The Devil's Promise, page 9
‘Dented a little about the skull, but I will live,’ I said. ‘And you?’
He gave a grim smile and rubbed the back of his head. ‘Much the same, I reckon.’
I dragged myself to my feet and with unsteady steps I went over to my friend. ‘Come on, old boy, let me haul you up.’ I extended my arms, which he grasped, and with some effort I managed to get him to his feet.
‘That’s better,’ he said, without much conviction. And then he gave a little smile. ‘This is a rum business, all right. You didn’t warn me that I might get beaten about the head when I agreed to help you.’
‘I’m sorry, Thurston. It came as a surprise to me also. If I’d known…’
My friend threw up his hand. ‘Don’t apologise, for goodness’ sake. This has been the most exciting day I’ve had since I left the army. I can see why you’re keen on this detective business. What’s our next move?’
With great enthusiasm Thurston stepped forward and then awkwardly fell towards me. I caught his arm and supported him.
‘Oh, the legs are still a bit wobbly,’ he said, his voice suddenly weak.
I helped him over to a large tea chest near the grimy window and he perched on the edge of it, mopping his brow, his face damp with perspiration.
‘Not… not as young as I was,’ he muttered.
I examined the back of his head. The skin had not been broken but he possessed a fair-sized lump.
‘We need to get you home. You need to rest. You’re obviously suffering from mild concussion.’
Thurston turned to me as though he was about to reject my suggestion, but the sudden movement of his head caused him to flinch. ‘Perhaps… perhaps you are right. But what about you?’
‘I think I must do the same. I believe it’s time to bring a halt to my investigations for a while and wait until I hear from Holmes.’ The lie came easily and I felt somewhat ashamed at duping my friend, necessary as it was.
Thurston was in too frail a shape to argue or to reason with my statement.
‘When you feel able, we’ll go downstairs and find you a cab to get you home.’
‘That would be very nice,’ he said faintly. ‘A brandy by my own fireside would be most welcome.’
And so, some ten minutes later I was helping my friend into a hansom after giving instructions to the driver where to take him. Thurston’s pale face seemed to glow in the shadows of the cab. ‘Sorry about this, Watson. I’m not quite the old campaigner I thought I was.’
‘Take care and rest!’ I cried, slamming the door and waving to the cabbie to set forth.
As the cab disappeared into the early evening gloom, my weary limbs and aching head indicated that I too was not quite the old campaigner I thought I was.
Fourteen
From Dr Watson’s Journal
On reaching Baker Street, the full effect of the blow that I had received, the second in a matter of hours, was having a severe and detrimental effect on me. I staggered up to our sitting room and had just enough energy to slough off my outer coat before slumping down in the armchair by the hearth. I gave silent thanks to Mrs Hudson, who had banked up the fire, and the fingers of flames were just beginning to show through the coals. It would not be long before I had a roaring blaze.
I longed for a restorative brandy, but I just didn’t have enough energy to take my tired frame to the drinks table. Instead, I lay back and closed my eyes. I knew that it would not be long before sleep carried me away into restorative oblivion. How long I slumbered I knew not, but I woke with a start, propelled into wakefulness by some horrific dream, the nature of which was lost to me as soon as I opened my eyes. I sat there as the dancing firelight silhouetted on the walls presented a bizarre picture show for me. My neck was stiff and my brain ached and I felt very odd. Suddenly flashes of light began to appear before me, and then faces and images loomed in view briefly before vanishing rather like the flame of an extinguished candle. It was like a wild unnerving tapestry. Indeed, I wondered for a moment if I was really awake. Certainly my mind was playing some kind of game with me. I pulled myself up into a more erect sitting position and stared into the darkness as the images continued. I saw a cottage. Then waves crashing against rocks. There was Holmes on the beach, but the picture was snatched away before I could determine more. Then I saw blood splattered on the sand. A corpse. Dappled sunlight. The dark interior of an inn. Then the pretty face of a girl. She smiled but intangibly her expression changed from one of fear into one of gloating malice, her teeth champing with fury and hate. Then her features seemed to melt like those of a wax dummy placed near heat, eyes widening into dark empty sockets and the mouth slipping open wide into a black silent maw.
