Shadows over Baker Street

by John Pelan;Michael Reaves

  “My dear fellow,” I said. “Whatever was—”

  “Not another word,” said my friend. “There are many ears in the city.”

  And not another word was spoken until we had hailed a cab and clambered inside and were rattling up the Charing Cross Road.

  And even then, before he said anything, my friend took his pipe from his mouth and emptied the half-smoked contents of the bowl into a small tin. He pressed the lid onto the tin and placed it into his pocket.

  “There,” he said. “That’s the Tall Man found, or I’m a Dutchman. Now, we just have to hope that the cupidity and the curiosity of the Limping Doctor proves enough to bring him to us tomorrow morning.”

  “The Limping Doctor?”

  My friend snorted. “That is what I have been calling him. It was obvious, from footprints and much else besides when we saw the prince’s body, that two men had been in that room that night: a tall man, who, unless I miss my guess, we have just encountered, and a smaller man with a limp, who eviscerated the prince with a professional skill that betrays the medical man.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Indeed. I hate to say this, but it is my experience that when a doctor goes to the bad, he is a fouler and darker creature than the worst cutthroat. There was Huston, the acid-bath man, and Campbell, who brought the Procrustean bed to Ealing . . .” and he carried on in a similar vein for the rest of our journey.

  The cab pulled up beside the kerb. “That’ll be one and tenpence,” said the cabbie. My friend tossed him a florin, which he caught and tipped to his ragged tall hat. “Much obliged to you both,” he called out as the horse clopped out into the fog.

  We walked to our front door. As I unlocked the door, my friend said, “Odd. Our cabbie just ignored that fellow on the corner.”

  “They do that at the end of a shift,” I pointed out.

  “Indeed they do,” said my friend.

  I dreamed of shadows that night, vast shadows that blotted out the sun, and I called out to them in my desperation, but they did not listen.

  5. THE SKIN AND THE PIT

  This year, step into the Spring—with a spring in your step! JACK’S. Boots, Shoes, and Brogues. Save your soles! Heels our speciality. JACK’S. And do not forget to visit our new clothes and fittings emporium in the East End—featuring evening wear of all kinds, hats, novelties, canes, swordsticks &c. JACK’S OF PICCADILLY. It’s all in the Spring!

  Inspector Lestrade was the first to arrive.

  “You have posted your men in the street?” asked my friend.

  “I have,” said Lestrade. “With strict orders to let anyone in who comes, but to arrest anyone trying to leave.”

  “And you have handcuffs with you?”

  In reply, Lestrade put his hand in his pocket and jangled two pairs of cuffs grimly.

  “Now, sir,” he said. “While we wait, why do you not tell me what we are waiting for?”

  My friend pulled his pipe out of his pocket. He did not put it in his mouth, but placed it on the table in front of him. Then he took the tin from the night before, and a glass vial I recognized as the one he had had in the room in Shoreditch.

  “There,” he said. “The coffin nail, as I trust it shall prove, for our Mr. Vernet.” He paused. Then he took out his pocket watch, laid it carefully on the table. “We have several minutes before they arrive.” He turned to me. “What do you know of the Restorationists?”

  “Not a blessed thing,” I told him.

  Lestrade coughed. “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about,” he said, “perhaps we should leave it there. Enough’s enough.”

  “Too late for that,” said my friend. “For there are those who do not believe that the coming of the Old Ones was the fine thing we all know it to be. Anarchists to a man, they would see the old ways restored—mankind in control of its own destiny, if you will.”

  “I will not hear this sedition spoken,” said Lestrade. “I must warn you—”

  “I must warn you not to be such a fathead,” said my friend. “Because it was the Restorationists who killed Prince Franz Drago. They murder, they kill, in a vain effort to force our masters to leave us alone in the darkness. The prince was killed by a rache—it’s an old term for a hunting dog, Inspector, as you would know if you had looked in a dictionary. It also means ‘revenge.’ And the hunter left his signature on the wallpaper in the murder room, just as an artist might sign a canvas. But he was not the one who killed the prince.”

  “The Limping Doctor!” I exclaimed.

