Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not Read online

  I gasped out an inarticulate word, my mouth gone bone dry. Then to my utter and unbounded amazement, the cadaver sat up, looked around and croaked out a macabre but perfectly natural question.

  “Where—am—I?”

  He no more uttered those baffled words than a great bloody froth rushed up from his lungs and was violently expelled by mouth and nose.

  With that, the poor beggar fell back with a sickening thud.

  I checked his heart and pulse. Both still. But the formerly cold flesh was strangely warm. As I felt about for other vital signs, the corpse again began cooling.

  “Dead,” I told West hoarsely.

  “Again!” snarled the man, pale eyes searching the sheeted remains. “I must find a livelier specimen.”

  As it happened, a fresh victim was wheeled in and deposited on the floor. I signalled the curious ward maid—all men suitable to perform the duties of an orderly having naturally gone off to war—to depart and Dr West knelt before the new arrival.

  Again, that foul needle found its way into a sluggish vein.

  And again, life was revitalized, only to come smashing down again.

  Three times Dr West worked his scientific sorcery. And in each instance, he succeeded, only to crash into the abyss of failure once more.

  “You are on to something quite remarkable, Dr West,” I admitted at last. “But I fear that your solution is not quite up to so formidable a task.”

  “It is a reagent,” West flung back in frustration. “Please call it by its proper name.”

  I ignored the outburst, recognizing it as a nervous reaction to the horrid moment. It was clear to me that the American was deeply frustrated by the limitations of his serum, and had been for some period of time.

  Reluctantly, Dr West surrendered his vial and needle and looked me dead in the eyes, saying, “One man alone possesses the mentality to assist me in perfecting my elixir,” he said gravely.

  He did not have to speak the name, for I took his meaning.

  “Sherlock Holmes?” I returned.

  Dr West nodded. “Take me to him.” It was almost a command.

  We were not able to get away for another week—a week in which the combined horrors of war and the unstoppable influenza filled our wards beyond capacity, and tried our souls beyond endurance.

  Through it all, Dr West moved as a machine through the dead and dying, taking equal interest in both. He appeared, to all objective scrutiny, uninterested in the maimed survivors of battles in Europe. The dead or near-dead alone fascinated him. I shudder now to contemplate the why of it all…

  Finally, I was granted my leave and with Dr West formally but temporarily placed into my custody, we trained up to Sussex Downs, where we found a motorcar for hire to take us to the charming villa of Mr Sherlock Holmes.

  I had telegraphed Holmes in advance of my arrival, and received a friendly if curt reply. I failed to apprise Holmes of my travelling companion, for I felt strongly that no one could do justice to Dr Herbert West and his intrigues than the remarkable A.E.F. major himself.

  Arriving late in the afternoon of a unreasonably warm Satur­day, I paid the driver and escorted Dr West to the modest home of my old friend and former benefactor—for I have always considered Holmes as such—a man whose keen intelligence and sterling presence had immeasurably enriched my otherwise humdrum existence.

  “Hulloa! Watson!” cried Holmes. But it was not the hale call of yore. There was a bit of a croaking of age-stained vocal chords in his timbre. I saw also that his complexion had attained a greyish pallor that concerned me.

  I said nothing of my observations, of course. “Holmes, dear fellow! Jolly good to see you after these long months.”

  “How fare the gallant fruits of the war?” he asked, shaking my hand firmly.

  “If you mean the maimed and worse, this conflict has borne England more bitter fruits than any in its bloody history,” I told him gravely.

  “Ah, but it will be over with soon. Mark my words. Now, who is this fellow?”

  In typically American fashion, Dr West spoke over my attempted introduction, impetuously thrusting out his pallid but eager hand saying, “Dr Herbert West. At your service, Mr Holmes.”

  This last took a bit of the sting out of the faux pas.

  “What brings you here, Dr Herbert West?” inquired Holmes.

