His face fell again.

'But what's the address?'

'Market Street,' I said. To Bernice's inquiring glance, I added, 'I lived in San Francisco for nearly a year.'

'What are the galactic co-ordinates for Market Street?' the Doctor asked.

'Never mind. I'll estimate.'

Wiping across Ace's carapace with his sleeve, he began to scribble down staves and sets of crotchets and quavers.

'No time to lose,' he urged. 'Ace, get your armour off!'

Under his direction, and all cl.u.s.tered around Ace's armour, we began to sing. Ace was shivering in an immodest singlet, and so I gave her my jacket to wear. I thought that she might throw it back in my face, but in fact she accepted it gratefully. The song was a collection of words similar to the chant that the fakirs were singing, but the notes spanned theirs, weaving around and between their weird harmonies, forming a straightjacket for their chant and forcing it in a different direction. The Doctor was forever darting in and scribbling an additional sharp or a flat, or altering the length of a note, until we got it right.

We knew that it was working when the deep, underlying beat of the fakirs'

chant began to alter into a double beat, and their descant picked up some of our notes. It was working. We were changing their song, but were we changing it enough?

The first indication we had that something was happening was when light - yellow gaslight, not the diseased red glow that illuminated Ry'leh - shone across us. We looked up, still singing, to see a vast tear in the fabric of reality through which a stretch of carpet and a marble wall could be seen.

Silhouetted against it, I could see the winged figures of raksha.s.si and Sherringford Holmes's still-robed form. He seemed agitated. It must have been obvious to him that this was not India but, unwilling to stop now and disappoint his G.o.d, he went onward, leading Azathoth's followers in. Most of the raksha.s.si went first, in case of trouble, then Azathoth's personal honour guard pulled its temple through the rent, straining to move the metal runners across the rock. The fakirs followed, still chanting. I could smell smoke and, oddly, freshly made coffee.

The chant was swelling towards some final crescendo now, and I watched, wide-eyed, not wishing to miss a moment of Azathoth's downfall.

Bernice tugged at my sleeve. I tried to shrug her off. Insistently, she tugged again. I tore my gaze away from the rent and glanced at her. She was looking back, over the terrain of Ry'leh.

I followed her gaze, and drew a sudden breath as I glimpsed a number of metallic shapes trailing fire as they arrowed through the air towards us.

A deep rumble shook the ground. The Doctor turned. His eyes widened in shock as he saw the craft. He chalked a quick message on Ace's back.

Shlangii mercenaries! it read.

A blue-green line of fire lanced from the leading craft and melted rock not ten feet to our right. The Doctor shook his head and, before I could stop him, ran towards the rent in the air.

We followed him. We had no choice.

The fakirs stopped singing just as we pa.s.sed through behind them and felt the carpet beneath our feet. We were in a huge, high-ceilinged ballroom whose walls were cracked and whose carpet was thickly smeared with dust. n.o.body else was present. A feeling of peace washed over me. I was home. I didn't care that it was, if Ace could be believed, almost twenty years since I had left. At least it was the same planet.

I turned and looked behind. The surface of Ry'leh hung like a painting on a wall of the ballroom. Tiny fivelegged shapes were rushing across the ground towards us, clutching weapons, as the metal shapes flew overhead like a flock of birds.

The gateway closed behind me, close enough for me to feel the sudden whoosh as it collapsed.

The Doctor led us into a deep recess in the wall. From there we watched the raksha.s.si milling around the temple, whose runners had cut deep gouges in the carpet. I could not see Sherringford.

'I thought you said half an hour,' he said to Ace.

'Anyone can make a mistake,' she said.

'Looks like a frying pan and fire situation to me,' Bernice added, looking around. 'How do we get back to the TARDIS from here?'

'We can worry about that later,' the Doctor said. 'Are we in the right place?'

'Search me,' Ace replied. 'I did all my research from an old copy of the Reader's Digest.'

'It's the Palace Hotel,' I said.

Holmes looked at me sceptically.

'It is,' I insisted. 'I practised medicine in San Francisco for nearly a year. I took rooms here when I first arrived. You sent telegrams to me.'

'It looks like we're too late,' the Doctor muttered. 'The earthquake has already happened. The hotel is still standing. I don't understand!'

'So they can still invade?' Bernice asked.

