The Secret Fiend (26 page)

Sherlock Holmes has never been inside this rookery. He can feel his knees shaking. He turns down Church and then left onto a smaller road. He can hear people screaming, babies crying, their little voices hoarse. At first, he sees no one. Then he comes to Old Nichol Street itself. The buildings are short and skinny, made of brick or stone, or of tumble-down rotting wood; many doors are wide open. It is nearly pitch-dark, not a single gas lamp evident. On the cobblestones, the scene is revolting. A row of children, ten or so in number, lie almost naked on the filthy road among piles and pools of animal and human refuse. Fast asleep, some are so still that they may be dead. A pig snorts near them, a hag is shrieking from a little window at an unseen foe. The smell is overpowering. It almost turns Sherlock’s stomach. He hears the sound of footsteps echoing in the distance, and looking down the street, he can make out three shadowy men chasing a girl, a “lady of the night,”
though she is dressed like anything but a lady. The boy can tell from where he stands that her long hair hangs in sweaty clumps, likely filled with lice, her cotton dress is stained and ripped and torn. She is in bare feet. As they near, he sees the terror on her face. She is dark-haired, like Beatrice, dark-eyed like her too; in her fearful grimace he sees missing teeth. The men are shouting now, and she is screaming. She is clutching something in her hand. Perhaps a coin, maybe a morsel of food: something they want? This poor young prostitute is Beatrice’s age, just fourteen or fifteen. She sees Sherlock and reaches out for him. He can see – through the grime – that she might have been as beautiful as Beatrice, had life been different for her. His former friend, but for her job and meager education, could
be
this girl, running for her life in the Nichol Street Rookery.

“Help me!” she cries.

At that very moment, a bat-like figure appears above them on the only building of any height on the street – a two-storey stone edifice, the words
Jackel, Butcher
imprinted in chipped letters on the front.

“CHAOS!” it shrieks.

Sherlock looks up and freezes. It spreads its wings. It is about to leap, all the way to the ground; its target … the girl. The villains in pursuit of her freeze too. Then the Spring Heeled Jack spots Sherlock Holmes. He turns to him.
That face.
It looks like someone he knows. But it isn’t him.
It can’t be!
The expression is distorted, the eyes red, veins pop out on the forehead, the hair is disheveled, sticking up in places like devil’s ears, and when it speaks a blue
flame ushers from its mouth. But most disconcerting are the eyes. They look down at the boy with evil glee, a disturbed intent, as if the mind behind them is as mad as the worst lunatic in the Bethnal Green Asylum.

“SHERLOCK HOLMES!” it cries. Then it descends.

Just as it is about to crush him, Sherlock hears footsteps smacking toward him,
clop-clop
on the cobblestones like a racehorse down the stretch … and catches sight of Sigerson Bell coming at him out of the corner of his eye. His face is distorted too, devilry in it.
He is in on it after all
, thinks Sherlock –
trust no one.
Bell leaps, a long, fantastic leap, and in midflight, strikes the boy right in the chest. Sherlock hits the cobblestones, and all the air is driven from his lungs. He lies there beneath the bizarre apothecary, gasping for air, feeling like he is dying. He looks up into the cold black London sky. There are no stars, of course. Beside them, the Jack has struck the hard ground without the anticipated cushion of the boy’s body. But it doesn’t seem to care. It rolls and leaps to its feet. Sherlock expects Bell to get off him and allow the Jack to have him, to hand him over. But the old man speaks into his ear at break-neck speed.

“You have merely suffered a winding of the upper respiratory system. Relax, and the air shall return and proper functioning of the lungs will ensue.”

Relax?
thinks Sherlock.

“Stay on the ground, my boy. I shall attend to this fiend.”

As he finishes, Bell springs to his feet, spins on a needle-head … and confronts the Spring Heeled Jack! Down below,
head on the stones, not a breath of air in his entire body, Sherlock Holmes actually smiles.

“KEE-AAHH!” screams Bell.

The girl stands back in amazement. A bent-over man, at least a hundred years old in her estimation, wearing tight and nearly transparent leggings and an oriental bandana around his head, has assumed a fighting stance within a few feet of the powerfully built villain, the most feared and evil man in London. Bell turns his hips and powers a punch toward the Jack’s head. But the fiend is quick. He ducks slightly and catches the blow on the meat of his shoulder. Then he turns on the old man. Blue flames stream from his mouth again.

