Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

“What if,” he said, “the stories about the Rubenstein Collection mummy are true? What if Pharaoh Djedhor languishes in some twilight state between life and death, kept that way by an infusion of herbs and chemicals introduced into his body during the embalming and mummification process? What if, from time to time, he rouses from this torpid state and staggers around briefly in a semblance of life? Mr Holmes, I implore you to look into this matter for me, so that I may know to my satisfaction whether my experience in France was a mere figment of my imagination or perhaps a hoax, or whether I really did spend an evening in the company of the oldest human being ever to have walked the Earth.”

“I am no expert in archaeology or ancient history,” replied my friend. “I can barely tell a Ming vase from a Qing vase. Surely it would be better if you yourself, Mr Smith, or one of your colleagues at the Royal Society or the Oriental Society, were to study the mummy and draw what conclusions you can from your analysis.”

“Alas, that is not possible. Mr Rubenstein has stipulated that no items in his collection are open to scrutiny, not even by professionals such as myself. It is a crime against the advancement of knowledge, if you ask me, but he will not be swayed. He is very jealous of his property, it would seem, and fears it might be marred by careless hands. The mummy may not even be exposed to the open air, lest it suffer the ravages of our polluted city atmosphere.”

“Intriguing. He allows the artefacts to go on tour, meaning they must be repeatedly packaged up, put in crates and transported from place to place, which entails no small risk of inadvertent damage; yet he is anxious that they should not be closely looked at, not even by those practised at handling such items.”

“He is an American,” said Smith, as though that explained much. “And very wealthy. A newspaper proprietor, I believe.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “I have read about him. A former vaudevillian and theatre impresario who went into newspaper publishing and now has a string of dailies across the United States, the majority of them at the salacious and yellow end of the market. Yet himself a cultured man, it would appear, given his acquisition of some of the finest and most valuable of ancient treasures.”

“It is possible to have refined tastes and peddle dross,” I averred. “Often it is a mark of great intellect, the ability to create a product which appeals to the lowest common denominator.”

“True, Watson, and such a talent has proved highly lucrative for some. I feel, however, that Mr Rubenstein would still like it to be known that he has a cultured side, hence his allowing his collection to be shown to the public on the Continent and in Britain. The publicity coup arising from the brouhaha about an animate mummy is, if nothing else, advantageous to his goal. Mr Smith? I would very much like to take this case on your behalf. I am interested in seeing this so-called living mummy with my own eyes, and to that end, Watson and I shall tonight install ourselves in the British Museum and lie in wait. With luck, Pharaoh Djedhor will oblige us by rising from his uneasy slumbers and embarking on one of his posthumous perambulations.”

So it was that Holmes and I entered the museum shortly before closing time, just as the paying visitors were leaving. It was the very first day of the Rubenstein Collection’s fortnight-long stay in London, and a great tide of people poured out of the Archaic Room, chattering excitedly, while the two of us shouldered against the flow, grim of purpose. We had obtained special permission to be on the premises after dark from no less a personage than Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, the museum’s Principal Librarian and Director. Holmes had done Sir Edward a small service in the recent past, a matter concerning the theft of a gold Anglo-Saxon belt buckle. My friend was wont to dismiss the case as “a trivial diversion” but to my mind it involved some of his more ingenious examples of analytical reasoning, not least his deduction of the culprit’s lack of a left eye based on nothing more than the angle on which a crowbar was deployed during the break-in. Sir Edward, at any rate, felt he owed Holmes a favour, and was returning it by granting us licence – contrary to regulations though it was – to roam the museum out of hours. He had some inkling of our reason for being there but stated that he would prefer not to be told explicitly, since he had no wish to be seen to be giving official credence to, in his words, “this absurd farrago of half-truths and wishful thinking”.

