The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes (14 page)

‘Suddenly snow stopped and sun burst through the clouds and the world turned dazzling: the valley spread out below us like a huge painting. We could see for many miles. Up and up we travelled. When we reached the station at the saddle of the mountain I stepped out of the train carriage and walked quickly towards the train waiting to descend to Grindelwald on the far side. Ludwig lurched towards the same train, pressing his way through the other travellers. I had no notion whether he intended to take my valise, my life, or both. I jumped aboard a middle car and bent down in my seat so as not to be seen. When the train was about to leave I slipped out of the carriage and into the snow. The train slid away.

‘But then I saw Ludwig leap out and go sprawling on the snow. I hurried uphill out of his view. The sensible thing to do now, I thought, would be to board the train back to Lauterbrunnen. But undoubtedly Ludwig would expect me to do this. He would do the same, which would leave me right back where I started. Therefore I hurried to the Jungfrau Railway and boarded a car. This made no sense whatever – which is why I thought I might get by with it. I would ride to the top of the Jungfraujoch, look around, and decide if I could stand staying out all night in the cold. If so, I would remain up there when my train (which was the last train of the day) descended. I would be safe for the night, though I knew I would suffer from cold. In the morning I would ride down and take a train to Grindelwald.

‘So there I sat in the Jungfrau Railway car, hoping for escape. But just before our scheduled departure, Ludwig came batting and hopping his way towards my train. He boarded it and sat in the back. In the middle of my car passengers from Grindelwald were laughing. The doors closed. We began to ascend over snowy pastures. We could see the Jungfrau and the mountains of the Lauterbrunnen Valley. After passing through a tunnel we reached the Eigergletscher station at seven or eight thousand feet. The restaurant appeared to be closed. My faithful
Baedeker
described this station as being situated amidst a ‘scene of wild magnificence' at the foot of the west arête of the Eiger. Perfectly true. The train whirred and continued upward. I paged through my
Baedeker
and tried to develop a plan.

‘Most railways ascend the outside of a mountain. The Jungfrau Railway is unusual in that it travels up the inside of the mountain. Soon we entered the main tunnel and angled upward steeply. At about 9400 feet we reached the Eigerwand station, one of the stations excavated from solid rock. Openings were cut in the rock so passengers could look right out of the mountain and enjoy stupendous views of Grindelwald, the lakes of Brienz and Thun, and a large part of Western Switzerland. We lurched away from Eigerwand and continued upward through the electrically lighted tunnel, straining and chugging another thousand feet till we reached Eismeer in the southeast face of the Eiger. This station, too, was excavated from solid rock. I noted its layout carefully. I had begun to form a desperate plan. The restaurant, I saw, was closed. Four of our group felt dizzy and wished to go no further, so they got out. We continued upward, ascending through the inside of the mountain until at 11,340 feet we came out on to the top, to the station on the Jungfraujoch. I walked to the terrace and mingled with the tourists from Grindelwald, all of whom were Swiss. The war had deterred foreign visitors. Ludwig hovered nearby and gazed into distance. Far away the world was at war, but here was peace. Dark was already settling upon the mountains. Overhead, stars had begun to appear in the purple. The cold was intense. The cold seemed to increase as we stood there.

‘Ludwig made no move. I returned to the train car with the Swiss group. The train jerked and started down the mountain. A new plan was whirling in my head. All the information on which it was based came from my trusty
Baedeker
. We stopped at Eismeer station. The four people who had gotten out there now re-boarded the train. I waited, carefully waited until the electric motors began to whir. And then, just as the train began to glide, I jumped out on to the platform with my valise. I had escaped! Or so I thought. Then I heard a yowl and saw a crutch jam itself in the train door: Ludwig tumbled out on to the rocky roadbed and hit hard.

‘The train disappeared downward and its sound faded.

‘I darted away into the pedestrian tunnel that led out to the glacier. When I got to the bottom of it I slipped around the corner, out of view, and there I crouched under the night sky and waited. The electric lights of the station showed dimly far out on the snow. Slowly the sky faded black. My hope was that Ludwig was severely injured – mortally injured, preferably. I knew he had a crutch and a knife. I could not be certain what other weapons he carried. I bitterly regretted that when I had had him in that trunk at Canterbury I had not shipped him to Scotland Yard as Willie Wiggins had suggested. I would have saved myself a deal of trouble.

