Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver (Sherlock Holmes Revival) (7 page)

“But to the business at hand Watson; no matter in how high a regard I hold both your company and your invaluable assistance in these matters, I doubt much that your new domestic estate would be improved if you did not immediately telegraph Mrs Watson and inform her that you may, perhaps, be occupied here for some days longer.”

*        *       *

CHAPTER FOUR

A Night in Bedlam

Sleep came hard to me that night, and when finally Morpheus grudgingly admitted me to his salon of somnolence, he served me not with that sweet nocturnal interlude of rest and blessed oblivion, but instead, with a night-long pageant of nightmarish and bizarre tableaux.

No doubt the day’s surfeit of overly-rich food, sweetmeats, strong cheese and wine took its due toll, and so it was that my first night back at 221B was broken by the most troubling of images, occasioned – I realised the next morning – unquestionably by the disturbing revelations of the elderly master engraver.

Mr Freud, I am led to believe, proposes the notion that dreams may be the brain’s subconscious attempt to bring order and understanding to the tangled chaos of matters which the conscious, analytical mind is unable to comprehend.

Eventually, a strange form of sleep overtook me...

...I stood in night so black I might have been a blind man. The air was suffocatingly humid, tropical and heady with the thick, cloying scent of exotic flowers. Steadily the temperature was rising – the ground beneath my feet was becoming hellishly hot at a fearful rate!

Cautiously I felt down through the gloom to investigate the cause – and cried out aloud in mingled pain and shock; nursing my seared fingers, I realised I was standing over a serpentine maze of giant gurgling metal pipes as fiercely hot as Dante’s inferno! To my horror I felt my scorched right hand blistering and tightening into a malformed sinewy claw, although, curiously, I no longer felt pain.

Warily I stepped forward, feeling before my face with my good left hand. The footing beneath me became blessedly cooler.

Something large fluttered past me so close I felt the touch of its wings; suddenly I was engulfed in a swarm of huge soft, furry insects – giant moths or butterflies I calmly decided; not so alarming – indeed, perfectly reasonable; after all I was apparently in some tropical jungle...

Just when the swarm seemed never-ending, abruptly it passed by. I felt my way on through the humid heat, along a seemingly endless path bordered with what felt refreshingly like cool damp foliage; thousands of leaves seethed around me as if trying to identify this alien intruder in their private, exotic and rarefied domain. My investigation was halted abruptly when I encountered a smooth hard wall; I explored it cautiously and found it, perhaps, to be cold glass – so I was not after all in a jungle, but mayhap in the palm house at Kew or some-such? Much reassured I resolved to continue my journeying.

Abruptly and shockingly, and with an enormous report, the glass wall shattered inward, cascading razor sharp daggers all around me but I, strangely, remained quite unscathed.

Peering through the resultant jagged hole I was confronted by a cheery, ruddy-cheeked workman; grey dawn light and a bitter cold wind assaulted me, pungent with the distinctive odours of his trade – paint, burnt paraffin, putty and linseed oil.

All around me the tender seductive flowers shrivelled, drooped and died in face of the icy blast. The workman grinned demonically:

“If you’ll just step aside through here Sir – mind the glass – I’ll get on and fix this lot up in short order.”

That seemed to me to be an eminently sensible proposal and so I unquestioningly complied. Passing by his tall moustachioed companion, whose features I was not quite able to discern in the gloom, I observed that outside, dawn was breaking and it had started to snow exceptionally heavily – gigantic flakes drifted down all around me. I reached out and caught one, but no sooner had I seized it than it turned to paper – a ten-pound banknote. Wonderingly I caught several more and all at my touch transformed into real money, so I gleefully pocketed as many as I could. This seemed to me quite splendid sport.

I had just determined to track this unusual torrent of incessant money to its source, when a smartly dressed lady, evidently much distressed, accosted me. I noted that I now found myself to be outside the doorway of a large fashionable villa on a smart suburban street.