  “Very good. There was a tall man there that night—I could tell his height, for the word was written at eye level. He smoked a pipe—the ash and dottle sat unburned in the fireplace, and he had tapped out his pipe with ease on the mantel, something a smaller man would not have done. The tobacco was an unusual blend of shag. The footprints in the room had for the most part been almost obliterated by your men, but there were several clear prints behind the door and by the window. Someone had waited there: a smaller man from his stride, who put his weight on his right leg. On the path outside I had seen several clear prints, and the different colors of clay on the boot scraper gave me more information: a tall man, who had accompanied the prince into those rooms and had later walked out. Waiting for them to arrive was the man who had sliced up the prince so impressively . . .”

  Lestrade made an uncomfortable noise that did not quite become a word.

  “I have spent many days retracing the movements of His Highness. I went from gambling hell to brothel to dining den to madhouse looking for our pipe-smoking man and his friend. I made no progress until I thought to check the newspapers of Bohemia, searching for a clue to the prince’s recent activities there, and in them I learned that an English theatrical troupe had been in Prague last month, and had performed before Prince Franz Drago.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “So that Sherry Vernet fellow . . .”

  “Is a Restorationist. Exactly.”

  I was shaking my head in wonder at my friend’s intelligence and skills of observation when there was a knock on the door.

  “This will be our quarry!” said my friend. “Careful now!”

  Lestrade put his hand deep into his pocket, where I had no doubt he kept a pistol. He swallowed nervously.

  My friend called out, “Please, come in!”

  The door opened.

  It was not Vernet, nor was it a Limping Doctor. It was one of the young street Arabs who earn a crust running errands—“in the employ of Messieurs Street and Walker,” as we used to say when I was young. “Please, sirs,” he said. “Is there a Mr. Henry Camberley here? I was asked by a gentleman to deliver a note.”

  “I’m he,” said my friend. “And for a sixpence, what can you tell me about the gentleman who gave you the note?”

  The young lad, who volunteered that his name was Wiggins, bit the sixpence before making it vanish, and then told us that the cheery cove who gave him the note was on the tall side, with dark hair, and, he added, had been smoking a pipe.

  I have the note here, and take the liberty of transcribing it.

  My Dear Sir,

  I do not address you as Henry Camberley, for it is a name to which you have no claim. I am surprised that you did not announce yourself under your own name, for it is a fine one, and one that does you credit. I have read a number of your papers, when I have been able to obtain them. Indeed, I corresponded with you quite profitably two years ago about certain theoretical anomalies in your paper on the Dynamics of an Asteroid.

  I was amused to meet you yesterday evening. A few tips which might save you bother in times to come, in the profession you currently follow. Firstly, a pipe-smoking man might possibly have a brand-new, unused pipe in his pocket, and no tobacco, but it is exceedingly unlikely—at least as unlikely as a theatrical promoter with no idea of the usual customs of recompense on a tour, who is accompanied by a taciturn ex–army officer (Afghanistan, unless I miss my guess). Incidentally, while you are corr
ect that the streets of London have ears, it might also behoove you in the future not to take the first cab that comes along. Cabdrivers have ears, too, if they choose to use them.

  You are certainly correct in one of your suppositions: it was indeed I who lured the half-blood creature back to the room in Shoreditch. If it is any comfort to you, having learned a little of his recreational predilections, I had told him I had procured for him a girl, abducted from a convent in Cornwall where she had never seen a man, and that it would only take his touch, and the sight of his face, to tip her over into a perfect madness.

  Had she existed, he would have feasted on her madness while he took her, like a man sucking the flesh from a ripe peach, leaving nothing behind but the skin and the pit. I have seen them do this. I have seen them do far worse. It is the price we pay for peace and prosperity.

  It is too great a price for that.

  The good doctor—who believes as I do, and who did indeed write our little performance, for he has some crowd-pleasing skills—was waiting for us, with his knives.

  I send this note, not as a catch-me-if-you-can taunt, for we are gone, the estimable doctor and I, and you shall not find us, but to tell you that it was good to feel that, if only for a moment, I had a worthy adversary. Worthier by far than inhuman creatures from beyond the Pit.

  I fear the Strand Players will need to find themselves a new leading man.

  I will not sign myself Vernet, and until the hunt is done and the world restored, I beg you to think of me simply as,

  Rache

  Inspector Lestrade ran from the room, calling to his men. They made young Wiggins take them to the place where the man had given him the note, for all the world as if Vernet the actor would be waiting there for them, a-smoking of his pipe. From the window we watched them run, my friend and I, and we shook our heads.

  “They will stop and search all the trains leaving London, all the ships leaving Albion for Europe or the New World,” said my friend, “looking for a tall man and his companion, a smaller, thickset medical man, with a slight limp. They will close the ports. Every way out of the country will be blocked.”