‘I grew colder. The full moon rose. All the vast earth – the valleys, the mountain ranges, the lakes – made a moonlit scene more beautiful than ever I had witnessed.

‘“Holmes!” he cried.

‘The shout echoed down the cold tunnel.

‘“Holmes!” he cried. “Wo bist du!”

‘I peeked around the corner and saw his hulking shape silhouetted at the top of the tunnel; a bear leaning on a crutch.

‘He hollered, “Holmes! I vant the case! I vill leave you your life.”

‘He could not know if I was armed. I thought he might retreat. He turned and walked towards the restaurant with a tentative and uncertain air, the air of a man who is puzzling over his next move.

‘Quickly I got to my feet and walked out on to the snow of the glacier. I headed down.

‘I knew from my
Baedeker
that the Bergli Hut was an hour and a half away. I could see its distant roof.
Baedeker
sternly recommended a guide for anyone who tried to reach the hut, warning of falling stones and dangerous ice. I had determined to try to reach the hut without a guide. I had no choice. If I made it I would certainly find shelter for the night, and maybe even food. If I was very lucky I might encounter a party of mountaineers descending. I had heard rumours of climbers who had been caught by the snows and were trying to get down. This, of course, was unlikely. Most probably I would need to find my own way down to the valley and to civilization in the morning. I had no idea whether this was even possible.

‘For half an hour I picked my way down and down through the snow. All the deceptions of the mountains were doubly deceptive by moonlight. Many times I came to a drop-off that had been hidden until I reached it. Then I was forced to backtrack and try another route. It was on one of these occasions, as I was turning around to backtrack, that I saw Ludwig. His huge dark figure tilted and skittered and hopped across the brow of a snowy crest. He looked like something out of a comic opera. What a fantastic scene it was, Wilson! There was this huge, dark, bearlike figure flailing towards me. Behind him hung a stupendous backdrop of towering white peaks and millions of stars in blackness, and closer by were streams of snow blowing off ridges like white fire. Suddenly Ludwig's monstrous figure stumbled and with a cry he began to slide. I hoped he might slide into a crevasse so I could climb back up to Eismeer station. No such luck. He halted his slide by dragging his crutch in the snow. He got to his feet, much closer now. He dug into the pocket of his greatcoat. I saw the gleam of a pistol in moonlight. The drop-off was below me, Ludwig above. I fell to my stomach on the snow. I heard a bullet
zing
, then a
crack
. He fired the pistol twice more in rapid succession. The sounds echoed away and became a strange roar.

‘The mountain behind him had begun to move.

‘The roar grew louder. White slabs of mountainside dropped straight down, intact, like massive walls, and then disintegrated into a boiling flood of white, and the flood of white formed a massive wave, and the wave hit Ludwig and flipped him like a doll, and he rose high into the air and then fell back and was buried, sucked away, and I saw his crutch skittering and leaping and hopping by itself atop the surging flood.

‘I rolled on to my back. I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. Make best use of all your time – that is what my father always told me. I decided to practise my Zen meditation in my remaining few seconds. It was all I had time for. A wall of cold wind fluttered my clothes. A terribly cold wind hit me. Then my mother appeared and threw a blanket on to me. But the blanket was cold and pressed down upon me very heavily. I felt the ice seeping into my brain.

‘A moment later I opened my eyes and looked for mother. But she was gone. I realized I was in St Bart's hospital, the new wing. I realized this because I recognized the ceiling moulding. I was in the very room, as it turned out, where I had once beaten corpses with sticks to ascertain how much a body might be bruised after death. I later learnt that this was now the old wing of the hospital. But that was later. At the moment I was merely puzzled as to why I was lying in bed instead of tending to my lab experiments.

‘A nurse appeared. She flung her left hand to her lips. “Oh,” she cried, “you're awake at last!”

‘“I'm cold,” I said. But I could barely say those two words. I had trouble speaking.

‘She leant close to me, holding out the thermometer stiffly. She seemed to fill the night sky. “You're sweating,” she said.

