Warlock Holmes--The Sign of Nine Read online

  Though, if it was, he was delicious.

  And it was just what I needed. Sometimes there is nothing quite so rejuvenating after an evening of self-poisoning than gnawing a terrible sandwich, sprawled in exactly the sprawl your body needs to feel at rest and just not giving one bloody damn what anybody thinks of you.

  Apart from a quick trip to return the plates, I did my best to focus on the window and not fall asleep. Through good luck and diligence, I even managed to keep my wallet.

  Just at the stroke of nine, Holmes and I beheld a strange sight: a figure, obscured in shadow, began erecting some sort of machine at the third-floor window. It appeared to be a large metal cylinder atop a tripod. We watched as it was carefully aimed at Mrs. Warren’s upstairs window.

  “Any guess what that thing is, Watson?” Holmes asked.

  I had none. But if my military service had been with the navy rather than the army, I’d have known better. Sixteen years ago the Royal Navy had finally abandoned the flag-based system of signaling so beloved by our aging admirals, and had adopted the modern signal lamp—a device designed to emit a beam of light visible for more than three miles, even in broad daylight. I had no idea I was looking at just such a machine, until its shutters swung open and threw out a single, retina-scorching blast.

  “Aaaaaaaagh!” I screamed, falling back and clutching at my eyes.

  “A single flash: the letter ‘A’!” cried Holmes as the orphans around us ducked and scuttled for the cover of the alleyways.

  “Erm… yes,” I said, wiping away my tears. Then, taking up my notebook and pencil, I wrote down “A” and turned my attention back to the window, where the signaling beacon had undertaken a feverish barrage of flashes.

  “That’s twenty,” said Holmes. “What letter is that?”

  “‘T’,” I said, writing the same.

  “Twenty more! ‘T’ again!”

  “Again? That’s curious…”

  “Now five! Let’s see… A, B, C, D… E! It’s E!”

  The next blast of fourteen flashes gave us “N”.

  “At ten,” I said. “Perhaps something is going to happen an hour from now.”

  “Maybe he’ll finish his sentence,” Holmes opined. “I’ll say, it takes quite a bit of flashing to get one’s meaning across, eh?”

  He wasn’t wrong. Twenty more flashes gave us yet another “T”, then a single one gave us “A”. Then the light went dark for a few moments.

  “Attenta? That makes no kind of sense, does it?” Holmes wondered aloud. “Ah! Perhaps that’s the name of the lady we saw in the mirror! Miss Attenta! Oooh, it’s got an exotic sort of ring to it, eh, Watson?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, Holmes. More likely it is one of the Romantic or Germanic tongues’ version of ‘attention’. They are closely related. Let us see… attenta… I want to say… Italian?”

  “He’s starting up again!” said Holmes. “Look: ‘A’… ‘T’… ‘T’… ‘E’… What the deuce? He’s doing the same word again?”

  Indeed he was. And as soon as he finished it, he let the light fall dim for just one moment, before beginning the same word for the third time.

  “What?” Holmes and I cried together.

  “That’s two hundred and forty-three flashes, just to get someone’s attention?” I said, shaking my head.

  “I’ll bet he has it, if he hasn’t blinded her,” said Holmes.

  “It may be a good thing it’s as bright as it is,” I noted. “If he’d been using a simple candle, she’d have fallen asleep by now.”

  “Here he goes again, Watson!”

  P. E. R. I. C. O. L. O.

  Holmes screwed up his face at that and wondered, “Er… do you suppose that’s his name?”

  “I do not. I think my earlier supposition was correct, Holmes. If I recall, pericolo is Italian for ‘danger’.”

  “Are you sure? I seem to remember it as a name… From a play, wasn’t it? Ah! Yes! The famous love story: The Tragedy of Attenta and Pericolo!”

  “I don’t think so, Holmes.”

  “But look: he’s starting up again!”

  P. E. R. I.

  “Egad, is he going to do this all night?” Holmes wondered, but his thought was interrupted by a sudden scream from the signal window. A series of grunts and cries of protestation broke across the night air and the signal lamp suddenly tipped to the side and disappeared from the window with a crash.

  “That’s a relief, if I’m honest,” Holmes remarked.