'More fool me, yes they can. And in the middle of a national disaster, it will be even more difficult to fight them. Still, at least we're here to try.'

In the centre of the ballroom, Sherringford emerged from Azathoth's temple.

'My brothers...' he began.

He got no further. A deep shudder ran through the fabric of the hotel.

Sherringford looked around wildly.

With a tremendous explosion, the doors to the ballroom burst open to reveal a wall of flame. Gluts of red-tongued fire leaped up the walls, scorching the plaster and cracking the marble. A wave of heat rolled towards us.

'Fire?' Holmes mouthed.

Ace grinned.

'Started after the earthquake when some stupid woman tried to cook breakfast after the gas main cracked. Caused more damage than the earthquake itself. The army tried to stop it by dynamiting the buildings, but they spread it even further. I remember the dynamite, it's why I enjoyed the project so much.'

An ominous cracking made me look upwards. What I saw made me shout: 'Run, run for it!'

We got to the door just as the ceiling gave way and huge chunks of masonry fell into the centre of the room. Raksha.s.si staggered around, blinded and deafened, their wings alight. A cloud of dust and smoke rolled towards us, hiding the h.e.l.lish scene. Holmes led the Doctor, Ace and Bernice along the corridor. I stopped to look back. I thought that I had heard a voice, a sweet voice screaming, 'No, I cannot die, I cannot die!

Help meee!'

I took a step into the room, but the heat drove me back towards the door. A gust of superheated air drove the dust and the smoke away from me for a moment, and I saw that the temple had been smashed open by a falling concrete beam. Azathoth flailed helplessly in the wreckage, pinned by the beam. Its skin was burning.

'Watson!' it screamed, 'help meee!'

I took a step into the room. I wanted to help. I had to help.

From the smoke, a figure emerged. Its white robes were in tatters and its wings were ragged and torn. Its chitinous armour had been seared by the fire. It swayed uncertainly as it looked me over.

'Forgiveness only goes so far,' Sherringford hissed in a pained voice. 'You have killed my G.o.d. No punishment can atone for that.'

He took a step towards me, his spiked tail swinging in readiness. In the midst of the spikes that const.i.tuted his face I could just make out two human eyes that gazed at me in bloodshot hatred.

Holmes walked past me. He was holding a length of iron pipe that had fallen from the ceiling.

'No,' he said simply. 'Watson is my friend.'

He lashed out with the pipe, catching Sherringford across his chestplate.

Pale pink fluid splashed out of a crack in the living armour. Sherringford staggered backwards and flailed at Holmes with his tail, but Holmes stepped out of the way and snapped Sherringford's wing with a short jab.

Sherringford fell sideways as the wing crumpled. He lowered his head for a long moment, then looked back up at his brother. There were tears in his eyes.

'The horror. . .' he said quietly. 'The horror!'

Holmes brought the pipe crashing down on the back of his brother's head, splitting it open and bending the pipe. A shower of sparks drifted down from the ceiling and lodged in the folds of his wings. Tiny flames began to flicker.

His other wing buckled beneath his weight, sending him sprawling.

I turned to Holmes. His gaze met mine.

'I had to,' he said.

I nodded.

'I know.'

Something exploded on one of the upper floors. Flames and drips of molten metal issued through the cracks in the ballroom ceiling. We left in a hurry, running through rubble-strewn corridors until we found ourselves in the deserted foyer of the hotel. Its fine antique trappings were wrecked.

We emerged, coughing and choking, into bright sunlight and ran across the road to a barricade where the Doctor, Ace and Bernice were waiting anxiously for us. Behind them, uniformed men watched the destruction.

They were pale and haggard, as if they had walked through the valley of the shadow. I glanced back at the hotel. Every window was a glimpse of h.e.l.l. Nothing could survive that conflagration. Nothing.

The last thing I saw before I turned away was a tongue of flame licking up the flagpole on the hotel roof and setting fire to the Stars and Stripes.

Chapter 19.

In which our heroes have breakfast in the ruins, and the Doctor makes a surprising offer. surprising offer.

There was, as is usual in Holmes's cases, no distinct finale, no crescendo and clash of cymbals to mark the end of the case. Rather, there was a long, slow diminuendo, a trailing off into silence. Even now, four years later, the case of the All-Consuming Fire still haunts us both, and yet it is that moment, as we wandered amid the ruins of San Francisco, that marks an end, of sorts.

