I did not know it at the time, but I was being shown a war that was less than two decades away, and which would claim seventeen million lives – with as many more again horrifically wounded. One of the most appalling and deadliest conflicts in human history, and I was being given a preview of it against my will.
After I had regained my composure, I looked up over the lip of the trench again – to see that the woman in white had returned. She was drifting through the bullets and muck, bending and placing her hand on the fallen soldiers to ease their grief, shaking her head. I saw now that she was not wearing robes as I had first thought, but some sort of long, flowing nightgown.
I waved at her to try and gain her attention. “Get out of there! Can’t you see how much danger you’re in?” She did not even look in my direction.
Another mighty blast and this time I was thrown clear of the trench. I landed and shook myself, realising that the scene had shifted a third time – and I was in a city, with oriental-looking people rushing around me, pointing at something and screaming. Men, women and children, all in a state of turmoil.
Then I saw why.
A huge cloud in the distance, I can only think to compare its shape to that of a mushroom. A bomb, unlike anything I had seen before, or since, had been dropped. Moments later, the people around me were blown apart as a wind ploughed through them. All that was left in the thing’s wake were shadows cast upon the walls, the outlines of people. And there, in the distance, walking through the carnage, was the woman in the nightgown – walking slowly and looking from side to side.
“Wait!” I called out, running after her. “Please wait!”
But she did not, rounding a corner and vanishing. When I reached the spot myself, I skidded past. As I turned the corner and ran on, I found myself in a jungle – trailing men dressed in green. They were holding rifles that looked more advanced than anything I had ever seen, and when we suddenly broke cover, I was confronted with strange flying machines. Much smaller than airships, and with some form of propeller on top, these were landing – waiting for the soldiers to climb on board. A sneak attack came from the jungle, flashes of gunfire tearing into the soldiers, ripping them apart before they could fire back. Another future war, and there was the woman in white again, bullets not even grazing her. I realised now how ridiculous my warnings were; she was in no more danger of being hurt than I. So, trying to ignore the bloodshed as best I could, I ran after her again, ran past the metal machines that were taking off, running so fast I barely noticed that I’d stepped on something: a landmine, which blew me several feet into the air.
When I landed with a thump, I was in a more urban environment, where the warfare had spilled out onto the streets.
Explosions shattered storefronts and as they had in that other cityscape, people were scattering in every direction, but it was doing them just as much good; they were killed on the spot by flames and... chains with hooks. I frowned, puzzled. For the perpetrators of this chaos were not soldiers this time, but what looked like members of the Order of the Gash.
No, not the same as the others. I could not quite put my finger on it, but these were different somehow. As amazing is it sounds, they looked more haphazard, as if not as much care had been taken over their appearance. Like they were copies… They acted differently, as well. Much less controlled, but at the same time directed. Maybe they were foot soldiers? I glanced around for the general orchestrating this ‘invasion’, and, yes, sure enough, I spotted him. At first I almost mistook him for Glass, as he wore a similar kind of crown and skirts; carried himself with the same authority. It was not glass in this one’s head, however, but a crown of something altogether more disturbing – something akin to those fetishes back in Monroe’s quarters...
“John!” I turned, and there she was, walking away from me, beckoning me to follow.
As I ran after her, I tripped and fell... only I did not land on the ground. I was falling for the longest time – twisting over and over, blackness and stars all around me. Something whizzed past, another flying machine making its way through that space – only this one was more like the rocket from that famous George Méliès motion picture which would astound audiences in a few years’ time. This particular rocket was engaged in a battle with lots of others. Different-coloured lights shot from cannons mounted on those rockets. When the beams hit something, they destroyed it completely in a big ball of fire. In the distance was a larger vehicle. No, more like a train station in the sky, where the rockets could land, docking as ships might after a long journey on the waves. I’d only been watching this display for a few moments when that too exploded. It was a pretty sight, but no less devastating for those who must have been on board the structure.
