A Study in Brimstone Read online

  Also by G.S. Denning and available from Titan Books

  WARLOCK HOLMES

  The Battle of Baskerville Hall (May 2017)

  Warlock Holmes: A Study in Brimstone

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783299713

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299720

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2016 G.S. Denning

  Illustrations © 2016 Sean Patella-Buckley

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  To my wife, Amanda, for all her support.

  To my kids, who I hope get a giggle from this someday.

  To my parents, who had the grace not to suggest I get a real job.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by G.S. Denning

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Study in Brimstone

  The Adventure of the Resident Sacrifice

  The Case of the Cardboard… Case

  The Adventure of the Yellow Bastard

  The Adventure of the _eckled _and

  Charles Augustus Milverton: Soulbinder

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  A STUDY IN BRIMSTONE

  PART I

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. JOHN WATSON

  1

  THE DOMINION OF MAN IS DRAWING TO A CLOSE. THE age of demons is upon us. This, I recognize, is largely my fault and let me take just a moment to apologize for my part in it. I am very sorry I doomed the world.

  Really, just… absolutely, horribly sorry.

  And yes, I do realize my apology fails to come up to the occasion. I am not accustomed to expressing regrets of this magnitude. In fact—this being the first time the world has been doomed—I can safely say that no man has ever had to craft such an apology, so let’s all agree to give me a break, shall we?

  It’s not as if my words could save any of us, in any case.

  No, I’m afraid the only useful commission remaining to me is to chronicle the history of our fall. If this book survives to be read, if any survive to read it, I hope this volume will make clear that Warlock Holmes—though powerful almost beyond description—was merely a dupe. That Moriarty, whose name is unknown to the species he betrayed, was our true nemesis and architect of our destruction. That I am… well… not so much of an idiot as might be supposed.

  How is it, some might wonder, that a London doctor chose to share his lodgings with a sorcerer? Is this the same John Watson who once demanded a new room at medical school, just because “Splitty” Winslow kept that damned yappy dog? Yes? Then why did he fail to move out of 221B when he noticed the walls were bleeding? In what way is a howling, demon-filled void preferable to a schnauzer?

  These are fair criticisms, but there were extenuating circumstances. Believe me, if fortune had not contrived to doom me to the company of Warlock Holmes, I would not have endured it. You see, I do not enter into this story as a healthy, well-moneyed London gentleman. I enter it as a ninety-two-pound typhoid-wasted wreck secretly rifling his wallet in a cheap pub. I was sure—sure—I had another shilling. I could not have miscounted. I had not spent every night of the last month agonizing over the ever-dwindling pile of coins just to lose count. Where was that damned shilling?

  Had I put it in my waistcoat pocket? I had! There I found it. I gave thanks for small mercies, withdrew the coin and snuck it into the leather sheath our waiter had brought with our bill. It was my last shilling. I had only three coins left to my name: tuppence, sixpence, ninepence. Starvation could not be far off. On the one hand, it was folly to be paying for a meal out for Stamford and myself. I hardly even liked the man and if it were not for a chance encounter on the street and the burdens of London gentility I would not have made the offer. On the other hand, why not? My choice as I saw it was this: If I did not purchase lunch, I would starve to death in a London gutter, in two weeks’ time. If I did purchase lunch, I would starve to death in only one week’s time, but just before I succumbed, I could turn to the next beggar over and tell him with my dying breath, “If you ever find yourself at the Holborn, don’t bother with the beef consommé; it’s somewhat overrated.”

  Without taking my eyes off of Stamford, without respite in my continual “Oh yes, quite,”-ing agreeing and nodding, I slid the sheath to the edge of the table, hoping our waiter would claim it the next time he passed and that Stamford would not notice. I needn’t have worried; Stamford was not known for observational acuity.

  “I have the worst luck,” he was saying. “Just the damnedest luck! Why such misfortunes should flock to me, I will never know!”

  “Oh yes, quite,” I agreed, nodding.

  In the years since we’d worked together at St. Bart’s, Stamford had done nothing to cure the tediousness for which we’d all shunned him. He had been holding forth for ten or fifteen minutes about his troubles, which seemed to revolve around nothing more than making an ill-advised promise to help some chap he knew at the hospital. At last he came to the end of his diatribe and settled on a topic I enjoyed even less.

  “I say, Watson… I don’t mean to be rude, but you look like you may have had a bit of misfortune yourself. I’ve rarely seen a man so changed. Do I miss my mark, or…”

  “No. You are quite right, Stamford. I was shot.”

  “Shot?”

  “Through the shoulder.”

  “But how did you manage to get shot in India? Nobody gets shot in India—nobody British, anyway.”

  “Exactly why I elected to go there,” I told him, “but then the army realized it had been nearly forty years since our last disastrous invasion of Afghanistan. I was sent to Maiwand.”

  “Maiwand? Afghanistan? As in the Battle of Maiwand?”

  “The same.”

  “But we lost that one, didn’t we?”

  I winced.

