The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (52 page)

“Is it then your theory that this situation may be explained away as mass hysteria?”

“I refuse to theorise until I have made the acquaintance of Mr. John Smith.”

St. Porphyry's Hospital was Georgian, but only in so far as it had been rebuilt from the ruins of
the Reformation. Parts of it dated back to William the Conqueror, and I once knew an antiquarian who insisted it was constructed on the site of a Roman temple. It had been by turns a redoubt, a prison, and an abbey, but the addition of some modern architectural features had softened somewhat the medieval gloom I felt whenever I entered its grounds; but not today. The air itself crawled with the horrors of human sacrifice.

The dread sensation increased when we crossed the threshold. An agitated orderly conducted us down the narrow corridor that led past the common room—the heavy door to which was locked up tight—to Dr. Menitor's consulting-room at the back. A stout rubber truncheon hung from a strap round his wrist, and he gripped it with knuckles white. The ancient walls seemed to murmur an unintelligible warning as we passed; it was the sound of the patients, muttering to themselves behind locked doors. This general confinement was by no means a common practice in that establishment. It had been added since my last visit.

We found my friend Menitor in an advanced state of nervous excitement, worse than the one I had left him in not twenty-four hours before. He appeared to have lost weight, and his fallen face was as white as his hair, which I had sworn still bore traces of its original dark colour at our parting. He shook our hands listlessly, dismissed the orderly with an air of distraction, and addressed my companion in a bleating tone I scarcely credited as his.

“I am honoured, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “but I fear even your skills are no match for the fate that has befallen this institution to which I have dedicated my entire professional life. St. Porphyry's is damned.”

“Has something happened since I left?” I asked, alarmed by his resignation.

“Two of my best orderlies have quit, and I've taken to arming the rest, much good has it done them. None will go near Room Six, even to push a plate of bread through the portal in the door. ‘You cannot starve the Devil,' said one, when I attempted to upbraid him for this insubordination. And who am I to lay blame? I'd sooner face a pack of Rider Haggard's lions than approach that colony of Hell.”

“Come, come.” Holmes was impatient. “Consider: If Smith's assertion is genuine, no door fashioned by the hand of Man can hold him. His continued presence there is proof enough he's either mad or a charlatan.”

“You don't know him, Mr. Holmes. We're just his playthings. It pleases him at present to remain where he is and turn brave men into cowards and good women into familiars. When he tires of that, he'll slither out through the bars and bid the maws of the underworld to open and swallow us all.”

His voice rose to a shrill cackle—cut off suddenly, as by the sheer will of whatever reason he retained within him.

I went into action without waiting for Holmes's signal. I forced him into a chair with my hand upon his shoulder, strode to the cabinet where he kept a flask of brandy, poured a generous draught into a glass, and commanded him to drink.

He drank off half the elixir in one motion. It seemed to fortify him. He took another sip and set the glass on the corner of his desk. Colour climbed his sallow cheeks.

“Thank you, John. I apologise, Mr. Holmes. I don't mind telling you I've questioned my own rationality throughout this affair. It's more comforting to believe myself mad than to accept the only other explanation that suggests itself.”

Holmes's own cold tones were as bracing as the spirits.

“Only the sane question their sanity, Doctor. Until this business is concluded, however, I suggest you let Haggard be and turn your attention towards the Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan. Their shoguns and pirates are healthier fare in trying times. Later, perhaps, you will agree to collaborate with me on a monograph about the unstable nature of the criminal mind in general. Certainly only an irrational individual would consider committing a felony as long as Sherlock Holmes is in practice.”

“Bless you, sir, for the attempt; but I fear I've passed the point where an outrageous remark will lift the bleakness from my soul. Smith has taken the hindmost, and that unfortunate is I.”

At that moment, the clock upon his mantel struck seven. Menitor started.

“Five hours left!” he moaned. “He's pledged to quit this world at midnight, and we shall all accompany him.”