  “I have a proposition that may interest you.”

  “Indeed?”

  West got right down to brass tacks, as Americans so often do. “I propose, Mr Holmes, to raise you from the dead.”

  “Good heavens!” I gasped.

  An eerie twinkle flickered in and out of Holmes’s canny grey eyes. “Might I point out that although I am obviously at an advanced age, I have not yet passed over into the great unknown.”

  “But you do admit that this event looms on your personal horizon?” countered West.

  “It appears to be unavoidable,” allowed Holmes rather diff­idently. “Now, how do you propose to create such a Biblical miracle?”

  “Are you familiar with the so-called Arkham Atrocities?” inquired West.

  Holmes gave that only passing reflection. “Indeed I am. Although many of those foul events actually took place in surr­ounding towns, such as Bolton.”

  West nodded, evidently pleased to find Holmes in possession of his old faculties, despite his wrinkled and rheumy appearance.

  “I,” proclaimed Dr West with a touch of maniacal pride, “am the author of those atrocities…”

  Holmes lifted his tangled eyebrows. “You are? I should like to hear more of your career, morbid as it promises to be.”

  We adjoined to Holmes’ spacious if cluttered study, where a woman I did not recognize served tea. As the water was being boiled, Holmes regarded Dr West in a profound silence.

  “You are obviously an American, but I take it you have served in France, as an officer. A major, I should judge.”

  “Very astute, Holmes,” West acknowledged.

  “By what deductive wizardry did you arrive at that correct assessment?” I asked grandly.

  I fully expected a recounting of clues and other minuscule trivia, but Holmes, as always, baffled me. He said, “I now recall reading in the Times of an American major, Dr Herbert West by name, who had his field hospital blown to flinders by a German shell.”

  “The very same,” said West, inclining his blondish head so that the light momentarily made the lenses of his spectacles opaque.

  Turning to me, Holmes smiled and said, “It is no more remark­able than an attentive eye coupled with a retentive memory.”

  Tea was served and, after his third thoughtful sip, Holmes addressed Dr West by saying, “Now, you were going to recount for my edification your rather sordid career.”

  “I hardly call it sordid, for I have been engaged in the remark­able enterprise of unlocking the secrets of bodily reanimation.”

  “As I recall, the press accounts that reached us here implied grave-robbing as a prelude to the atrocities themselves,” comment­ed Holmes.

  “One cannot reanimate cold clay without suitable raw mat­erial,” insisted West, his voice skittering in the direction of High C.

  “Your theory then is that life is but a series of chemical react­ions, and by the application of the proper chemistry, whatever processes have been interrupted may be restored to full vitality?”

  It was such a penetratingly accurate summation of the man’s true thinking that Dr West sat blinking, incapable of answer.

  Finally, he stammered. “How-however did you deduce that?”

  Holmes remarked simply, “You do not strike one as a man who credits the existence of the human soul.”

  “A damned myth!” snapped West.

  “Permit me to point out that there exists no credible scientific literature addressing the que
stion one way or another, so the issue must remain an open one. Now, as to your goals in this seemingly unsavoury enterprise,” pressed Holmes. “For how long do you propose to sustain your Lazarus-like subjects?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  “Do you speak of immortality?” asked Holmes, dreamy eyes alight.

  “Precisely. I have devised an injectable reagent by which a recently deceased cadaver may be restored to full vitality.”

  This bald statement was met by no outward display of emotion, nor any comment on the part of my friend. I took this to mean Holmes maintained a studied scepticism, restrained only due to necessary politeness toward a house guest.

  I hastened to add, “Holmes, I beg of you to hear this man out. While working in my ward, I witnessed him inject no less than three deceased victims of the so-called Spanish Influenza. All were resurrected, although for mere moments. One spoke distinctly, wondering aloud as to his present whereabouts, before death reclaimed him.”

  “So the solution is not permanent, then?” inquired Holmes, a trace of disappointment threading his wavering voice.

