Watson put a handkerchief to his nose. “You don’t suppose he’s really gone down there?”
Again, Holmes didn’t answer. Watson glanced around, and found his friend staring down at the scrap of paper that Jobson had given them.
“Holmes?”
“Watson,” the detective finally whispered, “. . . Harold Jobson deceived us. But only slightly. He didn’t leave us a puzzle. He left us a map.”
“A map?” Watson was astonished. He gazed at the paper for a moment, then down into the foul recesses below the grating. “Not . . . not of the sewers, surely?”
Holmes indicated the numerous tenuous lines on Jobson’s paper, and the way they all seemed to reach a common confluence at the right-hand side of the page. “These are the interceptory sewers built by Bazalgette some thirty years ago . . . they divert the city’s waste eastward from the main sewers, and studiously avoid the Thames.” When he mentioned the river, he indicated a thicker central line with a downward loop that was suddenly reminiscent of the point where the River Thames curved around the Isle of Dogs. Holmes indicated two pencil-scrawled blobs, also at the right-hand side of the map. “Here is the Abbey Mills pumping station in Stratford . . . and here the sewage treatment works at Beckton.”
“But what does the red circle signify?” Watson wondered.
Holmes couldn’t suppress a shudder. “Well, it lies to the left; in other words, to the west of the city center. If I am correct, this straight line passing through it will be one of the mains that brings fresh water from the drinking reservoirs at Surbiton and Hampton. Watson . . . this circle, whatever it indicates, is located at a point after the water is passed through the filters.”
Watson felt a crawling between his shoulders. “Jobson said there’d be a calamity . . . dear God, would that be a water-borne calamity?”
Holmes’s skin had paled to an ashy gray.
“We must send for Lestrade straight away,” Watson insisted.
Holmes struggled with this, then shook his head. “There’s no time. Come . . . we have a map.”
He bent down as though to climb under the grating, but Watson stopped him. “For God’s sake . . . you can’t mean to venture into the sewers?”
Holmes glanced up at him. “What choice do we have?”
“In the name of heaven . . . you’ll need waders, a safety lamp, some sort of lifeline—”
“Watson . . . this may be the gravest case you and I have ever embarked on,” Holmes replied, staring at his friend. “Personal safety cannot even enter the equation.”
Subterranean London was a multilayered labyrinth of lost sewers, underground railways, pipes, tunnels, culverts, and conduits of every description, a sprawling network of forgotten passages comprising centuries of buried architecture, level upon level of it, from the medieval to the very modern. It was so vast and deep that no known maps covered it in its entirety. It was also hellishly black, and constantly swimming in a foul miasma from the rivers of excrement and industrial and chemical ooze that meandered back and forth through its slimy entrails.
Once down there, Holmes made a torch by tying pieces of rag around a broken stave, and bade Watson do the same, though even then they proceeded with utmost caution, wading warily westward along arched passages of ancient, sweating brickwork. Everything they saw was caked in the most loathsome detritus. Strands of putrid filth hung in their faces; the squeaking of rats was all around them; there was a continuous rumble and groan from the streets above. Persistently, Watson advised against the foolhardiness of such an enterprise, warning about the dangers of Weil’s disease, hepatitis, bubonic plague. “And these naked flames,” he added worriedly. “They’re a perilous option on our part. Suppose we encounter firedamp?”
“That’s a chance we must take,” Holmes replied, again consulting the map as they approached a junction. “If we turn right here, I believe we’ll be cutting north onto the Piccadilly branch.”
“Holmes!” Watson protested. “This is a deadly serious matter. Suppose there’s a sudden downpour? These pipes get flooded!”
Holmes looked up. “Watson . . . I am perfectly aware of the risks we are taking. Believe me, I wouldn’t have brought myself, let alone my dearest friend, into such danger if I wasn’t absolutely convinced of its necessity.”
“But, Holmes—”
“Watson, I can’t force you to accompany me. If you wish to return to the surface and hunt down Lestrade, then by all means do so. You’d be serving a useful purpose. But I must continue.”
He was wearing his most no-nonsense expression. It was at once plain how utterly serious he was. Finally, Watson shook his head. “And a fine thing that would be . . . for dearest friends to abandon each other in their hour of need.” He smiled bravely.
Holmes smiled back, then gripped his companion by the shoulder. “This maze may appear daunting, but Jobson’s map is not too difficult to follow. He must have been this way many times himself, to be able to draw it from memory while sitting in the death cell. If he can manage it, I fancy we can.”
They plodded on for another fifteen minutes, making turns both left and right, occasionally passing under manholes and ventilation grilles beyond which the upper world was briefly visible. The overwhelming stench of rottenness and sewage became slowly bearable, but that didn’t lessen the visual horrors in London’s dark and fetid bowels. Here and there, gluts of offal were heaped, having been jettisoned from the slaughterhouses; the carcasses of cats and dogs lay decaying, enriching the already poisonous waterways in the most rancid and sickening fashion.
“I doubt anything they could put in the drinking water could be worse than this brew,” Watson commented as they sloshed into a low-roofed, egg-shaped passage, which seemed to run endlessly in a roughly northwesterly direction. “Where is this place you mentioned, anyway? Innsmouth? I’ve never even heard of . . . GOOD GOD, LOOK OUT . . .”
With a reptilian hiss and a ferocious snapping of gigantic jaws, something came barreling out of the noisome darkness in front of them.
“HOLMES!” Watson shouted again, then he was dealt a blow to the chest, which sent him reeling backward.
The torch flew from his hand and extinguished itself in the thrashing water, but not before it cast a fleeting glow on ten to twenty feet of gleaming leathery scales, on a colossal tail swishing back and forth, on an immense saurian-like head filled with daggers for teeth.
Holmes, too, had fallen back, though he maintained his balance and held his light out before him. Its wavering flame reflected in two hideous crimson orbs, but also on a stout iron chain, which was connected at one end to a plate in the tunnel wall, and at the other to a thick ring clamped around the monster’s neck. Gasping and choking, Watson scrambled back to his feet, then dug his revolver from his overcoat pocket.
“I wouldn’t,” Holmes advised. “Not unless you want to deprive Inspector Lestrade of his next triumph.”
Watson had already taken aim with the weapon, but now lowered it. “You . . . you think that’s the animal missing from the zoo?”
“I’m certain of it,” said Holmes. “Unless there’s a breeding population of krokodilos down here in the London sewers, which I seriously doubt.”
He ventured forward to get a closer look. Watson went with him. The brute was now entirely visible, a squat, broad monstrosity, so large it was only half submerged in the brackish fluids. It filled the passage from one side to the other, and now simply sat there, its mouth agape and steaming in a defiant show of menace . . . though a show was about all it could manage. By the torchlight, it could be seen that the chain holding the thing was only three or so feet in length and already pulled taut; it meant the savage beast could successfully block access to the tunnel but was unable to advance and pursue those it turned away.