The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (17 page)

It was his man.

Holmes exhaled slowly.

Soundlessly, the figure came closer, and closer yet. Finally he reached the corner directly opposite, no more than twenty feet away. He stopped and looked up and down the street — as if looking for someone, or as if wanting to make certain there was no one there to be seen.

After some little while he crossed the intersection diagonally and sauntered into the other street. There he paused once again, this time just opposite the front entrance to the pub. Again he looked in all directions. Then, apparently deciding not to tarry any longer, he began walking. Slowly, hesitatingly. Then he picked up his pace, his step becoming more certain. Now with purposeful stride, his footsteps sharp against the cobbles, he faded once again into the fog. Clearly his manner suggested he had a destination in mind.

Holmes waited a brief interval until well after the shadowy figure had receded into the mists, until the sound of his footsteps began to recede as well. Then Holmes cautiously emerged from his hiding place and began to follow.

It was not a difficult task. If he remained a reasonable distance behind his quarry, if he did not get too close, he felt confident he would
not be detected. The fact that he in turn could not see his quarry was for the moment of little concern to him. He was content to place his dependence more on his sense of sound than sight: As long as he could hear the man’s footsteps, all would be well. And the footsteps were sharply clear against the wet cobblestones, a steady, systematic gait. The sound of them was strangely comforting, not unlike the ticking of a clock or the rhythmic beating of a heart.

But of course such fanciful notions never occurred to Holmes. He devoted his full attention to the task at hand, allowing no extraneous thoughts to interfere with his concentration. He maintained the steady pace of the man in front of him, staying close to the sides of the buildings and avoiding the dim pools of light emanating from the occasional street lamps he encountered, sometimes crossing from one side of the street to the other in order to do so.

A principal concern was to avoid unseen obstacles. Piles of debris were to be found as a matter of course in the gutters and against the sides of the decaying buildings that lined the street. And every once in a while he passed the huddled, silent forms of derelicts sleeping in stairwells or against the building walls. These he detoured around, and took special pains not to rouse.

The going was not easy. The pavement was slippery underfoot and in places even treacherous, despite his rope-soled shoes. To stumble, to slip, to collide with something unseen might create a noise that would carry far in the fog.
⁵⁰

His concentration focused as it was, Holmes soon lost all track of time, and because of the dense fog he was no longer completely certain where he was. He knew the direction in which he was heading had remained reasonably constant, and he knew in a general way what streets lay before him, but the darkness and the fog effectively kept him from defining his precise whereabouts. Obviously his quarry had no
such problem. The man seemed to be pursuing his course with total confidence, and his familiarity with the maze of streets and twisting alleys was apparent.

At the moment Holmes hardly cared where he was. His only concern was the sound of the footsteps ahead of him. They had stopped.

Holmes halted in his tracks.

He simply froze in mid-stride, not daring to move. He remained totally motionless for several seconds. Then slowly, ever so slowly, he lowered himself down on his haunches. He waited for several seconds more, listening intently. Then, crablike, he inched his way over to the side of the nearest building. There again he waited, straining his ears for the slightest noise.

In an instant he heard a sound, a sharp, scratching noise, and then another. Then a faint pinprick of light appeared through the fog. The man had struck a lucifer, a match. And though Holmes could not see him do it, he sensed he was lighting a cigarette. The pinprick of light disappeared and the footsteps resumed, and Holmes rose from his crouched position and once again took up the pursuit.

Several more minutes went by, and the pace continued unabated. Then, with no warning at all, the sound of the footsteps suddenly became less distinct and then faded completely. It was as if a tap, a faucet, had been turned. One minute there was sound, the next minute nothing.

Holmes rushed forward, his heart racing. Flinging caution away, he all but broke into a run. Coming to the intersection of two alleys, he abruptly halted, jerking his head this way and that in a desperate effort to catch the slightest noise. For a moment all he could hear was his own heartbeat. He took a deep breath and held it. He strained to hear.

There it was.

His man had merely turned the corner. The sound of his footsteps was receding off to the right, the cadence once again steady and
reassuring. Holmes shook his head and breathed deeply and once again took up the pursuit.

The way had become narrower and winding, the route now twisted and turned and he lost all sense of direction in the fog and darkness.

Within a short while a soft yellow glow from up ahead told him that he was approaching a wider street, a major thoroughfare, and he soon found himself at the intersection with it.

The street he now entered was lined on either side with lampposts on every corner, hazy orbs of light receding into the fog in both directions. Though the street lamps resulted in a slight improvement in visibility, it was very slight indeed, and for the moment he had no idea where he was.

But that was a secondary problem.

His primary problem was that the man he was following was nowhere to be seen, and the sound of his footsteps could no longer be heard.

He had lost him.

S
ATURDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
29-S
UNDAY
S
EPTEMBER
30, 1888

“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”

—
The Hound of the Baskervilles

S
herlock Holmes was at a total loss. The darkness and fog, the thick yellow-gray fog — so thick he could feel it against his skin and even smell it — had not only swallowed up the man he was following, caused him to disappear completely, but had caused Holmes to become utterly, hopelessly disoriented.

It was a wasteland all about him, an amorphous, dreamlike wasteland, the street devoid of life, as if the fog had not so much enshrouded everything as devoured everything. In every direction there was emptiness, simply emptiness: No movement, no sound, no shape or form. There was only the fog, pervasive and all-encompassing. It was what silence looks like, he thought.

