By dint of great straining I extended the shoeless toes of one foot far enough to reach the wall, and managed to push hard enough to turn my cart. At once I saw that Seward himself must be dead; his horribly mangled body lay half in and half out of the cage, blocking the small door which had been opened for feeding purposes. The angle that his head made with his trunk showed that his neck must have been completely broken at the last.
A shape stirred on the floor just outside the cage, and I saw that one of the brutal attendants was not yet dead. With many groans, struggling against what must have been massive internal injuries, the man called Campbell dragged himself to his feet. It was an effort that could not be sustained. Even as an uproar—a muffled cry, a shot, the sound of running feet—broke out somewhere overhead, Campbell staggered again, lurched against the table where the oil lamp stood, and carried both over in his last collapse. Flames sprang up to lick at the fallen table, at the wall, and at the cage itself.
Under the stimulus of fire, the caged beast, whether by instinct or crude intelligence, pulled entirely into the cage the body it had already begun to devour. Through the small doorway thus left unobstructed, it strove desperately to force itself to freedom.
I shouted until I thought my voice must fail, yet heard no answer. The uproar continued upstairs, with more shots, and trampling feet, and confused cries. When at last I thought I heard an answering yell in response to one of mine, I took heart and continued my efforts to be heard.
Meanwhile, to my horror, the Rat was succeeding in forcing its body through the aperture, which had at first seemed much too small. Squeezing its body inch by inch past the constricting metal, it bared its teeth at me—my cart lay now between it and the door. With a last effort, it burst free, and crouched to spring upon me.
A revolver shot rang out, near at hand, and the brute fell dead into the spreading flames. 'Watson!' cried a familiar voice. 'Thank God!' A face loomed over me, coughing in the smoke, and altered by false bushy eyebrows, but still beyond all doubt the face of Sherlock Holmes.
Though volunteers from the nearest houses soon came to fight the fire, it had gained too great a start to be controlled before it had destroyed the entire building. The gray light of dawn found me wrapped in a blanket donated by some kindly neighbor, and seated on a stump in the half-wooded grounds of the old asylum while I contemplated the smoldering wreckage.
With the exception of some trifling burns, I was uninjured. So were Holmes and Lestrade, who had searched the building for me at considerable danger to themselves, after besting Seward's two remaining henchmen in a deadly struggle on the floor above. My friends had then carried me out of the building, cart and all, to a spot far enough removed from the blaze for Holmes to take the time to pick the locks that shackled me.
Nor had any of the Harker family, Seward's guests, been hurt. All of them were dressed as if they had been hastily aroused, and were the picture of innocence and shock—Mrs. Harker, the young woman I had already seen and heard; her husband Jonathan, a rather pudgy man of about forty, prematurely white-haired; and their two small children with a young governess. Mrs. Harker, so she said, had chanced to be awake, and had smelled smoke, thus giving her entire family a chance to get safely to the open air. In the presence of the folk from neighboring villas and houses, she said not a word—nor did Holmes or Lestrade—of shots or fighting or indeed anything out of the ordinary beyond the fire itself.
The blaze was blamed for the extermination of most of the staff of the institution, of which only an innocent cook and stableboy appeared to have survived—and for the death of Dr. Fitzroy, who, it seemed, had been visiting in connection with some animal experiments. In these, it appeared, I also had been taking part, and I was the sole survivor of those who had done so. Lestrade, who of course had at least some idea of the true state of affairs, hastened to assure other police arriving on the scene that I would give a statement in due time, but was in no condition to be questioned just at present. Right after the police came Lord Godalming, in his own carriage, to exchange shocked words with his old friends the Harkers, and then with Holmes and Lestrade.
Then he came, shaking his head, to where I sat upon my stump. 'Dr. Watson,' he muttered, 'very fortunate that you could get out alive. They tell me there were five dead in all, including poor Jack.'
'Six,' corrected Lestrade. 'We found one chap just over there at the edge of the trees. He was running for help, I should guess, and in his panic evidently fell and broke his neck… a bad business, very bad.'
