"I admit that it is a length to which even the recently departed Professor would not stoop. Still, as a method of conveying stolen materials past guards it has its advantages."
He frowned.
"But why stop there?" he asked himself. He reached beneath the body and gently eased it onto its back. Surd"s face resisted the attempt for a few moments, finally coming free with a glutinous sucking noise. The features were no longer recognizable, being how subsumed into a ma.s.s of raw meat. I felt my stomach lurch. Holmes, unconcerned, began to unb.u.t.ton the shirt.
"Aha!"
Surd"s chest, like his scalp, was a ma.s.s of scars.
"The man is a walking suitcase!" Holmes observed, pulling at a flap to reveal another, larger leather-lined s.p.a.ce in the position where I would have expected a lung to be. Either it had been shunted aside or removed entirely.
"I wonder how many poor souls underwent Maupertuis"s surgery before one survived," I mused.
Holmes turned a rueful gaze upon me.
"You do right to remind us that this is an abomination committed against our fellow man," he sighed. "I find it hard to believe that anybody could survive such ma.s.sive trauma, let alone evade infection afterwards."
"I have seen worse," I replied. "During field surgery in Afghanistan, I worked on men whose heads had been half-obliterated by cannon-fire, and I was still able to hold a conversation with them. Much of the brain is underutilized, and many of our organs are duplicates which we can do without - kidneys, for instance, and lungs and..." I hesitated, conscious of Bernice"s rapt attention, ". . . er, other things. In fact, it is amazing how little of our bodies and our brains we actually use."
Holmes just looked at me.
"Well, some of us," I amended.
"What I find myself wondering about," Bernice mused, "is those powers of his."
"You mean the spontaneous combustion?" I asked. "What connection could there be?"
"It"s been shown that damage to one part of the brain results in other parts - possibly dormant parts - taking on the extra workload. Like if fire destroys your bedroom you might start sleeping in the attic."
"Where has that been reported?" I asked.
"Well, maybe it hasn"t yet. Anyway, it"s also been shown that mental powers like telepathy and telekinesis and the like are related to unused areas of the human brain the attic and bas.e.m.e.nt areas, if you like. So.. ."
I carried on the thought to its logical conclusion.
". . . So if some part of Surd"s brain was surgically removed, it might follow that other parts could come into operation!"
Whole vistas of medical and mental science began to open up before me. I was entranced.
"Telepathy, of course," Holmes said, frowning. "From the ,Greek for feeling at a distance. Telekinesis, therefore, would mean movement at a distance.
Most intriguing."
Bernice"s expression suddenly changed.
"What it is?" I asked.
"The Doctor always warned me about interfering in history. "Don"t reveal more than they already know," he said. "Such gifts don"t come cheap". And I think I"ve just done it. He won"t be pleased."
"I"m not," said the Doctor from behind us. We whirled around. Bernice flushed a bright red.
"Good Lord," exclaimed Roxton, who was standing beside the Doctor and peering at Surd"s corpse. "What a poacher that feller"d make!"
"You seem to have a remarkable facility for turning up when least expected, Doctor," Holmes said.
"You don"t seem pleased to see me," the Doctor replied. His linen suit was stained with a pinkish fluid and his hair was covered in some sticky substance. He was a mess.
"What happened?" I inquired.
"Ask Bernice."
Bernice frowned. "I don"t. . : she began, and then started to laugh. "Oh no!
You can"t be serious!"
"I"m always serious, even when I"m being trivial," the Doctor snapped.
I just looked from one to the other. Eventually the Doctor saw fit to put me out of my misery.
"I was underneath the last raksha.s.sa that you shot down. It knocked me out. When I woke up, everything was dark and sticky. I thought I"d gone to Time Lord h.e.l.l. It was only when I heard your voices that I realized I was lying beneath its wing."
"What"s Time Lord h.e.l.l like?" Bernice asked.
"Earth," the Doctor replied.
There was no answer to that.
Holmes dragooned us all into a search of the cavern, but we found nothing of any import save odd sc.r.a.ps of clothing and a few personal possessions left behind by the departing army. I tried to imagine where they were now and what they were engaged in, but my mind would not stretch that far.
How would the men stand up to Ry"leh? How well had they been trained?
Would K"tcar"ch"s people be waiting for them or would their entry be unopposed?
I could hear part of a conversation between the Doctor and Bernice concerning his period of captivity. Apparently his flight across India had taken almost as long as our train journey. He had only arrived a day or so ahead of us, and had been held captive in the Nizam"s palace. The books, of course, had been taken from him.
"There"s nothing here," Bernice said finally. She sounded dejected. "The action"s moved on and left us all dressed up with nowhere to go."
