Eight Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Page 3

  So it was that I found myself both worried and saddened by the prospect before us one evening after our supper. Holmes wore a mouse-colored dressing gown and lay in lethargy on the couch. I tried to cheer him up by reading to him from one of the agony columns, which he of late had not even had the energy to clip and file. The plaintive whining contained in the advertisements, which would at one time have roused his enthusiasm, did not stir him, however, and I was on the point of giving up when I heard someone ascending the stairs.

  Had Holmes been in his usual state of keen awareness, he would have heard the footsteps long before I, but as it was, he hardly glanced up when I rose from my chair to see who our visitor might be.

  “There is no hurry, Watson,” Holmes said, and then he proved that he was not so deficient in alertness as I had thought. “There are two of them, and judging by the slow sluff of their tread, I would say they are not eager to see us.”

  Indeed, they were not, for the footsteps ceased at the head of the stairs, and I heard muffled whispers through the door. I hesitated for a moment, but then the footfalls resumed and someone knocked on the door, which I opened at once.

  Two men, as Holmes had informed me there would be, stood there, hats in their hands. One man was well-formed and athletic, with a well-trimmed beard and hair combed close to his head. His clean-shaven companion had a square chin and wide forehead. He too had the look of an athlete with powerful build and wide chest. Both men wore black suits and waistcoats under their topcoats.

  “Do I have the honor of addressing Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” said the man with the beard.

  “No,” I responded. “I am Dr. Watson.”

  I turned to indicate Holmes, but he was no longer on the couch behind me.

  “Holmes will be here momentarily,” I said, hoping that I was correct. “Please come in.”

  I ushered our visitors into the room, and Holmes emerged from his bedroom almost at once, the mouse-colored gown now removed to reveal him fully dressed and alert, his eyes alight in his thin hawk-like face as if he had never been drowsing at all.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said with an enthusiasm I had not heard in quite some time. He clearly anticipated something of interest. “I am Sherlock Holmes.”

  “And I am Bram Stoker,” said the bearded man. “My companion is Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. We have come to seek your help and advice.”

  “Please take their hats, Watson,” Holmes said, and when I had done so, he waved the men toward the couch that had somehow been made to look fresh in the seconds when I had not been looking. “Take a seat and tell me more specifically what it is that brings you here.”

  The men took their places on the couch, both of them sitting on the edge, their backs straight. I returned to my chair, while Holmes leaned on the mantel. Stoker looked at Holmes, but Van Helsing’s gaze was fixed on Holmes’s old work table with its acid-stained deal top covered with beakers and bottles and tubes containing chemicals whose nature was unknown to me but certainly important to Holmes’s studies when he was in better fettle.

  “I take it that you have an interest in science, Dr. Van Helsing,” said Holmes.

  Van Helsing turned to look at Holmes, but it was Stoker who spoke. “Dr. Van Helsing is from Amsterdam, where he is considered one of the most advanced scientists of the present day. But he is much more. He is a medical doctor, a doctor of letters, and a student of … let us call them the occult sciences.”

  Holmes kept a perfectly straight face, which must have been difficult for him, considering his opinion of the occult.

  “Indeed,” he said. “And what brings you to London, Dr. Van Helsing.”

  “A matter of some urgency,” Van Helsing said. “Made even more urgent by certain recent events.”

  “And you are from Amsterdam?”

  Van Helsing straightened a bit. “My family has lived there for generations.”

  “Yet you speak with a German accent.”

  I had not detected such an accent, but Holmes’s ear was much keener than mine.

  “German is one of my languages,” Van Helsing said. “I use it so often in my travels that it has become almost second nature to me. Perhaps that would explain it.”

  “Perhaps,” said Holmes. “But now you must tell us of the urgent matter that has brought you not only to London but to seek my advice.”

  “Vampires,” said Stoker.

  Sherlock Holmes is not an entirely humorless man, and I believe I saw a smile twitch at the corners of his mouth. The movement was so slight that it would have passed unnoticed by anyone less accustomed than I to his feelings about such things as vampire, and I do not believe our guests took notice of it.

  “Vampires,” Holmes said. “In London.”

  “Yes,” said Stoker, leaning forward, his voice urgent. “We have killed one.”

  “My word!” I said, almost leaping from my chair.

  Holmes did not stir. He said, “Vampires have existed in legend for many years. I had not heard of one in London before now.”

  While Holmes did not believe in the occult, he was well versed in tales of blood down through the centuries. He had spoken to me before of Vlad Tepes and Countess Bathory, whose depredations had been worked into some of the vampire legends.

  “Despite what you have heard or not heard,” Stoker said, “the vampires are here now. Soon many people will be dying if they are not stopped.”

  “You have stopped one of them, however,” said Holmes. “Or so you said.”

  “Therein lies the problem,” said Van Helsing. “We killed the creature, but we did not take the proper precautions. The thing has escaped! Mein Gott! I fear that it has risen from its gory bed to walk the night and create others of its hellish kind! And the fault is ours!”

  Holmes’s eyes widened. “Create others?”

  “When the vampire feeds on the blood of its victims, they can be transformed,” said Stoker. “The victims become hungry for blood themselves.”

