The American’s trail was easy to follow. Even in the gloom of the sewers, his blood besmeared the brickwork and lay in oily swirls on the brackish waters. Though he took turn after turn, passage after passage, he hadn’t got too far when Holmes and Watson came in sight of him again. Once more, he turned and greeted their challenge with blazing gunfire. In the narrower confines of the culvert, the furious volley was far more deadly, and both men were forced to cower in the effluent.
“Gad!” Watson cursed. “This filth . . . mind you, he can’t hold us off for long. That bandolier must be almost spent.”
“He doesn’t need to hold us off for long,” Holmes replied. “Somewhere along here there’ll be a downflow pipe to the Thames. If he reaches that, he’s as good as free.”
“What do you mean?”
Holmes hurried on. “For Heaven’s sake, Watson . . . Rohampton is an amphibian, and the Thames connects with the sea. What I mean is he’ll shortly have escaped to a place where nobody can ever reach him!”
The full import of that dawning on him, Watson scrambled frantically in pursuit. They rounded a sharp bend and again were almost shot from their feet. Only ten yards ahead, Rohampton had stopped. Just behind him, there was a breach in the wall where a series of bricks had fallen through. From beyond it came the furious gushing of the downflow pipe.
The hybrid gave a riotous laugh. “Humanity’s finished, Holmes!” he roared. “And London dies first!”
And then the noxious waters behind him surged and exploded, and the next thing any of them knew, a colossal pair of jaws had snapped closed on Rohampton’s midriff. He gave a piercing shriek, which was instantly cut off as the crocodile guardian tossed itself violently over, sending a wave of slime against Holmes and Watson, and tearing and twisting its hapless catch like something made from rags.
The two men could only watch, rooted to the spot.
For what seemed like minutes, the giant, half-starved reptile rent and ripped at its prey, regardless of his shrieks and gargles, swinging him ’round and ’round, beating him on the brick walls in order to pulp and tenderize him, then tearing and chomping on him again, finally swallowing him down in quivering, butchered hunks. The waters around the animal ran deepest red; bone and gristle were swallowed in dinosaur-like gulps; clothing and shoes vanished, too; even the massive machine gun was bent and buckled in the frenzy of the attack, and almost consumed.
The echoes of the slaughter continued until long after it had finished.
When he was finally able to move, Watson drew slowly backward in shock. “Thank . . . thank God I didn’t shoot the thing . . . I suppose.”
Holmes, steely as he normally was in these circumstances, was also shaken by what they had witnessed. “Thank God indeed,” he whispered.
“Of course, you know what this means,” Watson finally added. “No one will believe us. I mean, there won’t be a scrap of the blackguard left as proof.”
Holmes nodded. “Much as I hate to say it, Watson . . . a price worth paying.”
The scaled beast had now sunk back under the stained surface, only its ridged back and beady crimson eyes visible. It watched them steadily, hungrily.
The Horror of the Many Faces
TIM LEBBON
What I saw that night defied belief, but believe it I had to because I trusted my eyes. “Seeing is believing” is certainly not an axiom that my friend would have approved of, but I was a doctor, a scientist, and for me the eyes were the most honest organs in the body.
I never believed that they could lie.
What I laid eyes upon in the murky London twilight made me the saddest man. It stripped any faith I had in the order of things, the underlying goodness of life. How can something so wrong exist in an ordered world? How, if there is a benevolent purpose behind everything, can something so insane exist?
These are the questions I asked then and still ask now, though the matter has been resolved in a far different way from that which I could ever have imagined at the time.
I was on my way home from the surgery. The sun was setting into the murk of the London skyline, and the city was undergoing its usual dubious transition from light to dark. As I turned a corner into a narrow cobbled street, I saw my old friend, my mentor, slaughtering a man in the gutter. He hacked and slashed with a blade that caught the red twilight, and upon seeing me, he seemed to calm and perform some meticulous mutilation upon the twitching corpse.
I staggered against the wall. “Holmes!” I gasped.
He looked up, and in his honest eyes there was nothing. No light, no twinkle, not a hint of the staggering intelligence that lay behind them.
Nothing except for a black, cold emptiness.
Stunned into immobility, I could only watch as Holmes butchered the corpse. He was a man of endless talents, but still I was amazed at the dexterity with which he opened the body, extracted the heart, and wrapped it in his handkerchief.
No, not butchery. Surgery. He worked with an easy medical knowledge that appeared to surpass my own.
Holmes looked up at me where I stood frozen stiff. He smiled, a wicked grin that looked so alien on his face. Then he stood and shrugged his shoulders, moving on the spot as if settling comfortably into a set of new clothes.
“Holmes,” I croaked again, but he turned and fled.
Holmes the thinker, the ponderer, the genius, ran faster than I had ever seen anyone run before. I could not even think to give chase, so shocked was I with what I had witnessed. In a matter of seconds, my outlook on life had been irrevocably changed, brought to ground and savaged with a brutality I had never supposed possible. I felt as if I had been shot, hit by a train, mauled. I was winded and dizzy and ready to collapse at any moment.
But I pinched myself hard on the back of my hand, drawing blood and bringing myself around.
I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, but when I opened them again the corpse still lay there in the gutter. Nothing had changed. However much I desired not to see this, wished it would flee my memory, I was already realizing that such would never happen. This scene was etched on my mind.
One of the worst feelings in life is betrayal, the realization that everything one has held true is false, or at least fatally flawed. That look in Holmes’s eyes . . . I would have given anything to be able to forget that.
His footsteps had vanished into the distance. The victim was surely dead, but being a doctor, I had to examine him to make sure. He was a young man, handsome, slightly foreign looking, obviously well off in the world because of the tasteful rings on his fingers, the tailored suit . . . holed now, ripped and ruptured with the vicious thrusts of Holmes’s blade. And dead, of course. His chest had been opened and his heart stolen away.
Perhaps he was a dreadful criminal, a murderer in his own right, whom Holmes had been tracking, chasing, pursuing for days or weeks? I spent less time with Holmes now than I had in the past, and I was not involved in every case he took on. But . . . murder? Not Holmes. Whatever crime this dead man may have been guilty of, nothing could justify what my friend had done to him.
I suddenly had an intense feeling of guilt, kneeling over a corpse with fresh blood on my fingertips. If anyone rounded the corner at that moment I would have trouble explaining things, I was sure, not only because of the initial impression they would gain but also because of the shock I was in, the terror I felt at what I had witnessed.
The police should have been informed. I should have found a policeman or run to the nearest station, led them to the scene of the crime. I was probably destroying valuable evidence . . . but then I thought of Holmes, that crazy grin, and realized that I already knew the identity of the murderer.