The West End Horror (18 page)

“But it’s not been heard from since, surely.”

“On the contrary, my dear Watson, it has been heard from –and only as recently as last year.”

“Where?”

“In China. It erupted with an old vengeance: sprang out of Hong Kong and is at present decimating India, as you know from the papers.”

It was difficult, I owned, to associate the bubonic plague that one read of in the newspapers with something as primitively awesome as the Black Death–and even more difficult to envisage another onslaught of the fatal pestilence here in England.

“Nevertheless, we are now facing that possibility,” Sherlock Holmes returned. “Ah, here we are. Hurry, gentlemen!” He dismissed the cab and dashed up the steps of number 33, where we discovered the door to be unbolted. Cautiously Holmes pushed it open. Almost at once our nostrils were assailed by the most terrible odor.

“What is it?” Shaw gasped, reeling on the front step.

“Carbolic.”

“Carbolic?”

“In enormous concentration. Cover your noses and mouths, gentlemen. Watson, you haven’t your revolver with you? No? What a pity. Inside, please.” So saying, he plucked forth his own handkerchief and, pressing it to his face, moved into the house.

The lamps were off, and we dared not light the gas for fear of disturbing the occupants, though how anyone should have passed a decent night in that pungent atmosphere, I could not imagine.

Gradually, making our way back along the first floor, we became aware of a rasping, rhythmic sound, rather like the pulse-beat of some piece of machinery in need of an oil can.

Instinctively we made our way towards that pumping sound and found ourselves in a darkened room.

“Come no nearer!” a voice rasped suddenly, very close by. “Mr. Holmes is it? I have been waiting for you.” I was aware of a shrouded figure, slumped in a chair somewhere across the room by the windows which faced the street.

“I hoped we would find you in time, Dr. Benjamin Eccles.”

Slowly the figure moved in the dark and, with a groan of effort, managed to turn up the gas.

It was indeed the theatre doctor who was revealed to us by the faint light of the lone lamp.

But so changed! His body, like that of a wizened old monkey, sat shrunk in its chair, and I should scarcely have recognised the face as human, let alone his, had Holmes not identified him for us. His countenance was withered, like a rotten apple, covered with hideous black boils and pustules that split and poured forth bile like dirty tears. The stuff ran down his bumpy face and made it glisten. His eyes were so puffed and bloodshot that he could hardly open them; the whites, glimpsed beneath the lids, rolled horribly around. His lips were cracked and parched and split, with bleeding sores. With a chill shock shooting through my bones, I realised that the rasping, pump-like sound we had been listening to was his own laboured breath, wheezing like the wind through a pipe organ–and the knowledge told me that Dr. Eccles had not another hour to live.

“Come no closer,” the apparition repeated in a husky whisper. “I am going fast and must be left alone until I do. Afterwards you must bum this room and everything in it, especially my corpse–I’ve written it down here in case you came too late–but whatever you do, do not touch the corpse! Do you understand? Do not touch it!” he croaked. “The disease is transmitted by contact with the flesh!”

“Your instructions shall be carried out to the letter,” Holmes answered firmly. “Is there any way we can make you more comfortable?”

The putrescent mass shook slowly from side to side, a black, swollen tongue lolling loosely from what had once been a mouth.

“There is nothing you can do for me–and nothing I deserve. I am dying of my own folly and merit all the pain my wickedness has brought me. But God knows I loved her, Mr. Holmes! As surely as a man ever loved a woman in this world, I loved Jessie Rutland, and no man since time started was ever forced to do for his love what fate made me do for mine!” He gave a choked sob that wracked all that remained of his miserable frame, and it almost carried him off then and there. For a full minute we were obliged to listen to his dreadful sounds, until at length they subsided.

“I am a Catholic,” said he, when he could speak again. “For obvious reasons, I cannot send for a priest. Will you hear my confession?”

‘We will hear it,” my companion answered gently. “Can you speak?”

