Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London Read online

  Sherlock Holmes:

  Zombies Over London

  By

  Stephen Mertz

  Based on the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Sherlock Holmes: Zombies Over London by Stephen Mertz

  Copyright © 2015 by Stephen Mertz

  Cover Design by Livia Reasoner

  Rough Edges Press

  www.roughedgespress.com

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  (Dedication)

  For David Avallone, Noonman incarnate, who knows a hero when he sees one.

  From the Journal

  of

  Dr. John H. Watson

  Chapter 1

  The steady thrum of steam engines shivered through the enormous military dirigible Blackhawk, belying the high rate of speed at which we cut through the night sky.

  I stood in the angle of one of the huge braces that lined the walls and watched Commander Standish complete the adjustments on the "flight enabler" strapped to Sherlock Holmes’ back. With its metal framework, the fabric draping between the struts floated about Holmes like a cloak.

  Standish turned to me.

  "Your turn, Doctor."

  He worked the frame over my shoulders and buckled the straps.

  We rode in a small anteroom along the outer shell of the airship, well aft of the control and radio rooms. A large portal opened in the anteroom’s side. Brisk air rushed in around us, and though I stood well away from the edge, I could see the winking lights of Devonshire spread out below.

  Then, so suddenly that it was like entering a portal to another world, the thrum of the engines simply stopped. The great ship glided along the lower edge of the clouds, cutting them silently.

  Holmes nodded with satisfaction and, gripping the framework of the great door, leaned out into the darkness.

  "Right on time," he said. "And there—do you see it, Watson?"

  I said, "I feel it!"

  Below and off to the right the walls of Castle Moriarity rose, thick and impenetrable, like the bones of some great, fossilized beast jutting from the stony ground. I stepped to the portal, steadied myself and leaned out slightly, taking in the approaching lights. I had not grown accustomed to the utter silence, and without the vibration of the engines, the swiftness of our flight had an eerie, disorienting effect.

  The Blackhawk was magnificent. Developed in secret, the dirigible had been housed in the shell of an industrial complex north of London. Based on an original design stolen by British agents from the files of Ferdinand von Zeppelin more than a decade earlier, Blackhawk was nothing less than a manifestation of the future. The first time I saw her, tethered to a stone and metal tower deep inside that hangar, her streamlined shape and stark black tail had given her the aspect of a tethered behemoth, transported from a far planet.

  Blackhawk’s long, ominous shape was a formidable, nearly invisible presence moving silently through darkness. The outer envelope of the airship concealed huge cells that contained a lighter than air gas. Forward thrust was provided by engines, mounted in cowlings, of a type previously only imagined existing in the dreams of madmen, or dreamers like Jules Verne. In that year of grace 1895, on the ground below, the world went on about its business as it always had. Steam power waged war with horse-drawn carriages, weapons grew ever-more complex and powerful, and here, far above it all, a new world was being forged.

  It has occurred to me, in my efforts to chronicle the exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that I have perhaps too often acquiesced to my friend’s desire that such accounts focus on his unique cognitive abilities. Holmes is, of course, correct in priding himself in those powers of deduction and reasoning which constitute his discipline, and yet I have always been of the opinion that equal attention should be paid to the remarkable warrior he could become; a formidable opponent in nearly every form of combat.

  Our plan was a simple one. Holmes and I, clad all in black, would leap from the doorway of this amazing ship. We would be invisible against the night sky. We would glide down with the grace of descending birds and light inside the castle walls. That was the plan.

  A plan of which I was not altogether enthusiastic.

  "Ready, Watson?" Holmes’ query crackled with anticipation.

  I gestured with my arms in a mildly exaggerated flapping motion. The lightweight material fluttered.

  "I’d be a damn sight more ready if this contraption of yours had been field tested at least once before I have to depend on it while I step into thin air like a man leaping off a bridge."

  "Courage, Watson." The chiding was softened with the twitch of a grin. "You were a combat surgeon in Afghanistan. You’ve faced death before."

  "True enough, and I’d step into the pits of Hell to take on Lucifer himself if it meant saving Mary."

  A shadow emerged from a corner of the cabin.

  Normally I might have been startled or aggravated but at the moment, with everything else that was going on, the appearance of Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes’ brother, did somehow not come a complete surprise.

  "Good Doctor Watson, you will be stepping into Hell down there and we are taking on Lucifer’s premier ambassador here on earth earth. With your wife held hostage by Moriarty, I would much prefer that you and my dear brother would allow a squad of able bodied men to accompany you."

  I said, "Absolutely not. An overt assault of any kind would only result in Mary’s death."

  He said, "A singular sequence of events has placed each of us in the predicament in which we now find ourselves. And so you and my brother will leap to your deaths, one way or another, and I am unable to dissuade you of this suicide mission you’ve undertaken?"

  Holmes registered no surprise. "And how long have you been monitoring the activities of Doctor Watson and me, dear brother?" There was an acidic tone to my friend’s voice. His eyes were glacial, his demeanor petulant.

