Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

He climbed the stairs slowly, testing each one carefully before committing his weight. The wood was soaked and rotten but had once been a sound and noble wood and only a few steps had to be avoided completely. The railing was continuous for the length of its long, curving climb, but so many balusters had fallen away that nowhere was the banister solid enough to hold a person’s weight should he or she be pressed against it. Between what the Americans called the second and third stories, there was almost no banister at all.

He turned into the dripping, wallpaper-curling corridor on the fourth floor and threw his shoulder against the warped door of his chosen room.

This was it. There was a rotting floor intact for only eighteen inches or more before the huge cavity began. Holmes could see lathing and shards of ancient carpet that had been left in the interstices between joists when the impossible weight had crashed down for forty feet. There was space enough only on the right side of the crater to edge around the hole in this unfurnished room, and the constant drizzle from above—lit by the dim sunlight coming through gray clouds—gave an eerie and unreal illumination to the bare walls and remnant of floor and ceiling. Holmes had hoped that there’d be room enough against the wall opposite the doorway for him and there was—just. Four feet or so of downward-sloping floor there before the hole began.

If Culpepper wanted to kill him, all he had to do was open the door, aim, and fire—their target would be fewer than twenty feet away. But the odds of “Mr. Baskers” falling forward after being shot by a .442-caliber ball were almost 100% and it was Holmes’s mortal wager that Culpepper and Murtrick—or whatever their real names were—wanted the bottles of morphine and heroin intact after their other thievery was finished.

Holmes squeezed against the wall opposite the mild waterfall and empty space separating him across the room from the door he’d closed behind him and then slid down that wall, hoping the sloping floor would hold his weight. It did, although it groaned in protest. He got out one of the bottles and his leather syringe kit.

In France and during the crossing, Holmes had pondered the wisdom of arming himself with a pistol. He’d had one in India but France had been so peaceful—even the time he’d spent with the experimental chemists in Montpelier where he’d decided to wean himself off morphine by shifting to this newer, safer drug—that he’d had no need of a firearm there. His last chance to pick one up had been his one night in New York, but he’d been so busy there getting information about possible contacts in Washington that he hadn’t had time to go pistol-shopping. In truth, the thought had never entered his mind while he was there.

Sitting with his knees apart and one shoe bracing the bottle on the floorboards should it roll toward the terrible crater, Holmes set out his various apparatuses and smiled.

In Watson’s many written “Adventures . . .” and “Cases . . .”, most of which he kept in his older medical satchel on the shelf in his room and which the public had not yet heard of or read, Watson almost always portrayed himself as the one who brought a pistol to the adventure when a pistol was needed. In truth, despite the hundreds of hours of shooting instruction by his father and many more hours of lonely practice since, Holmes did indeed dislike firearms of any sort. But he smiled again at the memory of Watson always describing his own pistol only as “my old [or “trusty”] service revolver”, but his medical friend had learned enough about writing from Conan Doyle to know that readers were bored by details.

Holmes lived (and would probably die someday) for details. He’d noticed the first time Watson had ever armed himself for one of their mutual adventures that the “service revolver” was an Adams six-shot caliber .450 breechloader with a 6-inch barrel; standard issue for the British Army during the second Afghan war in which Watson had received his suspiciously mobile Jezail bullet. Dr. Watson’s weapon was not so different, in size and capability, from the Beaumont-Adams pistol that Culpepper had been showing off from his belted waistband. Holmes had noticed that the dandy had worn both braces—“suspenders” his Mr. Baskers would call them here in America— and a thick belt. Mr. Culpepper was a cautious man. Just how cautious, thought Holmes, they would all soon see.

Perhaps all five of them are carrying pistols by now , was Holmes’s last thought before he heard the front door of the hotel being forced open three stories below.

But no—Holmes felt certain, to his deep disappointment, that Mr. J had not joined this expedition. He’d certainly returned to report the interaction to his own superior.

Which meant that he would have to leave at least one of the four men tracking him alive. But not necessarily Culpepper.

Holmes’s materials were set before him on the leather cloth. He’d preloaded his syringe with saltwater and now he brought out a bottle cap taken from a bottle of Hires Root Beer he’d purchased earlier in the morning, after renting his magic-lantern projector. Holmes had tossed away the bottle and its contents—hideous stuff, “root beer”; he wondered how Americans could buy and guzzle three million bottles of it a year. Now he filled the bottle cap with the heroin salts and then squeezed out enough water to liquify the salts.

From another pouch in his unrolled leather bag, Holmes extracted the bit of chemical tubing he’d used that morning to tie off his arm. He did so again, tapping at the veins on the inside of his elbow and then, from his waistcoat pocket, brought forth perhaps the most unique device he owned—a prototype cigarette lighter presented to Holmes in 1891, just months before his self-disappearance, by a satisfied client: a scientist by the name of Carl Auer von Welsbach. The patenting of a flint-like substance called ferrocerium allowed the von Welsbach lighter to be small, simple, and safe, in comparison to the bulky, complex, and extremely dangerous Döbereiner flame-makers of decades past. He held the blue flame from von Welsbach’s gift under the bottle cap.

The von Welsbach lighter had saved Holmes’s life numerous times in the Himalayas; now he asked it only to work quickly so he could heat the heroin-crystal-saltwater mixture before the audible footsteps on the stairway reached his floor.

Holmes took a small pellet of cotton he’d been carrying in his shirt pocket next to the three photographs and dropped the cotton wad onto the Hires bottle cap he was using for a cooker. The cotton acted as a filter, blocking the inevitable undissolved clumps of heroin salts that would clog the syringe and stop his heart.

The footsteps were climbing above the second-story landing.

Holmes lifted the filled syringe, tapped it, squirted a tiny bit to be sure there were no air bubbles, and leaned over to inject the contents into his vein.

It sounded like only four men, not five, climbing to the fourth floor. They were trying to climb quietly, but not too quietly. They obviously weren’t overly concerned as to whether meek Mr. Baskers heard them or not. What could he do if he did?

Holmes wanted time for the heroin to take effect. He tugged the tubing off, emptied and disassembled the syringe, and put the bottles, bottle cap, and precious von Welsbach cigarette lighter back in their proper places.

The heroin hit his system almost at once.

First came the glowing warmth filling his heart, chest, torso, limbs, and then brain. Then came the fading of all pain—especially the pain of his question of existence or non-existence—and then came the sense of rising on the crest of a curling wave.

The footsteps stopped outside the door of his room. Holmes vaguely heard whispering. He ignored it.