no more than two feet long, with brown dots on its back. It had been moving in a bizarre fashion toward Crew, sideways, and now rattles as he indicates it. “From Mojave Desert, symptoms of bite: swelling, nausea, chills, shock, then death.” In his growing excitement, Crew is actually stringing together his version of sentences.

He turns to another little one. “Saw-Scaled Viper, from India.” As Sherlock looks at it, his mind now numb with fear, it sits at Crew’s feet and coils against itself, rubbing its serrated brown scales until they produce a sizzling sound. “Nice noise. Deadly,” adds Crew.

A six-foot-long brown and white snake now approaches
him, as if seeking his attention. “Indian Cobra!” he cries, turning to it. It stands up, its neck flaring out in the cobra swell. From where Sherlock lies, the pattern on the back of the neck looks like a pair of eyes and a smiling face. “Venom paralyzes muscles, acts in fifteen minutes.”

Crew pivots. “The Boomslang!” he shouts. “Lovely name too!” A four-foot-long snake, a shockingly bright green and black, its skin almost glowing, comes forward. “African,” mutters the pudgy fiend. The killer opens its jaws at its master in a massive yawn, its big fangs dripping. “Internal bleeding, then death.”

Crew smiles. “Such choices!”

Another snake, at least six feet long, comes up and coils around his foot. “The Puff Adder. Idiots say Swamp Adder. Deadliest snake in Africa! Has killed the most human beings!”

Sherlock is now sweating profusely. He feels like crying. He wants to get to his knees and beg Crew for his life. But he can barely move. The snakes are beginning to hiss together, like an evil choir.

“Most prized biters?” asks Crew as he turns to a horribly huge one. “I present the King Cobra! From the Asian continent.”
It is at least fifteen feet long!
Sherlock can’t believe his eyes. A gigantic cobra! It is green and black, pale yellow on an underbelly that is now visible as it twists. It stands up in a perfect cobra stance and looks like it wants to strike Crew. “Biggest venomous snake ever!”

Then he turns to one that Sherlock can’t quite see yet, sulking, it almost seems, in a corner. Several rats and a lizard lie beside it, very still. It is nearly ten feet long, pale on its
belly and purplish-black along its long top. “Mr. Holmes, look, the Inland Taipan, world’s most poisonous snake. One bite can kill one hundred people!” He glows at the boy as if his captive should be thrilled.

“Please!” cries Sherlock. “Please! Spare me!” He wishes he had not come here. He thinks of Irene and Beatrice and their tender touch. He thinks of his home above the hatter’s shop when he was a child, and of his dear friend Sigerson Bell. He wonders why he ever thought he should pursue this life of fighting crime.

“Yes?” asks Crew. He is smiling now, as if he is actually enjoying talking so much.

“I will leave here and never bother you again. I will give up crime fighting forever. I will let Malefactor be!”

“But,” whines Crew, “you have not met my greatest pet, one chosen for you, Mr. Holmes.” He turns to the wall. “Satan?” he calls out.

It emerges. It is the one Sherlock saw coiling around Crew from above, the one that looked like a monster from a book, whose size Holmes could not fully estimate. He can now. It keeps coming and coming and coming, slithering out from a place against a wall away from the others,
almost thirty feet long!
It is a sickly greenish-brown with black spots like diseases on its skin. Its head is the size of a football! Holmes can see now that it is chained to the wall near its tail, a hook impaled in it, so it cannot fully get free. Perhaps Crew fears it a little too.

“World’s largest snake!” whines the villain. “Constrictor for the ages, the ANACONDA!”

Sherlock realizes that he is seeing the thing that he had come to find tonight.
The murder weapon!
If he had only been able to live, he could have shown it to the police. He could tell them that
this
is what murdered Grimsby. They would have believed it. It is evidence enough. He thinks of that thick, purplish ring around the little man’s chest, of something smashing his ribs, bursting his lungs. Something, as the doctor would testify,
inhuman
.

But it is too late now. He has miscalculated. He will never utter another word to the police.