“Sulfur,” says Bell, just as the Spring Heeled Jack pivots on a leg, raises the other, and thrusts a kick into his opponent, using the sole of his big, black boot flat across the old man’s scrawny chest. The sound is like a gun going off. Bell flies halfway across the street and slams into a stone wall.

“Rat flatulence!”

The air completely leaves his lungs, and he falls to the ground and lies still. The Jack walks forward and stands above him, laughing.

On the stones nearby, Sherlock feels a wisp of air enter his upper body. He shakes his arm and lets the horsewhip fall from his sleeve, into his hand. The Jack is facing away from him. He struggles to his knees, pulls the whip back, snaps it in the air and cracks it at the villain. Just as intended, it wraps around his legs. Holmes jerks it violently, pulling his target off his feet, way up into the air. The fiend
lands on his face on the hard road surface without getting his hands down for protection.

But he is apparently indestructible – he immediately rises, kicking off the whip. There is blood on his face. He advances on Sherlock and glares down at the boy, just a few feet away.

It’s him!

“Please turn somewhat, about forty-five degrees,” says a high-pitched voice. The expression on the Jack’s face indicates that he knows it is the old man who has spoken and that he is now standing behind him. Still, he doesn’t see the Bellitsu kick coming. As the fiend turns his head just so – forty-five degrees – exposing his left temple, Bell’s foot connects with it at a top speed, perfectly, according to the rules of physics. London’s most feared villain is unconscious before he hits the ground.

“A patient taught me how to recover from a winding of the respiratory system in less then five point seven-five seconds. It has to do with the relaxation of the anal sphincter and –”

“Uh sir?”

“Yes, my boy?”

“I don’t think we need to know that, not right now.”

“Quite. More pertinent would be getting this chap hog-tied and delivered to Scotland Yard.”

Sherlock Holmes turns the unconscious Spring Heeled Jack onto his back. Robert Hide’s face is still distorted.

“It barely looks like him,” says the boy.

“Sherlock!” They turn and see Beatrice Leckie and
young Lestrade run into Old Nichol Street and hurry toward the scene. Bell turns back to the fallen man.

“Well, it isn’t him in a sense, my young knight. It is his double. When you mentioned the name of the apothecary, I knew something was not right with Robert Hide. Simian is a practitioner who dabbles in the dark arts. He went over to the shadowy side long ago. Most apothecaries try to help others bring health and goodness and progress of the human spirit to the world … then, there are others. I believe one of those vials you saw Simian giving Hide contained a substance removed from the reproductive parts of an aggressive male animal – perhaps a baboon or an ape. The other likely contained secretions from the glands that adjoin the tops of human kidneys.”

“Aggressive male animal?” asks Beatrice, as the other two arrive.

“Why that’s Robert Hide!” exclaims young Lestrade.

“Apothecaries have long believed that there are chemicals within males that make us manly,” continues Bell, “a powder keg of elements for the male arsenal, if you will. If one could find a way to multiply that supply, then ignite it with secretions from those glands that impart vigor to our systems, someone could possess energy almost beyond his control. A man could become a triple man! And the dark personality inside would be free to come forth … creating a fiend!”

“We didn’t agree to ’is doing anything like that,” says Beatrice.

“We?” asks Lestrade.

“I went to Blackheath tonight and waited outside Hide’s house,” says Bell. “I wanted to catch that Simian rat red-handed. But as it got dark, I saw a figure through the glass in Hide’s laboratory. He appeared to be putting on a costume. When I saw the wings, it did not take me long to comprehend what that costume was. Then I watched his shadow take the vials from the cabinet and ingest them. He stood still for a moment. Then he staggered, and his shadow transformed. It seemed to grow before my eyes. He began smashing bottles and test tubes in the laboratory. Then he leapt, in a single bound from a squat on the floor up onto a counter. In moments he was rushing out the door and coming this way. He took to the rooftops once he got to the north side of the river, ran along them, and when there were spaces between the buildings, he jumped … sometimes more than ten feet at a time!”

