Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (17 page)

The Prime Minister reinstated himself into the proceedings.

“A rather clumsy and discourteous scientific mind, I’ll wager,” he growled, peering at Mycroft Holmes.

“Yes, gentlemen,” he explained to us, “it appears that Professor Challenger’s actual formula resided purely within his own head.”

“My George memorized everything,” the lady sparkled. “He claimed it considerably reduced the clutter of his filing cabinets.”

Sherlock Holmes moved to the window, putting a match to another cigarette.

“Allow me to refresh my own memory,” his eyes took on a momentarily pensive aspect. “After Challenger returned from South America, he proposed to prove his claims of having discovered a hellish plateau, a lost world — if you will — still populated by the surviving denizens from the ancient Age of the Dinosaurs. As I recall, Challenger delivered such authentication by exhibiting, in person, a pterodactyl which he had captured and brought back alive to London.”

Mrs. Challenger moved to my friend, her dark doe-like eyes suddenly tragic.

“That’s exactly as it happened, Mr. Holmes,” her fine porcelain features flushed with feminine ferocity. “But the creature escaped and the assembly of scientists almost immediately pronounced it a hoax. Two of my husband’s most trusted colleagues, dear old Summerlee and young Mr. Malone of the
Daily Gazette
— both of them sworn eye-witnesses — were ridiculed into professional and public exile. My husband was furious. Even with such a temper like his, I don’t think I ever saw him so close to cold-blooded murder as he was toward the entire academic community in those weeks that followed. In the end, George vowed that he’d go back to that primordial purgatory and, once and for all time, return with positive proof of its reality for the entire world to witness.”

The heavy silence in the room was remindful of a wake. The dear lady fought back tears, more of outrage than of sorrow. Sherlock Holmes extinguished his cigarette and smiled at her kindly, if sadly.

“Madam, what you ask is impossible,” he spoke to her as if they were alone together in the room. “Surely you must see that I am at my own limits, considering my age, and for me to even begin such a journey would be madness. It is my opinion that your brave, brilliant husband met an honorable end to his noble life somewhere upon that mysterious plateau. There are no existing maps or charts of this lost world. No way to even find it, let alone search for clues, now some two years old, of his possible whereabouts. I very much regret that services such as mine are useless to you in this endeavor.”

Mrs. Challenger sank back against a chair as if all strength had left her. I felt powerfully sympathetic toward her plight, but Holmes, of course, was quite correct in his assertion. Without a map, without a guide, it would be like seeking a single lost speck of sand from among all the beaches of the world.

“Now see here, sir,” the Prime Minister blocked the door. “We do not request, but rather, command this duty of you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It is by royal decree that you undertake this mission, regardless of your personal feelings in the matter. Whatever the chances, or the odds, England must have that formula or our boys fighting for our liberty in the trenches will be slaughtered like sitting fowl. Even if there’s only the merest possibility of Challenger’s miraculous survival, surely the World’s Greatest Detective can discover this lone indispensable needle in a haystack for the sake of his nation?”

I didn’t like the hot rapacious gleam in Holmes’ eyes as he stalked so closely to the Prime Minister that his aquiline nose nearly brushed the suddenly fluttering mustache. A quiet knock at the door stayed his reply, for the moment.

Mycroft Holmes opened the door, receiving a calling card from the butler. His watery grey eyes were astonished as he read the name aloud.

“Apparently, Professor Challenger is … here.”

The room was silent as a confessional until broken by the clack of a lady’s boots.

Into the chamber stepped a tall, golden-haired young woman of twenty-eight or thirty. Her striking features were, somehow, familiar and yet the intense grey-green eyes almost buried her beauty behind a gaze of such piercing intelligence that I have never before witnessed in one so young and fair. She was, at once, Athena and Artemis, molded into the same divine being.

“Indeed, gentlemen,” her voice was low though not unmusical, supremely confident in her rapid inflection. “Professor Jessica Cuvier Challenger — doctor of medicine, zoology, and anthropology.”

