Warlock Holmes--A Study in Brimstone (19 page)

“No need to worry, Holmes, I expect the box shall soon make itself known,” said Moran, turning to smile at the smaller of his two companions. The stunted man raised his dagger and tapped it twice against his own chest. I turned back towards Holmes to ask what the little creep meant, but found he had gone. Holmes was no longer by my side, but pelting down the street in the direction of Trevelyan’s house. For lack of a better plan, I took to my heels as well. One cannot run with a walking stick, so I was forced to waddle after Holmes as best as my wounded and wasted frame allowed. I am sure my progress must have been more amusing to Moran than frightening. Over my shoulder, I could just hear him call, “Until next time, Doctor…”

My first instinct would have been to run up the stairs and search Trevelyan’s rooms for the missing box, but as I entered by the shattered front door, I heard Warlock cry out from within Moffat’s rooms downstairs. Bustling in after him, I beheld a horrible sight. I’d not had time to guess what purpose Moran had for the ladder and toolbox his elderly hireling carried. Now I saw his reason and—even as a doctor, accustomed to blood and viscera—it turned my stomach.

Moran and company had taken their time with Moffat. Four sturdy anchors had been affixed to the ceiling in the bedroom. From these hung iron chains; tangled within them was Moffat himself. He had been stripped to his undergarments and hung spread-eagled over his precious cashbox. He was soaked in blood. His face was pale. He had been stabbed in several places—on the inside of his thighs, the base of his neck, and the inside of his arms, just below the armpit. Though the wounds were small, they told a clear tale to my doctor’s eye. Moran’s little knifeman had nicked both Moffat’s jugular veins as well as his femorals and axials. It must have taken him some time to bleed out—indeed, he may have still been alive—but the wounds were mortal. Compounding this cruelty, the cashbox had been opened and placed directly beneath Moffat. The chains were arranged such that he could pull himself to one side, while he had strength, causing the blood to drip beside the box, rather than into it. As most of the blood soaked the carpet, I could see that Moffat must have struggled as long as he could to see that no blood touched the tousled wads of banknotes within the box. Yet, as his blood had drained, the strength left him. He must have slumped into unconsciousness even as we entered, for the thin red stream that dripped from his vast belly had only just begun to paint its crimson upon the money. From the floor above us, there came a terrible rumble. The house creaked and squealed, as if all the boards of her frame had warped, pulling at the nails that bound them.

“Oh, damn!” Warlock cried. “Quick, Watson, the stairs!”

We rushed upstairs to Trevelyan’s bedchamber. With a reluctant grimace, Holmes opened the door and peered inside.

How can I describe what I saw?

I am familiar with height, width and depth, but I think there must be four or five spatial dimensions, for the creature defied physics as I understood it. Its horrid appendages seemed disjointed, appearing in several different places at once, though through their movement I began to perceive how they must come together, into a whole. It had no color—or no color I could understand. Its shape was defined to me as the area I could not see—the space where human perception failed. It pulled itself up out of the center of Trevelyan’s bed, which wasted and fell in upon itself, even as we watched.

Only when Holmes shut the door did I realize that I had been screaming. I clutched at the sides of my aching head and felt my pulse pound against my hands with terrible force.

“Oh dear,” said Holmes. “It’s even worse than I expected.”

“Wha… what do we do?” I stammered.

“Hmm… That all depends upon you, I think. Watson, did you or did you not steal my protective amulet?”

My hand went to my chest. I flushed. Understand, I was not embarrassed that I had stolen the thing—Holmes had made it abundantly clear that such was his wish. No, I was merely ashamed to be wearing such a monstrosity; horrified by the feel of the ever-warming earwax of Holmes’s horrid trinket against my skin. Though I said nothing, Holmes must have comprehended my expression, for he said, “Good! Now understand, Watson: that thing is looking for a human sacrifice. Moffat is gone. Trevelyan is gone. There’s only one thing for it. Good luck.”

With one hand, Holmes swept open the door. With the other, he thrust me inside. The wave of sickness that washed over me made it impossible even to protest. I heard the door slam shut behind me and turned to face my destroyer. One of the creature’s unspeakable upper limb-things shot towards me and impaled my chest. It passed straight through me. I felt no pain; indeed I felt nothing touch me at all, for the beast and I did not share an equal number of dimensions.

Instead I saw a flash. No, I saw
the
flash: the fundamental, big, bright start to everything. All the matter that ever was or would be spun across an expanding cosmos in a luminous cloud. Gravity began to work upon it, drawing this sea of chaos into whirling spheres, which grew into stars and planets. Plasmas cooled to burning gas, then liquid and finally stone. Water rained down. Upon one such planet, slimy things began to crawl with legs upon the slimy sea. These creeping forms became ever larger and more distinct—fishes, insects, slugs and snails. They grew legs and traversed the cooling continents as plants sprang up all around. In an instant so small I could barely perceive it, man came. I saw the pyramids rise and the winds begin to corrode them. I saw great armies march, fight and fall. I saw my parents, younger than I had ever known them. I saw myself, but even to me, I was a thing of no value. What a small part I was, of the whole. What an insignificant jot was the span of my existence. It was already over, I realized. If ever I had truly been—if that tiny period of time was enough for anything to be said to exist at all—such a thing as might live in that inconsequential blink of time was of no account. I was gone as soon as I began.

