THE DRIVE TO SCOTLAND YARD WAS A LONG ONE AT THE best of times. In the middle of the afternoon, through streets bustling with traffic, trade and about six thousand “flower girls” showing off their “wares” it took even longer. Thus, Jefferson Hope finished his tale ere we arrived.
“As soon as I found they had landed in London, I began to shadow them,” he told us. “I started spending most days and nights near Charpontier’s boarding house. But they took care, as they always did, not to travel alone. That last fateful night, I followed their cab to Euston Station and watched ’em make for the trains. I don’t mind telling you, I was desperate. I couldn’t have them escape me again, for the pressure in my head and heart had grown so intense that I thought I might explode early.”
At this point, I was forced to intrude myself upon the story and ask, “Now, precisely why are you convinced that you are going to explode?”
“Russian Gypsy wise woman,” he remarked, as if it were a perfectly common avenue of medical advice. “Even before St. Petersburg, I felt the pressure growing. I knew I had to catch ’em. She’s the one who told me I was likely to bleed profusely at exciting moments in my life story, due to my unnaturally high blood pressure. She seemed real sorry when she told me I’d explode after everything was all resolved, but I didn’t mind much. I just want to have justice and be done with it. I don’t reckon a man ought to outlive his own story on any count, do you, Doctor?”
Preposterous as it all sounded, you should have heard his chest. He gave me permission to examine him and I was astounded by what I found. His skin was hot and throbbed with an unaccountably powerful and uneven pulse. Though my medical training encompassed no such possibility, I found myself shying to the opposite end of the cab, lest his heart and brain burst in my lap.
“Anyways, they missed the train,” Hope continued, “and they argued. Leaving my horse, I snuck through the crowd, close enough to hear ’em. Strangerson wanted to go on to another private hotel he knew—Halliday’s—I guess they wasn’t welcome back where they come from. Still, Drebber said he had business back at Charpontier’s. Drebber weren’t too nice to his friend that day, being already rotten with drink. He treated everyone pretty bad, I guess. Strangerson took one cab, Drebber another. I followed Drebber. I guess I hated him more. He went back to Charpontier’s but didn’t stay long. In no time at all, he comes running back out onto the street with a young man at his heels, waving a stick and threat’ning to beat him to death. Well I pulled up my cab to the curb to save him. Funny, but in that moment I wasn’t thinking to kill him, only that I couldn’t let nobody else do it, or I’d lose my chance forever. Wasn’t ’til we were alone in my cab that I realized I finally had him. He hadn’t recognized me. He was jolly as you like; kept taking swigs out of that flask of his and telling me about some pretty girl he’d just been courtin’. He said he was tired out and ordered me to take him some place to sleep.”
“I drove him round to 3 Lauriston Gardens, what I knew to be vacant. He followed me in, friendly as you like, and complained of the darkness. I lit a candle, held it before my face and said, ‘You know me, Drebber! Who am I?’”
“He musta thought we were playin’ a game, for he guessed Abraham Lincoln, but when I showed him Lucy’s wrapper, he knew what was comin’. He tried to push past me, but in that moment I had the strength to best a rhino. He tried begging, promised me money, but nothing, nothing was going to stay my hand. I’d come so far… I showed him the pills. I told him, “Now Drebber, you choose. One of ’em is deadly poison; the other ain’t. You choose one now an’ eat it. I’ll eat th’ other and we’ll see if there’s any justice in this world or not!’ I weren’t afraid, for I could feel Lucy with me, smell her sweet dough. Either she would be avenged, or I would join her in the boundless ever-after. Mewlin’ like a baby cat, Drebber chose one and we ate. Then I seen his face tighten up and I knew he’d chose the bad pill. In that moment, I knew myself an instrument of justice. Can’t tell you how good that felt. For a number of years up ’til then, I was afraid I might just be crazy. Felt so good to watch him die. It was only a fraction of the misery he’d caused me an’ Lucy, but it still felt good. I stuffed the wrapper in his mouth and left. I didn’t even realize I’d been bleedin’ ’til then.”
“No, no, no,” I protested. “You carried that paper across ten years and two continents. Not a day after the murder, you risked capture to retrieve that wrapper from my very hand. Do you expect me to believe you just decided to leave it with Drebber’s corpse?”
“Thought I wanted to,” he shrugged. “I wanted to make him eat it, wanted it to be the last thing he ever tasted. Only, when I got back to the cab, I felt she was gone. I was alone, you know? First time since Nevada. Even in my madness, I had her there. I could smell her. My Lucy. I had to go back, but that damned cop had already come. I didn’t know what to do, ’til I saw the ad in the paper. I pulled a dress off a clothesline and… heh, heh… I sure fooled you, Doctor!”
I saw no sense in arguing with the man. “You sure did,” I said.
“Good thing, too,” he added amiably, “or I’da had ta slice you up!”
I fell silent. He continued, “Once I had Lucy’s ghost back, I drove round to Halliday’s and began sneakin’ round. I saw Strangerson up there, reading by his window. I went and found a ladder and climbed up to see him. I gave him the same choice I gave Drebber, but he weren’t having none of it. He come at me and I let him have it. I meant to poison him, but I weren’t sad to see him fall to the same knife he took to my Lucy. I left Lucy’s ghost in his mouth too, for I thought I wouldn’t need it no more, then I went outside to explode.”
“Only you didn’t,” I pointed out, in passive-aggressive defense of actual medicine.
“I shoulda figured—getting caught and explainin’ myself—story wasn’t over ’til I did that.”
I shook my head again and reflected, “So… you followed these men for ten years; taught yourself the trades of dock work, lumberjacking, portering, cab-driving; taught yourself Russian, Spanish, German, French and Danish?”
“Guess I did,” Hope said.