  “We must stop them!” Van Helsing cried, rising from his seat. “Before it is too late!”

  I shared of the man’s agitation, but Holmes, as always, remained calm.

  “First,” said he, “tell me how you killed this … vampire, and of the precautions you failed to take.”

  “The vampire was killed properly,” Van Helsing said, looking at Stoker.

  Stoker hung his head and stared at his boots. “The fault is mine. The death itself was gory beyond anything I could imagine. I could not allow Van Helsing to go through with the rest.”

  “The rest?” said Holmes.

  “The creature must be beheaded to make certain that it never rises from its grave again,” Van Helsing said. “I was prepared to do the job, but Mr. Stoker was not. And now it is too late.” He shook his head. “Too late.”

  “I refuse to believe that it is too late,” said Stoker. He looked at Holmes. “You can see our predicament. We must find the creature before it feeds. We must find it tonight.”

  “Have you informed the police?” asked Holmes.

  “The police?” Stoker gave a bitter laugh. “Do you think they would believe us? Creatures of the night, men who become bats? If they did not put us in a madhouse, they would arrest us and put us in prison as if we were the killers.”

  “And why,” said Holmes, “would they do such a thing as that?”

  Van Helsing stood up. “Because of the evidence. You must see it. You must help us, we beg of you.”

  Holmes was no more likely to believe in creatures of the night than were the police, but he was certainly interested in physical evidence. He moved away from the mantel and stood near our visitors.

  “It appears, then, that we must look into this matter,” he said, with a glance in my direction. “Dr. Watson will, of course, assist me in my inquiries.”

  It was Stoker’s turn to rise from where he sat. “That is wonderful news,” he said. “For I believe that you are the only man in London who can help us.”

 
; Holmes gave a slight smile. “In all modesty, I must say that there are others. Two, possibly three. But that is beside the point. Where is the evidence you spoke of?”

  “The St. Marylebone Cemetery,” Stoker said. “The creature must sleep in a coffin on his native earth. Where better than in a crypt?”

  “Where, indeed?” said Holmes. “I must ask you and Dr. Van Helsing to go there at once. Watson and I will meet you at the gate, as there are certain preparations that we must make.”

  “The matter is urgent,” said Stoker. “You must not delay.”

  “There will be no delay,” said Holmes. “We will be arrive almost as soon as you do.”

  Stoker did not appear convinced, but at a look from Holmes I gathered up our visitors’ hats and handed them to their owners. After a few more protestations about the urgency of the affair, Van Helsing and Stoker departed.

  Holmes at once moved to the mantel and selected a briar pipe from among several that lay there. He took tobacco from the toe of a Persian slipper, tamped it into the bowl of the pipe, and lit it. When he had it going to his satisfaction, he turned and addressed me.

  “What do you make of our visitors, Watson?” he asked between puffs.

  “They seem desperately in earnest,” I said, “though I find it difficult to credit their vanished vampire.”

  Holmes nodded. “So do I, Watson. So do I. I could list for you all the reasons why such a creature as a vampire could not possibly exist, but that is, I am sure, quite unnecessary.”

  “Yes, it is. As a doctor, I know something about the spread of disease. If vampirism existed in the form Mr. Stoker described, it would be something like a communicable disease. It would be like a plague. Before many years had passed all of Europe would be infected.”

  “That has not happened, of course,” said Holmes.

  “No.” I watched him as he smoked calmly. “Should we not be making the preparations you mentioned?”

  “And what might those be?” Holmes asked.

  “A wooden stake?”

  Holmes chuckled. “You can be quite droll at times, Watson. I have always said you had hidden depths. But fetch your pistol, for I believe that will be all we might need for this night’s work.”

  The possibility of danger, along with a puzzle, were just the things to bring Holmes back to a semblance of his better self. I got the pistol, and we were ready to go.

  It was a warm but misty night, and an oily fog seemed to rise up out of the ground. Clouds obscured the stars and moon, and the street lamps were merely a hazy glow. Holmes wore a close-fitting cloth cap, and I wore a hat against the dampness. Occasionally a cab would rattle past us in the street, but we could hardly glimpse it through the fog.

  The walk to the cemetery seemed to take a long time because the fog made the city an unfamiliar territory, but we arrived eventually and found Stoker and Van Helsing waiting at the gate.

  The cemetery itself was not associated with a church. It had not been so long that so many people were buried in London churchyards that there was no more room for the dead. Bodies lay atop bodies, and those who came to visit the graves of their departed relatives were sometimes greeted by the gruesome sight of bones that stuck out of the ground as if the dead were seeking to rejoin the living. As a doctor, I knew that such burial practices were a hazard to the health of the city, and I was quite pleased when laws were passed to allow the establishment of private cemeteries such as the one at whose entrance we now stood.

  Stoker and Van Helsing were already present, awaiting our arrival. They greeted us, but Holmes brushed the greeting aside and said, “Take us to the vampire.”

  “The vampire, as we told you, is gone,” said Stoker. “We can, however, take you to the tomb where he lay.”

  “Then do,” said Holmes, and we followed the two men into the cemetery.