“’e must have been fortifying ’imself,” says Beatrice, looking down at him with sympathy. “It wasn’t in ’is nature to be so violent. ’e must have felt that ’e ’ad to … be someone else to do this. ’e had to use the devil inside. We didn’t know.”

“We?” says Lestrade again. “Beatrice, how can you know anything about this? You told me we were coming here to see Master Holmes … that he would be in trouble.”

“I have been ’elping the Spring ’eeled Jack.”

“You what?”

“She and Louise Stevenson and Robert Hide concocted the first attack,” says Sherlock. “They did it late at night when there wouldn’t be enough witnesses to intervene, just a few who might report it, give it credence when,
as they hoped, it got into the papers. They played it out, screams included, exactly as if the Jack were a real villain and they real victims.”

“Robert Hide,” says Beatrice, looking down at him, “would give ’is life for people like my father and me, and Louise and ’er poor family. ’e was excited about the changes that Mr. Disraeli had made and said that when a Conservative prime minister can do such things – give the vote to many millions at the stroke of ’is pen – the politicians must be at the point where they would make more changes. ’e said they would surely do almost anything to keep the peace … if their ’ands were forced. Robert thought now was the time to strike for the poor, for children, for women. ’e said we needed to create fear in the streets.” She looks sad. “The idea of the return of the Spring ’eeled Jack came to us.”

“You told him that you could get me involved, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but it was in the cause of good, in the end, Sherlock. I told ’im that I knew a boy, a brilliant boy, a wonderful boy, who believed in justice. I knew you ’ad ’elped the police capture some of the worst criminals in London over the past year. But the public didn’t know. I told him that the senior Inspector at Scotland Yard was jealous of you – ’ated you.”

“That is, perhaps, too strong a word,” mutters young Lestrade.

“Let us tell the truth, sir,” says Bell.

“But I told Robert,” continues Beatrice, “that you would never agree to ’elping us, that you would think our
plan reckless and criminal. So, we came up with a way to make you ’elp us without you knowing. And we enlisted Master Lestrade as well.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Women, Sherlock,” says Bell. “You see, they are not what they seem. Oh, excuse me. Miss Leckie, do go on. You were explaining how you deceived these young men so easily.”

She gives him a look, but continues.

“We never intended to ’urt anyone. It was the opposite. We thought a sense of chaos would push the government to
really
’elp people in need. But we knew that a simple Spring ’eeled Jack appearance, even several of them, would be treated as pranks, nothing more. We thought if we could involve Sherlock ’olmes, the boy whom the lead inspector at Scotland Yard ’ated, get him to pursue the case, and make sure Lestrade knew he was doing so … then the Force would go after it with everything they ’ad and the public would know that. Fear would grow. Louise and I, we know London, we know where the poor are, we live like them ourselves. Robert, for all his brilliance and understanding, doesn’t. So it was us who scheduled his appearances and moved them around London. In order to protect ’im, should he be suspected … I wrote the notes he left behind. Every few days I wrote up ’is locations and ’is notes to leave at the crime scene, and ’ad them delivered to Blackheath. Louise and I, we tried to stay away from
’im, so no one could connect us. And every day, I fed the press everything I could.”

“But …” gasps Lestrade, “you were involved in the murder of an entire family! Hide turned into a beast! You are an accomplice to a gruesome butchery!” His eyes are turning red. He reaches out and takes her violently by the arm. But Sherlock pulls him off.

“There was no murder. No one was injured by this Spring Heeled Jack … unless you count the self-inflicted wounds on Miss Leckie.”

Beatrice looks ashamed.

“No murder? What do you mean?”

“Horse blood, my friend: all that blood was horse blood.”

“So where are the bodies? Where is the Treasure family, those little girls?”

“They are upright and healthier than ever, probably living somewhere in Mr. Hide’s large home. They were his followers, friends of his who believed in him.”

“Yes,” says Beatrice.

“They are scheduled to leave London tomorrow by boat,” continues Sherlock, “for a better life in Montreal, in Canada.” He turns to his childhood friend. “I have only one question. Why was Hide carrying the note about me?”

“He wasn’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I planted it on the scene afterward, for Master Lestrade to find.”

“You what?” says Lestrade.