I was left there floating through space, nothing but silence surrounding me, when I felt someone behind me, heard my name called out one last time. “John... Turn around, John.”
I managed to manoeuvre myself until I was facing the lady I had been chasing through one war after another. Part of me had known who she was all along. Who else could it have been? If I was dreaming of my time abroad, then it followed that I should also be dreaming about her. Indeed, the nightgown she had on was the one she had been wearing when she died in that hospital bed. Now restored and smiling, fair hair flowing behind her, she looked as beautiful as the day I had met her and given her my heart.
“Mary,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes, my love. It is I.”
We drifted towards each other and then I had her in my arms again. Oh, how I had missed holding my dear, sweet wife. Words cannot express the joy! I pulled back and kissed her. I thought my heart might just burst, such was the strength of feeling I experienced. I was crying when I broke off that kiss, and Mary brushed my cheeks with her thumb.
“No tears, John,” she said to me. “Not here.” I couldn’t help it. If this was a dream, then I did not want it to end. As if reading my thoughts she said, “Oh, you’re not dreaming, sweetheart. Not really. I wish you were.”
“Then how...?”
“Your memories of Afghanistan, they provided the raw material for your visions. It was their deity, John.”
“Deity?”
“You saw it, and it saw you. It looked into you, used those recollections. For a vision of one war, is a vision of all wars. Past, present and future.”
“I... I don’t understand.”
“There is a war coming, John. A battle which you will play an important part in. But I will be with you; I will always be with you.”
“A battle...” I still didn’t understand, but then how was I supposed to? I did not yet have all the information at my disposal. As Holmes once said, one cannot make bricks without clay.
“If that monstrosity back there is the Order’s god, then where exactly am I?”
“I think you know the answer to that question already. You’re just not ready to admit it.”
My mind flashed back to those representations in Monroe’s chambers and I shuddered. “And the others? Cotton, Spencer...?”
“They are all here, in their own private purgatories. It was their choice, John. Nobody forced them. Would you like to see?”
Before I could answer, Mary waved a hand and the stars around us vanished: replaced with a chamber, a dungeon room that looked very much like the one I’d been held captive in back at the Institution. I recognised the man we were looking at as Francis Cotton, for he bore more than a passing resemblance to his brother. He was on his knees, pounding the floor. A group of women entered the room and encircled him. All were in various states of undress, enough to make me blush; writhing and moaning and coaxing him with crooked fingers. Francis wasn’t blushing, he was gazing up at them with lust in his eyes – and when he stood and reached for one, she disappeared, as insubstantial as mist. He turned and tried to touch the others, and the same thing happened again and again, until there were none left. At that point he fell to his knees once more, ready for the whole performance to repeat itself.
/>
We moved on to the next victim, Lieutenant Spencer – who was wearing his Army uniform. He was being treated to a succession, not of women, but bloodied and wounded men – paraded before him, arms hanging off, bandages wrapped around their heads. Not his comrades in arms, but all the people he had ever killed brought back to haunt him. I wondered if such a fate might await me, as well.
Monroe, now, and he was being made to watch his parents’ death – him as a teenaged boy slitting their throats as they slept. Grinning at the time, with the thought of inheriting their money, the grown up Monroe who bore witness to this never-ending scene was less than entertained. A man I imagined must be Thorndyke was being put through the horrors of watching his little girl wandering around in the darkness, terrified and calling out for her father. “Where are you?” she kept repeating over and over. “Please come, Daddy. Please, I need you!” But every time he ran to her, she would shift position and the whole scenario would play out again. As for Amelia Kline, she was being put through the torment of watching her partner, Miss Summersby, being stoned to death by a crowd, shouts of “Bitch!” and “Trollop!” ringing in her ears.
“Enough, Mary! I’ve seen enough.” She halted the sights immediately. “It doesn’t mean a thing. You could be one of those apparitions, conjured by their god. Or... or my mind could still be making all this up. I could still be dreaming or –”
She took my hands. “Oh my love, you are not. This is as real as anything you have ever experienced. Perhaps even more so. Please believe me.”
