The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(80)
I groped for the swaying lantern, meaning to use it as a weapon. I got a hold of it with my right hand while jamming my left into the crazed vampire’s chest in a near-futile effort to fend him off. Boucher’s spectral face leered at me.
But past that face, amazingly, I picked out another face.
Mary. She’d gotten her footing and was aiming, very carefully, so that she could put a bullet into the back of Sherlock Holmes’s head. I had not a moment to lose.
I thrust the lantern into Boucher’s face, smashing glass and mangling the thin metal with the force of my blow. Oil splattered and Boucher’s head went up in an instant bonfire.
He screamed, a horrible wail like a wounded hound. His hands lashed at his own face, scrabbling at it as if he meant to flense away fire and flesh together. I shoved him further away, ignoring the railing that threatened to finally snap behind me, and kicked out. My foot took Boucher full in the chest, and he flew, a flaming missile that went, gratefully, precisely where I’d aimed him.
He crashed into Mary.
Her shot went wild. Boucher grappled at her, now, and the two of them were covered in burning oil. Not just Boucher’s head now, but both their bodies, the mizzenmast that they crashed into, and the sail above it all blazed. In a world of pitch, tar and sail, sailors live in constant fear of fire for good reason. The fire ran in all directions, in no way impeded by the rain. In instants, the entire bow of the ship was a conflagration that enveloped them both. They screamed and thrashed, becoming small infernos in their own right. Boucher’s figure finally collapsed to the deck, immobile, gone at last. Mary survived some further twenty or thirty seconds, a harrowing and haunting vision wreathed in agony and flame and writhing in pain. Her screams still haunt me now, many years later. Finally, it was cut short as the burning deck collapsed and both of them fell into the fiery hold, where gouts of more flame and a great shower of sparks showed that the fire down there was even more terrible. I had to turn away.
“There!” Holmes shouted, and pointed with Morris’s pistol, which Holmes had wrested from Morris. Holmes had his other hand on the scruff of Morris’s neck and the defeated American looked to be an entirely broken man. I looked to where Holmes pointed and saw the welcome twin lights of the police boat through sheets of rain behind us.
“Lestrade!” I breathed.
“As dogged as ever!” Holmes agreed.
The backs of my own hands were smoking from where some of the oil had splashed on them and I only just now thought to smother them with the wet sleeves of my coat.
The Merry Widow’s entire main deck was engulfed in flame now, too, along with most of the sail, and the sulphurous blast of hot air battered and singed us in equal measure. Holmes dragged Morris’s limp body over to me at the railing. As if in sudden irony, the railing which had kept me from falling under Boucher’s assault, under no visible pressure whatsoever, shook itself loose under our gaze and tumbled into the Thames.
“Can you make it?” I shouted at him, nodding my head to indicate the somewhat daunting swim between us and the approaching police boat.
“We’ll have to!” Holmes shouted. “We haven’t a moment to lose!” He flipped Morris’s pistol casually into the water and grabbed hold of my shoulder. We jumped and tumbled into the Thames. Only after I hit the water did I remember that the Merry Widow had been a liquor smuggling operation.
The towering pillar of flame when the fire got to the hold was, I’m told, nothing short of spectacular.
*
“Tell me again,” Lestrade said some hours later back at Baker Street, “what the actual plan was? Or was it your intention to nearly get braised and poached with high-proof grain whiskey?”
“I’m just grateful you were there to pick us up!” I said.
“Those were Mr Holmes’s instructions,” Lestrade said pointedly. “As if I’d do any less. Might have warned me about the whiskey, though.”
Never had my old chair felt so comfortable than it had now, with the danger of drowning so close behind me. It had fallen on me hard, the coma-like torpor, a black, spinning, spiralling suffocation of sensation that terrified me far more than death ever could. I remember Dracula claiming that the vampire’s transformation brought out the deep-rooted superstitions of the psyche, making vampires more prone to the baser emotions than before. I hadn’t believed him then, but I did now.
“Well,” Holmes said. “Things did get rather out of hand. I knew Morris was reckless, but not that he was suicidal enough to board a ship and cast off without any visible crew.” He lounged, fully at ease in his purple dressing gown, which had seen much better days.
“Those suicidal instincts,” Lestrade said. “Nearly got us all killed. Bad enough for us on the police boat, but you and Dr Watson were even closer. You took an awful chance, Mr Holmes!”
“One we’ll not take again,” I said heartily. “I assure you.”
“You took the worst of it, Doctor,” Lestrade said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“My hands are remarkably well recovered,” I said. “But my shoulder still hurts. Makes me feel as if I’ve come full circle, somehow.”
“One wound on top of another is poor luck,” Lestrade said.
I nodded, though the truth of it was that the Afghan wound hadn’t bothered me for months, not since my transformation. Given a proper supply of blood, I could heal more thoroughly, if not as quickly, than I ever had before. Now, however, it seemed that Morris’s silver bullet had inflicted an identical wound and the poisonous wound throbbed more painfully than the Jezail bullet ever had. Still, it should heal again, if excruciatingly slowly.