  “Well, you know, I missed the end. Still… the last bit I remember… it looked as if we weren’t doing all that well.”

  Oh yes, I’d say we lost that one. I choked back memories—visions of my friends and comrades being hacked to sauce all around me.

  “Oh… well… you got out all right, though, eh?” Stamford stammered. “So… getting shot—that’s what made you so skinny?”

  “Eh? Oh, no. Enteric fever. My orderly Murray got me back to the hospital at Peshawar before I bled to death, but the conditions were filthy. The fever killed off half my ward before it relented.”

  Memories: piles of corpses, baking in the sun. The doctors too busy, the soldiers too sick, the natives too wise to dig our graves. I tried to think of something else besides the big black wasps that laid their eggs in our dead and dying. Puppies, perhaps? Christmas? Ponies? Big-eyed puppies riding ponies home for Christmas?

  “Ah… So sorry to hear it, Watson,” said Stamford, visibly regretting the zeal he’d just employed complaining of workplace trivia. “What is next for you? Are they sending you to India?”

  �
��They are not sending me anywhere. The army has reconsidered our partnership. I suppose I wasn’t the most useful doctor they’ve ever had…”

  “What are you going to do, Watson?”

  What could I say? The truth was I had considered myself a goner from the moment I was struck. The better soldiers had the sense to be unconscious before they hit the ground and dead two minutes later. I, it seemed, was determined to stretch the ordeal out.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I suppose I ought to be seeking a job or… common living arrangements of some sort, but…”

  I looked up expecting to see pity in Stamford’s eyes. Instead, I found him wearing an inscrutable expression that encompassed both hope and guilt. He licked his lips and mumbled, “So many misfortunes, Watson… Ought I to add one more? It is cruel, yet it also seems you may have been sent as the remedy to my own woes.”

  Let me admit that I didn’t care for his tone. I said, “Add to my misfortune? What an extraordinary thing to say. What are you speaking of?”

  “Well… that man I was complaining about before, at the hospital. Oh, he is the damnedest fellow, but if you need an inexpensive place to rest yourself, he may be just the man you need.”

  “If he is, that would not be adding to my misfortune, it would be an unexpected boon,” I said. “Tell me about him.”

  “Awful fellow. A loner and a skulker. Loves the macabre. Always breaking into the hospital to hang about in our morgue. He has a devil of a time getting anyone to lodge with him. Well… trouble keeping them, I suppose. He was complaining of it only this morning. I said I would help and I made a promise I should not have and I got myself rather tangled up in the whole affair. I’ve been drifting about all day, wondering how to get out of it.”

  For a moment, the man sounded revolting to me. Yet, as Stamford spoke, I began to reflect that I myself was far from an ideal living companion. Not many Londoners craved the company of a shoulder-shot, gut-sick invalid who would mope around the house, complaining of life’s treatment of him, occasionally screaming when he heard a loud bang or suffering an attack of nerves if he realized his blanket was Afghan. Also, having become destitute over the concern of this one meal, my need was dire. I swallowed my pride.

  “Stamford, I am intrigued. I would very much like to meet this… what did you say his name was?”

  “Warlock Holmes,” Stamford replied, wincing as if the name alone were enough to undo all my interest.

  It was not. “I should very much like to meet this Warlock Holmes. When might it be arranged?”

  A look of profound relief broke across Stamford’s face and he turned to the wall clock above the bar. “If we rush, we might intercept him now!” he said. “Hurry, hurry! Get up! Let’s go!”

  I was loath to hurry. I had no money for a hansom cab, and no strength for the walk. I related this regret to Stamford and suggested that perhaps I should come around the next day and that our current attentions were best devoted to lunch.

  “No!” he cried and slapped the soup spoon from my hand, spattering the table with second-rate beef consommé. All heads turned. He immediately demurred and added, “Ah… what I mean, Doctor, is… why waste a day? Certainly, I would be happy to provide us with a cab. Wait here. Don’t move. Do not leave this spot, do you hear me?”

  He disappeared out the door, only to reappear a few moments later, feverishly beckoning me to follow. One side of his suit was torn and dirtied. Apparently the fastest way to get a cab on High Holborn was to run into the road and be struck by one, then insist that you would summon the police unless the driver took you where you wished to go. As soon as we were settled in his ill-gotten cab, Stamford shrieked that he would like to be taken to St. Bart’s Hospital as quickly as possible and shoveled the driver twice the usual fare. Once, during the ride, he gave the man an extra shilling, enjoining him to hurry, lest we arrive too late.

  Alighting at the hospital, Stamford practically shoved me down a small flight of brick stairs, through an aged side door, towards the morgue. As we neared it, the sound of an argument came to my ears, though I could discern only one of the participants’ voices.

  “Absolutely not! Brains are the natural property of the individual in whose skull they reside. They are the seat of our very identity. A man’s brain is his kingdom!”

  The voice had a high, strident timbre to it, but lacked the haughtiness of a true gentleman. In a few moments, I heard it again, saying, “I have already told you: I am unwilling to part with it. Good day, sir.”

