The Holmes-Dracula File, Fred Saberhagen [pride and prejudice read .TXT] 📗

all, and was now caught on the stair, between some burly policemen trying to climb, and other men who were attempting to get down. These last were pushed on by still others, behind them, who endeavored to escape. I tried at once to go to her assistance, but soon discovered that whether I strove to move in that direction or the opposite one made very little difference in my actual position.

   The entire establishment was by this time in a perfect uproar. As I was spun round almost helplessly in a surging of the crowd, I caught sight once more of the imitation “Scott.” He had been one of the first to take alarm, and was now apparently well on the way to making his escape. He had somehow managed to catch hold of one of the overhead beams, which extended completely across the loft some nine or ten feet above the floor, and was in the act of pulling himself up to a standing position on it. Above and beyond him in the shadows, I could see what appeared to be a closed trapdoor or sealed window set in the angle of the roof.

   At the next moment I again spied the gray-haired purveyor of rats, just as he leaped with an incredible agility to catch hold of the same beam upon which our quarry balanced. But the ragged, hatless man was prevented from going on by an athletic constable who jumped upward from a chair to catch him by one leg.

   The rat-carrier’s face was now turned to the full light of a gas fixture on the wall, and what I saw in that face compelled me instantly to forget all else. A great understanding—as it then seemed—burst upon my brain. An instant later I was hurling men from my path, fighting to reach his side.

   But before I could achieve this, a powerful double kick from the dangling man’s lean legs sent the body of the athletic constable flying like an acrobat’s above the melee. Several men went down beneath the uniformed figure. Once more the ragged man pulled himself up, and once more a policeman would have seized his legs to drag him down; but I was just in time to collar this second officer and pull him, instead, back into the crush. When I let go, the policeman of course glared about, but in the confusion and the press of bodies he was unable to tell who had just foiled him in what he conceived to be the performance of his duty.

   When I looked up again, “Scott” had already disappeared—and the ragged man, looking as weightless as a fly, was clambering rapidly toward the closed trapdoor.

   Moore had now seized me by the arm, and was shouting as he tugged at me. Following with my eyes the direction of his pointing finger, I could see the villainous-looking fellow who had been with “Scott” and Barley embarking upon a more orthodox climb of his own. He had reached a wooden ladder crudely built against one wall, which evidently furnished the normal means of ascent to the trapdoor and the roof, and around which a throng of men still struggled for the chance to get away.

   The crush in general was now thinning out, and the noise diminishing, as men either made good their escapes or, more frequently, fell quiet in the hands of the police. “Dr. Watson!” It was Tobias Gregson at my side. “Is Mr. Holmes here too?”

   “No longer,” I choked out, meanwhile glancing upward, to where the trap opening now yawned black and empty against the night. “Come this way, and quickly! There is a man who must not escape.”

   Gregson, shouting to one of his men to join us, came with Moore and me in a rush. Together we made short work of getting through the group of men who were still struggling around the ladder for a chance to climb. Our latest quarry was himself just on the point of being able to get up and away, butt seizing his feet, we dragged him down by main force, despite his desperate struggles to avoid capture.

   Gregson and Moore pinioned his arms, and I drew my pistol and presented it to his head, at which point he ceased to struggle.

   “Got you, my beauty!” Gregson shouted. “Now where is Dr. John Scott?” And at the same instant I was demanding of the prisoner: “What is your name?”

   The wiry form we had surrounded slumped in resignation. “As to Dr. Scott’s whereabouts,” came the dry answer, “I fear I have been prevented from gaining any useful information. You will oblige me greatly, Watson, by putting up your pistol; my name is Sherlock Holmes.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

   In his good journeyman style—if not in what I should count as sparkling prose—the late Dr. Watson has provided a substantially correct account of the affair at Barley’s upon that long-ago June night. Still there are, to my mind, one or two points where the reader may benefit from a change of viewpoint and a small amount of overlap. Therefore I resume my history at approximately the moment when the police pushed open Barley’s front door.

   Of course I might have heard them coming from afar, had my attention not been riveted upon that same small private office into which Watson and Moore had been so clumsily attempting to spy. As Watson has noted, my duties as rat-factor had brought me upstairs; but, at the risk of seeming boastful or tedious, let me reiterate for the last time that my hearing is far keener than that of almost any breathing human; so keen that, had the animals and enthusiasts about me been less noisy over their blood sports, I would have had a good chance of understanding almost all that Barley and the other two were saying down in the office, though their voices were quite low.

   Their talk was on a subject that