  Van Helsing had a dark lantern, and he led us along a winding route through the graveyard. In the darkness and the fog, I was soon disoriented. The fog dampened my face, and I glimpsed dark stones and obelisks that reared up out of the fog on all sides. I hoped that I would not trip over a foot stone and fall.

  As we walked, it seemed to me that I heard someone else in the graveyard, the occasional ghostly step that might have been only the echo of our own. I glanced at Holmes, who was close beside me, but if he heard, he gave no sign.

  I thought about vampires and their need to sleep in their native earth. I thought about the supposedly empty crypt to which we were making our way. What if the vampire was returning?

  I knew, of course, that there were no vampires, but in the fog and darkness, it was only too easy for the logical part of one’s mind to allow strange notions to intrude. I mentally brushed them aside and followed along behind Stoker and Van Helsing, but while I kept listening for the sounds, I did not hear them again.

  After what seemed quite some time, though it must have been only a few minutes, we reached a stone crypt. The door stood open, and the inside was even darker than the night around us.

  Van Helsing did not hesitate but walked right inside, Stoker following. Holmes and I stopped outside.

  “Well, Watson,” said Holmes, “what do you think? Shall we follow them?”

  I did not know what to think, so all I said was, “That is why we came.”

  Holmes nodded. “You are right, as usual, Watson. Come. Let us see what our friends have to show us.”

  Shadows cast by the two lanterns danced around the crypt as we entered. Just as I passed through the doorway, I thought I heard the spectral sound once again, but I refused to give in and glance back.

  The inside of the crypt was ghastly enough in its own aspect to make me forget the foolish idea that the vampire might be lurking outside. On a raised block there sat a wooden coffin, the lid flung back as if someone inside had made a hasty exit. The cerements were flung about and horribly stained with something that must have been blood, though its color was impossible to discern in the dim light of the lanterns. From my vantage point, it appeared to be almost black.

  The smell in the confined space was terrible. In wartime, one becomes all too accustomed to the smell of blood, and in Afghanistan, my nostrils had been clogged with it more than once. The Jezail bullet that I had taken at the Battle of Maiwand seemed suddenly to throb within me.

  There was, however, something different, although indefinable, about the smell inside the crypt. Could it have been the difference between vampire and human?

  Van Helsing and Stoker had paused upon entering, but now the doctor strode to the coffin and reached within. From among the bloody winding-sheets, he pulled an object that he then held aloft for Holmes to see. It was a wooden stake, sharpened to a point and covered in gore.

  “This is the instrument of the vampire’s supposed death,” Van Helsing said. “Would that we had done all that was necessary to dispatch it forever.”

  “I bear the blame for that,” Stoker said. “But if Sherlock Holmes can find the creature, I will not fail you again.”

  Holmes closed the distance between himself and the doctor.

  “May I see the stake?” he said, and Van Helsing handed it to him.

  Holmes ran his hand over the smooth wood and gave the stake back to Van Helsing, who put it back into the coffin.

  From somewhere, Holmes brought out his magnifying lens and examined the cerements, not touching them but moving slowly down the side of the box. At one point, he reached out and plucked something from the sheets and held it under the lens.

  “A hair?” said Van Helsing.

  “So it appears,” Holmes said, tucking it away without further comment.

  After a few more moments of examining the coffin and its contents, Holmes bent down to the stone floor of the crypt, which, like the cerements, was stained with blood. A small pool if it had formed in a pocket in the stone, and Holmes touched it with a finger. A droplet clung to his fingertip, and he rubbed the blood between fingertip and thumb. Nodding as if satisfied, he wiped th
e blood on the cerements.

  “Well?” said Van Helsing. “Do you believe you can be of any help in this case?”

  “I daresay I can.” He paused and turned toward the entrance of the crypt. “But what was that noise?”

  I, too, heard the stealthy sound of a footstep, and a chill went through me, such a chill that the throb of the Jezail bullet was forgotten.

  “Someone is out there,” I said. “Someone has been following us since we entered the cemetery.”

  “Someone?” said Stoker. “Or something?”

  I had no answer for that, but Holmes did. He walked to the heavy iron door of the crypt and pushed it shut. It ground across the stone floor, and I leapt to help him. Just as it was about to close, someone—or something—fell heavily against it as if trying to push it back upon us, but we were too strong, and the door closed with a satisfying clank. There was, of course, no lock on the inside, but I leant back against it. I would hold it firm, I told myself, no matter what might be outside striving against me. I felt several hard shoves, but though my feet slipped a bit, I was equal to the task of keeping the door well closed.

  “What is out there?” I gasped. “Is it a man or monster?”

  “A man,” said Holmes with his usual confidence, “and I believe I can tell you easily enough what manner of man it is.”

  “A half-human one,” said Stoker. “One of the undead!”

  “Not at all,” said Holmes. “More likely the same kind of man that the so-called Dr. Van Helsing is.”

  “A polymath?” said Stoker. “Hardly likely.”

  “As likely as that Van Helsing himself is one,” said Holmes.

  No one pushed back against me now, so I relaxed a bit.

  “But Holmes,” I said, “we have heard Dr. Van Helsing’s credentials.”