  I was already on my feet, unsteady as they were. “Holmes! Something is wrong!”

  “What do you think, Watson? Shall we investigate?”

  “Of course, Holmes!” I cried, taking up the wheelbarrow’s handles.

  “Ha ha! Onward, to battle! Giddy-up, Watson!”

  “Giddy-up?”

  “Yes, it means: get going, quickly.”

  “And it is a term generally directed towards horses,” I panted as my feeble legs pumped us towards the corner of Howe Street. “I will thank you not to address me as if I were a horse!”

  “Even if you sort of are, right now?”

  “Especially because I sort of am, right now!”

  “Well what ought I to say, then, to you, my good friend and noble steed?”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “Hi-ho, Watson! Awaaaaaaaaaay!”

  “Stop it.”

  But the argument had reached its end, for at that moment we turned the corner onto Howe Street and beheld…

  “Stanley Hopkins?” we both said.

  There stood the diminutive inspector, leaning against the gate of the house, looking downcast and bored. When he heard his name, he looked up and said, “Mr. Holmes? Dr. Watson? What are you… doing?”

  “There’s trouble, Hopkins! Right there, in that house behind you!” roared Holmes.

  “I know,” he said. He made a miserable face and kicked a pebble into the gutter. “I’m supposed to watch the door and not go in.”

  “Who says?” I asked.

  “Mr. Leverton. He’s an American. Scotland Yard is working with the Pinkertons on this case. But it’s really theirs, you know, not ours. So… I have to wait outside.”

  “While crime and mystery happen just behind you?”

  Hopkins gave a meek shrug.

  “Now look here, Hopkins,” I said, wagging a finger at him, “if you are ever, ever, to become a true detective and solve a case on your own—”

  “I thought you said I solved that other one!”

  “—you mustn’t allow yourself to be so easily cowed! You must develop a tireless thirst to know what’s really going on! Do you think Inspector Grogsson would stand by, doing nothing, while criminals and Pinkertons battled behind him?”

  “Er…”

  Holmes leaned forward in his wheelbarrow to say, “The answer is ‘no’, Hopkins. No, he would not.”

  “Now, Holmes and I are going up those stairs to find out what’s happening! Are you coming with us?” I thundered.

  A sudden resolve broke across the young detective’s face. He balled his fists and cried, “I am, by God!”

  “Good,” I said. “Because I rather need someone to help me carry Holmes. Just get your arm under his other shoulder, won’t you? There’s a good lad…”

  As we began dragging the world’s most powerful magical being upstairs, Holmes asked, “So, exactly what do we know, Hopkins? What’s going on up there?”

  “Three days ago, the Pinkerton Detective Agency contacted Scotland Yard. It seems they’ve been hunting a hired killer who works with a particularly dangerous splinter group of the Italian Mafia in New York. His name is ‘Black’ Giuseppe Gorgiano and he’s killed at least fifty men. Apparently he’s here in London, hunting another Italian, named Gennaro Lucca.”

  Holmes and I exchanged a look.

  “Are the English and Italian alphabets different,” Holmes asked me, “or does his name start with a ‘G’?”

  “The problem is, Holme
s, that both men’s names do.”

  Hopkins continued, “The Pinkertons sent one of their top men, Mr. Leverton, the hero of the Long Island Cave Mystery. Scotland Yard assigned me to follow him about and act as liaison. From what I gather, I’m just supposed to make sure he doesn’t do anything too bold. Only, it seems to me—” Hopkins lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper “—Mr. Leverton seems a bit more interested in Black Gorgiano’s prey than he does in Gorgiano himself.”

  “So the Pinkertons have crossed the ocean and neatly marginalized Scotland Yard in their own territory, so that they might hunt either an Italian-American killer, or an Italian-American killee, is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

  Hopkins nodded. “We followed Gennaro to this address an hour ago and watched him carry some form of large machine upstairs.”

  “Yes, Holmes and I may have seen it.”

  “We picked a spot in the alley across the street and waited. About twenty minutes ago, Black Gorgiano and a group of six or seven others went in. Mr. Leverton went after them, and told me to hold the door. Since then, I’ve been listening to them do—” A fresh barrage of frenzied screaming came from the floor above us. “—whatever that is.”