We spent several long hours in the Archaic Room, hearing nothing but the whisper and sigh of the grand, venerable building around us and the clamour of pedestrians and road traffic on Great Russell Street outside the thick walls, all of which dwindled as the night wore on, leaving just the chilly, lonely rattle of the January wind. The only illumination came from moonlight slanting in through the high windows, which lent a phosphorescent silvery cast to the statues, pottery, swords, crowns, amphorae and other treasures that filled the room. The night watchmen had been instructed to give this particular corner of the museum a wide berth, an admonition which few of them minded heeding since at least half of them believed that Pharaoh Djedhor’s eternal rest was more unquiet than it ought to have been and the remainder had no desire to have their scepticism put to the test.

“It is a most singular errand we are engaged on,” Holmes murmured to me at one point during our vigil. “I would, of course, like to inspect the sarcophagus for myself, but I fear I cannot without disturbing its occupant and alerting him to our presence, which may have a deterrent effect. I would not care to inhibit friend Djedhor, should he elect to take the air this evening.”

“Holmes, you’re not telling me you think the mummy actually walks?”

“Do you suppose that it does not?”

Up until that moment I had been proceeding on the assumption that it was all hokum, a series of tall tales and misapprehensions which had grown with every stop on the collection’s tour, gathering size and momentum like a snowball rolling downhill. Now, in light of Holmes’s rhetorical question, I cast an uneasy eye towards the sarcophagus, which lay on a trestle some twenty feet from the glass-sided display cabinet behind which my friend and I had sequestered ourselves. It glimmered in the moon’s glow, the features of its painted face suffused with a radiance that made them seem weirdly, I might even say preternaturally, alive. Its black-rimmed eyes seemed to sparkle with deep, long-held knowledge, and I could not help thinking of the withered effigy within, confined to that fig-wood coffin over three hundred years before the birth of Christ, a once all-powerful ruler of one of history’s greatest and most enduring empires, worshipped as a god, considered a son of Ra, no less. Might he still be alive, fending off the approach of death via some arcane alchemical process lost to time? Might he, even now, be reaching for the underside of the sarcophagus’s lid with bony, impossibly old fingers, to push it open and once again walk the earth as he did in the dim and distant past?

I won’t deny that a chill descended upon me then and a knot of dread took up occupancy in my belly, so much so that when Holmes next addressed me, I started.

“Your service revolver is, I need not ask, to hand?”

“It… It is. Yes. In my pocket. But if we are about to confront the undead, what hope have we of stopping it with mere bullets? Are not such creatures impervious to harm by conventional means?”

“By repute they are,” said Holmes, “and it is a pity we have not taken the precaution of investing in ammunition made of silver. It is surely better, though, to face them with some manner of weapon at the ready than none at all.”

I could not fault his logic, but it did not comfort me. As the night wore on I became increasingly unsettled. The shadows in the room seemed to thicken, and I sensed the antiquities all around me as though they had an ineffable weight, as though their cumulative age was a force that made the atmosphere in the room heavy and oppressive. Time crawled, anchored by these many relics of long-gone civilisations in far-off yesteryears.

Shortly after the bells of St. George’s, Bloomsbury struck midnight, we heard it – Holmes first, with his sharper ears. The merest of scraping sounds reached us, followed by the merest of creaks.

Before our very eyes, the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Djedhor began to open and the mummy slowly, stiffly clambered out.

“Now, Watson!” Holmes hissed. “Quick! We must move!”

I, though, was unable to, for I was still overcome by that surge of terror which had left my entire body paralysed. I could no more have moved at that moment than could the squat limestone figurine of a Mesopotamian fertility goddess which sat on a pedestal nearby.

The mummy lumbered towards us with a dire, implacable gait, seemingly aware of the horror its menacing appearance must strike in all who saw it.

All, that is, save Sherlock Holmes, who was not intimidated. Rather, he was energised, and leapt forward with a fierce glee, clamping a hand upon my arm and dragging me along with him. His touch had a galvanic effect, and though I was far from thrilled at being pulled bodily into the path of the oncoming revenant, I took heart from Holmes’s intrepidity. If he was unafraid, should I not be also? My companion, after all, was far from being a fool. If he perceived no imminent danger in the situation, then no imminent danger there must be.

