Dust and Shadow

At last Holmes reappeared, with something tied around his neck. He leaned head and shoulders out the window and barely managed, with his arm fully extended, to reach the water pipe. Using it as an anchor to pull himself out, he swung himself over to it and, when nearing the cistern, jumped to the water barrel and the hay and then fell to the ground. I do not recall, in my entranced state, that I was at all surprised to see Miss Monk hanging limply from his shoulders.

I fumbled at the knot binding her hands and so disentangled them. They had been tied with Holmes’s scarf. When I lifted Miss Monk and laid her gently upon the ground, her head lolled backward. Her neck was entirely unmarked.

“Is she alive?” Holmes gasped raggedly.

At first, I could not tell, so shallow was her breath, but at last I identified a sluggish pulse.

“There is life in her still. She has been drugged. Holmes? Holmes, for heaven’s sake, lie back and breathe deeply. You’ve been poisoned by the smoke.”

He collapsed against the wall. “Surprising,” he managed through shuddering breaths. “I would have thought myself entirely inured to the substance.”

I laughed and felt an itching sensation at the back of my neck. I reached behind my head to touch it and my fingers returned clotted with blood.

“Holmes, we must get away from this place. The building is still burning.”

“Then let us—” Holmes began, and then his eyes fixed upon a point behind me and above our heads.

“You aren’t meant to be here yet,” said a soft voice.

I turned around, intending to rise, but managed only to fall to the stones beside my comrades.

“I doused the basement with kerosene. Then I brought Mother downstairs with an excuse about a broken window,” Edward Be

“Tavistock led us here,” said Holmes after a struggle for air.

“Oh, I see. I didn’t know who had broken the window. He has been of the greatest use to me. He is clever enough in his own way. Not as clever as you, of course, Mr. Holmes.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“You were the only real threat to my work, you know,” Be

“I ca

“That is a pity. I do not think I can allow you to remain in it much longer.”

“Your mother—”

“Oh, you got her out as well, did you?” Be

“I don’t,” Holmes coughed, retching slightly. “I never pretended to. I never understood any of it.”

“Come, now. You know far more than I ever intended you should.”

“I don’t know why you killed Martha Tabram.”

“Martha Tabram?” he repeated wonderingly. “Martha Tabram. I remember. The first girl. She had so much blood on her. She was crying out as she walked down the street. It reminded me of something.” He paused to consider. “They have all reminded me of something. I don’t know what it was. She was crying and I made her still. And the last girl, when you forced me off the streets—she was singing, and then all at once she was crying. I made her still too. Yes, I think that was part of it.

“Now, Mr. Holmes, I believe we should stop talking.”

It was becoming increasingly impossible to concentrate. My eyelids closed of their own accord. I forced them open again.

“You’re a fool,” Holmes murmured in a terrible, rasping voice. My friend still could not seem to breathe properly. “It will only be a moment before the police—”

“I am not a fool, and the police are a confused lot of imbeciles,” came the sharp reply. “I ought to know it. Ru

Be

Two revolver shots went off. Be

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE With the Respects of the Yard

I awoke in my own room to the sight of pale November light falling on the plane tree outside my window. I touched the bandage upon my head in confusion. I was extraordinarily hungry, and there was a violin playing somewhere.

When I tried to sit up, my left side flooded with a searing pain. I felt the area gently with my fingertips. No bandage had been applied, but there was a compress—a broken rib, then, or two perhaps. Using my elbow as a prop, I gradually managed to ease myself upward, until I was seated on the edge of my bed. No sooner had I accomplished this feat than I saw that it had been entirely u

The bell rested on a page from the London Chronicle. The most prominently placed article’s title blared out, “AN HEROIC RESCUE.”

In a striking and dramatic turn of events, a courageous rescue has been effected by the dauntless private investigator Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose unflagging vigilance in co