The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(89)
“But what?” I said. “We have so little information. How could we possibly fathom his reasons for doing anything?”
“There is little enough information, it is true,” Holmes mused. “But little is not the same as none. We have our deceased John Clay in the morgue, do we not? What can we infer from that?” Plucking up my doctor’s bag from its resting place near my chair, he casually dumped out the contents onto the floor and started stuffing some of the cardboard boxes filled with Ingerson’s silver bullets into it.
“Holmes!” I said, picking up my stethoscope, bandages, and several other odds and ends, and putting them in a little pile on the table.
“For Gravesend, Doctor,” he said. “Come now, what can we infer?”
“I am sure that I am very stupid,” I said, wishing, as I often did, that Holmes would simply come to the point.
“Moriarty has pitted himself against both London,” Holmes said, “and Transylvania, or rather against the protectors of both those places.” He opened another drawer in his desk and pulled out a heavy mallet and several wooden stakes. After a quick moment’s thought, he opened another drawer and pulled out a large deerskin pouch and dumped that in, too. Leaving my bag on the sofa, he dashed back into his room, raising his voice as he rummaged among his things in there. Overtaken by curiosity, I went over to the bag and pulled out the pouch. I tried to open it, but the cords were knotted shut.
“Dracula assured us that controlling other vampires was no easy task,” Holmes called out from the other room, “and also of the fracturing of personality that almost always comes with the transformation to vampirehood. We have seen that Moriarty seems to have found a way around that, to be able to transform his victims and still retain control, building a vampire horde that neither I, nor Dracula, nor any other agency in the world, could hope to contend with. His entire enterprise has been built on this threat and our need to counteract it or perish.”
I stopped working momentarily on the pouch cord, and shivered again, as I always did, at the thought of teeming hordes of vampires in Moriarty’s thrall running rampant in the London streets.
“But,” Holmes said, stepping back into the room, “what if his method of control has failed him? What if there is one, or more than one, convert that threatens his newly formed nocturnal criminal organization from the inside?” He held a silver dagger in his hand that glinted brightly.
“That would change things a great deal,” I said. “Has that happened?”
Holmes came over to me, took the pouch from my hand, severed the cords in an easy flick from the silver knife, and handed the pouch back to me. He dumped the knife into the bag with the rest, then went and yanked open the door.
“Mrs Hudson,” he called down the stairs in a sing-song cadence. “We are awaiting a four-wheeler with Somersby and Miss Winter in it. Please keep a watchful eye on the door!”
I could hear the outrage in Mrs Hudson’s voice from here. “As if I’d let them stand on the doorstep when they arrived, Mr Holmes. I can hear a doorbell as well as anyone else. I never!”
I sniffed at the deerskin pouch, but really, there was no need. In fact, there had barely been a need to open it if I’d been less distracted. The scent of strong tobacco filled the room.
Holmes spun, shutting the door behind him, then sank into a chair. He waved at the tobacco pouch. “It is a long train ride to Gravesend. There are other possibilities,” Holmes said, returning to the question of Moriarty’s motives, “but I rather favour internal strife as the most likely one. Why else would he suddenly abandon his perfect stratagem? Moriarty was ever a careful and cunning foe. Moriarty driven to haste is even more dangerous.”
“More dangerous?”
“Don’t you see?” Holmes said. “We no longer have just Moriarty to worry about, but his possible rivals. In short, the rest of his vampiric empire. Moriarty’s recklessness with making more vampires still prevails, only his control over them is suddenly in question. Unless I am very much mistaken, the situation is rather like a raging river now and my fear is that if we do not find and defeat Moriarty in very short order, possibly days, the river will drown Moriarty, ourselves, and possibly all of Europe.”
“Mr Holmes!” Mrs Hudson called from the bottom of the stairs. She kept calling as she came up the stairs as fast as she could, finally bursting into our sitting room with an out-of-breath: “The King’s Ransom! That was the steamer you were waiting for, wasn’t it? That was what you told me, I’m sure of it!”
“Dracula’s ship,” I said.
“Slow down, Mrs Hudson,” Holmes said, bracing her in the doorway with both hands on her shoulders. It was a good thing, too, for she looked near spent from her dash up the stairs and he eased her into the nearest chair. “What is it?”
“The King’s Ransom,” Mrs Hudson panted. “It’s been sunk!”
Chapter 18
GRAVESEND
Holmes fell into a dark mood immediately after the news regarding Dracula’s steamer and did not speak at all while we were waiting. He sat near the window, looking out at the dreary rain and clutching the special edition that detailed the sinking of the King’s Ransom. He sent off a telegram to his brother in the British government, Mycroft, explaining the importance of the Royal Navy apprehending the ship that had committed this foul crime in the very lee of English waters and explaining, in carefully coded language that Holmes said Mycroft would understand completely, the unique danger that a boarding action would involve. The ship must be sunk at a distance, then divers could be sent to finish the job.