“Doctor Watson, please will you help my husband? He is suddenly overtaken by the most dreadful turn! I fear he may not last out the hour!” Not in the least bit mystified by this perfect stranger knowing me by name, I rushed instinctively to oblige.

A pretty young woman in smart maid’s attire brought a glass of water for the gentleman who, to my great relief, speedily recovered. I waved a cheery farewell to the grateful couple as they continued upon their journey.

When I turned to thank the maid, unaccountably she had vanished. Thinking little or nothing of this, I – quite naturally – continued to follow the wondrous, never-ending, blizzard of money; whenever the fancy took me, I reached out and further augmented my fast-growing wealth – indeed, my pockets were soon stuffed to overflowing, and still the great magical ice-crystals fell thick and fast around me. If only Holmes could be with me upon this grand adventure, we could both garner our fortunes with little more application than is required to pick cherries from the tree! I trudged steadily on, and soon noted that I was approaching close to Baker Street.

Turning a corner, I encountered some young rascals engaged in the age-old game of snowballs; one mischievous lad launched his projectile at me.

Deftly I caught the ball of ice crystals in my bare hands, whereupon it instantly metamorphosed into a great cloud of crisp ten-pound notes that fluttered to the ground around me.

Chuckling, I walked on, followed by the gleeful cries of children and adults alike as they harvested the magical currency that seemed to materialise only when I touched the snow.

Stepping around a group of uncouth labourers engaged in stirring a vast cauldron of boiling pitch, I was halted in my tracks by a news-vendor’s bill:

‘OFFICIAL–

BANK OF ENGLAND

GOES BROKE!’

Dumbfounded at such a startling event, I handed the customary few coppers to the vendor, that I might learn more of this astonishing news.

“When was you born Sir? Everyone knows The London Times is a tenner a copy! ’As bin for ages!”

Wonderingly I handed over a £10 note, a mere fraction of my crisp new-found affluence, to the news-vendor which he added to a huge and fast-growing mountain of notes piled high behind his stand.

As I scanned the front page, a tall, skeletal, well-dressed silver-haired gentleman wearing monstrously thick gold-rimmed eyeglasses, whom I somehow felt I had met previously, also purchased a newspaper. “Sorry Sir; it’s twenty pounds a copy now. Best buy one nippy ‘cos it’ll be thirty in a few minutes.” The vendor pointed at me; “Mebbe that gent there will let you have a quick gander at his for a fiver.”

I decided to depart this scene of lunacy and headed for the familiar, comforting sanctuary of my old lodgings at 221B, Baker Street.

The door opened unbidden at my approach. Mrs Hudson gravely offered me several huge bundles of crisp new ten-pound banknotes on a silver tray and said: “Mr Holmes gave me this Doctor but I’ve got so much already, perhaps you would like some?”

“That is most considerate of you Mrs Hudson but I, like you, have more than sufficient of my own.” I reached out and captured a handful of snowflakes. “And here is ample money to cover Mr Holmes’ rent for some years ahead” and I mounted the stairs. As I approached the door to the parlour, I became aware of a metrical hammering noise issuing from within, the most astonishingly raucous musical performance, and a Babel of voices in animated discussion.

Tentatively I opened the parlour door and peered within; I was greeted by a most curious sight. Holmes was seated before the fire, furiously playing his violin, a manic grin on his face, fingers mere blurs as they flew over the strings. He was accompanied by a cellist and a timpanist, who beat his kettle-drums fit to bring down the walls of Jericho, all conducted at an insane tempo by a rakish-looking conductor of eastern European aspect with extravagantly pomaded moustache and sleekly oiled hair.

I noted with detached professional interest that all but Holmes, of this odd musical troupe appeared to have fresh ligature wounds on their necks, although this did not appear to inhibit their extraordinarily spirited performance. A prima-ballerina pirouetted at possessed speed to the frenzied rendering – a favourite of mine by Boccherini, but rather comically played in at least four-four time.

