Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (15 page)

“I’ve heard you were in a shipwreck in the tropics, afloat for days clinging to a section of broken mast, and a tiger shark bit your arm off, although you snatched the arm out of the beast’s jaws and beat it to death with it.”

“I’ve heard,” said Gedge, “that you were wounded in a knife fight with three lascars in a tavern on the Malabar Coast, so badly you had to have your arm amputated.”

Torrance gave a gruff chuckle. “Well now, there’s a grain of truth in both of those, but only a grain.”

“What happened, then?”

“Fact is, I did get bitten, yes, but not by a shark. It was back in my sailing days. I was crewing with a scientific expedition ship, the SS
Mayumba
, collecting live samples of rare and supposedly extinct animal species from the islands of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Leading the show was this young shaver, George Challenger by name, fresh out of university and looking to make a reputation for himself, as well as gather material that would help earn him his doctorate. You think I’m built big? Challenger was a giant, and devilish smart too, but also crude, opinionated, and not one to give a fig about the feelings of others.”

“Sounds like you liked him.”

“I did, and he me. Education aside, we had much in common. But to cut a long story short, we were tracking down a rodent in the jungles of Sumatra, a massive thing, a rat the size of a cat. No, bigger. Of a dog. I found it. Or rather, it found me. Sank its teeth into my forearm and wouldn’t let go, no matter how I whacked it and pounded it. In the end Challenger had to kill it with his machete, because there was no other way of getting it off me. He was not best pleased about that, I can tell you. He bawled at me for an hour. ‘Prize specimen, the fabled Giant Rat of Sumatra, we’ll probably never find the likes of it again, thanks to you I’ve had to chop it in half,’ et cetera, et cetera. And that would have been that.”

“But?”

“Damn me if the wound didn’t become infected. Badly. That vermin had been carrying some nasty germs in its gob, and within hours the bite was inflamed and starting to fester and my arm had swollen up like a football and I was stricken with a fever like you wouldn’t believe – the sweats, the shakes, cramping, agony. There was a likelihood of gangrene and even death, so young Challenger stepped up to the mark. I never did learn what he was a student of. All the sciences, as far as I can tell, and one of them was medicine. As the ship’s resident sawbones he saw there was only one possible course of treatment, so he got me stinking drunk on rum, rammed a pad of leather in my mouth so I wouldn’t bite my own tongue off, and set to work with a hacksaw and a bone file.” Torrance winced at the memory. “Saved my ruddy life, he did, but was it pleasant? No, it was not.”

“Phew,” said Gedge. “Rather you than me.”

“That was the end of my career as a seaman. You can’t tie a sheet or hoist a sail with only one arm. I had to look to other forms of employment to make ends meet. And that’s your bedtime story for the night, lads. Back to work with you.”

Gedge and Kaylock had ceased digging while Torrance recounted his tale of woe. Now, they stopped leaning on their shovels and resumed using them.

“Professor Challenger,” Holmes mused softly. “I know of him. One of these days I’d like to meet the fellow – see if he’s half the objectionable braggart everyone makes him out to be.”

After several minutes, the blade of one of the shovels thudded against something hard.

“Think we found it, boss.”

“Dig around it, then. Ever so gently, mind.”

Gedge and Kaylock scraped and spaded. In short order they had excavated a wooden crate, which they heaved out of the earth by its rope handles. It looked heavy.

“There we are, my beauty,” said Torrance. He set down the lantern some distance from the crate, then knelt to prise off the lid.

“Any chance you’ll be able to make out what’s inside once he gets it open?” I asked Holmes.

He shook his head. “Not from this vantage point. I shall attempt to get closer.”

“Be careful.”

Holmes crawled forward on his belly, slithering slowly from the cover of one headstone to the next, making incremental progress towards the trio of ruffians.

Abruptly, Torrance jerked his head up.

“What is it?” said Kaylock.

“Hush! Did anyone else hear that?”

Holmes froze on the spot, pressing himself as flat as he could to the grass. I nosed the barrel of my revolver round the edge of the headstone I lay behind, steadying my wrist with my free hand and sighting on Torrance. It would be a tricky shot at this range but not impossible. Should he make a move in Holmes’s direction, I would drop him where he stood.