We walked for a little while, the four of us. We were not heading for anywhere in particular. We just needed to get away from the scene of Azathoth's destruction.

The city was devastated. Cracks crossed streets and houses without any distinction. Many areas were in flames, or had been afire but were now charred and smoking. Whole streets had been blown up as makeshift fire-breaks, scattering bricks, twisted metal, items of crockery and personal items to the winds. One of those houses had been mine. In it I had wooed and won my wife. Now she was dead, and a part of me wished that I was too. I was tired. I was so tired.

We saw things as we walked that I cannot explain. At one point we turned a corner to find a group of Chinese men attacking a maddened bull with machetes. I wanted to intervene, but Bernice held me back. Later we had to hide from a group of soldiers who were firing indiscriminately at looters.

Later we found a quiet square on the edge of the city and sat there for a while, saying nothing and trying hard not to think. As we did so, a man started to sing in the sweetest, purest voice I have ever heard. His clothes were torn and covered in dust, but he did not seem to care, and neither did his listeners. Hearing him, I felt a small bud of hope flower from the ashes within me. Life went on. Life went on.

'Enrico Caruso,' the Doctor said eventually, after the man had finished his recital and had begun to argue with a companion. 'You are lucky to have heard him sing.'

'I wish I had been in a better mood to appreciate it,' Holmes said dryly.

'Forgive me, Doctor, but if you are to be believed, we are several thousand miles and nineteen years from home. Do you have any suggestions?'

The Doctor blinked owlishly.

'As usual, the time is no problem,' he said. 'It's the s.p.a.ce that might be difficult.'

The Doctor walked off around the corner, telling us that he would be back in a moment. Indeed, he was. A miraculous contraption appeared out of the air before us, a blue cabinet of the Doctor's own construction that can travel through the aether at his direction. He told us that after walking round the corner he had made his way across America by rail and engaged pa.s.sage in New York upon a ship bound for London. Once there he had located his miraculous time-travelling cabinet, which remained exactly where he had left it at the home of Professor Litefoot, and travelled back to the moment at which he had left us.

I did not know whether to believe him or not, at least, not until we travelled back to Baker Street in that same cabinet: nineteen years removed from the life of the world in as many minutes. I cannot help thinking that such power is dangerous, and yet I cannot think of safer hands to hold it than those of the Doctor. He is a strange little man, but he engenders such trust.

Bernice and I talked for some of those nineteen minutes. We were standing in a corner of the control chamber of the Doctor's mighty craft, a room whose oak-panelled walls and bra.s.s railings give no hint as to its true function. With the Doctor's permission Holmes had opened a round panel in one of the walls, and was asking pointed but, I fear, ill-informed questions as to the source of its energy. Ace was standing near Holmes. I a.s.sumed that she was watching to make sure that he did not interfere with the workings of the mechanism.

I asked Bernice if I might see her again. Perhaps, I offered, a night at the theatre might amuse her, or a meal at the Savoy. She smiled.

'I'm a good six hundred years too young for you,' she said, handing me a package wrapped up with string. 'Have this instead.'

'A gift? Really, I . . .'

'It's not a gift, it's some of my diary entries. You might find them useful when you come to write this case up.'

I started to protest, but the Doctor wandered over.

'Perhaps you would like to stay,' he said. 'There's room enough for more travellers.'

Bernice looked askance at him.

'Well, why not?' he asked defensively. 'I've been thinking that one of our problems is that there's just the three of us, cooped up in here, getting on each other's nerves. It might do us good to broaden the team a bit. Bring some fresh blood in.'

'This isn't Mission b.l.o.o.d.y Impossible,' Ace muttered.

'A tempting offer,' Holmes replied, shutting the panel decisively. 'I greatly wish to see more of these worlds you talk about, and the shining marvels that technology will bring us in the future. And yet...'

He glanced over at me, a question in his eyes. I nodded. I knew what he was thinking: the same arguments had occurred to me as well.

'. . .And yet I fear that we would be out of our depths. The adventure we have just shared with you has brought us both to the edge of our sanity.

The human brain cannot take too much information at once: it must be given time to sort, to index, to catalogue. We need our London around us once more, like a comfortable overcoat.'

'Perhaps...' I ventured.

'Yes, Watson?'