“I can. I must!” With a superhuman effort the creature hoisted himself straighter in his chair. “I was born not far from here, in Sussex, just over forty years ago. My parents were well-to-do country folk, and though I was a second son, I was my mother’s favourite and received an excellent education. I was at Winchester and then at the University of Edinburgh, where I took my medical degree. I passed my examinations with flying colours, and all my professors agreed that my strength lay in research. I was a young man, however, with a head crammed full of adventurous yearnings and ideas. I’d spent so much time studying, I craved a little action before settling down to my test tubes and microscope. I wanted to see a little of life before I immured myself within the cloistered walls of a laboratory, so I enrolled in the course for army surgeons at Netley. I arrived in India in the wake of the mutiny, and for fifteen years I led the life I dreamed of, serving under Braddock and later Fitzpatrick. I saw action in the Second Afghan War and, even like yourself, Dr. Watson, I was at Maiwand. All the time I kept notebooks and recorded the things I found in my travels, mainly observations on tropical disorders I encountered in my capacity as army doctor–for I was determined, eventually, to follow my true calling and take up research.”

He stopped here and again broke into a series of heaving coughs, spitting blood upon the carpet. There was some water in a glass and a carafe just out of reach on the table beside him, and Shaw made to move it nearer.

“Back, fool!” he gasped. “Can you not understand?” With an effort of will he seized the glass and greedily gulped down its contents, the water gurgling through his distended intestines, so that all could hear it.

“Five years ago I left the army and settled in Bombay to pursue research at the Hospital for Tropic Diseases there. I had by this time married Edith Morstan, the niece of a captain in my regiment, and we took a house near my work, preparing ourselves for a happy and rewarding future together. I don’t know that I loved her the way I came to love Jessie, but I meant to do right by her as a husband and a father, and I did it, too, so far as it was within my power. Up until that time, Mr. Holmes, I was a happy man! Life had smiled upon me from the first, and everything I had touched had turned to gold. As a student, as a soldier, as a surgeon, and as a suitor my efforts were always crowned with success.”

He paused, remembering his life, it seemed. Something very like a smile played upon what remained of his features and then vanished.

“But overnight it all ended. As suddenly and arbitrarily as though I’d been allotted a store of good fortune and used it all up, disaster overtook me. It happened in this way. Within two years of my marriage, my wife, whose heart condition I had known of from the first days of our courtship, suffered an attack that left her little more than a living corpse, unable to speak, hear, see, or move. It came like a thunderbolt from the blue. I had seen men die or lose their limbs in battle, but never before had catastrophe blighted me or mine. There was nothing for it but to put her in the nursing home run in conjunction with the hospital–she who only the day before had been my own dear girl.

“At first I visited her every day, but seeing that my visits made no impression on her and only served to rend my own heart, I reduced their frequency and finally stopped going altogether, satisfying myself with weekly reports on her condition, which was always the same, no better or worse than before. The law precluded any question of divorce. in any event, I had no desire to marry again. It was the last thing in my mind as I continued my work in the hospital laboratory.

“For a time my life took on a new routine, and I came to assume that I was finished with disaster. But disaster had oniy begun with me! My father wrote to say he was not well, but I hesitated to return home, fearing to leave my wife. Thus, he died without seeing me again, and my elder brother succeeded to his estate, After my father’s demise, my mother wrote, begging me to return, but again I refused, saying that I could not leave Edith–and soon my mother died, herself. I think she died of double grief–my father’s death coupled with my refusal to come home.

“And then last year, as if all that had gone before it were but a foolish prelude, a light-hearted glimpse at things to come, there came the plague from China. It tore through India like a veritable scourge of God, sweeping all before it. By the millions people died! Oh, I know you’ve read it in the papers, but it was quite another thing to be there, gentlemen, I assure you! All the Asian subcontinent turned into one vast charnel house, with only a comparative handful of medical men to sort out the situation and fight it. In all my experience as a physician I had never before beheld the like. It came in two forms: bubonic, transmitted by rats, and pneumonic, which infects the lungs and is transmitted by humans. By virtue of my previous research in the area of infectious diseases, I was one of the first five physicians named to the Plague Board, formed by Her Majesty’s government to combat the epidemic. I was put in charge of investigations into the pneumonic variety of plague and set to work at once.