Torrance turned this way and that, ear cocked.

“You don’t suppose it’s Bar –” Gedge began, but Kaylock interrupted him.

“Don’t say it. Don’t say his name. It summons him, everyone knows that. He hears it and he comes, like a dog answering a whistle.”

“Will you both pipe down!” Torrance snapped. “I’m trying to listen.”

Seconds passed, each seeming a minute in length.

“Nothing,” Torrance said eventually, and I let out a breath I wasn’t even aware I had been holding. “Not like me to be so jumpy,” he added. “I forget that tonight I have a guardian angel watching over me.”

I took this to be an ironic reference to the monument beside him, the marble angel with its wings furled and head piteously bowed.

Torrance returned to prying open the crate, and Holmes, likewise, continued on his surreptitious serpentine course across the graveyard.

What happened next was of the nature of a phantasmagoria, and had I not been there myself and witnessed it in person, I doubt I would have believed it.

The ground burst open, erupting from below. Turf and soil flew into the air, raining down in clods in all directions. Headstones toppled and tumbled. It was like a landmine going off. The terrific jolt sent me sprawling onto my back. Holmes, nearer to the point of disturbance than I was, was hurled sideways by the force of it and thudded helplessly into the pedestal of a raised tomb.

From a crater in the earth, a shape arose, sturdy, black and intimidating. A revenant from the nethermost pit.

Baron Cauchemar was back.

I was momentarily gripped by fear. All I could do was stare.

There he was, Baron Cauchemar. It was my first completely clear view of him, with no fog to blur and shroud him this time.

I saw those segmented limbs again, that torso made up of various cunningly interlocking metal plates. I saw also, now, how a kind of armature was affixed to the outside of each of his arms and legs, and how this armature, manifestly a means of reinforcement and mobilisation, consisted of rods and cogs that moved in perfect meshing synchrony.

I perceived other aspects of Cauchemar’s appearance that I had missed before. His hands were of exaggerated proportions, like huge gauntlets, and from the palm of the left there protruded a pair of spherical brass studs, not unlike electrodes. His back was humped, fitted with the housing for some sort of miniature powering furnace. Flames danced within, visible through small glass portholes, and steam purled out, expelled through louvred vents.

All this made him seem yet more monstrous and inhuman. Indeed, it crossed my mind that the Bloody Black Baron was no man at all, nor anything demonic, but in fact pure machine, a fusion of automaton and steam locomotive, built by some demented toymaker in a huge hellish workshop-cum-foundry and operated by internal workings I could only guess at, a brilliant profusion of cogs and levers.

No sooner had the idea suggested itself than I dismissed it. Holmes was right: this was surely just an extraordinary, steam-propelled suit of armour, a “mechanised carapace” as he put it, with a human wearer inside – a pilot, one might call him.

Holmes!

In my dazed, amazed state, I had neglected to think of my friend, who had been so violently catapulted aside by Cauchemar’s spectacular arrival from underground.

I scrambled over to where Holmes lay. He was semi-conscious. I patted his cheek a few times to bring him round. He moaned, eyelids fluttering.

Meanwhile, Cauchemar took a couple of steps towards Torrance, Gedge and Kaylock. They three were in various states of fright, Gedge and Kaylock most of all. Gedge quailed and Kaylock quaked as the baron thumped over to them.

Then – perhaps the most remarkable thing of all – Cauchemar spoke.

“Abednego Torrance. I have come for you.”

The words came out in a dull resonant rasp, as though intoned through a long hollow tube.

“This must end. You betray your own country. There will be no more hiding from me. Prepare to atone for your sins.”

Torrance responded with a defiant snarl. “I have wounded you once already, and escaped your clutches. I shall again. If there’s anyone who’s facing a reckoning tonight, it’s you, you jackanapes.”

Cauchemar appeared taken aback, this not a reaction he was expecting.

Then a shot rang out, the
boom
of a powerful rifle.

Cauchemar reeled. The round had caught him in the back of the head. Knocked off balance, he sank to one knee. The rear of his helmet now bore a deep dent.