The images continued like a mad, fractured lantern show, and all the while my head throbbed and my senses whirled. Gradually, I realised what was happening – I was regaining my memory.
And then the images faded, darkness descended again and I drifted back into deep sleep. I woke some hours later. I felt stiff and cold, the fire having long burned itself out, but strangely I felt relaxed, elated somehow, as though some great burden had been lifted from me. Those blows to my head may have been physically painful but they had, I was sure, been instrumental in restoring to me the lost fragments of my memory. It was as though I had been able to slip the many missing pieces into a large jigsaw puzzle, completing the picture. With more energy than I expected, I rose and acquired that large brandy I had desired many hours before. Its warmth invigorated and enlivened me. I turned up the lamp and returned to my chair once more.
I cast my mind back to that fateful holiday with Holmes. I was determined to track its progress in detail. By doing so, I hoped, indeed I believed, that it would provide me with the answers to so many of the conundrums which had baffled me in recent days. With great effort, I forced my mind back to recapture those memories. I remembered the train journey down to Totnes, hiring the horse and cart and the drive to the coast. With a thrill, in my mind’s eye I saw the cottage on the cliffs, exactly as I had seen it on the day we arrived. I took a large sip of brandy and sat back in the chair, closed my eyes and allowed the whole scenario of what happened next to run through my mind. I was thrilled by the precise details I was now able to recall; the scenes, the conversations, the faces and the names.
Blackwood! That name reverberated in my mind. Of course. Blackwood. Enoch Blackwood, the son of the reviled Bartholomew Blackwood. The young man’s face loomed before me, rippling insubstantially. My heart beat faster and my body tensed as the awful realisation washed over me. Yes, I did remember meeting him in Howden and the meal at his strange house, but what made my whole body stiffen with a strange mixture of fear and excitement was the realisation that I had seen the face, the man, since then. I was sure that he was the strange visitor who had come to see Holmes that day I had been sent off to organise tea; the visitor who had disappeared before I returned. He had been here in Baker Street. In these very rooms! Why did I not recognise him, remember him? Why did Holmes not indicate that we had met before? What on earth did it all mean?
I took another gulp of brandy and tried to organise my thoughts, but my brain was in such a whirl, crowded with new puzzles and fresh memories, that I could not think straight. However, one thing was clear to me. I was not meant to know him – not meant to recognise Enoch Blackwood. Somehow, my memory of him had been suppressed. How? Why did I not remember? Had my mind been tampered with? The thought appalled me. And what made this contemplation all the more horrendous was the underlying notion that my friend Sherlock Holmes must have known. Indeed, he must have been complicit in the matter. It seemed that he could not be trusted any more. As I allowed this thought to rise in my mind, I shuddered at the terrible implications it wrought. The whole stability and basis of our relationship was upturned.
It would seem that in some way, the events that took place in Howden had been removed from my memory deliberately so that I could not remember them. Had it been drugs or some cunning form of hypnotism? I forced myself to return to the newly recovered scenes once more, and with as much determination as I could muster I began to run them through my brain again in a cold and dispassionate manner. I wanted to recall as much detail as possible, and in particular I wanted to remember those last moments before darkness fell and I woke up some time later in a hospital bed.
There I was, heading for the little stable in the early morning light. I had just left Holmes in the cottage guarding the corpse that had been such a puzzle and a trial to us. I was eager to prepare the horse and cart for our journey and had no sense of danger or apprehension as I entered the small building. The horse stirred at my approach and pawed the ground with one of its forelegs. I patted his flank and uttered some friendly word of greeting. As I did so, I sensed a movement behind me. Before I had time to turn around, a firm hand had clamped a damp cloth across my mouth, pressing hard with a vice-like grip. A familiar aroma assailed my nostrils. There was no doubt in my mind that the cloth contained a strong dousing of chloroform. The smell was more than familiar to me and in that incomprehensible way one’s mind works, even in dramatic situations like this, I was momentarily transported back to the makeshift operating theatres in Afghanistan where chloroform was used liberally on the poor wounded devils to enable us to ease their pain while we attempted to save their lives. It was with thoughts and images of that time that I succumbed to the powerful fumes and sank to the ground unconscious.