  “Not yet perfected,” insisted West. “But I am edging closer to perfection. I had thought a man of your intellect might assist me in this great endeavour.”

  Again, this absurd suggestion was greeted by no outward enthusiasm on the part of Sherlock Holmes, yet I, who had known him for so many years, could detect a trembling interest. It shocked me. But then I recalled how many years-prolonged my friendship with Holmes was, and the traces of rheumatism that wracked that spare and fleshless frame suggested that his own mortality weighed heavily upon him in as this new century advanced through its present stage of global war.

  Momentarily, I yearned for the grand old days, and the Sherlock Holmes I once knew—young, keen of wit and impossibly vital. He had been a man of electricity in those former days. A dynamo of sheer, unsurpassed brilliance and robustness. No more. Alas, no more.

  I turned my head away for a moment in order to compose myself.

  Holmes finished his tea and launched into a series of penetrating questions.

  “The Massachusetts phase of your researches. Tell me of them.”

  There followed a recounting as grisly as it was improbable. Poe himself might have penned such a monstrous account. I began to apprehend why they had come to be known as the Arkham Atrocities. For Dr West had been a cold-blooded and unrepentant grave robber; disinterring and reanimating corpse after corpse—always successfully at first, but never vindicated in the final results.

  “Your degree is from Miskatonic University Medical School?” Holmes asked at one point.

  West nodded. “Class of ’05.”

  It seemed a minor point, for the man’s credentials were not in doubt, but Holmes seemed to derive special meaning in the American’s alma mater. I, for one, knew only of its reputation as a seat of rather arcane, if not eccentric, learning.

  The unsavoury discussion ranged far into the evening, and, as the hour approached ten, I could see that Sherlock Holmes began to shows signs of fatigue, especially in the unsettlingly grey cast of his craggy features.

  Abruptly, he declared, “It is my intention to retire early, for I have absorbed much that interests me this evening. I beg you both to be my guests overnight, that we may discuss this further in the morn.”

  Dr West nodded eagerly. He seemed to think that he was getting somewhere with Holmes. For my part, I rather doubted it, but as we repaired to our guest rooms, I began to grow unconvinced of my own convictions.

  The summery night passed fitfully for me, and I found myself tossing and turning, opening the windows to let in the night air, which was so stifling hot that I could scarcely breathe.

  I am by nature and professional temperament an early riser, but on this fateful morning I slept late. I awoke with a queer sensation in my throat, and rather a gurgling from within my own larynx. My head muzzy with sleep, at first I did not take any particular meaning from these sensations, unaccustomed as they were. Then, before conscious thought could form, my heart started pounding and I struggled for my breath.

  With a slow dawning of dread, I began to suspect that I had come down with the thrice-accursed Spanish influenza. There was a servant’s bell at my bedside, and I floundered about until I had grasped its mahogany handle. I began ringing it vigorously, having discovered that I could not organize my feeble powers into understandable speech.

  Sherlock Holmes promptly threw open the door, and cried, “Watson, what is it?”

  I could manage only the most spasmodic of gasps, and the alarm on Holmes’s sharp features merely added to my floundering consternation.

  Herbert West made his appearance next, and the eyes behind his spectacles grew rather round, but otherwise did not reflect any deep concern, as one might expect of such a cold-blooded adventurer into the macabre.

  Both men rushed to my bedside, one on either side of the four-poster. West made a cursory examination, and spoke to Holmes as if I were not present, “All signs point to the flu.”

  Holmes seemed at a momentary loss for words, then drew back a measured pace, as if instinctively fearing the pathogen I now knew was harboured within me.

  “Terribly sorry, old man,” he muttered, his gaze shifting this way and that.

  He stamped his foot once, in a gesture of baffled frustration.

  West continued speaking in his confoundedly detached manner. “If the disease progresses as expected, the virus will run its course approximately four PM this afternoon.”