  Dragging Holmes up the last flight of stairs, we emerged into an empty corridor.

  “To the right,” I hissed. “It should be the second door from the end. Come on.”

  When we reached the door, we could hear strangled screams and a series of muffled thumps. I looked at Holmes.

  “Careful, Watson,” he whispered.

  Oh, how I wish I’d listened. Instead, I gave a nod to the newly emboldened Hopkins. He set his jaw and nodded back. Then, we each drew back one leg and kicked open the door.

  Oh, God… the things we saw…

  Sprawled on the floor against the far wall of the room lay what had to be Mrs. Warren’s original lodger, a fellow with a big bushy beard. He seemed to have been clubbed and stabbed a few times and—though I’m sure he must have deemed it unfortunate when it was happening—he was probably only alive because he’d been unconscious when the real trouble broke out. His arms were locked about the chest and throat of another Italian-looking gentleman, who was quite dead. A bone-handled knife protruded from his chest, and his neck was bent at a grotesque angle. It seems Gennaro Lucca had managed to take down at least one of his attackers. Compared to most of the other fellows in the room, these two seemed to have gotten off rather easy.

  Seven other bodies lay scattered about—presumably Black Gorgiano and his gang. Some of them were still moving, banging their heads feebly against the floor, or trying to drag themselves away from the two figures who stood at the center of the room.

  Mr. Leverton looked unworried and untouched by the violence around him. I was surprised by the darkness of his skin. After all, only twenty years ago he might have been deemed “property” in his home country. He did not look like property now. He wore rose-tinted glasses and a self-satisfied expression. His clothes were fairly normal—only slightly… American. His left hand was clad in a jagged gauntlet of blackened iron.

  Beside him stood…

  …a thing.

  It was the same basic shape as a man and clad in black clothes. But it was impossibly tall. Hard to say its height, exactly—probably seven and a half or eight feet—because it was bent and crooked. Its skin was pale and crackly, like ancient parchment, bleached to a light gray. It had no face really, just crude holes for a mouth and eyes. As the door swung open, it turned its gaze to us: first Hopkins, then Holmes, then me.

  Hopkins screamed. And not just a little bit. It was one of those horrible, wrenching screeches that make it clear that the screamer is not planning on using their vocal cords for anything else ever again. Hopkins howled until his air ran out, then clawed his face. Rather badly. His left hand worked so many knuckles into the socket of his left eye that, as a doctor, I could not help but despair of its future function.

  Not that it mattered.

  Because it was clear to me—and I don’t think very much medical training was needed to come to this assessment—that Hopkins’s heart had just burst. Or stopped. Or something. You know that instant when something very important inside a person—some vital organ, or their soul, or very likely both—just breaks and they scream their life out in a single breath and fall down dead?

  Well, I do. Because I watched it happen to Stanley Hopkins.

  Next, the creature’s gaze fell across my friend, Warlock Holmes. Holmes made a bit of a face, like he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the present situation, and reached out to close the door. Unfortunately he was still a bit unsteady on his feet, so he didn’t do it as fast as I might have liked. Because by then the monster’s absent eyes had fallen on me.

  How can I describe it?

  Can you imagine the moment a gazelle sees the cheetah spring and turns to run, though it knows it is no match for the killer at its heels? Or the instant the condemned man feels the floor drop away beneath his feet, knowing only the rope around his neck can stop his fall? I felt as if I were frozen in that moment—that onset of perfect and primal fear. If I’d been able to calculate coolly, I’d have realized I was dying, just like Hopkins and Gorgiano’s gang before me. And that would have come as something of a relief. But no, I could not imagine anything ever saving me from that terrible fear, not even the cold release of death. It seemed as if that initial horror would continue forever—the only thing I would ever feel.

  His left hand was clad in a jagged gauntlet of blackened iron.

  Luckily, there was one form of salvation available to me: Holmes shut the door.

  Suddenly, I could feel how empty my lungs were. I’d screeched all the air out and was trying still to scream, though I had no power to. My nails had sunk into the skin of my face. My heart, seized and useless, refused to pump. I realized I was on the floor, though I couldn’t remember falling.