Across the room, a vast printing press was thundering away. Again and again the gleaming engraved steel plates hammered down on an endless supply of sheets of crisp white paper, while an equally incessant stream of money poured out of the maw of the great mechanical beast. The whole operation was being supervised by three tall, thin elderly, silver-haired gentlemen who appeared to be marking time, each referring to a heavy gold watch on a gold Albert chain, festooned with intricate keys; they were accompanied by a dark moustachioed man, who was presently engaged in counting out money into the waiting hand of the maid I had earlier encountered, while upon the settee an elegant and elderly lady poured forth a voluble stream of rapid Italian.

A gang of tar-daubed labourers was busily occupied in stacking ten-pound notes in neat, regimented bundles.

Holmes paused at my entry, smiled oddly, then set to fiddling with renewed vigour. As the whole assembly appeared to be quite immersed in their revels, I decided my wisest course would be to make my way home and discuss these interesting matters with Mary.

I descended to the street, hailed a cab and was not in the least bit surprised to see that it was driven by the same cheery glazier who I had previously encountered repairing the tropical glass-house.

I paid the cabbie his very modest twenty pounds fare, tipped him a further ten, and entered the house to find my wife sobbing her heart out. “John, the butcher has presented his account for the Christmas goose and it is eighty pounds! Where ever shall we find the money?” I smiled cheerfully. “Never fear my dear” – I reached into my pocket and passed her a generous handful of... rapidly-melting snow...

While I make no claim to be an expert on the inner workings of the human mind, I am cognisant of the commonplace that the imaginings of our dreams are oft-times more readily understood upon waking, when critical reason once again assumes direction of that most baffling of organs, the human brain... Waking early, I spent the dogwatch hours considering – even jotting down in lengthy, but rather more ordered, detail – my recall of the events of my dream.

Now, reviewing my notes it seems to me that I had not so much spent my night in bed, but rather, in Bedlam.

As a medical man of some considerable training and experience, I do not particularly hold Mr Freud’s theories in any special or credulous regard. They do not to me, upon rigorous scrutiny, appear to be particularly scientific in their origination.

And so I do not necessarily suppose that unconscious dreaming thoughts provide the key to unlock the secrets of one’s waking dilemmas, and yet I was oddly and most forcefully persuaded that somewhere in that lunatic nocturnal adventure, I had glimpsed deep into the heart of this dark mystery.

Was there, concealed within that insane play in which I had taken the passive observer’s part, a compass that might point to the culprits? Reader, how profoundly I yearned to possess Holmes’ unique analytical abilities; to be able to exercise that mysterious skill which only he can bring to bear in such problematical situations – the gift of sorting the players into their proper places – the prime suspects, their accomplices, the unwitting assistants and lowly hired hands quite ignorant of the far greater and more sinister enterprise into which they had been gulled. At the conclusion of my lengthy but quite ineffectual deliberations I was really none the wiser, save for the fact that I was struck by one most disquieting notion; every player in my nocturnal escapade could readily be accounted for within Mr Petch’s narrative, with a single notable exception.

Who was the tall shadowy man I glimpsed behind the glazier? I was convinced he was one and the same, apparently heavily moustachioed, as the man who appeared to be directing the printing of the currency at the lunatic revelry of my dreams in Baker Street. I could make no more of the troubling matter and resolved to keep my thoughts private until such time as matters became clearer.

*        *       *

Christmas day passed quite uneventfully. I spent much of the time reading before the fire; at two o’clock Mrs Hudson served a very decent lunch of goose and plum pudding, which I consumed with relish. Holmes, by contrast, was in a high fever of activity; he spent the morning issuing a flurry of telegraph messages, drafting and then despatching letters by hansom, and throughout all, paid scant attention to my various comments and questions, and even less to our meal, much to Mrs Hudson’s evident frustration.

Only later that Christmas Day evening, after he had consumed three pipes of Barkers’ strongest Twist in complete silence, and a lengthy telegram and two hand-written notes had been delivered, did his mood mellow. The contents of the telegram appeared to cause him some small perplexity, while the two notes plainly improved his spirits considerably.

“Forgive me Watson; I don’t doubt I have been a somewhat churlish companion at Christmas, but now matters are resolving themselves by the hour!”