“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,”
returned my companion, bitterly. “The question is, what can
you make people believe that you have done?”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet
December 4,1900, cont.
The bullet tore off Bobby Stegler’s left cheek. Blood and skin sprayed against the window behind him and then slid down the glass, down onto the dirty sill.
There was screaming. The boy wailed, still very much alive. He bellowed like some demon, and he looked the part, half-faced and grotesque.
Arthur watched the boy tear at his face and the blood spurt onto his blond hair. The bullet, Arthur’s single bullet, had transformed him into something monstrous. His true form was now revealed.
Still wailing, Bobby lashed out at Arthur, grasping at the gun in his hand. They struggled. Arthur strained every muscle in his arms to hold on to his revolver, while his nose was pressed up against Bobby’s open jaw. Arthur could see the bones poking out from behind what once was a cheek.
Arthur heard Bram fire as well, but Bobby was undeterred by the shot. Arthur fought, pushing and pulling, trying to get hold of his pistol for one more shot.
He was faintly aware of a sound at the door. A single breath, caught in someone’s throat. Arthur could not turn to look.
He struggled against Bobby. The boy was so much younger than Arthur, and he was clearly stronger, despite his injuries. Arthur felt his own biceps strain to the point of bursting. He ground his teeth as he pulled, and he thought he might bite through his own molars.
The revolver in Arthur’s hand went off again. When he would think on these moments, later, this is how he would think of them: The gun simply went off. No one fired it. Certainly not he. It was simply fired. The passive voice was there for Arthur, and it understood. The gun was fired. The bullet was loosed. And yet Arthur and Bobby still struggled with all their might. The bullet had not hit either man.
Bram fired again. This time Arthur saw the metal ball carry what was left of the boy’s brains out the other end. He felt the boy’s grip slacken. With a dull, wet thump, Bobby Stegler’s corpse smacked against the wooden floorboards. He was dead.
It took Arthur a few moments to hear Bram’s voice. Arthur’s mind was pure white snow, clean and uncluttered by thoughts. He regarded Bram, his friend, his Watson, dazed and dreaming.
“What have you done, Arthur?”
There was another sound, from the doorway. A gasping and gurgling, like a country brook. Arthur turned, and saw Melinda Stegler, Bobby’s sister, slumped in the doorframe. Her neck had been opened wide by the stray bullet.
Arthur did not kill her. This point would become of paramount importance to him, later on. He did not pull the trigger. Bobby must have done it. Arthur would have remembered pulling with his forefinger. In the struggle, amid the blood and the noise and the allconsuming shock of violence, Bobby had shot his sister.
Melinda’s body did not fall as easily as her brother’s had. She did not die. At least not at first. As her blood spouted into the thickening air, she clutched at it, trying to hold it in. The sickly red liquid gushed through the cracks between her fingers before falling onto the front of her sky blue dress. A stream of blood rushed into the fabric between her breasts, soaking through her corset and then down toward her waist. From her throat came the gargling noise, as her lungs took in deep swallows of blood and coughed them back up again.
When Melinda fell, she fell only to her knees. There, while she knelt on the floor, her eyes went wide as she gripped tighter at her throat. The look on her face, as Arthur watched her die, was not of horror or pain but of wonder. She beamed at Arthur, her eyes shining a brighter blue than even those of her brother. She looked like a baby, staring at the new world for the first time. She held her mouth open, but Arthur knew that she did so out of awe for the lights dancing across her vision. Yes, Arthur noted to himself later on, she was happy when she died. She saw something beautiful before her, and she went to it. She did not suffer.
In another moment her heavy head tugged her body over to the side. She slumped there on the floor, blood still flowing freely from her wounds. He watched it come toward him across the room until it mingled with her brother’s, right between Arthur’s feet. Arthur thought about Emily Davison’s brutalized corpse. This was so very different. The passing of these two children so much more gentle than Emily’s would have been. Arthur was no monster. A killer, perhaps. But he was no monster.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Bram. And he was squeezing firmly.
“Let’s be off, then,” said Bram.