thunderstruck was he by the room’s other contents.
The floor was overgrown with moss and a thick, spongy loam. A great tree trunk pushed up out of the floor and thrust up through the roof, presumably spreading out amongst the upper decks. And at the base of the tree lay an altar of human skulls, bracketed and reinforced with golden framing. A large gong stood off to one side, its face engraved in the style of the Aztecs to reveal a circular procession of creatures real and imagined. As Watson’s eyes scanned the room, Aztec fixtures and carvings, furniture and treasure littered the scene: looted, and herein preserved before they could have been melted down and recast in Spanish forms.
A Nunamiut girl lay upon the altar, her arms and legs outstretched and quivering as though restrained by some unseen force. Her eyes stared and rolled in their sockets, reminding Watson of the horses at Maiwand as they bolted in panic. She was dressed head to toe in ornate woven feathers and reeds: a great head-dress; a sort of corset; a skirt and loincloth. Her pale limbs trembled, her northern pallor utterly alien to the clothing and the scene around her. Upon her breast, a cruel silver dagger lay flat, its edge curved like the undulating path of a winding serpent.
Watson moved into the room, throwing back his hood against the heat. Sweat poured from his brow, and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his left arm to clear his vision. Stepping towards the girl, he felt a thrill of shock shoot through him, like a tremendous charge of static electricity, and all at once he found himself transported…
From a great height, as though he were a gull on the wing, he looked down and watched as members of the Netsilik tribe abandoned one of their elderly to die alone on pack ice. In his fear and isolation, the man called out, and many leagues to the west, the altar answered. “I am Tezcatlipoca,” a voice crooned in the tribesman’s head. “Come to me and live.”
The man came. On foot and alone, he should have perished, but he came. He and other outcasts, over the span of centuries crossed the ice at the altar’s will, and were preserved by it in perpetuity. Hunting settlements with shamans and spells of protection could not hear the voice, would not heed it: when such settlements came close enough to the wrecked ship, they died. Watson saw it happen, heard it explained in a language not of words, knew it to be true even as all sense of distance and time drifted away from him.
A jungle rose up before John Watson, and great flat-topped pyramids of stone appeared. An endless parade of human sacrifices came and went, screaming and wriggling in unheeded agony. The sun blazed hot in a cloudless sky, its trajectory assured by the constant killing, and in the minds of the priests a voice was heard: “I am Tezcatlipoca. Kill for me and live!”
Arctic winds blew as huddled proto-Siberians crossed into North America for the first time, bringing with them the voice; naming it; speaking it. They spread down through the continent over the course of millennia, eventually becoming the Inca, the Maya and the Aztec, but they never forgot the ice deep and submerged in their hearts. “I am Tezcatlipoca, who was Tezkul-oc,” the voice said, and the hot, moist, Aztec voice was tinged with ancient frost.
A storm raged at sea; a Spanish captain, eyes wild with hysteria, fought the elements as he lashed himself to his wheel. “I am Tezcatlipoca,” the voice boomed in his head. “I will go home.” That which had been plundered now took command; the altar with a hellish will of its own sped the ship ever northward to its icy doom.
“I am Tezcatlipoca,” the voice now thrummed in Watson’s head, roaring the way a pounding sea crashes against the surf. “Kill for me and live!”
Somehow, Watson had traversed the room, was standing next to the altar. He couldn’t remember dropping his gun, but there it was at the roots of the tree behind him. In his hand, he held the serpentine dagger and had hoisted it high above his head. The girl on the altar squirmed in terror, her neck straining to release a scream that would not come. Watson gasped at the effort of resistance it took to stay his hand — the dagger poised to plunge down and into the chest plate of the trembling sacrifice.
And then: Sherlock Holmes.
The Zulu knife met the serpentine with a ringing clang, and lightning-blue light blasted forth from the contact. The girl unleashed her scream at last, a distant echo to the screams of long lost sisters who had died generations ago and continents away. The girl screamed, and Watson screamed with her as dark magicks surged through his body like a completed circuit. Arcane war was fought out in his cells; his limbic system became a bubbling battleground. And all around, the room was drenched in the sudden white hot light of African and Mexican suns in collision.
The dogs were restless, tails twitching, ears twisting with every new sound. Sacks of golden treasure, jewels, ornaments, trinkets and artifacts weighed down the sled: everything needed for the trip back had been available on the ship. The girl, whose name might have been Anerkernerk, although Watson couldn’t be certain, sat atop a mound of treasure, bundled in caribou skins twice too large for her. She looked in the direction Holmes and Watson looked, and all three faces glowed with firelight.
The ship crackled and blazed, bathing the onlookers in brazen orange hues, and seething warmth. Lights arced into the sky from the burning hold — green and violet and pink — like an Aurora Borealis as the shattered altar within gave up its accursed energies. Watson felt the heat upon his face, smelled the smoke, thought of burning villages and endless campfires while on march with the 66th foot Regiment.
“I don’t envy you this one,” Holmes chuckled, his voice straining for a jaunty tone, but failing under the weight of extreme fatigue. Watson winced at the sight of his friend: the eyes bloodshot and receding into their sockets; the cheeks sunken — that thin face turned gaunt by the exercise of the Zulu knife. If wielding the blade brought to mind the surging pleasures of cocaine, the aftermath recalled the physical cost of heroin.
“Envy?” Watson said. “The devil do you mean?”
“The story. You’ve got your work cut out, I’d say.”
“The story? You mean retelling this as one of your observational fantasies? Insanity! Cannot be done! Where on Earth would I start?”
“I would have thought that was obvious,” Holmes managed a wan, secretive smile. “Start with the Russians.”
* * * * *
KEVIN COCKLE lives in Calgary, Alberta and often incorporates Calgary-style boom-town themes in his work. A frequent contributor to
Sherlock Holmes and the Diving Bell
by Simon Clark
WATSON. COME AT ONCE. THAT WHICH CANNOT BE. IS.
That astonishing summons brought me to the Cornish harbour town of Fowey. There, as directed by further information within the telegram, I joined my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, on a tugboat, which immediately steamed toward the open sea. The rapid pounding of the engine made for an urgent drumbeat. One that reinforced the notion that once more we’d embarked upon a headlong dash to adventure.
By the time I’d regained my breath, after a somewhat hurried embarkation, I saw that Holmes had taken up a position in the tugboat’s bow. There he stood, straight-backed, thin as a pikestaff, hatless, and dressed severely in black. Every inch the eager seeker of truth. His deep-set eyes raked the turquoise ocean, hunting for what he knew must lie out here.
But what, exactly, was the nature of our case? He’d given no elaboration, other than that mystifying statement in the telegram.
I picked my way across the deck, over coils of rope, rusty chain and assorted winding gear that adorned this grubby little workhorse of the sea. The vessel moved at the limits of its speed. Steam hissed from pipes, smoke