“Your pistol, old man,” he urged me. “Take it out. Aim it.”

I did as I was told, blindly compliant, cocking back the hammer with my thumb.

“You there!” Holmes said, speaking now to the mummy. “The jig is up. We have you at gunpoint. I would recommend you stand still and surrender, or face the consequences.”

I did not believe for one instant that his barked command would have any effect. How could they on a creature whose mother tongue had not been uttered aloud in several centuries and who doubtless knew not one word of English? A creature, moreover, whose very existence mocked death.

But then a most remarkable thing happened.

The mummy obeyed.

It halted in its tracks, and its extended arms rose from horizontal to vertical.

“P-please,” it stammered in an accent which sounded to my ears distinctly American. “Don’t shoot. I give up.”

Holmes gave vent to an arch laugh. “I knew it! The whole thing has been a charade, perpetrated by an associate of Rubenstein’s from his theatre days. You are, are you not, sir, a vaudeville performer?”

“I am that, among other things,” said the mummy, his tone somewhat crestfallen. “Kindly ask your companion to put away his pistol. I assure you I am no threat.”

“Perhaps I should be the judge of that. Watson, keep your gun trained on him. Let us firmly establish the facts of the situation before we lower our guard.”

“Watson?” said the mummy. “As in Dr John Watson? Then you, sir, must be Sherlock Holmes.”

“None other. From your distinctive drawl I take you to be a native of one of the mid-western states of America – Wisconsin would be my guess, judging by a certain particular broadness of the vowels which derives from the many Norwegian settler communities there.”

“That is true.”

“Yet I discern the faintest tinges of a Slavic heritage too, in your rather choppy intonation. I suspect your parents are of European origin, immigrants. From Budapest, perhaps?”

“Now you are being truly uncanny,” said the mummy, who was in no small way uncanny himself. “I was in fact born in that great city but we emigrated when I was very young.”

“I confess that it is a hobby of mine, tracing a man’s ancestry from his inherited speech patterns. It especially applies to your nation. Few Americans are just American. More often than not they betray the imprint of their forebears in their accents and vocabulary. I have composed a short monograph on the subject which is currently undergoing peer review by members of the Philological Society on its way to publication in their annual
Transactions
. Your origins, however, need not detain us, since it is your present activities with which we are concerned.”

“Before you go any further,” said the mummy, “may I at least remove some of these bandages? I have been bound up in them for nearly eighteen hours, and I find them constricting to say the least. Now that there is no further need to wear them, I may as well divest myself.”

“By all means.”

The impersonator of the dead Pharaoh Djedhor began carefully to unwind the cerecloths from around his head, to reveal a roughly triangular face with eyes set close together and eyebrows that canted towards each other at a very determined angle. His hair, wiry and dark, he combed with his fingers until it was somewhat neatened and given an approximate centre parting. Then he smiled sheepishly and stuck out a still cloth-wrapped hand. He could not have been more than twenty or twenty-one years of age, yet had the bearing of someone older and more worldly.

“It is an honour to meet you, Mr Holmes,” he said. “Your fame has reached the shores of my homeland, and I must say, if I had to be apprehended by anyone in the commission of this little imposture, I’m glad it was you. To have been unmasked by a lesser man would have been humiliating, whereas to have fallen foul of the great Sherlock Holmes – well, I guess then we can call it quits.”

I bristled at the sheer impertinence of the fellow. He evidently felt that he, a felon, was somehow the equal of my friend and that his capture
in flagrante delicto
was no more than the outcome of a contest, like a joust between two knights in which both were unhorsed. He could not, it seemed, have had a higher opinion of himself, his self-esteem excessive even by the standards of his own countrymen.

Holmes, for his part, was merely amused. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?” he enquired, grasping the mummy’s hand.

“I was born Erik Weisz,” came the reply, “but I prefer to go by the stage name of Harry Houdini. Of the Brothers Houdini? The toast of Coney Island?”

“I regret your fame has not stretched as far this way across the Atlantic as mine has the other way.”