Holmes Coming (eBook)

2

Indeed, I shrieked.

I also quickly realized that this hideous creature, standing before me with his eyes rolled back into their sockets so that only the whites were showing, was convulsing in a grand mal seizure in his tattered, once white but now disgustingly stained robe.

He had three-inch fingernails, curved like the talons of a great bird of prey, and his right hand was employing a huge 1890s syringe, such as I’d only ever seen in a medical museum, to inject something into his chest.

Then he collapsed at my feet.

Dead.

Or so it seemed. In spite of my revulsion at his appearance, my medical training kicked in. I knelt beside him and pressed the tips of my index and middle fingers against his neck, feeling for a carotid pulse. I couldn’t find one. I pressed my left ear to the moldy, dingy garment over his foul-smelling chest. I heard no heartbeat. I shot a quick glance to Mrs. Hudson. She had risen shakily from the wicker settee and was staring wide-eyed with fear at this extraordinary figure, clutching her hands to her chest.

I shouted to her, “His heart’s stopped! Help me!”

Mrs. Hudson responded by exhaling a limp sigh, then she passed out and fell sideways onto the settee.

“Oh, wonderful,” I grumbled to myself as I overlapped my hands on the grotesque man’s sternum and gave three sharp pumps. I was praying this would work. Fortunately, mouth-to-mouth CPR was no longer recommended. The notion of putting my lips to his drooling, mucous-covered mouth was beyond unappealing. I checked his carotid artery. Still no pulse. I pumped again, vigorously. This time he responded.

He coughed wetly, wheezed, and—thank God—sucked in a breath.

I saw that his tongue was still blue. His skin was icy cold to the touch. He was either in shock or headed that way fast. I turned an old trash can on its side and, lifting his legs, which I now saw were wrapped with gauze like an Egyptian mummy, elevated his feet onto it.

He coughed, sneezed, gurgled, wheezed some more, and then struggled to reopen his sticky eyes. He blinked, trying to focus. His skin had a sallow, corpse-like pallor. I tried to gain an idea of his age, but given his sepulchral, crypt-keeper appearance, I could only guess that he was somewhere between 30 and 130. His eyes appeared gray, his nose was thin and hawklike. His lips were thin but looked firm, even as they were covered with brown, slimy mucous.

Feeling that he was out of immediate danger, I grabbed a nearby stick and went back just inside the wine rack’s secret entrance. I used the stick to separate the crossed wires overhead. While there, I heard the faint sound of trickling liquid from the direction of the strange sarcophagus that I’d glimpsed earlier.

I ran upstairs to replace the fuse. This time it didn’t blow. I grabbed my cell and dialed 911, but when I got their “due to unusually high call volume” computer voice, I decided not to wait and hurried back down to the cellar. Evidently, my fuse replacement had worked, because the single old-fashioned light bulb hanging from the ceiling was on.

Mrs. Hudson was not—still out cold but breathing adequately. I grabbed a nearby tarp and spread it like a blanket over the bizarre quivering man on the floor. He had a peculiarly foul reek, far beyond the sourness of normal body odor. His eyes still struggled to focus; they crossed and uncrossed themselves in a manner that I might have thought humorous in other circumstances. He brought his long, shivering, taloned fingernails up near his face and was trying to focus on them with some amazement, like an infant discovering its hands for the first time.

“Easy, just take it easy,” I counseled, adjusting the tarp over him.

And then, with a rasping, unsteady voice and eyes wide and slightly crazed, he asked in what sounded like an elegant though inebriated British accent, “What . . . is . . . the year?”

“2022.”

“Ah!” he emitted in a small burst of jubilation, then coughed badly again. Gasping, he spoke with a drunken slur, “Mmmm . . . three years sooner than I’d imagined . . . but I shall adjust.”

I glanced back in at the Victorian laboratory and the now open steampunk sarcophagus he’d emerged from. Vapors were still rising out of it. “How long have you been in there?”

He smiled with a quirky smugness as he fingered and examined the length of his tangled beard, “Hmmm? . . . Since second November, 1899.”

