The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(48)

“Very well,” Eliot said, pointing at me. “But you shall fetch the tiara, and I shall hold your clever friend hostage here in the meantime, so that there are no tricks. At the first sight of the police, be assured that I shall cast him overboard. We may not be at sea, but there are deeper waters even in this domestic river than you can possibly know. And perhaps a hook or two might go with him, if you take my meaning. You would be well not to endanger your friend needlessly.”

“I am not so easy a fish to hook,” Holmes said. “However…” He pushed his way through the man and settled himself on the nearby rail, his revolver at the ready. “I shall wait right here while Watson retrieves the tiara and I’ll thank you gentlemen to keep this most reasonable distance between us.”

“Holmes!” I said. “How can you even think—” but my friend raised his hand and fixed me with his masterful gaze.

“It is a necessary evil, Watson,” he said. “I shall be quite safe. Now you must hurry, for it would far behove us to have our transaction completed before sunrise, would it not?”

The thought of leaving my friend in this terrible predicament repelled me. I did not like the look of Eliot, or the relentless gaze of the Innsmouth sailors. I trusted in no bargain and considered trying my strength against the entire deck rather than leave my friend to their disreputable mercies, but Holmes called out to me softly, clearly divining my inner turmoil.

“Hurry, Watson. The night is slipping away.” He tugged the deerstalker hat down further on his head as proof against the cold and wet weather.

I could see that he would not be dissuaded, and so left him, surrounded on three sides with foul assailants barely held at bay, with the water at his back. There were only six bullets in his gun, and more than a dozen men on deck, odds that worried me deeply, for all that Holmes was a formidable opponent. I hurried off into the fog, where our cab was still waiting.

*

The ride back to Baker Street was harrowing, despite the late hour, for I railed at the driver passionately, and had to assuage my conscience by offering him a gold sovereign if he made the trip in a timely fashion.

The golden tiara was waiting for me, and it was with some revulsion that I picked up the piece of inexplicably foreign jewellery. It shone like a brilliant spider and I could not help but feel that both Holmes and I, as well as the Nowak sisters, were but helpless victims caught in its glittering web. I was only too happy to shut the thing away in a leather bag. I breezed back out the door, past Mrs Hudson’s querulous questions, and back into my cab.

I arrived back at Blackfriars wharf with at least two hours of the night left, but a storm shattered itself onto the Thames just as the cab approached, so that it was necessary to lean over and holler into the cabbie’s ear in order to make him understand that he should wait again.

The wooden stairs down were slick with the sudden torrent, but I took them two at a time, only to come round the landing, stop, and cry out loud in anguish.

The Bountiful Harvest was gone.

I rushed to the edge of the dock, but the empty stretch of water the ship had sat in reflected the lightshow above with perfect and relentless clarity. There was no sign of them. In between the blinding pulses of light, darkness reigned above with the equally black surface of the Thames below and hapless London imprisoned between. No ships dared work the Thames in such weather, so only emptiness looked back at me, with no sign of the Innsmouth whaler.

My heart quailed inside of me. The Innsmouth sailors had given over reclaiming the tiara in order to make good their escape and had either succeeded in Eliot’s threat of drowning Holmes in the Thames, or else had taken him with them as their prisoner. Probably they had never required the tiara, and it had all been a ruse on their part. Now I would never see Holmes again, for I had no doubt that if he had been taken prisoner, they would bundle him into one of the grisly packages destined to splash into the darkest waters they could find, one of their unwholesome cultist sacrifices.

The reader will not credit such speculation, but the unknown and blight-shadowed forces behind our enemies became suddenly clear to me, and despair came with the knowledge. The possibility that Eliot and his blasphemous god had somehow called forth this unnatural storm in order to foil any pursuit rose from the depths of my fevered brain as an absolute conviction.

Dagon. They had called to Dagon in Winston Carson’s story, a story I now fervently believed, despite my early aversions to it. Dagon now seemed an unknowable but inevitable horror, an aggregate of malevolent urges and forces too potent for either Scotland Yard, myself, or even Sherlock Holmes to contend with.

I gnashed my teeth and scanned the water all along the wharf, hoping against all possibility that I might find Holmes, but only the opaque waters of the Thames stared back at me. I was quite alone.

Turning from the water with a sob, and clutching the sodden leather bag with their useless gold trinket in my hands, I raised it to the sky with a fitful cry of rage. There was no course of action left to me that could prevail. The police boats would be as fragile toys in this elemental fury, and any attempt to overtake the American ship would be madness.

Then I froze, and a cold chill descended down into the pit of my stomach.

A peculiar quality to the churning water of the Thames had changed, alerting some atavistic sense within me to the presence of furtive, hideous things beneath its surface. The stench from the savaged prison cell, abominably repellent, cut through the scents of the Thames and the rain. I think that the foul fishy odour had been growing for some time, but so stealthily that I had not noticed until just this very moment. I turned again to face the water, fully expecting some horror to come rising up. A churning in the water identified the spot, just a few feet away from where I stood on the dock.