Lyndsay Faye - Dust and Shadow

She shuddered slightly. “Where are we?” she asked.

“There was an explosion. Can you move at all?”

“I do not like to try,” she murmured.

“Then do not attempt it.”

“I wonder if the girl is all right.”

“What girl?” my friend asked.

“Gently, Holmes,” I whispered. “She is quite mad, after all. We must not alarm her.”

“Can you tell me what girl you mean, Mrs. Bennett?”

“I can hardly say exactly,” she sighed. “My son had a friend. I don’t know what they were doing. There is little enough to see upstairs. He was going to show her the stars, perhaps, through the broken window. They would look different through a broken window.”

My friend staggered to his feet and made at once for the door, which I now saw had been blown partially off its hinges. The walls of the chamber within were painted with orange flame, and smoke poured from the now glassless front window.

“Holmes!” I shouted. I managed to stand, but only with a tremendous effort. My friend had tied his scarf over his face, but just as I reached him, he spun around to face me and arrested my movement with a forceful hand on my chest.

“Go to the window!” he cried. He turned and walked into the flames.

One petrifying glance at that room told me Sherlock Holmes was entirely correct. No matter what he found in the upstairs chamber, there could be no return the way he had come. I looked about the yard for a ladder or anything else of use, but saw nothing save a forlorn water barrel. I stumbled desperately toward the rotting object and dragged it with considerable difficulty to the alleyway on the other side of the house.

There, my prospects proved more promising. In addition to the barrel, there were several bales of hay at my disposal, and in a flash I recalled, as if from another decade, that Holmes had predicted a stable next to the site where one of the Ripper’s letters had been penned. I could see the window, entirely free of glass and billowing smoke, many feet above my head, and a water pipe running down the side of the building into a tall cistern perhaps a yard distant. Shoving two bales of hay together beside the tank and placing a third on top of them so as to form a makeshift staircase, I heaved the water barrel on top of all, ignoring as best I could the fiery pain in my side.

A moment later, my friend’s dark head appeared through the hole in the wall far above.

“The pipe, Holmes!” I cried. “It is the only way!”

He disappeared. Seconds passed, masquerading as hours. I was fighting desperately not to fall but could not understand why. I leaned against the opposite wall and somehow remained standing. If you remain standing, I thought madly, he will come out.

At last Holmes reappeared, with something tied around his neck. He leaned head and shoulders out the window and barely managed, with his arm fully extended, to reach the water pipe. Using it as an anchor to pull himself out, he swung himself over to it and, when nearing the cistern, jumped to the water barrel and the hay and then fell to the ground. I do not recall, in my entranced state, that I was at all surprised to see Miss Monk hanging limply from his shoulders.

I fumbled at the knot binding her hands and so disentangled them. They had been tied with Holmes’s scarf. When I lifted Miss Monk and laid her gently upon the ground, her head lolled backward. Her neck was entirely unmarked.

“Is she alive?” Holmes gasped raggedly.

At first, I could not tell, so shallow was her breath, but at last I identified a sluggish pulse.

“There is life in her still. She has been drugged. Holmes? Holmes, for heaven’s sake, lie back and breathe deeply. You’ve been poisoned by the smoke.”

He collapsed against the wall. “Surprising,” he managed through shuddering breaths. “I would have thought myself entirely inured to the substance.”

I laughed and felt an itching sensation at the back of my neck. I reached behind my head to touch it and my fingers returned clotted with blood.

“Holmes, we must get away from this place. The building is still burning.”

“Then let us—” Holmes began, and then his eyes fixed upon a point behind me and above our heads.

“You aren’t meant to be here yet,” said a soft voice.

I turned around, intending to rise, but managed only to fall to the stones beside my comrades.

“I doused the basement with kerosene. Then I brought Mother downstairs with an excuse about a broken window,” Edward Bennett continued thoughtfully, for I knew him from the funeral that seemed an age ago and in another country. “How could you have known the girl was missing so quickly? It ought to have been burned to the ground when you arrived.”

“Tavistock led us here,” said Holmes after a struggle for air.

“Oh, I see. I didn’t know who had broken the window. He has been of the greatest use to me. He is clever enough in his own way. Not as clever as you, of course, Mr. Holmes.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“You were the only real threat to my work, you know,” Bennett remarked. His face and figure were strikingly, disarmingly neutral. He had blond hair and queerly pensive blue eyes. Even with him standing before us, I could scarcely describe him to myself, though that may well have been the effect of the explosion upon my senses. “I was with you on the Baron Ramsden case, if you recall. The missing patch of grass. Gregson didn’t see it as we did. Of course, you lied to him. You lied to everyone. You think yourself the final seat of judgment, don’t you? Astonishing arrogance. I can’t abide arrogance. Admit that you lied.”

“I cannot think what you mean,” Holmes exhaled coldly. “Then again, the world is rather hazy just now.”

“That is a pity. I do not think I can allow you to remain in it much longer.”

“Your mother—”

“Oh, you got her out as well, did you?” Bennett’s face changed entirely as his mouth curved downward in a witheringly cruel contortion. The features twisted into the personification of hatred. I saw the letter writer staring back at us, the man who had written the words From hell. In an instant the look was gone. “You think of distracting me, but it won’t work, Mr. Holmes. You understand everything now.”

“I don’t,” Holmes coughed, retching slightly. “I never pretended to. I never understood any of it.”

“Come, now. You know far more than I ever intended you should.”

“I don’t know why you killed Martha Tabram.”

“Martha Tabram?” he repeated wonderingly. “Martha Tabram. I remember. The first girl. She had so much blood on her. She was crying out as she walked down the street. It reminded me of something.” He paused to consider. “They have all reminded me of something. I don’t know what it was. She was crying and I made her still. And the last girl, when you forced me off the streets—she was singing, and then all at once she was crying. I made her still too. Yes, I think that was part of it.

“Now, Mr. Holmes, I believe we should stop talking.”

It was becoming increasingly impossible to concentrate. My eyelids closed of their own accord. I forced them open again.

“You’re a fool,” Holmes murmured in a terrible, rasping voice. My friend still could not seem to breathe properly. “It will only be a moment before the police—”

“I am not a fool, and the police are a confused lot of imbeciles,” came the sharp reply. “I ought to know it. Running about like ants in their absurd circles. Take that message in the street I wrote, for example. I leave a note for them. And what do they do? They erase it.” He laughed pleasantly. “I thought they would. I couldn’t be sure until I had tried. I meant to write it in Dutfield’s Yard, next to the hall where all those Jews hold their meetings. That would have been something to see. But you arrived too soon that time as well.”