The Secret Fiend (19 page)
Authors: Shane Peacock
“I … I … yes,” says Sherlock.
“Have you ever seen such a thing?”
“No. No, Beatrice, I haven’t.”
She lowers her dress and weakly smiles at him.
“I must be off!” He stumbles out the door.
But he doesn’t go far. He waits in the shadows until the police come, two Peelers on the run. He expects Lestrade to emerge soon, but he doesn’t. It must be half an hour later, after the hatter has returned and more police arrive, that young Lestrade finally appears at the door.
Sherlock pounces on him as he walks past.
“OH!” he cries, his voice an octave higher than usual.
“Calm yourself, Romeo.”
“I … I am as calm as –”
“The Lake District?”
“You have no cause to call me Romeo!”
“I don’t?”
“No, you don’t. And if you persist … I will box your ears.”
“Or shoot me with your pistol while hanging upside down from a lamppost?”
“Don’t tell my father.”
“Of course not … if you do me a favor in return. Stop by Scotland Yard on your way home and tell me if there is any news of Spring Heeled Jack attacks over the last few hours. And if so, I’d like some details, something the papers won’t have. We can walk there together. I’ll wait for you down White Hall Street.”
“I don’t need to.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The last few Bobbies who responded to our call were chattering like monkeys. They said they heard there were as many as three attacks tonight. The city will be terrified.”
“Three attacks?”
“And one wasn’t like the others.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was murder tonight, Sherlock.”
“Murder?”
“You won’t believe what he’s done.”
A HALL OF MIRRORSS
herlock finds it difficult to get to sleep that night. Master Lestrade hadn’t been able to give him many details. What the young detective knew was that the Bobbies were certain that the Spring Heeled Jack had committed murder of a most gruesome kind, that the policemen who were on the scene came back with blood covering their boots, as if they had been wading through it. The Bobbies said there were rumors swirling in the city about it and that they couldn’t say more. They’d been told that policemen were being pulled from their beds and posted throughout London, and their Commissioner was talking about putting a Bobbie “on every street corner.”
As Sherlock tries to settle down in his wardrobe bed, his mind is racing, imagining the events of last night and who the Jack really is. All he knows for certain is that Malefactor must have had a hand in at least one of the attacks, and that his rival isn’t above committing murder.
How far did he go?
Holmes tries to distract himself by reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps a fictional nightmare can replace a real one. But it doesn’t work. He sets it aside and lies back,
listening to Bell tossing and turning upstairs, and as he finally starts to fade to sleep, he thinks the old man has risen and is descending the spiral staircase, dressed as the Spring Heeled Jack. But when he awakes with a start all is silent.
He puts his head back on his feather pillow and is suddenly out in the city at night, crossing Westminster Bridge, rats scurrying along the cobblestones, crows cawing on the House of Commons, and bats swarming in the black sky above. As he glances up to them, he sees the Jack on the balustrade wall and then notices Beatrice and Louise running at the other end of the bridge. The Jack rises and leaps after them at supernatural speed, closing in with each gigantic bound.
Sherlock tries to run after them, but his feet are glued to the ground. He looks down and sees he is stuck in congealed blood. He has the sense that he is being observed. He turns and sees another Jack perched on the balustrade! It has Crew’s face. Sherlock hears a hiss and turns to the opposite side of the bridge. Another Jack is perched there! It has Sigerson Bell’s eyes. Another is near it, looking like Munby, a fourth is Malefactor, another John Silver, a sixth Irene, and another … Louise.
Holmes looks down the balustrades and sees that they are filled with Spring Heeled fiends, all the way to Southwark. And across the river he spots them flying from the buildings, huge dark bats in the sky. He turns back to the House of Commons: the Jacks are lining it and the House of Lords, and a cluster is roosting on Big Ben. A veritable swarm upon the Palace of Westminster, their weight begins to
make it crumble. Far away, in the direction Beatrice has gone, he hears her scream. The sound echoes throughout London, a blood-curdling shriek.
The Jacks have her!
He shouts out loud and comes bolt awake.
He can’t sleep after that, and cannot wait for the sun to come up. In fact, it is still dark when he rises from his bed and makes his way to Trafalgar Square to await Dupin.
What happened last night?
Soon the sun peeks over the London skyline. Fat pigeons are about, watched from above by the crows. The vendors won’t be here for a couple of hours, but Holmes waits, under the Nelson Monument. The old, legless newsboy sells only one Sunday paper – Sherlock’s favorite, the blood-loving
News of the World
. A few folks stroll by, early church bells toll. When Dupin finally arrives he doesn’t bear his usual smile. He rolls into the Square on his board, his jaw set and his eyes dead serious. Sherlock sees the other newsboys appearing, every one of them looking somber.
“Mr. Dupin!”
“No joy in London today, Master ’olmes, no joy. They’ll be saying prayers in the churches, they will.”
“I –”
“I knows what you wants. And I’m ’alf of a mind not to give it to you. Why was you asking about the Spring ’eeled Jack a week ago? What does you know, boy?”
Dupin doesn’t sound like his friendly self.
“I know one of the girls who was attacked, that first time. She informed me soon after it happened.”
“You means the one the Jack says is next?”
“Next?”
“The one whose door ’ad the note on it.”
How does he know that?