  Mycroft Holmes was seven years his brother’s senior. There was a vague resemblance notable in their facial structure, but Mycroft was a much stouter and larger man than my friend. Heavily built and massive, he had the high brow of an intellectual and alert, steel gray eyes of an interrogation specialist. In fact he was both at the time of which I write. Mycroft Holmes was Her Majesty’s Chief of Intelligence. As our nation’s top intelligence officer (a fact known to only a few people at that time, I should add), Mycroft had most recently exerted himself on our behalf in the matter I chronicled under the heading of "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans."

  Despite their late middle age, their was a sibling rivalry between these two that surely had its roots in childhood, yet in adulthood it wore the cold mask of icy impersonality when matters not familial were being discussed.

  Mycroft said, "One of my agents picked up the scent at Lady Fairfax’s dinner party."

  "Of course," said Holmes. "The waiter, overly solicitous of our end of the table."

  "He’s been in place in the household staff for some time. Naturally he recognized you."

  "That dinner party was only the beginning," said Holmes. "Lady Fairfax’s nephew is a German spy. Count Kleinhart was at that dinner party to meet someone."

  I listened to the brothers address each other as if in a verbal match to best one another which, I had come to learn, was their standard form of verbal communication.

  Outside, the lig
hts of Castle Moriarty drew closer in the darkness below. It had indeed been a circuitous and yet, time-wise, compressed chain of events that had taken Holmes and me from Lady Fairfax’s sumptuous dinner party in London to us four in this enclosed windy dark space aboard the gondola of a midnight black dirigible.

  The trail of clues, subtle at first, began at that dinner party and interested Holmes to the extent he had undertaken a private investigation into Count Kleinhart, utilizing his own resources, motivated as far as I could discern mainly by a distinct dislike of the man’s supercilious manner. Though subtle, the clues had not long challenged Holmes’ powers of ratiocination. He sensed the hand of Moriarty at work behind the scenes as a pure bred hunting dog picks up that first faint scent of the fox.

  Holmes and I were on the trail of something the extent of which we could not guess and did not yet know. One thing alone became increasingly apparent. Professor Moriarty had devised some evil scheme or service that he was auctioning off to the highest bidder among the European monarchies. Kleinhart represented interests in Germany that wished to acquire whatever Moriarty was selling. And the closer we got to learning the nature of that scheme or service, the more dangerous the "game" became.

  There had thus far been three narrow escapes from death. A falling ton of brick from a construction site we’d been walking past. A racing brougham rattling down a narrow cobblestone street. Only the fortuitous presence of the mouth of an alley that we dived into saved us lives that time. Someone had taken a shot at us as we were leaving our apartment in Baker Street. None of this deterred us, which is why the blackguards struck closer to home.

  They kidnapped my wife.

  The warning was clear enough.

  Desist or Mary dies!

  Mary would not expect me to cower, to back off. I’d experienced combat as a soldier. I’d shared some narrow escapes with Holmes. Nothing but death itself would stop me from rescuing her.

  Holmes’ final deduction in the matter, similar cigar ash found in two locations, established the guilt of a prominent financier who, under threat of exposure, provided the final piece of the puzzle that led us to determine that Castle Moriarty was where my Mary was being held.

  Commander Standish leaned away from staring out into the blackness. "We’re passing over the castle now, Mr. Holmes."

  Holmes stepped forward, bracing himself in the doorway of the cabin. His hair and clothing flapped in the wind. "Remember, Watson, what I told you about aerodynamic control."

  I joined him at the doorway. "I’ll do my best," was the best I could muster.

  Mycroft rested a heavy hand on each of our shoulders. "I want to thank you both on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. Given that a troublemaker like Count Kleinhart would express interest in whatever Moriarty has up for sale, it becomes imperative in the name of national security that we learn what the Professor is up to in that accused castle of his."

  Holmes said, with a perfectly straight face except for the merest hint of a smile, "Gentlemen, it is time to test my invention."

  Before Mycroft, Standish or I could voice any reply, Holmes stepped through the doorway as if walking from one room to another, leaving me no alternative but to send Standish and Mycroft a parting glance.

  I then took a deep breath and stepped out into empty space.

  Chapter 2

  I was airborne.

  The night enveloped me as I dropped like a rock away from the airship that was already invisible above us except where its giant, long shape blotted out the stars. I started picking up speed, plummeting down, down, down, the air rushing by me, whipping at my hair and clothes. The lights of the castle were racing up toward me.

  The Blackhawk would be banking away. I had lost sight of Holmes. I was on my own, hoping to bloody blazes that Holmes’ invention was working and that my companion was not already lying crushed, broken and dead somewhere down on the dark ground. Two bloody fools crazy enough to jump out of a dirigible that wasn’t supposed to exist! As instructed, I raised my arms out from my side after having counted to seven, then breathed a mighty sigh of relief when I felt the chest harness tighten as the fabric grew taut, considerably lessening my rate of descent. The wind was cold, whistling.

