The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(93)
“Gonna regret this,” Miss Winter said, echoing my thoughts. Her voice was steady, but her face was a mask of fear. Somersby’s was even worse and he swayed briefly so that I thought the man might faint on the spot, but Miss Winter grabbed his arm and he gave her a tight, weak smile.
“Easy in,” Holmes whispered, “but not easy out.” His jaw was clenched as he raised the pocket lantern so that the light fell on cobblestone walls and a set of wooden slats leading down. He started down and I behind him, but Kitty Winter pushed her way in front of me, which startled me enough to make me hesitate half a moment before I followed. Somersby came after me, bearing a pistol that gleamed in the half-light. He’d come prepared, too.
Holmes drew his own pistol and then stopped and turned slightly to address Miss Winter behind him. “Only three of us have revolvers – perhaps it would be better if you waited upstairs?” I knew that Holmes had supplied all of his Midnight Watch operatives with pistols and silver cartridges, including Miss Winter, but she apparently did not carry one.
“Shove off,” Miss Winter said. “You think Somersby takes care of the fledgling vampires we find? Not hardly.”
“You have no pistol,” I said, keeping my voice very low.
Miss Winter shook her head, clearly distressed at our stupidity. “You might have remained the same, Dr Watson, with your dainty manners and spending all your time reading and the like, but that’s not how most of us come out of it. Men or women, don’t make no difference. I may be human enough to stop me from going on a killing spree, but that don’t make me human. Now we’ve already woken half of our reception party, I’m sure. Best we keep moving and not stand here whispering loud enough and long enough to wake the other half!”
Holmes caught my eye over the top of her small decorative hat and shrugged helplessly. We continued to descend, trying to be as silent as we could manage. There was a chill moisture in the air and somewhere water drip, drip, dripped, very slowly. Somersby slipped on one of the shaky slats partway down and fell against me, nearly dropping his pistol. The canvas-wrapped bundle of shovels came loose from his back and clattered down the wooden stairs, making a horrific racket that made me cringe.
“Sorry,” he whimpered. “Sorry, sorry.” His silver pince-nez fell off his nose as he crouched to try and close the bag tighter, a move far too late to do any good.
A particularly large shovel banged off the bottom few steps and landed right at the feet of a shadowy figure lurching out of the shadows. Feral eyes, lank brown hair, and a mouthful of fangs were shown in the light of Holmes’s pocket lantern. The creature sank into a crouch, preparing to leap up at us, but Holmes’s pistol went off with a crack and the vampire spun and fell in a heap.
Kitty Winter sprang down the steps with a snarl and another vampire, a ham-fisted man with a shopkeeper’s apron still on, seized her by the arm. Her fangs had grown with her surge of adrenaline, as well as her fingernails, transforming her in an instant to an apparition out of Hell. She swung her sharpened talons, tearing her assailant’s throat out with one brutal motion. The man gurgled black blood in a sickening spray and fell to his knees. He tried to rise again, but by then I was there to put a silver bullet into his brain. The crack of my pistol and the smell of cordite was an assault on the senses in this underground setting, but the man tumbled lifelessly to the dirt. The burning smell of silver coming into contact with vampire flesh made my nostrils itch.
A woman stepped into the light, looking from her once-white dress and blonde curls like she’d been on her way to get her photograph when Moriarty and his minions had gotten a hold of her. She oozed, stalking towards us with a boneless, liquid, inhuman grace that could not possibly have been hers during her previous life. She laughed, baring her fangs which already had blood stains on them, though I could not imagine from what source. Behind her, shuffling in unnatural and haunting imitation of what had once been her mother, a young girl in a matching dress, hair also in blonde curls, leered and stalked monstrously behind.
Thinking of the single worst moment in my entire life, the night Mary had tried to shoot Holmes, forcing me to shoot her, I pulled the trigger. I had to wipe the moisture out of my eyes, but my hand was steady.
The little girl didn’t even seem to notice as her mother fell, but only licked her lips and shuffled towards us. Another shot rang out, this time from Holmes’s gun, and she, too, fell.
“Element of surprise indeed,” Holmes said as he and Somersby joined us on the dirt floor. His tone was jocular, but the delivery came through clenched teeth. The greatest detective in the world had warned us that we were going to step, in all likelihood, precisely into Moriarty’s trap and so we had. All around us, the trap was springing, springing and springing.
Vampires toiled from rough mounds of earth in all directions. The ceiling of the basement was low enough for Holmes to have to duck the individual beams, and six or seven vertical support beams loomed in all directions, blocking some of the view. But I could feel the openness of the place. The cellar was large, probably larger than the building above, stretching back into the darkness like a warren of tunnels. A small theatre could have been housed in this space and Moriarty had filled the whole bloody thing with vampires, it seemed. Groans and snarls and the sounds of digging came from all directions and Holmes’s lantern showed dozens of the figures struggling from the dirt. Perhaps more. We formed a rough semicircle with the staircase at our backs and prepared for an assault from the very depths of Hell.