“Ah. Right,” I said, humoring him as I took his pulse. “Well, that’d make you the world’s greatest scientist.”

He chuckled and coughed, still gasping. “Hardly. That honor . . . would likely still rest with my friend Louis.”

“Louis?”

“Pasteur of course.” He said it with a haughty flash, as though I were an idiot.

I stared at him, deadpan. “Of course.” I nodded, continuing to indulge him. “So, you were friends with Louis Pasteur?”

“Until his death . . . four years ago. No, wait . . . 1895 would be—”

“One hundred twenty-seven years ago, yes.” I saw a shiver run through him and felt his pulse rate increase slightly.

“Louis was a gifted man, although a fondness for garlic sometimes made his breath difficult to bear.”

“Well, sure, naturally.” I was still trying to get a sense of exactly how insane this disgusting individual was.

He was slowly regaining his breath. “Louis would have been . . .” (with his British accent he pronounced the word as bean) “. . . intrigued . . . by what I have accomplished.”

“Oh, yes indeed, I certainly think he would have.”

“Of course, he would have recognized that the biochemistry I created . . . was actually . . . very elementary.” He took a deep breath. His respiration was becoming almost regular. “I’d found a man nearly frozen solid in a drift of London snow . . . whom I realized had miraculously survived . . . because he had been thoroughly inebriated.” He wheezed and took in another long breath. “That gave me the idea . . . of lowering my body temperature and using brandy as an anti-freezing agent to keep my blood slowly flowing.”

“Fascinating. Do go on,” I said. Ever more certain that I was dealing with a madman, I was determined to keep him passive.

“I retarded my bodily processes through my long-developed skill at self-hypnosis,” he continued, with growing enthusiasm for his perceived triumph. “A mechanical device cooled and cleansed my blood and administered vitamin E”—he pronounced it vitt-a-min—“as an antitoxin.”

“Vitamin E. Well, it seems to have worked.”

“The key element, however,” he said with haughty pride, raising his taloned index finger to punctuate the importance, “is an extraordinary serum I derived from the blackfish of the Bering Sea, which every winter is frozen solid and then miraculously revives during the spring thaw. This serum also prevented my muscular system from withering by atrophy.”

“Annnnnd why were you so sure this whole process would work on you?” I inquired.

“Because I had meticulously researched it, experimented carefully—and primarily because it was all entirely logical.” Again his tone was gratingly derisive, as though he were casting pearls of “ob-vious” wisdom before swinish me. He pulled some long, mud-colored beard hair out of his mouth. “Ptoo! And of course I fitted the apparatus with a fail-safe device to inject a stimulant into my body if the electricity failed before the year 2025, when my carefully crafted, electrically powered chronometer was set to trigger my revival. But upon awakening I still felt weak and injected myself with more.”

“You injected too much,” I said, picking up the large antique metal syringe and examining it. “You went into cardiac arrest. What, besides adrenaline, did you inject yourself with?”

He smiled coyly; his eyes twinkled between their gummy lids. “With a formula of my own devising. I’m sure it’s all terribly antiquated by this modern age, but perhaps it might prove of some minor historical interest to the doctor for whom you nurse.”

Still kneeling beside him, I leaned back onto my heels. “And just why do you think I’m a nurse?”

“The professional manner with which you’ve been taking my pulse; your knowledge of adrenaline,” he rattled on with complete confidence, “the way you’ve elevated my feet to ward off shock; and the faint, but distinct, odor of medicinal alcohol on your clothing.”

I frowned and tried to casually sniff the shoulder of my purple silk blouse. In doing so, I saw that Mrs. Hudson was just regaining consciousness. She struggled to pull herself into a sitting position. But when she saw the face of the man on the floor, her eyes went wide. She let out a small, fearful yelp, saying, “Oh dear God! It is him!” And she promptly fainted sideways onto the settee again.

I stared at her, feeling a bit nonplussed by everything. I looked down at my snot-covered patient. “Um, would you mind telling me just who you are?”

“Oh, come, come, my dear. No need to play games.” The smelly man struggled onto...