  For the briefest span of time, my soul yielded to such a liberating sense of freedom as I have never known except in dreams. I was flying! The sensation was spectacular and filled me with an urge to shout but of course that was an impulse I denied.

  Less than sixty seconds later I was guiding myself into a running stop upon the roof of the castle, stopping just short of charging full-force into the stone parapets under the momentum of my landing. I dug in my heels.

  First order of business was to shed the unique harness, which was accomplished with a loosening of the quick-release clips Holmes had devised. A quick shrugging off of the harness. I drew my Webley revolver, my eyes darting across the castle rooftop, my night vision having adequately adjusted during my descent.

  Holmes crouched on one knee beyond a stone structure that framed stairs leading down into the building, his pistol drawn, concealing himself behind one of the parapets, observing something through a pair of miniature binoculars. His lean frame was limned in a vague golden glow of illumination from below.

  Relief coursed through me with the knowledge that we had survived the "field test" of his invention for leaping out of dirigibles. I rushed to join him.

  Engrossed as he was, he did not draw his eyes from the binoculars but rather acknowledged my presence with a curt, "I see you’ve made it, Watson. Good. We have our work cut out for us."

  I crouched next to him, producing and snapping open my set of binoculars to see what so keenly held his interest.

  A courtyard, three stories below our position, bustled with activity in flickering torch and lamplight. The courtyard was bordered on one side by the main structure, opposite which was a main front gate set in a high stone wall that encompassed the castle grounds. Beyond the wide-open wrought iron gates, a narrow road snaked off into the gloom of the surrounding countryside. A long, low garage with closed doors and a storehouse faced a row of barracks. The activity centered around a pair of horse-drawn wagons that stood beside the loading dock of the storage warehouse.

  The wagons were being methodically loaded with an assortment of boxes and crates.

  The boxed cargo being loaded, which could have been anything from scientific equipment to household items, was not what arrested my attention. Rather, I was struck with the peculiar manner in which the workers went about transporting the crates from the building to the wagons. Their movements were too methodical, too precise. They ambulated without speaking, which could have been under instruction, certainly, yet there was about the workers a uniform rigidity of demeanor, a precise cadence to each and every movement and a peculiar similarity of physical appearance.

  The men and women, I counted fifteen of them, appeared to be of a uniform age, approximately thirty I would estimate. Light poured from the doorway of the warehouse, through which each of them passed, thus forming one continuous line that afforded me an unobstructed glimpse of each. They wore matching threadbare clothing, the men in gray work shirts and trousers, the women in shifts.

  Several men, armed with rifles, formed a loose semi-circle around the loading dock, keeping what I sensed, even from our vantage point, was a wary eye on the shuffling figures who went about their work like sleepwalkers, their arms hanging limply at their sides when they weren’t carrying the boxes. Their expressions were blank and empty-eyed.

  "Holmes, what in God’s name—?"

  "Zombies." He snapped shut the binoculars and returned them to the pouch at his hip. "The undead."

  I studied him in the faint light, trying unsuccessfully to detect some hint of a mild jest.

  "Bosh. That’s superstition, like werewolves and vampires."

  "Hardly." Holmes’ tone of voice was authoritative. "Unlike those superstitious you cite, there is in fact a scientific basis for—" />
  "All right, all right." I could not abide my friend’s pedantic nature while my heart hammered against my ribs like a kettle drum. I continued to scan the wagons, the loading dock and those strange figures moving about. "What about my Mary?"

  He pointed away from the loading dock, to the inky gloom near the front gate. "There, Watson."

  I cursed myself for having been overly focused on the loading dock and the strange figures there. My blood was running hot but as always, the cool analytical eye of my friend had observed something barely visible unless you stared hard at an area against the wall.

  The form of a coach. A horse. A driver.

  And there she was! My breath caught in my throat.

  "Good heavens! Those…things have her."

  My heartbeat increased, the blood pounding in my ears. I held my pistol so tightly, I feared I might crush the grip.

  Mary stood between two of what Holmes had called zombies. Two of the hulking male figures each gripped one of her arms above the elbow. And with my outrage there stormed through me a surge of pride, for Mary did not cower despite their towering hulks looming above her.

  My Mary was trim of figure, well-dressed in crinoline. She stood with her back ramrod straight and her chin lifted.

  I whispered to Holmes, "We must get to her. We must formulate a plan."

  "Of course, dear fellow. Observe more closely."

  I was irritated and impatient in equal measure, yet I sharpened the focus of the binoculars to see if I could make out more down there where the coach stood near the front gate, away from the loading dock. I made out some indefinite shadow down there that was more of an impression than something tangible. I held my breath.

  The strange, shambling figures were now engaged in securing tarps over the crates on the wagons.

  The man with the lantern was crossing the courtyard to confer with someone, who stood by the coach near Mary and the pair of brutes who had her in their grasp. When the amber glow of the lantern reached the coach, I had a sudden good look at the man who was obviously in charge here. The man Holmes and I had risked our lives to track down.