“In the meantime, the plague raced through Bombay itself, killing hundreds of thousands, but my ill luck stayed with me and my wife remained untouched. Do not misunderstand me. I did not wish her to die like this–” he gestured feebly to himself–“but I knew what a burden her life was, and I prayed for her to be stricken and put out of her misery. May God forgive me for that prayer!” he cried fervently.

He paused again, this time for breath, and sat there panting and wheezing like some ghastly bellows. Then, summoning reserves of strength I did not expect remained in him, he leaned forward, seized the carafe, and drank from it, holding it unsteadily to his face and dribbling much water down his chin and on to his open collar. When he had done, he let it fall to the floor, where the carpet prevented its breaking.

“The Plague Board decided to send me to England,” he resumed. “Someone had to continue research while others actually fought the disease. I had had some slight luck with a tincture of iodine preparation, provided it was applied within twelve hours of exposure, and the board wished me to experiment with the possibilities of vaccination based upon my formula. It was decided that the work could better be continued in England, as the ravages of the malady itself severely limited facilities and equipment, as well as making it more difficult to ensure absolute control over the experiments.

“This decision was by no means painful to me. On the contrary, it salved my conscience with a real excuse to quit that pestilent place, which contained so many bad memories for me, including a wife I could neither cure nor destroy. For years I had contemplated abandoning my life in India, and now the legitimate opportunity had been afforded me. All due precautions were taken, and I brought samples of pneumonic plague bacillus with me to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital here in London, where an emergency laboratory was placed at my disposal. I continued my investigations with a vengeance, studying the plague, its cause and cure, relying heavily on the work of Shibasaburo Kitasato, director of the Imperial Japanese Institute for the Study of Infectious Diseases, and Alexandre Yersin, a bacteriologist in Switzerland. Last year both these men isolated a rod-shaped bacterial micro-organism called
Pasteurella pestis,
vital to the progress of my work.

“I laboured long and hard to integrate their findings with my own but found that when evenings came, I could stand it no longer. My mind was stagnating for lack of recreation or other occupation. I knew virtually no-one in London and did not care to speak with my brother, so it was hard for me. And then I heard of the post vacated by Dr. Lewis Speliman, the theatre physician on call in the West End, who was retiring. I visited Dr. Speilman and ascertained that the work was not really difficult and would serve to occupy my evenings in a pleasant and diverting fashion. I had never known any theatre people, and I thought the job would certainly provide me with some human contact, sadly lacking in my life of late.

“Upon Dr. Speilman’s recommendation I was given the post some months ago, and it made a considerable difference in my life. The work was scarcely exacting, and I was seldom called upon to treat more than an untimely sore throat, though I once had occasion to set a fractured arm suffered by an actor during a fall in a duel. All in all, it was a distinct contrast to the desperate search I was engaged in at Bart’s. I would scrub myself down at the end of every day, using the tincture of iodine solution, and eagerly proceed upon my theatrical rounds. When I had finished my tour of an evening, I returned here to my lodgings, pleasantly enervated and mentally refreshed.

“It was in this way that I came to meet Jessie Rutland. It had been years since I thought of a woman, and it was only by degrees that I noticed and became attracted to her. In our conversations I made no mention of my wife or her condition, as the subject never came up. Later, when it was relevant, I feared to tell her of it.

“That was the beginning, gentlemen. All was perfectly correct between us, for we had not acknowledged the depth of our feelings and we were both aware of the rules governing contact between the sexes at the Savoy.

“Yet, slowly we came to love each other, Mr. Holmes. She was the sweetest, most generous creature under a bonnet, with the most loving and tender disposition. I saw in her love the chance for my soul’s salvation. It was then that I told her of my marriage. It caused me agony for weeks beforehand, but I decided I had no right to keep the facts from someone I loved so dearly and so made a clean breast of it.”