“I, for one, never embark upon a long voyage without first taking the measure of the captain,” Holmes said. “Where is the key to Room Six?”

A great deal of persuasion, and another injection of brandy, were necessary before Dr. Menitor would part with the key to the room in which John Smith had been shut. He wore it, like the poetic albatross, on a cord round his neck. Holmes took it from his hand and instructed me to stay behind with Menitor.

I shook my head. “I'm going with you. We've faced every other devil together. Why not the Dark Lord himself?”

“Your other friend needs you more.”

“He will sleep. I slipped a mild solution of morphine into his second drink.” In fact, Menitor was already insensate in his chair, with a more peaceful expression upon his face than he had worn in days.

Holmes nodded curtly. “Then by all means, let us deal with the devil we don't know.”

The criminal ward occupied most of the ancient keep, with Room Six at the top. Sturdy bars in the windows separated the occupant from a hundred-foot drop to the flags below. I had brought my old service revolver, and Holmes instructed me to stand back with it cocked and in hand as he turned the key in the lock.

This precaution proved unnecessary, as we found the patient seated peacefully upon the cot that represented the room's only furnishing. He was dressed neatly but simply in the patched clothing that had been donated to the hospital by the city's charitable institutions, and the shoes he'd worn when he was brought there, shiny black patent-leathers to match his formal dress, from which all the tailor's labels had been removed.

In appearance, there was little about John Smith to support his demonic claim. He was fair, with a windblown mop of blonde curls, moustaches in need of trimming, and a sprinkling of golden whiskers to attest to his three days without a razor. He was a dozen or so pounds overweight. I should have judged his age to be about thirty, and yet there was a quality in his eyes—large, and of the palest blue imaginable—that suggested the bleakness of an uninhabited room, as if they had witnessed more than one lifetime and remained unchanged.

There was, too, an attitude of mockery in his smile, outwardly polite and welcoming, that seemed to reduce everything and everyone he turned it upon to insignificance. I do not know if it was these features or the man himself who filled me with such dread and loathing. I closed the door and stationed myself with my back to it, the revolver in my pocket now, but still cocked in my hand.

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” he greeted in his soft, modulated voice, gentled further by a West End accent. “The engravings in the public journals do you little justice. You have the brow of a philosopher.”

“Indeed? A late gentleman of my acquaintance once remarked that there was less frontal development than he'd expected.”

“Dear Professor Moriarty. Thank you for that unexpected gift. I did not have him down for another decade when you pitched him over those falls.”

Holmes was unimpressed by this intelligence; the story of his last meeting with that blackguardly academic was well known to readers of the account I had published in
The Strand
magazine.

“Shall I address you familiarly as Lucifer, or Your Dark Majesty?” Holmes asked evenly. “I'm ignorant as to the protocol.”

“Smith will do. I find it difficult to keep track of all my titles myself. How did you make out on that Milverton affair, by the way? The Dreyfuss business had me distracted.”

At this Holmes hesitated, and I was hard put to disguise my astonishment. The case of the late
blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton had only recently been concluded, in a most shocking fashion, and its circumstances enjoined me from reporting it publicly for an indefinite period. Holmes's involvement was unknown even to Scotland Yard.

He changed the subject, dissembling his own thoughts on Smith's sources.

“I have come to ask you what was your motive in attempting to destroy Tom Turner,” said he. “I shan't accept that fable you told Dr. Menitor.”

Smith replied, “I must have my amusements. Arranging wars and corrupting governments requires close concentration over long periods. You have your quaint chemical experiments to divert you from your labours upon your clients' behalf; I have my pursuit of unprepossessing souls. Exquisite miniatures, I call them. One day I hope to show you my display.”

“It's a pity Turner escaped your net.”

“Fortunately, St. Porphyry's offers a variety of other possibilities.” The patient appeared unmoved by Holmes's thrust.

“So I am told. A career ruined, another besmirched, and a third severely straitened. Will you add violent insurrection to your exhibit?”

“Alas, there may not be time. I depart at midnight.”