“That may be the most trouble any human has ever taken over the matter of a crumpet with a hole in it,” I said.
“The perfect revenge,” Holmes mused.
“Yeah…” Hope agreed, “only…”
“Only what?” asked Holmes.
“Now that I get to thinkin’ on it, I shoulda done Strangerson first,” Mr. Hope said, shaking his head sadly. “Shoulda killed him with that knife, cut him in half, poisoned half his body and told Drebber, ‘I split, so you choose!’ I’da eaten whatever half of the body he didn’t, of course. I’da poisoned the smaller half. Drebber would have taken the smaller half.”
Horror-struck, I said nothing.
“That would have been masterful,” said Holmes.
Hope only nodded and said, “I know it. So… what about that gun? How’d you shoot my cab in half with one pistol shot?”
“It wasn’t the gun that did the damage, Mr. Hope. I only had Watson fire it for appearances. That way, any neighbors who beheld the action would see what you did: a pistol, apparently loaded with a potent explosive cartridge. That is not the truth, but what else could one assume?”
“What’s the truth then?”
Oddly, it was not Jefferson Hope but me that Warlock fixed with his otherworldly green gaze. He sighed. “Moriarty said I should be discovered if I took this case. I realize now, he was speaking of you, Watson. Strange… I have grown accustomed to denying everything. But one of you gentlemen is not long for this world and the other is too close and too observant to be fooled. I wonder, have either of you ever noticed the brimstone thread?”
“What’s that?” asked Hope.
“Think of the world as a sheet of cloth, woven on the master loom. There are thousands of threads that make it up, each coming and going in patterns. As you travel through life, you happen upon various threads. There is one for poverty, one for plenty. There is a thread for love, two for lust, several for disappointment, one for balsa wood and, of course, the brimstone thread.”
Holmes paused until Jefferson Hope said, “I still don’t think you’ve answered my question.”
“The brimstone thread is an echo. There are powerful things that exist outside our own, comfortable reality. They would like to be here; they are constantly searching for a way in. Thus, they are ever willing to do favors for people in this reality. After all, is one ever truly absent from a place that has felt one’s influence? Do a favor for a millionaire some time and, whenever you remind them of it, you are sure to find yourself treated to a nice meal, if not a new house. They can never be entirely free of their obligation to you. With guilt, I must admit that I am a person whom these outside entities perpetually attend, all clambering to do me favors. I try to avoid accepting them, for with each deed they do for me, they are closer to this world. The brimstone thread shows itself more and more within the cloth. You must have noticed.”
“I think I have.” Mr. Hope nodded, a faraway look in his eye. “I think I was stuck on that thread for a while. I almost feel a part of it.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Holmes mumbled, but his eyes were on me, not Mr. Hope. When I said nothing, he chided, “Oh come now, Watson. You must have seen it! Why do the zealots of every religion behave in the same way? Whatever their native faith might teach, they always turn hate, violence and intolerance against the innocent! Regardless of the god they turn from, why is it always the same one they turn to? Why is any number, raised to the power of zero, equal to one? It doesn’t make sense! It seems otherworldly because it is, but it is so well entrenched in our reality that we can no longer understand our own world without resorting to it. That is the brimstone thread! I know you have seen it, Watson, and I know you to be keen of mind and gifted with great powers of observation. I have hidden the existence of the outer realms from the simpletons who lodged with me previously, but you… Having caught one glimpse, one tattered edge of the thread, a man like you has the capacity to make a scientific analysis of it—a study in brimstone—which I would be powerless to stop, except by killing you or ruining your intellect.”
“You wouldn’t!” I retorted.
“No, I wouldn’t! Really, Watson, you are a danger to me—exposure to the unsympathetic world being my keenest fear. But you have no idea what a relief it is not to be lodging with some drooling imbecile who grows slowly more and more frightened of me with each passing day until he finally makes his escape. Why, you even seem to be my better at this crime-solving business.”
“Preposterous,” I declared.
“Fact,” insisted Holmes.
“I know how it can be settled,” said Jefferson Hope. “Which one of you caught me?”
“He did!” said Holmes and I together.
“I did not,” I told Hope. “He used his powers.”
“I wouldn’t!” Holmes protested. “Every time I allow one of those things to do me a favor, I sell them another piece of this world. I betray the entire race of man. I would never use my powers for anything so trivial as the capture of a single murderer!”
“Ah, so it was my pistol that blew up the coach?” I countered.
“Well… that hardly counts. That was Azazel smiting something. He loves to smite. Hardly a favor… Better to say, I did him a favor by giving him something to smite.”
“QED: you used your powers,” I said.
“Really, Watson, don’t be foolish. It was you who figured out that Mr. Hope here would be a London cab driver with an American accent. All I did was to send the Baker Street Irregulars out looking for such a man. As it happens, there was only one.”
Mr. Hope nodded his approval and congratulations. I sat stunned. Stunned. It really hadn’t occurred to me before that moment, but I had done it—I had solved the crime. I was so enchanted with the power of Grogsson, the terror of Lestrade, and the mystery of Holmes that I had come to view myself as quite powerless but… in the end…
I sat speechless the rest of the way to Scotland Yard, whilst Holmes and Hope chatted about demons, pistols, the finer points of cutting men in half, et cetera.
That is about the end of the matter, except to relate one final event which, I will admit, caused me some sadness. It seems that cardio-cranial narrative-sensitive exploditis is a real condition. The story of his life having run its course, his revenge complete, his capture having illuminated his strange history, Jefferson Hope’s head and heart burst that very night, as he slept in his jail cell. What surprised me most was the sheer power of the explosion. He was hardly more than a husk when they found him. The force was such that it tore the window and door from the stone walls of his cell. There was blood everywhere. Detective Inspector Vladislav Lestrade insisted on handling the investigation personally.