The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(79)
“The Mariner Priest!” I said.
“How predictable,” Mary said. “Poor John, ever the slowest person in the room. But has he told you who the Mariner Priest is? No? I see by your face that he has not. Poor John, stumbling around in the dark, even now, as a creature of the night! The irony is delicious, is it not?” She seemed to be entering a crazed fit, as if her words had been locked inside of her for so long that they virtually battered their way out of her without any conscious decision on her part. The gun seemed all but forgotten now. Even Morris seemed entranced by Mary’s sudden explosion of anger.
“Of course he hasn’t told you,” Mary yelled at me, “because if he had, then you’d know that my transformation, your transformation, the vampire plague and so much more besides, are all because Holmes has refused to bow before the one superior intellect that has crossed his path. All this has happened to you, to me, to assuage Mr Sherlock Holmes’s injured pride! Do you not know, really not know, who transformed me, John?”
“Holmes?” I said, turning to look at my companion. The rocking of the ship and the thunder and rain crashed, but distantly, as if the world around us held its breath, waiting.
“I suspected,” Holmes said, his face a tortured mask, “suspected from the start, but could not be sure. The cunning, the plans within plans, it all pointed to the same conclusion.”
“Say it!” Mary screamed. “Say his name!”
A shadow had passed over Holmes’s face, but he stood taller and shouldered whatever burden that shadow brought with it. When he did speak, it was with a clear voice, easily audible over the storm.
“Professor James Moriarty,” Holmes said. A thrill of astonished realization ran through me. Moriarty? Could it possibly be?
“Holmes!” I said, bitter at him keeping this vital piece of information from me.
“Yes!” Mary said, still focused on Holmes. “Moriarty is the one man you’ve never beaten, regardless of what you believed. The one man you never can beat! He is a better strategist than you and a far, far better vampire than Count Dracula could ever be, and he is coming for you both! Mark my words!”
She lifted the gun again. “The irony is that you’re not actually going to live long enough for Moriarty’s revenge to fall on you, because you die. Here. Now!”
I readied myself to jump in the way of the bullet, but the rocking ship made such an action impossible. The storm had swelled again and thunder boomed up in the grey sky.
Then a feral grunt, shockingly loud and out of place even over the storm, caused Mary and Morris to glance to our right. Mary’s mouth dropped open and Morris’s eyes went wide. I turned to look.
A large brown hand gripped the railing near the bow of the ship which dipped briefly under the water, then, as it rose, the railing and its occupant were revealed together. I heard Morris gasp.
Boucher dragged his bleeding and half-drowned body onto the deck. The ruin of his back, briefly visible as he dropped awkwardly to the deck, was a horror to behold, roiling and smoking like a bubbling cauldron from the silver lodged within. His eyes, when he stood, bulged horrifically, and he seemed more animated corpse than man.
“For… a… woman,” he spat at Morris. “For… a… woman!” The words he flung at Morris seemed not to come from his mouth, but rather dredged up from both the depths of his chest and from infernal domains unknown and unspoken. He lurched across the deck. Both Morris and Mary fired, not at Holmes and I, but at this new danger. But Boucher kept coming.
We were mere feet from their target, too close. Both Holmes and I scrambled out of the line of fire. I felt a hot furrow of fire plough its way across my shoulder.
“Watson!” Holmes’s voice cried out. The silver bullet seared me to the bone. The pain had thrown me into shock, I knew. I fell to the deck as more shots tore through the air, followed by the smell of cordite, more powerful than I’d ever remembered it.
Hands dragged me away from the shooting. Then I was wedged with my back against the quarterdeck wall. “Watson!” Holmes said again, his face a stretched mask of concern above me.
I tore myself free of the pain. The storm and ship snapped back into focus just as a horrible grinding noise came from below. It thrummed through my feet and rattled my skull, and the deck swayed. The motion flung both of us to one side, and it was only Holmes’s iron grip that kept us from tumbling right off the ship’s deck.
Wood splintered, and the world screamed and tilted impossibly underneath us. The Merry Widow had ground up against something, something that was tearing her hull out.
Morris and Mary were both better braced, and kept shooting despite the lurching deck. It seemed both absurd and impossible that anyone could shoot a man, vampire or otherwise, so many times and not kill him. But Boucher was still on his feet, looming between the two of them and the two of us.
Holmes started skirting around the combat, just as the world lurched again. The enormous support of one of the Thames’ bridges could be seen through the curtain of rain. The deck was nearly level now, but buckling like so much thin ice. I dragged myself to my feet.
Somehow Holmes had gotten across the deck, and had his hands on both of Morris’s wrists. They struggled now along the slippery deck, wrestling for control of Morris’s pistol.
The ship lurched again. The sudden motion flung me against the half-dead Boucher and he spun and tried to grapple with me. The huge hands reached for my throat, this time, to finish the job. He seemed mad and insensible, but determined to rip asunder anyone unfortunate enough to fall into his hands. He pressed me back against the railing, and the wood ground against the bones in my back. Then, the rail cracked, and I could feel it giving way.