The feeble glow of the gaslights on the street corners did not help to penetrate the vapors; they merely tinged them a sickly yellow.
Where before the visibility was a scant half dozen paces, now, on this well-lighted main street, it was perhaps twice that — no appreciable improvement at all really, because for all practical purposes he was still all but blind. To take a few steps in one direction or the other was to step into a void, swirling and vacuous. It was to walk off the very face of the Earth.

Straining to see, willing himself to see, he could just make out the dark, looming presence of what appeared to be a church across the way, but it took some concentrated study before he recognized it as St. Mary’s. And it was only then that he realized he was standing at an intersection with Aldgate High Street, which he knew led into Whitechapel Road, which had to be the street that receded off into the mists to his left. Well, at least now he was able to get his bearings.

Holmes’s knowledge of the streets of London was extensive, and he had gone to special pains earlier in the day to reexamine at length a detailed street map of the Whitechapel district to refresh his memory of it, so he had a vivid picture of the area in his mind.
⁵¹
And he was well aware of the options he was now faced with: all too many. The man he was following could have taken any one of several routes before losing himself in the fog. The corner of Aldgate High Street, where Holmes now stood, was not a simple four-way intersection but the confluence of several streets and alleyways, all going off in many directions, a disordered spiderweb of streets that twisted and turned without logic and seemingly without purpose. The streets of Whitechapel dated from medieval times and had not been laid out with any rational thought behind them — they merely happened.

Reviewing his mental image of this maze, Holmes finally made up his mind, deciding on what route to take more out of desperation than conviction. He crossed over to the other side of Aldgate High Street and made toward St. Mary’s Church, a brooding, grim presence in the
mists. He hurried past the church without a glance, his pace quickening now that he had committed himself to a destination, and turned into Charlotte Street, little more than a narrow passage located just beyond the church, almost missing it in the fog though he knew it was there. Once again he found himself cloaked in darkness. There were no street lamps here, and the only illumination was the murky, evanescent glow from behind him. Mindful that his silhouette would be outlined against even that feeble trace of light, he kept close to the sides of the buildings, clinging to what little protection they might provide should the man he was pursuing be waiting for him up ahead. He could not discount that possibility, the possibility that he, the hunter, had become the hunted, that his quarry might have somehow become aware he was being followed and was now lurking in the shadows waiting for
him
to appear.

With that thought in mind, Holmes became doubly alert for any sound, any movement, any obstruction in his path. But there was nothing to impede his groping progress, and no one lurking about to cause him any alarm.

Before long he spotted a patch of brightness up ahead, a hazy light seemingly suspended in the void. He breathed easier. It was exactly where he expected it to be, and he was drawn to it inexorably, like a moth to a flame. As he got closer, the glow became more distinct and he could make out the veiled outline of the public house he knew would be there, the light coming from a soot-blackened globe suspended over the doorway. From the outside the place looked very much like the one he had departed not so long ago: Decrepit, leaning in upon itself tiredly, the single large window looking out onto the street streaked with grime and rendered all but opaque. Holmes knew without trying that there was little he would be able to see by peering through it.

Just across from the pub’s entrance was a convenient doorway set back from the street, and he nestled into it gratefully. It was as good a
vantage point as he could hope for, and it provided him with a place of seclusion while he decided on his next move.

The problem that now faced him was a simple one, but if there was a simple solution, it escaped him. He knew that this public house was the closest one from the intersection where he had lost his man. It followed that it was the next obvious place for him to come. But if the man was indeed inside as Holmes prayed he was, it would be foolhardy to enter behind him. Holmes would be spotted the instant he walked through the door. He had not the time nor the ready means to alter his appearance once again, allowing him to adopt yet another persona. He berated himself for not foreseeing this eventuality and preparing for it. It was a rule of life of his that if one was prepared, it — whatever
it
might be — was less likely to happen.

The wisest course of action — perhaps the only one — was to wait for the man to emerge, if he was in there at all. But if Holmes’s conclusion was wrong, if the man was not inside but had made for some other more distant destination, then valuable time was being wasted, time that would be better spent even wandering aimlessly through the streets in an effort to stumble upon him once again, no matter how futile that effort might seem. There was a risk involved either way, but in neither way did the risk appear justified.

He stood there for several minutes, trying to make up his mind. Then suddenly the door of the pub opened and the decision was made for him. Out stepped the figure of a slim, pinched-faced ragamuffin, the sight of whom gave joy to his heart.

It was one of Wiggins’s band of street arabs, hands burrowed deep in pockets, narrow shoulders hunched against the chill and dampness. Undersized and no doubt undernourished, the boy was wearing a ragged cloth cap several sizes too large that would have dropped over his eyes without fail had his ears not been fortuitously prominent.

Holmes watched as the boy looked up and down the street several times before finally crossing over, glancing over his shoulder all the while as if concerned that he might be followed, unwittingly choosing a path that was taking him right past Holmes’s place of concealment.

Holmes, keeping one eye on the front door of the pub, waited until the boy had gone right past him, was actually a few steps beyond but still only an arm’s length away, then reached out and grabbed him, in one swift motion pulling him back into the confined space of the doorway and placing a hand over his mouth to prevent an outcry. “Gently now, gently!” he whispered urgently, holding the panicking child tightly. “You know who I am. I won’t hurt you.”