“But... but if this isn’t a dream, how can you be here?”
She sighed. “I’m not. Not really. I am just an echo – a shadow.” I thought back to that mushroom cloud, the remains of those people left behind; I looked down, more tears escaping. So this Mary was no more real than Cotton’s women? She felt real enough. Perhaps that was to be my punishment? I only raised my head again when Mary continued. “I am allowed to be here because of my link to you – and my link to someone else.”
“Holmes?”
Mary shook her head again. “No. Not Sherlock. But someone who is known to you both.”
“Mary, please tell me what is going on. I think... I think I’m going insane.”
She looked at me then with eyes that held so much love, and I knew deep down inside she was no illusion. This was my Mary all right, echo or no echo. “If you’ll indulge me one last time, husband. Perhaps it might be better if I showed you,” she said.
And the scene around us changed one final time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Engineer
SHERLOCK HOLMES HAD somehow managed to throw off the beast that had been trailing his every step. He’d glanced behind him at some point during the chase, only to find that it wasn’t there anymore, though he felt sure it wouldn’t be long before it caught up – the one thing he couldn’t really do was mask his own scent. If anything, the sweat pouring from his skin would make him even easier to find.
Nonetheless, he was free of the damned thing for now. The damned thing... just one more damned thing in a place chock full of them. Holmes realised now the enormity of what he’d done, cracking open the division between his world and the one the Order occupied. He’d accepted the truth of it much more easily than Watson, and that surprised him a little. Holmes wasn’t a particularly religious soul, and up until now had been no great believer in the supernatural – but he trusted logic and the evidence of his own eyes. As he’d once said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
What happened, though, if the truth turned out to be the impossible?
Then, by that token, the impossible became the possible. The Order of the Gash, no matter how incredible their existence had seemed before today, were real. Hell was real. He did not subscribe to Watson’s theories about drugs, hallucinations or mental collapse. This place was as authentic to him as anything he had ever seen or experienced. Those mutilated creatures back there, as solid as anyone he’d ever come across, client or villain. That Hound in pursuit of him, though it should not still be alive, in this place it was. In this place, death had no dominion – or at least not in the way human beings had always subscribed to.
It was as he mused about all this and turned the next corner that he realised his mistake. The Hound had not broken off its pursuit at all; it had merely completed its task, played its part to perfection. And that role had been to manipulate him into coming here, to this large stone room.
That much became apparent when the hooks and chains flew out of nowhere again, more than before: so many more. A dozen at least, embedding themselves in his limbs, his torso; there had been no hope of avoiding them, even with his superior reflexes, so Holmes let them have their way, shutting out what his nerve endings were telling him about the pain. He breathed in and out slowly, compartmentalising the distress, like the Tibetan monks had shown him. This was easier said than done when the chains pulled taut and lifted him off the ground, pulling his body into a star shape.
“Gah!”
There was someone, several someones in fact, here in this room with him.
“Show yourself,” Holmes managed. “I think we’re beyond games, don’t you?”
There was movement, and one of the figures stepped forwards into the blue-grey light. Pale-faced, and dressed in the apparel of the Order, this thing in front of him was, nevertheless, a newcomer. Its deformities and lesions were unlike any Holmes had witnessed before, parts of the creature having been replaced with clockwork and pistons. Steam escaped as the ‘man’ shambled forwards, pipes coiling around his neck and into his skull. Both eyes were red-raw, bloodshot and gaping as if only just awakened from its deathly slumber.
Another figure emerged on the other side of the room, similarly tampered with, except a whole arm had been replaced with machinery; wheels and gears, cogs that were visible beneath the surface of the skin, leading up to a shoulder-plate that would not have looked out of place on a suit of armour. Tubing and pipes snaked around its waist and legs – running down, in and out, the whole length of them.
