CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

FIVE MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT

I had no idea where I was. I was unable to move, hardly able even to breathe. Something was in my mouth. I bit down with what little strength I could muster. It was hard against my teeth. I coughed. Something tickled the back of my throat, a hair or a thread, I couldn’t tell what.

I tried to open my eyes, but they refused to respond; I wanted to move my arms but they were strapped down. The air was cool against my chest. Where was my shirt?

I groaned, and heard my name echoing from far away.

I turned my head, finally able to open my eyes a crack.

There was my name again. Watson. Nearer this time.

I was unable to see properly. There were lights, dancing in front of me like will o’ the wisps, tiny specks that became flickering candles. There were figures too, standing around me. White shirts. Black trousers. Blurred faces. Movement. Hushed voices.

And my name, over and over again.

Watson.

Watson.

Wat-son.

Suddenly, everything came into focus. I knew where I was. I knew what was happening.

I turned my head, seeing Warwick’s coffin on the slab beside me. I railed against the leather straps that bound me to the altar, yelling Holmes’s name, my voice hoarse and desperate.

Holmes hung in front of me, in the coffin cage, hands bound behind his back. A rope gag hung loose around his neck, identical to the one clamped between my jaws. He had worked his loose, but I could not do likewise, the gag was too tight.

All around was silent activity, the anticipation in the room palpable. Mrs Nell inspected the cots. Oh God. That meant the babies were in place. To my side, Dr Melosan was arranging a line of scalpels on the edge on the altar. I looked down, realising to my horror that the skin across my naked chest was smooth, devoid of hair. They had shaved me while I slept.

“Watson,” Holmes shouted. “Watson, listen to me. You’re going to be all right. Do you hear? We’re going to get you out of this.”

I could see the muscles of his arms twitching through the sleeves of the jacket. He was working at whatever they had used to tie his wrists together. He would be free soon, of that I had no doubt, just as he had escaped the cuffs in the police carriage, but what of that cage? It was fastened with two huge padlocks, which looked strong enough to confound even the greatest escapologist, let alone Holmes.

A shadow fell across me. I looked up to see Benjamin Redshaw.

“It is nearly time, Watson,” he said, a manic look in his eyes as he stared at his pocket watch. “Five minutes to midnight. It is fitting that you wake to see what you would have halted.”

“We will halt it,” Holmes yelled from his cage. “Do you hear me, Redshaw? This plan of yours, this ungodly rite; it’s insane. You know that, don’t you? It won’t work. It can’t. Sutcliffe made it up, all of it. The legend of Izanami. It doesn’t end the way he told you. She isn’t restored, Redshaw. She is left rotting in hell. You will do the same if you go through with it. If you hurt a hair on Watson’s head you will hang, and Warwick will still be dead.”

“Says the damned from his cage, watching all, but unable to act,” Redshaw shouted back, his voice echoing around the chamber like a mad evangelist. “As it was written.”

“As Sutcliffe wrote. One man, consumed with revenge. Do you not see, Redshaw? He was going to trap you, to shame you all as you shamed his father. That’s why he had to die, wasn’t it? Why you sent Hawthorne to throttle him? He had met with Lacey, in the Admiral’s Club. Offered him the scoop of the century. The Worshipful League of Merchants performing a blasphemous act of black magic. How he must have laughed when you swallowed his occult claptrap. You fell for it hook, line and sinker, didn’t you, Redshaw? All the lies that you wanted to believe, the spells written on ancient parchments thousands of miles away. But they weren’t. They were written here, in Bristol, by a man who hated you, who hated what you had done to his family.”

“The damned man lies,” shouted Tavener from his place beside Redshaw, “as deceitful now as when dressed as a vagrant, or as his non-existent brother. You don’t know what is true. This organisation has practised rites for centuries. We have protected this city and we will do so again.”

“The hour has come,” Redshaw said, snapping his watch shut. “Midnight. Gather around, brothers. The ritual must begin. Warwick will rise.”

I looked around frantically as the members of the Worshipful League formed a circle around the chamber. There must have been twenty of them or more, one for every cot, one for every life that was about to be snuffed out.

“Dr Melosan?” Redshaw asked. “Are we ready?”

Melosan checked his surgical implements once again, his eye twitching violently. “Yes, yes we are.”

Redshaw looked down at me, rapture written all over his face. “Your heart will become his, Watson, and then the blood of the innocent lambs will bring new life.”

How much of this was mania, or the painkillers he had been given for his wounds? I bucked against my restraints, but they held.

“You will play your part in our restitution, Watson,” he said, saliva flecking his lips. “Our innocent heart.”

“Innocent?” Holmes jeered from his cage. “Watson? Now I have heard everything. If you wanted innocent you have chosen the wrong man. Should have stuck with Clifford.”

“Silence!” Redshaw bellowed. “We must begin.”

“And you will fail!” Holmes promised, even as Melosan picked up a scalpel from the slab. “Think about it, Redshaw. If Sutcliffe’s parchments contain the truth, if you can raise Warwick from the dead, can you risk that John Watson is the man you think he is?”

Redshaw ignored Holmes’s jibes and nodded at Melosan, who leant across my chest, scalpel in hand. He was about to open me up alive!