Mrs. Challenger was clearly aghast.

“Jess … you promised—” she started and stammered, but the vivacious Amazon waved her aside.

“Not the first time I’ve broken such a ridiculous oath, Mother, dear,” Professor Challenger held a telegram in her graceful hand. “As is my habit, I’ve managed to discover the very thing that all of you are so desperately searching for. I am, in truth, my father’s daughter!”

She turned her cool scientist’s eyes upon each of us and finally relinquished the telegram to Sherlock Holmes. After scanning it, Holmes handed it to me with a smile of satisfaction. It was sent from Central America. I’m reprinting the message below exactly as written:

DELIGHTED TO GUIDE MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES TO LOST WORLD. WILL LAY ODDS THAT OLD SON OF A BITCH CHALLENGER
IS STILL ALIVE.

— LORD JOHN ROXTON

The cave man had slept for two full days. His belly again gnawed at him to be filled, but it was the desiccation of his painfully parched throat which provoked the descent from his protective little grotto fortress in the limestone cliff. He had chosen this refuge principally because of the small stream of fresh water that poured continually near its hidden entrance, but an aberrant ten-day drought had caused the flow to vanish.

There was no avoiding it. Gathering up his club and spear, slipping his treasured doeskin medicine bag around his burly neck, a chill raised the hackles along the caveman’s spine. His aching, adventure-etched body was already going through the motions before his clouded mind caught up with it. He must return to that monstrous river or die.

The long, snakishly winding, narrow river was an awful place, indeed. It was there that many of the terrible, most massive creatures of the Plateau came to sate their unfathomable thirst. Canopied in black-green shadows from towering vine-webbed branches, even at high noon, the river banks were a twilight world of creeping, crawling, living delirium and unseen impending death.

The cave man waited impatiently behind a concealing boulder, his swollen tongue raking across cracked lips. He knew what he was doing, the strategy worked flawlessly a thousand times past. The safest place among giants was to form an alliance with them.

The massive jagged-spined stegosaur wouldn’t do. The hulking reptile was docile enough, except when roused, but the two tons worth of meandering, slashing, spike-tipped tail made the beast a companion of unpredictable peril. The cave man warily kept his eye on the fin-backed flesh-eating dimetrodons, but the entire pride was too immersed in glutting themselves with the muddy water to notice him.

He’d nearly resolved to select the company of two enormous exotically crested duck-billed hadrosaurs, but then a great baritone bellow trumpeted the arrival of a lone hundred-year-old deinotherium. Even better, the cave man recognized the elephantine goliath from long-healed foreleg scars caused from the claws of great saber-toothed cats, the splintered skulls of which were embedded forever in the pads of a ponderous front paw, resulting in a familiarly distinctive limp.

Gathering up a bouquet of succulent orchids, the cave man showed himself plainly to the colossal matriarch. Her melon-size left eye regarded the snack tentatively for just a moment, then the long muscular proboscis snatched the juicy blossoms high above to her pink hook-tusked mouth. The cave man had chosen his allies carefully, knowing from endless hours of observation that the deinotherium were predominantly gentle, intelligent and entirely fearless, even in the face of the Plateau’s most fearsome flesh-eaters.

Confidently, the caveman followed alongside his lumbering guardian behemoth — safe in the shadow of her protective company — and drank his fill beside her from the edge of the beetle-infested, worm-writhing green-brown river. A swelling wave suddenly engorged the odious surface and for a scant second the cave man found his entire head submerged beneath the water. Coughing up the sulfur-flavored refreshment, he bitterly observed his leather medicine bag floating rapidly away from him. No chance of rescuing the precious little pouch, already it glided among sharp-beaked snapping turtles twice his own weight. The cave man’s sole luxury, absolutely irreplaceable, was bade a tender farewell through his tear filled eyes.

Abruptly, the source of the rising river became alarmingly clear as a wading herd of leviathan long-necked sauropods emerged from the bend of the river, the thunder lizards enormously dwarfing every other colossus among them. These majestic treetop browsers, the cave man knew, were the real lords of the Plateau, especially when they gathered in such abundant numbers. The danger of a panicked stampede of the lesser giants around him was a very real possibility.