‘“You're hurt,” I said.

‘She stared at me, and frowned.

‘“The horse threw you off?” I said, speaking with the thermometer in my mouth.

‘She stepped back a pace and her eyes grew wide. “My heavens!”

‘I gazed at her confused brow.

‘“How did you know that?” she asked.

‘But already I was falling back into Switzerland, trying to find the Bergli Hut in the snowy dark—'

His tale broke off.

We had just reached the top of Hay Bluff.

We paused to catch our breath.

He stood looking out over the vast scene below, his nose hawked to the breeze, his old plaid hat fluttering at the edges, his new blue nylon jacket pressed by breeze to his thin frame. His eyes were squinting and there was a faint smile on his thin lips, and he gave a snort of laughter as if he did not quite approve of what he was about to tell me next.

‘And then came the hard part,' he said.

‘The hard part?'

‘Waking up,' said Holmes.

‘So how did you get there – to St Bart's?'

‘I was found by two British hikers at ten thousand feet, frozen in the glacier. One immediately recognized me and cried, ‘That looks like Sherlock Holmes!' When the ever-efficient Swiss arrived on the scene an hour later, they too saw the resemblance and contacted the Home Office in London. Very quickly Scotland Yard and Dr Ronald Coleman of St Bart's were brought into the case. I must tell you, Wilson, that Dr Coleman is one of those scientific researchers who, like Victor Frankenstein, leaves one unsure whether he should be praised or put in gaol. For years he has been obsessed with creating life, human life, and he has created a huge edifice of theory as to how this could be done by highly technical methods. No stitching together of old body parts, collected from charnel house, for Dr Coleman. He believes a human being can be designed from the ground up on a computer, every cell and strand of DNA, every part of his body calculated and then created from raw chemicals. People are already calling him mad or immoral for contemplating such a thing. Coleman admits that his theory is a few decades away from being a practical scheme. But of course he leapt at the chance of resuscitating a dead Englishman. Which was me. Apparently the dehydration I suffered as a result of becoming sick from drinking Zimmerman's concoction, plus the sudden freezing caused by tons of snow encasing me, caused my body to be freeze-dried more or less like the raspberries or peas one buys in modern grocery stores.'

The idea sounded so fantastic that I could not help but believe it, while pretending not to. ‘Come now, Holmes!' I laughed.

‘That's how Coleman explained it,' he said, in a tone so uncharacteristic of the man that I felt a little sorry for him. A puzzled and bewildered tone.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I've heard of a boy who fell into the Red River in North Dakota in the winter of 1987, and was underwater for forty-five minutes, and later revived. They said the frigid water had slowed down his bodily processes, and that is what saved him. So I guess it makes a little sense.'

‘The sudden freezing was the key,' said Holmes. ‘Coleman directed the whole operation. They cut out the block of ice in which I was encased, used snow-cats to haul it up to Eismeer Station, then loaded it into a converted train car, and so brought me down the mountain to where a refrigerated lorry was waiting to bring me to London. At St Bart's I was put into a specially built refrigerator where I was kept until Dr Coleman had prepared his chemical bath.'

‘We'd better start back down,' I said, ‘It gets dark early these days.'

‘Right,' said Holmes.

We descended the steep path from the top of the bluff to the parking lot below. The world seemed huge and bright. Over the valley a tiny paraglider swooped like a drunken fly. We crossed the parking lot, stepped over the edge into green pastures, descended easily through the world of sheep as Holmes resumed his explanation.

‘Stem cells derived from my bone marrow were inserted into my inner organs. There they transformed themselves into the appropriate sort of cells for each particular organ, and grew to replace the damaged tissue. The technique Coleman used was, in essence, similar to that used by researchers in the United States who have managed to grow, for instance, a totally new rat's heart where none existed before. In my case, the scaffolding of all my organs was there, and the trick was to time everything properly, so that the total blood transfusion, the first beating of my heart, the awakening of my brain, and so on, all came together at the right moment. The whole system, or most of it, had to
come on line
, as they say nowadays, at the same time. And most of it did. There was a pancreas problem for a while, but that has been sorted out.'