I shivered slightly, thinking the broken neck not at all likely to have been an accident. But for the time being I said nothing.
'Very bad,' His Lordship agreed, distractedly. 'Watson, I suppose you have met the Harkers?'
I was thereupon introduced properly to the husband; the wife smiled gallantly and said: 'Dr. Watson and I did meet last night, though we scarcely had a chance to speak to each other—the men were so busy with their work. I did mean to come back, Doctor.' These words she spoke very earnestly. 'But I was delayed.'
'I do appreciate the thought,' I murmured. My eye at this moment chanced to fall upon the Harker children; they were a boy and a girl, and as I now saw, undoubtedly twins. When the girl looked at me I thought I saw in her face something wild and savage—a passing shade that I never should have recognized before I had met the Count. It may have been my imagination, for the strange look was gone in a moment, leaving only a child who regarded me thoughtfully.
At this point we were distracted by another arrival, that of Peter Moore and Sarah Tarlton, who held hands as they dismounted from a hansom and approached us. Word of the fire had reached them through the police, as I discovered later. I saw Miss Tarlton pale at the sickening smell of death-by-fire that hovered over the still- smoldering ruins. Holmes broke off a whispered conversation with Lestrade to greet them.
'I must report that my investigations have had an unhappy conclusion as regards the object of your search,' my friend informed her. 'There is no longer any doubt that John Scott perished in the South Seas.'
His words were painful to the girl, but it was obvious that she no longer found them in the least surprising. She raised her chin. 'And was his death a natural one?'
'I fear that it was not. But you have my solemn word, for whatever comfort it may provide, that those responsible have already paid the full penalty for their crime.'
A few minutes later Holmes and I were on our way back to Baker Street. It was, as I well remember, June 22, the day of Her Majesty's Jubilee procession. Somewhere musicians had risen early to begin their final practice, and from the distance, strains of martial music drifted to our ears. Though traffic was already snarled in places, the whole metropolis was in a festive mood, for which its people had even better reason than they knew.
We had continued our progress for some distance into the increasingly busy streets before I broke a silence by remarking:
'He is not dead, you know.'
'He?'
'Holmes… do not play games.' My friend gave the ghost of a chuckle. 'I do not doubt for a moment that the Count still lives. When he and I came to our agreement, it was not part of the plan that he should die.'
'Only that you should switch identities for a time. Well, the plan succeeded, though I never should have trusted him.' Then I bit my lip, recalling whom I had chosen to trust.
'Whatever else he may be, Watson, Count Dracula is a man of honor—a rarity in this day and age, and perhaps in any. We had a strong common ground in our enemies; once I had made sure of that, I knew the gamble was worthwhile. Dracula, his eyebrows and hair trimmed and darkened, and with a few other touches from my make-up box, remained in our apartment wearing my clothing, to let himself be kidnapped and taken to the enemy headquarters, where the men he yearned to destroy were most likely to come within his grasp.' I shuddered. 'I shall lose no sleep over their fate, Watson, whatever it may have been. But I confess that I never expected you to be taken with him, and I had a bad moment or two when I learned of your abduction. The Count was willing to gamble that the means of kidnapping would do him no serious harm; it was a much longer chance that you took so unknowingly. I was much relieved when Mrs. Harker's guarded telephone message came to me, through the police, telling me that you were at least still alive.'
'Ah. But how did you know that our chief enemy was Seward? And that when he came to our rooms it would be to kidnap you rather than to kill you outright?'
'My dear Watson, the next time you attempt to drug one of your patients with curried chicken, it would be well to choose a subject not yet out of his first childhood, or else far gone into his second.'
'Holmes, I—'
He waved me to silence. 'I was not certain whether this move was your own idea, or—you have never done anything of the kind before—whether it might have been suggested by some seeming friend with an ulterior motive. I pretended to sleep late, but was nevertheless up in good time to eavesdrop on your entire conversation in our