  A second later: “I said good day, sir!”

  Something crashed to the floor and the sounds of a distant scuffle reached my ears. The voice said, “Unhand me! You have your own brain! Be content with that, can’t you? Ouch! You cad! Very well, you have brought this upon yourself!”

  Now the combat began in earnest; a series of bangs and wet, fleshy thuds echoed down the corridor. Stamford, who had grown ever more nervous as we approached the source of the noise at last suggested, “You know, Dr. Watson, perhaps tomorrow would be a more ideal time…”

  I disregarded him and pushed past, intent on discovering the nature of the disturbance. I rounded the final corner into the morgue and beheld, for the first time, my future friend, Warlock Holmes.

  He was an excessively tall man, easily the better of six feet. His face was hawkish and thin. He stood in his shirtsleeves, his long jacket discarded across a nearby chair, his sleeves rolled to his elbows to keep them from interfering with his current study. His striking green eyes were wide with the physical effort he was engaged in, which dewed him, brow and arm, with sweat. On the table before him lay the corpse of a gentleman who must have perished in the last week or so. He already displayed the bloating and discoloration that comes as decomposition sets in. The hospital winding sheet on which he lay was spattered and stained with almost every bodily fluid one could name. Some of it may have leached out naturally, but you didn’t have to be a doctor to see there was a more immediate cause for the majority of it. Holmes was repeatedly striking the corpse across its chest and face with a dented cricket bat, crying, “Stay down! Stay down! Stay! Down!”

  “By God! Whatever are you doing, man?” I gasped.

  Holmes froze for a moment, mid-swing. His guilty eyes locked with mine and his mouth began to move as if to formulate a response, but no sound emerged.

  Stamford stepped in, offering, “Holmes is a scientist… of sorts… greatly interested in forensic studies. Doubtless, he is conducting some… experiment or other to… erm… Ah! To determine whether and to what extent bruising can be caused, post mortem. Isn’t that right, Holmes?”

  Holmes stood frozen a moment more, cricket bat raised. A look of consternation crossed his features and he wondered aloud, “What are you talking about, Stamford? What was all that?”

  “The perfectly reasonable, scientific explanation for your extraordinary behavior, Holmes!”

  “Oh! Yes! So it was. Yes… thank you, Stamford.”

  Holmes began to look about the room, searching—I suppose—for somewhere he could lay a battered, bloody cricket bat, where it wouldn’t look out of place. Finding none, he lowered it to the floor and slid it under the autopsy table with one foot, as casually as he could manage. Once this was accomplished, he gave me a half-convincing smile of welcome and said, “You see? There. It’s gone. Now… um… who is this, Stamford?”

  “Stay down! Stay down! Stay! Down!”

  “Ah! This is Dr. John Watson. He has given me to understand he has an immediate need for shared lodgings.”

  At this, Holmes’s bright green eyes flashed up at me and for a moment I had the sensation of being held in place by a giant but invisible hand. When I next exhaled, it seemed to me as if it contained not only discarded air, but the complete truth of my person and position as well.

  “Dr. John Watson,” Holmes intoned, his voice suddenly two octaves deeper than it had been, his expression remote as if lost in thought or struggling to hear a conversation b
eing held at great distance, “late of the British Army, having been wounded in the left shoulder in Afghanistan, currently residing at the Hotel d’Amsterdam, on the Strand.”

  The feeling of restriction left me, but I stood aghast nonetheless. After a moment I breathed, “By God… By God, how did you do that, man? Why, it’s almost supernatural.”

  “What? No! Supernatural? No, no, no,” said Holmes.

  Again, Stamford endeavored to explain. “No. It isn’t. Holmes is particularly observant. With the merest glance he can glean facts that elucidate a man’s entire history. Though it may seem supernatural, it is an entirely explainable phenomenon. Isn’t that right, Holmes?”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course, that’s it. Why I merely observed, my dear Watson… I merely observed…” he gazed at me searchingly, almost desperately, “your left arm hangs limp, but not stiff, indicating a wound, but not to the arm itself. The shoulder then. You have a sad expression, so of course, you must have been to Afghanistan. Any doctor recently wounded and recently in Afghanistan is bound to have been attached to the British Army. As to the Hotel d’Amsterdam… well… Ah! Observe the red mud caking your left shoe, sir! It is of a very specific type, unique in London to one particular puddle, just outside the Hotel d’Amsterdam, on the Strand.”

  He gazed at me with an expression of triumph and relief. My eyes wandered to my left shoe. It was indeed caked with mud, but not of a reddish hue and definitely not from my hotel. In fact, it was from a wet patch that Stamford had dragged me through, just outside the hospital. It occurred to me that a truly observant man might have realized that it was still wet. As it was not a rainy day, this small quantity of mud would surely have dried on the journey from the Strand. Nevertheless, he had guessed exactly and I had no means to refute him.

  “Ahem… Holmes?” Stamford interjected, “I think you said you have already found lodgings?”

  “I have,” said Holmes. “A fine suite of rooms at 221B Baker Street.”