A second shot clipped his arm, the bullet whining off to take a gouge out of a headstone. Cauchemar lumbered round, scanning for the source of the gunfire. From the angle of the shots, the sniper had to be firing from the rooftop of a nearby house that overlooked the graveyard, but which rooftop, I could not determine; neither could Cauchemar.

By now Holmes was back in the land of the sentient, more or less.

“Someone is besieging the baron,” said he, thickly. “This has been an ambush.”

A third shot found its mark dead centre of Cauchemar’s face. Astonishingly, the baron keeled over, like a tree felled.

“Heavy-calibre, high-velocity,” said Holmes. “The bullets might not penetrate his shell but the force alone is enough to stun him.”

“But who?” I said. “Who is this sniper, this ‘guardian angel’ of Torrance’s?”

Holmes did not have leisure to answer, even if he knew.

Torrance tore the lid off the crate, and from inside produced a stick of dynamite. He lit the fuse and tossed it at the supine Cauchemar. Before it even landed, he had fished out another stick and was lighting that one too.

Gedge and Kaylock scurried for cover as the first stick detonated.

Cauchemar managed to regain his senses in the nick of time. He dug his heels into the ground, and his armour’s feet shot out, extending hydraulically from his legs. This propelled him several yards across the grass, so that the dynamite, which had been lying right next to him, blew up nothing but earth.

The next stick came fizzing through the air at him, tumbling end over end.

Miraculously, Cauchemar swatted it aside with a sweep of his arm, like a batsman returning a skilfully delivered googly. The dynamite spun towards Gedge and Kaylock, who were huddled together beside the church. They both ducked behind a buttress, which bore the brunt of the blast and saved them from harm.

Baron Cauchemar rallied, leaping to his feet with a clanking of metal and a great rushing hiss of steam. His glowing eyes, I now perceived, were circular lenses set into his mask and illuminated from within. One of the lenses had been cracked by the second gunshot. Through them, a pair of only-too-human eyes peered out, seeking Torrance.

A slew of rifle rounds thudded and whacked into Cauchemar’s chest. He staggered backwards under the onslaught, unable to catch his balance. No sooner had he recoiled from one bullet than another smacked into him. The sniper, I concluded, must be using a bolt-action repeater in order to be able to deliver such rapid fire, perhaps a Lee Metford or a Lebel.

Cauchemar was driven against the flank of the church by the volley. This seemed to be what the sniper, clearly a crack marksman, intended, for no further shots came the armoured giant’s way.

What did come his way was a bundle of dynamite sticks from Torrance, the lit fuse sizzling with barely an inch left to go.

“Watson!” Holmes cried out. “Look out! This is not going to end well.”

The dynamite went off with one of the loudest bangs I have ever heard – louder even than the bomb at Waterloo Station.

Cauchemar was slammed against the church by the explosion, with such force that his body was partially embedded in the stonework.

The inevitable ensued.

That church was already a teetering, enfeebled edifice, barely able to remain upright unaided. The dynamite, and Cauchemar, proved the last straw as far as it was concerned.

A deep, aching rumble reverberated through the venerable building, a cavernous groan as of a leviathan in distress. The fissures which crazed the stonework all over widened and lengthened, joining up, multiplying. Tiles slithered down from the roof, shattering as they hit the ground, a hailstorm of slate. Gargoyles plummeted from the sky like pheasants at a shoot. The church shuddered along its entire length, from narthex to sacristy. Stained-glass windows burst outward in sprays of many-coloured shards.

Gedge and Kaylock were showing a clean pair of heels, haring away from the scene. Torrance was not far behind them.

Holmes and I were likewise on our feet and making good our escape, in a different direction. Holmes, however, had not yet fully recovered from having the wits and the wind knocked out of him, and I was obliged to support him. Hence our progress was not as fast as that of the three ruffians.

The rumbling intensified. I glanced over my shoulder, and what I beheld all but unmanned me.

The bell tower was crumbling, along with the rest of the church.

Holmes looked round too.

Before our very eyes, the entire tower sheared loose and tipped over.

Straight towards us.

“Watson! Move!”

Holmes gave me an almighty shove from behind. I stumbled forwards and fell headlong onto the grass. Behind me came the thunder of countless tons of limestone and mortar succumbing to gravity and plunging to earth. It was as though the fist of God Himself had descended from the heavens to punch the ground.