  Holmes made a clucking sound deep in his throat, and shook his head sadly.

  “There is no medicine suitable for this case?” he asked.

  “None,” replied West.

  “Then there is no hope for him?” murmured Holmes, closing his eyes. “That I would live to see such a sight, witnessing a dear friend approach such an unjust end,” he murmured.

  Dr West stated firmly, “Just because there is no hope in the view of conventional medical science, does not mean that none exists.”

  As I struggled to make my malfunctioning lungs process revivifying oxygen, a strange conversation ensued, which I overheard in fits and starts.

  “Speak, man,” Holmes demanded of West. “I implore you.”

  “As Dr Watson has testified, I have brought back from the brink three victims of the Spanish influenza. That they did not persist in their revival was only because they had already passed beyond this mortal gate.”

  “What do you mean?” Holmes asked.

  “What I mean, Mr Holmes,” Dr West said with a fever of excitement trembling in his voice, “is that we do not wait for death to settle in before injecting Dr Watson. We inject him while he trembles on the brink of eternity.”

  “I see,” said Holmes softly. “You propose to make an exper­iment of my dear friend, Watson.”

  I heard these words as if eavesdropping from some far-off listening-post, remote in time and space from earthly concerns.

  “Exactly,” said West.

  “I do not think I should allow this,” snapped Holmes. “It is against the natural order of things.”

  “What is natural about a damn disease taking a man before his time?” West retorted hotly.

  The vehemence of the American major’s assertion was electric. It suggested a man riding hard toward the edge of madness, but also an individual possessed of the firm conviction of his own Olympian powers. I have seen such mania as this amongst other members of my profession. Never on quite this order, but the flavour was the same. Place the power of life and death in a man’s trained hands, and he begins to think as if he stands above all other mortals.

  West continued in that vein. “If we do not intervene, Dr Watson dies a horrible death, his face turning blue, his lungs filling with blood and fluid.”

  Holmes hesitated, his gaunt facial lineaments resem­bl
­ing the strings of a violin being plucked by unseen hands. Even in my torture, I could see the play of conflicting emotions passing over his features.

  After several moments of these alterations in my friend’s facial expression, the emotional tremors appeared to subside, and once again the cool intellect of the Sherlock Holmes of years gone by reasserted itself like an eagle awakening to take flight.

  “If you inject Dr Watson with your solution before his untimely passing, how can you justly call it a resurrection?” he demanded.

  “By virtue of the unavoidable fact that if we do not arrest the progress of this disease, Dr Watson will inevitably perish before the sun sets on this day.”

  This struck Holmes most forcefully. By now, he had out his pipe and was charging it with tobacco, as if to mask his inner agitation. Setting the bowl aflame, he took several puffs, watching me gasp like a floundering fish through his hooded eyes, which age had barely dimmed.

  Presently, Sherlock Holmes said, “I commend my dear friend into your peculiar, if capable, hands, Dr West.”

  “Thank you,” said the other, evidently pleased with his triumph over a man of equal if not superior will. For I recognized in the American major a steely intellect which mirrored Sherlock Holmes’s alone, but of a more depraved character.

  “What do we do in the meantime?” asked Holmes. “For, poor Watson is clearly suffering tremendously.”

  “There is nothing we can do but make him comfortable, and see to his minor needs. This is a death-watch, Mr. Holmes. A death-watch in which we hope to pluck out a victory before the black wings of death smother your companion.”

  My eyes were upon Sherlock Holmes at that point, and I would have sworn that I detected something akin to a shudder pass through his gangling body. But I cannot be certain, for my own pain and hardship were rapidly consuming me.

  Abruptly, Holmes threw the windows fully open, to allow in the suffocating heat. But it did no good. He paced endlessly, smoking furiously, and finally, overcome with inner turmoil, Sherlock Holmes departed the room, to leave me in the hands of the uncanny American physician.