A third figure slunk from the gloom, and the most startling thing about this one was that its head was a patchwork of flesh and metal; squares of copper and steel bolted on to it here and there. It wore goggles, but removed these to show that its eyes were uncoordinated – rolling wildly. The creature that came around the side of Holmes, from behind, had no legs at all, and was propelling itself along with its forearms, its hind-quarters two metal wheels. It turned and looked back at Holmes, and he could see that this one was a female – or had been. Tubes flowed from the back of her head in lieu of hair, each pipe pumping out thick gouts of smoke.
None of them spoke. All of them had the same vacant expressions. Toys, puppets, but belonging to whom? Holmes fancied he had a good idea.
“Finally. You,” he said, speaking into the darkness still at the back of the room, “must be the Engineer, sir.”
There was a throaty laugh which bounced off the walls. “And you are Mr Sherlock Holmes. Your reputation precedes you, even here.”
“And what, pray tell, do they say about me?”
There was a pause before the answer came. “That you stand apart. That you are unique – and that you have no equal. But you and I both know that is not correct.”
Holmes’ brow furrowed. “Show yourself! Stop hiding behind these ‘inventions’ of yours. I wish to see your face, Engineer.”
“By all means.”
Then came the true madness. The moment when Holmes really did think he might be losing his mind.
The monster that revealed itself was – like him – suspended. Except it wasn’t being held aloft by chains, rather by thick tentacles made from meat and bone. Four of them to be precise, which disappeared beneath the long, flowing leather coat he was wearing – it looked like they were attached to his sides, between his arms and his legs. Where they were coming from was unclear, but they were supporting
him and under his command, as he glided confidently towards Holmes. He had once described this individual as a ‘spider in the centre of a web’ and at no time was this description more accurate than now, for these glistening tentacles made it look like he had eight limbs. Apart from his pale blue face now adorned with metal piercings and chains, he looked practically the same: protruding forward from those rounded shoulders, forehead dome-shaped, sunken eyes, an angular nose and thin, pursed lips. He also wore a top hat, perched at a jaunty angle. The collar of his black shirt was up, his tie a mess of muscle and tissue carved out and left to flop down from the top of his throat.
“Hello again, Holmes,” said the man.
Holmes shook his head, then thought, but why shouldn’t he be here? Had he not already seen the Hound’s ‘resurrection’?
What better place for one such as him to end up, but in Hell? Moriarty. Professor James Moriarty.
In spite of what Watson might have thought, Holmes would have given anything for this not to be so. He had been willing to sacrifice his own life so that the world would be rid of this fiend – little realising that another world would claim him for its own, welcome him back like some kind of prodigal son. Promote him and give him his own supply of raw material to work on and revel in. An engineer indeed, constructing new nightmares out of old.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he said, drifting close. “How easy it must have been for me. Well, you’re quite, quite wrong. I had to prove myself, Holmes. Prove myself worthy of being included in the ranks of the Cenobites.” When he saw Holmes’ eyebrow twitch, he smiled. “Ah, you haven’t come across that name? It’s what they... what we call ourselves. To some, demons. To others... something else.”
“Something vile,” Holmes breathed out.
“Something glorious!” corrected Moriarty, opening his arms wide. Out of the shadows more came, reconstituted beings, as much mechanical devices as humans now. “Do you like my handiwork, Holmes? My own personal creations, no two the same. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here – you have no idea! There are so few who would be able to appreciate all this.” It was at that moment a clicking sound caught Holmes’ attention and, at last, the Hound came in to join them. It growled when it saw Holmes, but wagged its tail when Moriarty called to it. The tentacles eased him down so he could pat the creature’s head. He produced a chunk of raw meat from somewhere inside the folds of his coat. “Good boy. Here’s a treat for you. Nice touch, don’t you think, Holmes? I thought you might appreciate being welcomed by a familiar foe. Wasn’t easy to find, but, well, I specialise in getting what I need, and getting what I want.”