The next thing I remember was waking up in some dark and damp environment. It was a lofty chamber with a vaulted ceiling, illuminated by burning torches fastened to the walls. I was seated in a large wooden chair and my feet and hands were tied, thus preventing me from moving. Some distance off there were some shadowy figures, who on seeing me raise my head and rouse myself from my drugged slumbers moved towards me. There were four men, three of whom I recognised. There was the man who claimed to be the Reverend Simon Dickens, Enoch Blackwood and Holmes. The other man kept himself in the shadows and I could see only his silhouette, which seemed wiry and crabbed, his back curved with age.
Holmes gazed at me with a kind of vague curiosity, but gave no sign of concern at my plight or made any attempt to release me. His features lacked any sign of strong emotion at all.
‘Let me go at once!’ I cried, pulling at my bonds.
‘Do not distress yourself, Doctor Watson. We mean you no harm,’ said Dickens.
‘Then why am I trussed up like this? Holmes, what on earth is going on?’
My friend gazed at me with a strange benevolent smile haunting his lips but he said nothing. I had seen him behave like this before, in the old days when in the thrall of one of his lengthy cocaine sessions, when the power of the drug had overwhelmed his senses and composure. But that was in the old days. He had long given up the habit, accepting at last the damage it threatened to his mental powers. Surely he had not relapsed? No, of course not. Something much stronger than cocaine had taken control of him. Gazing at him in the flickering light, it appeared that all emotion and concern had been drained from him. Here was just the shell of the man. It was clear to me that I was in some kind of danger and yet Holmes did nothing to help me; indeed, it seemed that he was in league with the others.
‘Holmes, untie me now,’ I urged him, but he gave no reaction to my plea.
‘Do not distress yourself, Doctor,’ said Dickens. ‘All will be well. There is no cause for alarm.’
‘If that is the case why am I bound in this fashion?’
‘In order that we might administer your medicine. It is imperative that we do so.’ It was Enoch Blackwood who uttered this statement and as he moved closer to me I saw that he was holding a cup which contained some greenish liquid.
‘Your medicine,’ he intoned softly. ‘It will make you a lot better.’
‘I am not ill. Let me go.’
‘Indeed, we will. After you have taken your medicine.’
‘You can go to hell,’ I cried, tugging once more on my unyielding bonds.
‘Obviously, the patient is going to be difficult, Mr Dickens. I think I shall require your help.’
Dickens grunted and stepped forward. ‘It would be easier if you took this of your own volition, Doctor,’ he said.
Blackwood held the cup to my lips. I turned my head sideways but not before I smelt the sour pungent odour emanating from the cup.
‘Mr Dickens, if you please,’ said Blackwood, leaning closer.
Suddenly I found Dickens’ hands on my face. With savage and brutish movements, he clamped one hand around my nostrils, while the other snapped open my mouth. I tried to resist but without success. I was held firmly with my mouth agape. Leaning over me Blackwood forced the cup up against my teeth and then slowly he began to pour the foul liquid into my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but my jaw was held open so tightly that I could not prevent the liquid slipping down my throat. As the volume increased, I began to choke and my eyes began to water, but Blackwood continued undeterred until the cup was empty. What were the devils trying to do? Drug me? Poison me? Surely there were easier ways of killing me than forcing me to swallow a fetid brew?
Dickens released his hold and stood back. Although I coughed and sputtered, it was too late to regurgitate the liquid. I had swallowed it, and whatever purpose they had in forcing me to consume the foul concoction they had been successful. Sherlock Holmes looked on, unmoved and emotionless, as though he were staring at a stone wall.