Yet as this revelation struck me—even as I ceased to be—the tentacle that probed my chest happened across the amulet. There was a whoosh—a great rush as all of time fell in upon me, drawn into my chest and up into my body. Suddenly, everything but the room around me was gone. There were no more planets in my mind, no more stars. Something must have been holding me up in the air, for I fell almost from the ceiling down to the floor. My head crashed into the floorboards and my left ear flared with burning pain. I had a moment of panic, for in my time as all things, I had forgotten how to be only one thing. I had no recollection of how to be an animal and no longer knew how to breathe.

Old habits began to recall themselves to me and at last I drew a gulping breath. I curled up on the floor and stayed there, letting the air fall into my chest and out again, re-acclimating myself to the strange sensation of owning arms and legs. Behind me, a door creaked open. A head interrupted the light outside and poked in to intrude itself upon my bedroom realm.

“So…” said Holmes, “how did that go?”

* * *

We stayed in Trevelyan’s room well into the day. As the sun slowly warmed the room around me, I became more and more myself again.

Holmes set Trevelyan’s clockwork tableau before me. Over and again he wound it and I beheld the clown flung through the air to his sure demise, saved at the last second each time by the man on the flying trapeze. I marveled to see the tiny figures. They moved and existed in a way that so resembled free will, yet I knew the action and outcome every time it began. The little clown had no way to prevent his ordeal. The shining brass trapeze artist, no alternative but to save him. Did they believe themselves masters of their own choices? If so, they were deceived in that notion.

I cannot say why, but this was comforting to me.

“You might as well keep it,” Holmes said. “Nobody owns it now.”

Dumb, I nodded. After a time, I asked, “Is it gone? The thing in the box?”

To answer my question, Holmes drew two plain wooden boxes from the folds of his overcoat. One was from the ruins of Trevelyan’s bed, the other from Moffat’s study downstairs. He flipped open both lids and showed me the contents.

“See? Nothing.”

“So… what does that mean?” I asked. “Have we changed the world? Can time no longer waste us?”

“Oh, no!” Holmes scoffed. “The beast still lives upon this plane, Watson. We have merely bound it. Understand that the power of time to wither all is not anything the beast does on purpose, merely a side effect of its existence.”

“Oh.”

“So, it will still kill us all.”

“I see.”

“It just won’t
lunge out
and kill us all.”

“Well… that’s something, I suppose.”

“Against such a foe, Watson, yes it is. It is indeed. I think I’ll leave the boxes here. Moran must be skulking close by, waiting for the house to fall in and reveal where the dangerous box was hidden. Let him have it. He’ll find it disappointing, I think.”

I rose and wandered about. The rooms were familiar to me, but they seemed a distant memory. Still, I began to recover enough of my senses to recall that I had things I wanted to accomplish, both great and small. I drifted downstairs and finished one of the smaller errands, ere I left.

Holmes was waiting for me upon the bullet-riddled front step.

“Ready to go home, Watson?”

“Holmes, did you know the amulet would save my life?” I asked. “Or did you mean to sacrifice me?”

He smiled. “I knew that either the amulet would save you, or you would be doomed anyway.”

“I hate it.”

“Well, you don’t have to wear it anymore. I am sure that after such a strain it is useless now.”

“Good.” I dug down beneath my clothing and began pulling melted, re-fused chunks of earwax out of my chest hair. A charred and twisted sovereign fell from my shirt. Holmes swept it up and regarded it with a jolly smile. The chain I kept. I prize it still.

Holmes waited patiently as I divested myself of the ruins of his gift. After a time, I said, “Oh! Holmes, I got a present for you.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Here.”

In his hand, I deposited a pair of platinum cufflinks, emblazoned with Holmes’s initials in 24-carat gold.

“Wonderful, Watson! Wonderful! You shouldn’t have,” he proclaimed, tracing the W and H with his fingertip.

Though he had the means, Holmes was not in the habit of purchasing luxuries for himself. Still, he could appreciate fine things when they were presented to him. He seemed to like the cufflinks; I often saw him wearing them and occasionally smiling at them.

We stepped into the street and directed our steps homewards, to Baker Street. I don’t know if it ever occurred to him to wonder what I had been doing in the house that day, while he waited on the front step. I laugh to think that, in all the time we spent together, he probably never realized how Henry Moffat’s fine platinum cufflinks would appear if one wore them upside down.

TO THE BRILLIANT MIND, THE TRUE ENEMY IS
inactivity. At least, that’s what I tell myself, because I like to pretend I’m an intellectual. And because I know how badly I cope with idleness. I still cringe when I recall how much I hated the pause that came between Holmes’s and my first two adventures and our third.

Our Study in Brimstone took place over two days in early November. Just one week after that, we handled the Adventure of the Resident Sacrifice. I prided myself on how well my medical knowledge had prepared me to solve crimes and I was eager to prove my mettle on our next adventure. Yet the remainder of November passed without any call to action. December followed. Each telegram, each piece of post, each visitor to our door would—I prayed—reveal our next challenge, but each of them failed me. I hardly knew what to do with myself. I formed the habit of taking long walks about the city, if only to fill the time.

Returning from one such walkabout at around ten on New Year’s morning, I found Holmes slouched in his armchair before the fire, honking away with his accordion and singing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of his lungs. I waved a greeting and he nodded back, but any verbal exchange would have been lost in his cacophonous song.