The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(49)
My jacket pocket was empty, though my revolver had been there just moments ago. Vampire-enhanced strength or no, I did not relish grappling with any detestable minion Dagon might send forth, but I would not shirk to do so, if any action of mine might somehow alter this evil night.
The next events contain certain inexplicable elements, and even with the tangible outcome, I cannot say for certain that the next portion of my account is entirely factual. I shall have to represent the events precisely as I remember them, tinged perhaps by my current nightmares. This is as much veracity as I can honestly claim, and the readers shall have to judge for themselves if my tale is some fevered hallucination or a reference to an impending malfeasance that might someday come into its own, and until that day, is far better forgotten.
An inhuman hand reached out and gripped the dock, not quickly, but with a surreal slowness and inevitability that nevertheless took me completely by surprise. A face rose out of the water, not as a man might stand, but with a grotesque and horrid undulation that hinted at something far different than a man’s legs still hidden underneath. Before my beleaguered senses could fully grasp the hideous features revealed to me in the flashing storm – part fish, part amphibian – another creature had joined the first, clinging to the wooden slats. Then another, then dozens.
I froze in revulsion, and by the time it might take to draw a breath, the long stretch of the wharf was lined with twisted and bestial faces.
No two creatures looked precisely the same, though certain hellish qualities prevailed. Their skin was shiny and slippery, of a greyish green hue, though I could see that some had only partly discernible white bellies and ridged backs. With their aberrant and inhuman features, an array of webbed fingers, palpitating gills, flippers, humped backs and those relentlessly bulging eyes, there should have been nothing of man about them, but there was. The traces of humanity, their vaguely humanoid shapes and knowing glances, made their existence an even greater abomination. They made no sound as they regarded me. Nothing moved but the lapping of the water, and the patter of the rain. Even the crash and rumble of the storm had slowed, as if by malignant command.
Gooseflesh crawled down my back, but I held firm and did not retreat. A feral growl tore free of my throat of its own accord and I’m sure that my predator’s fangs were plainly bared, for all the change it made in that enigmatic, monstrous gallery.
They merely watched me… No! Not me, but the leather bag in my hand. “This?” I said, shaking the bag. Fifty or more ancient eyes followed the motion, confirming the guess.
“You want this?” I hollered. “I want my friends. If you have them, you shall release them to me!”
For the first time since their partial exit from the water, one of the fish-frog things moved, leaning down; it opened a saw-toothed jaw, and vomited an unmistakable slime-drenched object onto the rain-soaked wooden slats. My blood chilled to ocean temperatures to see it: Holmes’s deerstalker hat.
“Does he live? You will return him… for this?” I yanked the shining diadem from the leather bag and shook it at them.
For answer, the creature that seemed to be their spokesman prodded the hat with a clawed flipper. Its gaze never left the tiara.
“Then you shall have it!” I cared nothing for the tiara, and would have gladly poured untold riches into the Thames for the barest chance of Holmes’s safe return. I flung it in a far-out glittering arc, into the element of Dagon that no man – sailor or fisherman – can truly claim for his own. Before the object had disappeared into the water, the creatures around me had slid silently back into the depths.
The storm ceased with such amazing abruptness that I could still make out the ripples of the tiara’s impact on the suddenly still waters. My eye followed the ripples further out, and revealed as if by a parting curtain of rain mist, was the dark prow of a police boat making directly for the wharf.
In the prow, the gaunt figure of Sherlock Holmes was clearly visible, unharmed. The golden hair of the young Nowak child was visible in the boat, as well, but of her older sister, there was no sign. While I was waiting for them to land, I found my revolver, which I had apparently dropped in my rush onto the wharf. I say ‘dropped’ but, in truth, the pocket out of which it had fallen was quite deep and I’d never had any problem of this sort before and I could not help but wonder at the possibility of some dark hand guiding the Innsmouth whaler and bringing misfortune upon its enemies.
I shook with an overpowering relief when the boat with Holmes and the others finally landed, and if there were tears of joy on my face, the rain was too recent for even the world’s greatest detective to know the difference.
Chapter 10
THE DEPTHS
“Eliot and the Esoteric Order of Dagon,” Holmes pontificated darkly, “as embodied by the crew of the Bountiful Harvest, have escaped, Watson. They had help, you see, help from below. Creatures from the depths.” Unclamping the pipe from his mouth and pointing downward, he might have meant the bottom of the Thames, or some deeper, more infernal source.
“I know,” I said with a deep and chilled shudder. “I have seen them.”
“You have?” he said. “It sounds as if you have had altogether a more interesting time than I have. Perhaps you should tell your tale first this time.”
This was easily done. We were both in dry clothes back at Baker Street. The young Nowak girl was with relatives – ones without any association to Innsmouth, or even America – that Bradstreet had discovered. Relatives, too, of Konrad Pawlitz, for Holmes’s surmise that the murdered man was a relation of the Nowak sisters had proven to be correct. The girl had been remarkably docile and self-possessed for one who had undergone what must have been a horrible ordeal, though I had not yet heard the details.