Neil Gaiman - Shadows over Baker Street

“And yet,” Holmes observed mildly, “Mr. Adcott seems to have been in the mood for an afternoon stroll.”

“Shall we search for him?” I asked, ready to button up my sleeves and get to the task at hand.

“There’s no time,” Holmes said, his expression shifting in an instant to the old, familiar intensity of the hunt. “I didn’t really expect he would be here, but without knowing . . .” He trailed off, and I followed him out the door. Without a word, he was back in the cab and holding the door impatiently, as I made to enter.

At just that moment, there was a cry from down the street, and I turned, startled. A young man darted from around the corner of the morgue, tousled hair waving about a roguish face and a scrap of paper clutched tightly in grubby fingers. I recognized him at once, as did Holmes, who rose and exited the carriage, calling to the driver to hold.

Wiggins was the leader of a group of ragged urchins Holmes had called on a number of times in the past. Holmes claimed there was more work to get from one of the little beggars than a dozen of London’s finest, and I’d had occasion to see the truth in this. As always, though, Wiggins’s arrival was a surprise to myself.

“Mr. Holmes,” Wiggins cried, coming to a halt and holding out the paper. “We’ve found him, sir, as you asked.”

Holmes didn’t say a word, but took the paper from the boy’s hand, eyes blazing. He read quickly, then folded the paper and slipped it into one of the pockets of his coat. “The others are posted?” he asked quickly.

Wiggins nodded. “He’ll not slip past, sir. Count on it.”

“I do,” Holmes replied, almost smiling. Shillings changed hands and Holmes had turned away and reentered the carriage before I could ask what was written on the paper, or who the “irregulars” were watching.

I knew better than to ask. I’d seen that expression on Holmes’s face too many times. He was on the trail of something, and until that thing was in his grasp, he’d not share it with anyone. Best to keep to his side, watch his back, and wait until he was ready to speak. The carriage took off without a word from Holmes, and I realized suddenly that he’d already anticipated our next stop. Either the note Wiggins had brought him had confirmed his suspicions, or it was related to another matter.

I watched out the curtained window as we passed deeper into the city, trying not to think of the scrap of paper in Holmes’s pocket, or the pallid face of Michael Adcott, staring at me from heavily lidded eyes.

Silverman walked briskly down the street, hands pressed deeply into the pockets of his coat. At his heel, Michael Adcott followed more slowly, his gait forced and clumsy. Silverman paid his companion no mind. They had to meet Jeffries at the court before the last of the judges left his chambers, and that left little time indeed. Time was slipping through his fingers too quickly, and things he’d expected to have accomplished had evaded him.

The doctor—Watson was his name—was a problem. The man should have seen what was obvious, feared what was less so, and signed off on the paperwork by now. Without that signature, they would be forced to let a court decide Michael’s state, and at the very least, he’d be found unfit to speak on his own behalf. That wouldn’t do. Michael Adcott would not be speaking to anyone, and that was another problem.

For the moment, things were under control. The serum—alone—was not enough. That much had been clear in the sketchy notes that had been included with the case that lay waiting in the laboratory at St. Elian’s. Only fate—a bottle of wine—and a loose tongue had given Aaron Silverman the information he needed.

“There was a time,” his father had said, head drooping toward the table and fingers loosely gripping his wineglass, “when we had ways to deal with our problems. There are things we know.” The old man had glanced up to see that his son knew the we in question. “We have always harbored our secrets, Aaron. There was a time when we kept them less guarded—when a rabbi could walk the streets with the respect of those around him. They knew. I know.”

Several glasses of wine later, and a lot of cajoling and flattery on Aaron’s part, and those secrets had begun to surface. Men from clay. The Cabala. Patterns of words and form, rhythm and breath, that emulated the formation of the first man. A mad Arab poet who spoke as if he were in another place and time and stared into distances that were not there. Those words, copied onto the canvas corner of a tent and guarded, studied—shifted over the years and recombined. Al-Hazred, the man had been called, and though he’d been mad, he’d been a prophet as well—a prophet of power. At first the notion had seemed ludicrous. A clay monster controlled by he who gave it life, born of the proper words, the proper earth—the prayers—the faith of the rabbi, and the vision of a madman.

Sworn to secrecy, Aaron had left his father’s home and set out to find a use for his new secret. Money wasn’t everything, he reminded himself often, but no money was certainly something to be avoided. Money was power, and if you were not the one with the power, you were under that man’s thumb. Aaron Silverman would feel the pad of no man’s thumb.

A chance encounter had landed the wooden case in his hands, won from a drunken, reeling fool at poker. The man had wagered it against a five-pound note, holding it close to his chest and announcing drunkenly that the secrets to life itself were contained within, and that this being the case, it certainly qualified as collateral against a five-pound note. The case had been found floating, he claimed, off the shore of the island of Eucrasia after the explosion that destroyed its culture and its ruler. It had been handed from man to man since, and nothing was known of its contents save that they came from the laboratory of one Dr. Caresco Surhomme. Silverman, who knew of Caresco’s work, had agreed impatiently, the four threes in his hand itching to be slapped to the tabletop, and he’d walked away with all the other man’s money, and the wooden box. He could still hear the fellow’s words, echoing in his mind.

“You’ll find more than you bargain for in there. I’m glad to be rid of it. God bears a very heavy burden my friend—don’t be too quick to shoulder it.”

It had taken years of poring over corresondence and articles, diatribes about and against Caresco and fictions written about the man and his work, to realize what it was that he possessed. It had taken another five years to analyze the serum and attribute it to one small corner of Caresco’s work. The reversal of aging. The shaving away of the ravages of time. Taken to the extreme, and with certain additions of Silverman’s own devising, reversing the process of death.

Silverman shook his head to dislodge the memories of what had come before. More important to see to the needs of the moment. He led Michael around a corner and disappeared into the fog. Jeffries would know what to do, and they would have to set about whatever it was with haste. Both the serum, and the incantations and amulets his father had reluctantly provided him, were proving less stable than he’d anticipated. The row in the cell earlier had been a near miss that Silverman didn’t want repeated.

The asylum brooded over the street beneath, giving off a sensation of density, immovable and old as time. When the carriage stopped in front of that place and Holmes stepped out, tipping the driver, I was sure he had lost his mind. The Asylum of St. Elian had been deserted since I was a young man, still pursuing the degrees and education that would lead me to a career in medicine. The stories I’d heard had seemed laughable enough at the time, but when I was faced with the reality of the place, they came back to me full force, flickering across the years of my memory with chilling speed.