With a rapid, final, and regretful glance, the cave man scurried away to his lonely lair.

“There, lady and gentlemen, is our Plateau!” Lord John Roxton pointed with a weathered bronze forefinger.

Our ominous destination jutted up through the eerie morning mist like a dark green jungle-haunted obelisk. Already the dizzying height within the balloon’s carriage had threatened to rob me of my meager breakfast as the humid tropical atmosphere rocked and swayed like an angry sea. It was, however, an excellent and even awe-inspiring view of our perilous objective. Lord Roxton remarked, jabbing an elbow playfully into my ribs, that he felt like a boy living out a Jules Verne adventure. Sherlock Holmes had said nothing at all since we’d cast off and he clung white-knuckled to the carriage handrails.

The last two months had been a flurry of planning, packing, and speeding away at a dizzying pace by motor, rail, sail, and steam. Twice Sherlock Holmes cautioned me that we were being followed, but would say no more about it afterward, even with me pressing him firmly.

Holmes had spent a goodly portion of our journey in silent study of Professor Challenger’s recovered notebook. The missing scientist’s distinctive barbed-wire scrawl contained enough chemical details on the mysterious super-steel formula to convince my friend of its possibility. Even so, he’d laboriously bemoaned leaving his little Sussex bee-farm and direly confided to me that all we were likely to find was Challenger’s bones upon that Plateau, perhaps to eventually jumble with our own. A sobering prediction, indeed, especially as the terrible formation loomed up before us and was, at last, an incredible reality.

“Is that the region you and my father ascended?” the young professor indicated a treacherous slope seemingly somewhat more passable than the others in our sight.

Lord Roxton laughed cheerily.

“No, Miss, we can’t see it from this angle. It’s climbable, obviously, but more than a mite dangerous. I like this balloon idea of yours much better — saves on lots of sweat, blistered fingers, and potentially broken-necks!”

She glowered at him, lifting up her pretty chin.

“Refer to me as ‘Professor’, if you please, Roxton,” her tone was as cold as it was arrogant. “I’m not simply some Kensington school mistress out on holiday.”

Holmes took a sharp long breath and let it out slowly.

“Oh, beggin’ your pardon, Mi — uh, Professor Challenger,” Lord Roxton grinned, winking at me, then spoke low into my ear. “Two of them in the world is rather over-doing it — what?”

I must say, however frequently disagreeable she could be, Professor Jessica Cuvier Challenger conducted the piloting of our little airship with the valiant hand of a seasoned expert. In truth, during the past several weeks I’d come to the pleasurable realization that the young lady was most remarkable in nearly every aspect.

Her knowledge of medicine was far in advance of my own, having studied in both Vienna and America. She flattered me personally, as well, with a profound familiarity of my written accounts of the cases of Sherlock Holmes — correcting some of my careless chronological blunders from her own prodigious memory — and finally interrogated me most brazenly upon the exact anatomical location of my Afghan War wound.

Indeed, despite her arrogant, quick-tempered, and almost artificial personality, the lady’s keenly disciplined brain, utter fearlessness, and her unrivaled physical beauty had charmed me completely.

Suddenly I noticed and followed Holmes’ gaze towards a small flock of birds pursuing us at a distance.

“An impulsive beak or talon might well rend a hole in this contraption,” my friend mused matter-of-factly. “I take it, Professor, that you’ve a perceived notion preventing such a catastrophe?”

She lifted her excellent field-glasses, nodding calmly.

“The silk is chemically reinforced, Mr. Holmes. I doubt that nothing less than a rifle bullet could pierce it. Also, I noticed you warily detecting the electrical charge in the air. You needn’t be concerned, there’s no chance of fire as these pressure tanks contain helium, not hydrogen.”

Holmes rolled his grey eyes at me. The altitude was making him a bit green.

“You seem to have thought of everything,” he said curtly.