  Then Holmes was on me, slapping my face and shouting, “Ponies, John! Think of ponies. One of those wonderful Shetland kind with all the hair hanging off it. Doesn’t she look silly, John? Remember Christmas, with your family? Wasn’t it wonderful? And what about puppies? What about a big-eyed puppy licking your nose because he wants a biscuit? And who’s got all the biscuits, John?”

  I could do nothing but writhe on the floor, grasping at my chest. Warlock raised his hand and gave me a slap so hard it would likely have knocked me off my feet, if I’d still been on them.

  “Who’s got all the bloody biscuits?”

  He was too strident to be ignored. With supreme effort, I drew a breath. I felt a shock as my body remembered its vital functions. With an agonizing wrench, my heart beat once, twice, then resumed its familiar rhythm. I used that first, awkward breath to stammer, “Uh… I do?”

  “Ha! Yes!” Warlock crowed. “You’ve got all the biscuits, John, yes you do. Oh, by the twelve gods, that was close.”

  I shook my aching head and wondered, “Holmes, what was that thing?”

  “I’ve no idea,” he said, then got a guilty sort of look and added, “I… er… I feel I really ought to. Yet, if I’m honest, I absolutely cannot bring it to mind. But whatever it is, it’s clearly got to be dealt with. I can’t be weak, Watson. I must be strong. Gods, of all the days to have taken poison…”

  As he spoke, an expression of agony and deep concentration broke across his features. Green fires lit in his eyes. He grunted and rose to his feet. He must have been using no small amount of magic to help him regain his strength, for blood began to run in rivulets down his face, as black goat horns curled forth from his scalp.

  “Can’t be weak…” he repeated, then shouted, “Melfrizoth!” and the burning black blade appeared in his hand. He turned to me. “I’m going in there, Watson. You must not look at what lies beyond that door. And no matter what you hear, you must not come in until I say it is safe. You stay here and take care of Hopkins, all right?”

  “But… but Hopkins is dead.”

&nbs
p; Warlock’s shoulders slumped. The fierce green flames dimmed just a bit and I’ll swear those new-grown horns actually drooped.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. His heart stopped. I mean, I haven’t examined him, but…”

  “Damn it,” Holmes mumbled. He stepped over to Hopkins’s corpse, waggled the tip of his demonic sword in his face and said, “I’m getting a bit tired of this nonsense, Hopkins! Now stop being such a ninny and get up.”

  There was a sound like ripping canvas and the color red ceased to exist. All the droplets of blood where Hopkins had clawed himself and the burst vessels in his eyes turned suddenly gray. And—as red is a key component of other colors—the world looked quite queer for a few moments. The tasteful brown wallpaper around us turned a hideous shade of green. Fortunately, this lasted only a few moments. As the colors slowly reverted to normal, Hopkins took a deep breath and began screaming.

  “Eeeeeeahghuah! Aaaaaaaaaagh! Mr. Holmes? Mr. Holmes, what has happened to you?”

  “Oh, um… costume contest?” Warlock said with a shrug. “I’ve got a masquerade ball after this, so I… pretty good, eh?”

  Hopkins sagged back in disbelief, but this seemed good enough for Holmes, who mumbled, “Right. Now, where was I?”

  “You were going to go in there and do battle with that… thing,” I reminded him.

  “Ah yes, that was it. Botheration…”

  I scuttled over to Hopkins, held his quaking head against my chest and tried to soothe him. I made sure to turn his face so he could not see into the room where the beast stood. Holmes stepped to the door, put on the most resolute face he could manage, and swung the door wide.

  The beast was gone.

  There stood the man in rose-colored glasses, smiling amiably. The black iron gauntlet hung from a hook on his belt.

  “Well, hello there,” he said in a smooth, companionable tone. “You must be Mr. Warlock Holmes. My name is Nathaniel Leverton of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. I want you to know that my employer and I deeply regret any unpleasantness that just befell your two companions.”

  “They’ll be all right,” said Holmes, through tight lips.

  “Oh?” said Leverton, leaning around Holmes to get a look at Hopkins and me. “Now, that is a piece of luck, isn’t it? I don’t suppose that’s got anything to do with what just happened to the color red?”