“Do you miss home so much?”

“I am not going home just yet. If Menitor gave you that impression, he misunderstood me. This has been a pleasant holiday, but there is work for me in Whitehall and upon the continent. Your Foreign Secretary shows indications of being entirely too reasonable at Bloemfontein, and the Kaiser is far too comfortable with his country's borders. Also, the Americans have grown complacent with the indestructibility of their presidents. A trip abroad may be warranted. It isn't as if the situation at home will go to Hell in my absence.” He chuckled.

“Blighter!” I could no longer restrain myself.

He turned that infernal smile upon me, and with it those vacant, soulless eyes.

“I congratulate you, Doctor. In matters of detective science you remain Holmes's trained baboon, but as a master of classic British understatement you have no peer.”

“Your own grasp of the obvious comes close,” Holmes observed. “How pedestrian that you should choose this of all nights to plan your escape.”

“It's hardly an escape. It's pleased me to have stayed this long in residence.
Walpurgisnacht
, that brief excursion when dead walk and witches convene, has a paralysing effect upon those who still credit it. However, it requires renewal from time to time. Perhaps after tonight, you will believe as well.”

Holmes made a little bow. “I accept the challenge, Mr. Smith. We shall return at midnight.”

“Shall I offer you kingdoms then?”

The detective paused with his hand on the door. “I beg your pardon?”

“I should admire to have you sit at my right hand throughout eternity, as your mind is nearly as clever and devious as my own. Upon second thought, however, kingdoms would offer you scarce temptation, as any comic-opera monarch who has tried to purchase your loyalty with promises of great wealth can attest. Cocaine, perhaps. Or morphine: bushels and barrels of it without end. My poppy fields are vast beyond measure. You need never suffer the horrors of static reality again.”

Outside the room, Holmes locked the door, his hand trembling ever so faintly as he twisted the key. He led me down the first flight of stairs, a finger to his lips. On the landing he stopped.

“We are out of earshot now, Watson. What is your opinion?”

“He is cruel enough to be whom he says he is. I should have smote him with my pistol for that despicable last remark.”

“I meant about his timetable. Midnight is but four and one-half hours distant, and he has pledged to quit these premises today.”

“I don't trust him, Holmes. Whatever devilry he has planned won't wait.”

“I disagree. In his way he considers himself
an honourable fellow. Tricksters never cheat. It robs them of their triumph.”

“However did he know about the Milverton case?”

“That was a bit of a knockup, was it not? Milverton may have had a partner after all—either Smith, or one he's been in communication with. Smuggled intelligence is a parlour trick. Mind-readers and spiritualists have been using it for years. We shall ask him after the stroke of twelve. How long will Menitor sleep?”

“Until early morning, I should say.”

“While he is incommoded, you are St. Poor's ranking medical authority. I advise you to place a guard upon Smith's door and another outside, at the base of the tower. I suspect our friend is too enamoured of his confidence skills to attempt anything so vulgar as an escape by force or an assault upon the bars of his window, to say nothing of the precipitous drop that awaits; still, one cannot be too careful. While we are waiting, I suggest we avail ourselves of the comforts of that public-house you mentioned earlier.”

Holmes's expression was eager. It carried no hint of the irritable
ennui
he had worn to my consulting-room. Although I was loath to own to it, I had the Devil to thank for that, at least.

“You must think of it as if you'd borrowed from our century, and must repay the full amount,” Holmes explained. “You would not return ninety-nine guineas and imagine that you had discharged your debt of one hundred. Therefore, you cannot consider that the twentieth century has begun until 1900 has come and gone.”

We had enjoyed a meal of bangers-and-mash at our corner table, and were now relaxing over whiskies-and-soda; taking our time over the latter lest their depressant qualities rob us of reflexes we might need later that evening. Holmes had refused to discuss Smith since we had entered the public-house.

“I understand it now that you have explained it,” said I, “but I doubt your example will prevent all London from attending the pyrotechnics display over the Thames come the first of January.”