Was this a mad dream from which I was about to wake up in my bed in Baker Street? Oh, if only that were the case. I screwed my eyes up momentarily in a desperate and childish attempt to make everything go away.
But it did not.
Everything remained as it was. Except now my vision began to blur and my thoughts began to scramble. For some unaccountable reason I chuckled. What was happening to me? Of course, it was the drink. The potion. The draught. The poison. I chuckled again as I failed to find any more synonyms for the drink that had been forced upon me.
What on earth was happening to me?
I have only been really drunk twice in my life and the feelings I was experiencing now were of a similar nature to those I felt on those two occasions. My limbs seemed to have lost any kind of firmness or strength and my tongue seemed to have swollen to fill my mouth. Conversation was nigh impossible: I could not form any kind of coherent sentence. My head ached and I was losing the ability to think clearly.
From the shadows the old man shambled towards me. He was thin and wizened. His paper-thin skin, like an ancient papyrus, was so taut against his face that he looked like a walking skeleton, with fierce eyes blazing in the hollows of his face. His appearance should have frightened me, but my senses were so far adrift from their normal functioning that I just gazed at him in a dreamy fashion as he reached out with his scrawny hand and placed it upon my forehead. I felt the hard fingers scratching on my flesh like the cold claws of some giant bird. His ancient eyes gazed into mine and he began to speak. The words emerged through the thin slit of his mouth, although his lips did not seem to move. The voice was eerie, like the creaking of some ancient door. What he spoke made no sense to me at all. If it was in some foreign language it was certainly not one I had heard before, but this did not concern me in the least for I already felt my whole being floating away on a raft of blessed sleep. As my eyelids grew heavy, I was aware that I was smiling. The odd words reverberated in my ears as greyness cloaked me, a greyness that darkened into deep black. I was now in some sable void, at peace apart from the strange chanting of the old man, which I still heard in my head.
And then suddenly there was nothing.
I was nowhere.
The world was beyond me.
Fifteen
From Dr Watson’s Journal
As I sat in the darkness in our Baker Street sitting room I shuddered at the realisation that this memory had been hidden from me until now. The blows to my head had somehow dislodged it from its hiding place. It had been deliberately suppressed, no doubt by the powers of that strange brew that I had been forced to ingest. However, this unpleasant revelation did nothing to help me pierce the veil of mystery that surrounded me. Desperately, I tried to make some sense of it. If this drug I had taken could trick the memory in such a fashion, then no doubt Enoch Blackwood and Dickens could have held Holmes in their power by similar means. Remembering his blank face in that dank cellar, it was clear that he was under some kind of spell, maybe held in some kind of hypnotic trance. That must be the answer. The powerful, independent strength of my friend’s intellect which had proved no match for such mind games in the past had in some way been undermined. By whatever dastardly means at their disposal these villains had managed to coerce him, bend him to their wishes. Certainly in his right mind he would never have allowed them to treat me as they did.
However, what continued to puzzle me was what happened next. After I sank into oblivion, what did they do with Holmes? What did they want from him? And why did they let me live? The next thing I knew, the next thing I actually remembered, was waking up in the hospital bed some weeks later with no memory or knowledge of how I got there. At the time, I vaguely recalled entering the little stable, but did not remember where it was or any of the events that preceded that moment. Gradually, I regained my strength and the ability to eat and converse. I was informed that I was in a private nursing home near Richmond and that I had been there for nearly a month. I was shocked by the news that I had been unconscious for so long, but desperate as I was I could not piece together any of the incidents that had occurred leading up to my blackout. The doctor, a young Scotsman with a deferential air, told me that I had succumbed to a fever that had overcome my central nervous system, which had effectively shut down in order for me to recover naturally, but slowly. ‘No doubt,’ he averred, ‘your condition is the result of some bug or virus you picked up when you were out in Afghanistan and it has been lying dormant all these years.’