"The lad"s right," shouted Roxton from his little area of ground. I looked around for a moment before realizing that he meant Bernice. "We"re on a wild goose chase."
"I have no choice but to follow them," the Doctor said decisively. "Thank you for your help so far."
"We will accompany you," Holmes said. "Watson, can you remember the words of the chant?"
"You have to be joking."
Holmes just stared at me.
"You"re not joking," I said finally.
"You"ve heard it three times now, Watson."
"But I"ve got a tin ear."
"I"m not exactly one of the De Reskes Brothers myself, but it"s the only chance we have."
I walked across until we were standing virtually nose to nose.
"Holmes," I said quietly, "has it occurred to you that we could just turn around and go home? We"ve done our bit. We can"t be expected to do any more. Alien planets are outside our bailiwick."
"I accepted a commission. I shall see it through. And besides, can you really see the Doctor succeeding?"
I glanced over to where the diminutive man was shaking raksha.s.sa blood out of his umbrella, and sighed.
"Well, I had to try."
Holmes smiled.
"The better Roman Emperors had servants who would whisper in their ear, "You too are mortal". I value your level-headedness, Watson. Don"t ever think that I don"t."
I didn"t, of course, and I never have since.
"Lord Roxton!" Holmes called. Roxton came over.
"You"ll be needing an old shikari like me," he said. "I"ve shot everywhere on Earth. Might as well have a crack at baggin" game up in the heavens."
"I"m afraid not."
Roxton sighed, and nodded.
"I thought as much. You"ll be needin" someone to report back to your brother, and you can"t trust Moriarty."
"I"m glad you understand."
Roxton held out a hand and Holmes shook it.
"You"re a credit to your country, Mr Holmes, and there"s not many I"d say that about."
As he shook my hand, I wished him a safe journey.
"Gad, I hope not!" he cried, and laughed.
Bernice took his hand and pumped it vigorously.
"I hope you"ll seek me out and tell me the outcome of this adventure when you get back to Blighty," he said.
"Oh, Doctor Watson is the teller of tales," she said diplomatically. "I"m sure he"ll be only too pleased to turn a minor skirmish into a major adventure."
The Doctor saluted Roxton with his umbrella.
"Fare thee well," he said.
Roxton looked one last time at us, saluted, and walked towards the stairway which coiled up the side of the cavern. I felt as though some vital force had been drained from our enterprise.
"Well," said the Doctor finally. "Let"s get on with it."
"How do we start?" I asked.
"We must all do our best to remember the words which were used in the ceremony," Holmes snapped. "I have trained my memory to the point where it rivals the Daguerreotype for accuracy. You, Professor Summerfield and the Doctor may be able to aid me in problems of intonation."
I rummaged around in my pockets.
"I"d better write down what I remember, then."
Pulling out a piece of paper and a fountain pen, I was about to start writing when I realized that it was the piece of paper Moriarty had given me. I tried to decipher his scrawl. The words were meaningless gibberish. Gibberish like . . .
"Holmes! Moriarty has written down the words of the chant!"
"Indeed. What a fortuitous piece of luck," Holmes said dryly, walking over and taking the paper from my hand. "Indeed, these are the words as I remember them, with phonetic notes as well."
"I remember him writing something just before the attack," Bernice said, "but why would he want to give it to us? Could it be a trap?"
"I think not," said Holmes after a moment"s thought. "I am an irritant to the good Professor, and he has already tried to kill me on a number of occasions. How convenient for him if we died on this alien planet, and thus allowed him to continue extorting, blackmailing and terrorizing his way through England and ultimately the world?"
"So you trust him?"
"In this instance, his aims and ours coincide. Now, to business."
Like members of a choir, we gathered around Holmes and the piece of paper.
"On the count of three. One . . . two . . . three!"
"I-ay, I-ay," we managed before Bernice and I collapsed in fits of giggles.
Holmes and the Doctor stared at us with lips pursed.
"When you have quite recovered..." Holmes said.
"That"s quite enough of that..." the Doctor barked.
Without daring to look at one another, Bernice and I cl.u.s.tered around them and tried again.
"I-ay, I-ay Naghaa, naghaighai! Shoggog fathaghn! I-ay, I-ay t - "
The phrasing was wrong and we stumbled over the unnatural words, but there was something there. We tried again, and again. Under Holmes"s tutelage we must have spent a good hour rehearsing that d.a.m.ned chant.
Even now I can hear it echo in the labyrinthine pa.s.sages of my mind: a dark, malevolent sound that has a life of its own and induces feelings of dread in me whenever it pops into my mind.
"I-ay, I-ay. Naghaa, naghaighai! Shoggog fathaghn! lay, I-ay tsa toggua tholoya! Tholoya fathaghn!"