“I memorized it, I did, from today’s paper. It makes me blood run cold.
I will kill the poor, the ’elpless, the females. Just like our government. I’ll start with you. Chaos!
There is an animal, a freak of nature, on the loose in London, Master ’olmes. This ain’t like the one I remembers when I was young, or even the one from the Penny Dreadfuls. This one is the devil.”
Why did Beatrice give that note to the police? He had specifically told her NOT to. Or did she give it directly to the press? That would be even worse.
“What happened last night?”
“You don’t know?”
“I know it was terrible, that it was murder.”
“It wasn’t murder, Master ’olmes, it was
murders
, five of ’em.”
Sherlock’s heart thumps.
“Five? It killed five people across London?”
“Not across London … in just one place. It was a whole family, poor as church mice: the father, the mother … and three children, all little girls. It was ’orrible.”
Sherlock is speechless.
Could Malefactor do that? And if it wasn’t him, then who is this despicable fiend?
“What is our world coming to? It’s days like this that makes you feel it is falling apart. The government ’as to respond to this, Master ’olmes, the Jack is forcing them. Mr. Disraeli, ’es being tested. It’s as though this Jack is saying that if the politicians won’t ’elp the poor more … ’e’ll kill ’em all. It’s blackmail and terror. ’ere’s the paper. No charge.
I’d like to get them off me ’ands today. It’s like they is full of blood. When you read this, it will make you sick.”
Sherlock takes the paper. The story isn’t difficult to find. It screams across the front page.
EVIL IN THE ISLE OF DOGS
A most heinous crime occurred last night in the marshes on the Isle of Dogs. After the sun had descended, a fiend dressed as the Spring Heeled Jack attacked and brutally murdered a family of five. They were residents of nearby Millwall, living in the shacks on Maria Street, the father, Mr. Treasure, a part-time employee of the local rope factory, his wife a seamstress. It is a rough, industrial area, south of the West and East India docks, near the construction location for the new Millwall pool. There are patches of crude homes amongst the factories and shipping wharves, and great stretches of deserted land and black mud. Police seldom patrol there. The Force believe Mr. Treasure was attacked and killed on the doorstep of his little home, which was then entered by the villain, who knocked the wife and little girls insensible and, with fiendish strength, dragged them all out into the marshes in the center of the peninsula. Screams were heard and trails of blood were discovered near the Iron Works, the Lead Works, and the rope-walk that leads to the marsh. Though much
blood was found (in fact, it saturated the lying water in the area and turned it red) the bodies were not recovered. It is believed that the fiend butchered them and threw them into the Thames at the Blackwall Reach.
A note was recovered, which the police have not allowed the press to see. One assumes it said something further about killing London’s poor, and its females, until the government does more to help them. It seems a vicious and backwards way to go about being of service to the unfortunate.
Mr. Disraeli, who has been avoiding comment on other attacks, will almost certainly be addressing this incident in the Commons today. If he does not, Mr. Bright shall surely force him.
There were two other Spring Heeled Jack attacks last night, without injury, in working-class areas. Both times the fiend materialized briefly and instantly vanished. The police do not know if these appearances were perpetrated by the same beast responsible for brutalizing the Treasure family.
Sherlock looks up, feeling numb.
This doesn’t seem real.
He sees another man reading the same story not far away. The man looks shocked, his face as white as a Mayfair bed-sheet. The boy turns back to his own newspaper. It has one more paragraph.
It is also rumored that a revolver was stolen from a desk at Scotland Yard some time yesterday. The news that some villain, perhaps this murderous one, may have infiltrated the inner sanctum of our Force does little to alleviate the fear now gripping our streets.
It’s like one more blow in the stomach. And then his eyes fall on another report on the front page: of a bomb going off in a suburb, the act attributed to the Irish Fenians, those experts in terror, who are using fear to force the government to give Ireland its independence.
It takes Sherlock a few seconds to be able to move. There aren’t many people in the square at this hour, but as he makes his way toward a stone bench, he notices that others who have newspapers are also staring at the front pages in disbelief. He shoves his copy of
The News of the World
into his coat pocket and slouches down onto the bench.
Using Beatrice as bait, not an idea he was entirely comfortable with in the first place, is now impossible. The police will be watching the hatter’s shop like hunting dogs, likely stationing a half-dozen men there. Malefactor may not know that Sherlock was with Lestrade last night, but he
might
, and if the Jack is indeed one of his people, then it saw Holmes at the railway bridge. Sherlock glances around the square –
he would be after me with all his might – I may be next
. The boy has no real evidence that connects the Irregulars to this crime and even if he did, he doubts Inspector Lestrade would listen to him. He would be more apt to find a way to arrest him.
Bell always gives the boy Sunday mornings off. He can go where he wants, do what he must do. He sits on the bench, immobile.
Perhaps I should simply hide.
Beatrice is safe now – she doesn’t need his protection.
But can I abandon this case?
If Malefactor is indeed behind this Jack, turning angry, murderous, and anxious to contribute to the uneasiness in London, then he must be imprisoned, both for the city’s sake … and his own.
I must act! But how?
An hour passes. Various faces and actions involved in the crimes flit across his imagination. He begins to think about Louise.
Who is she? Was there a reason why the Jack attacked her first?
He considers Sigerson Bell’s comments about women –
they are more than they seem
.