  “Do you think they will catch him, then?”

  My friend shook his head. “I may be wrong,” he said, “but I would wager that he and his friend are even now only a mile or so away, in the Rookery of St. Giles, where the police will not go except by the dozen. They will hide up there until the hue and cry have died away. And then they will be about their business.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because,” said my friend, “if our positions were reversed, it is what I would do. You should burn the note, by the way.”

  I frowned. “But surely it’s evidence,” I said.

  “It’s seditionary nonsense,” said my friend.

  And I should have burned it. Indeed, I told Lestrade I had burned it, when he returned, and he congratulated me on my good sense. Lestrade kept his job, and Prince Albert wrote a note to my friend congratulating him on his deductions while regretting that the perpetrator was still at large.

  They have not yet caught Sherry Vernet, or whatever his name really is, nor was any trace found of his murderous accomplice, tentatively identified as a former military surgeon named John (or perhaps James) Watson. Curiously, it was revealed that he had also been in Afghanistan. I wonder if we ever met.

  My shoulder, touched by the Queen, continues to improve; the flesh fills and it heals. Soon I shall be a dead shot once more.

  One night when we were alone, several months ago, I asked my friend if he remembered the correspondence referred to in the letter from the man who signed himself Rache. My friend said that he remembered it well, and that “Sigerson” (for so the actor had called himself then, claiming to be an Icelander) had been inspired by an equation of my friend’s to suggest some wild theories furthering the relationship between mass, energy, and the hypothetical speed of light. “Nonsense, of course,” said my friend, without smiling. “But inspired and dangerous nonsense nonetheless.”

  The palace eventually sent word that the Queen was pleased with my friend’s accomplishments in the case, and there the matter has rested.

  I doubt my friend will leave it alone, though; it will not be over until one of them has killed the other.

  I kept the note. I have said things in this retelling of events that are not to be said. If I were a sensible man I would burn all these pages, but then, as my friend taught me, even ashes can give up their secrets. Instead, I shall place these papers in a strongbox at my bank with instructions that the box may not be opened until long after anyone now living is dead. Although, in the light of the recent events in Russia, I fear that day may be closer than any of us would care to think.

  S—— M—— Major (ret’d)

  Baker Street

  London, Albion, 1881

  Tiger! Tiger!

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  What of the hunting, hunter bold?

  Brother, the watch was long and cold.

  What of the quarry ye went to kill?

  Brother, he crops in the jungle still.

  Where is the power that made your pride?

  Brother, it ebbs from my flank and side.

  Where is the haste that ye hurry by?

  Brother, I go to my lair—to die!

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  It was in India, on the high Malwa Plateau in July of 1882, that I chanced to make the acquaintance of an American woman whom I have never forgotten and undertake an adventure which I have long waited to recount. The monsoon was much delayed that hot and arid summer, and war raged between the British and the Russians in nearby Afghanistan—another move on the chessboard of the “Great Game.” No end was yet in sight to either problem when I, Magnus Larssen, shikari, was summoned to the village of Kanha to guide a party in search of tiger.

  My gunbearer (who was then about fifteen) and I arrived some ten days before the shooters, and arranged to hire a cook, beaters, and mahouts and prepare a base of operations. On the first full day of our tenancy, I was sitting at my makeshift desk when “Rodney” came into my tent, ferment glistening in his brown eyes. “The villagers are very excited, sahib,” he said.

  “Unhappy?” I felt myself frown.

  “No, sahib. They are relieved. There is a man-eater.” He danced an impatient jig in the doorway.

  I raised an eyebrow and stretched in my canvas chair. “Driven to it by the drought?”

  “The last month only,” he answered. “Three dead so far, and some bullocks. It is a female, they think, and she is missing two toes from her right front foot.”

  I sipped my tea as I thought about it, and at last I nodded. “Good. Perhaps we can do them a favor while we’re here.”

  After some days of preparation, we took transportation into Jabalpur to meet the train from Bhopal. The party was to be seven: six wealthy British and European men and the woman, an American adventuress and singer traveling in the company of a certain Count Kolinzcki, an obese Lithuanian nobleman.

  The others consisted of a middle-aged, muttonchopped English gentleman, Mr. Northrop Waterhouse, with adolescent sons James and Conrad; Graf Baltasar von Hammerstein, a very Prussian fellow of my long acquaintance, stout in every sense of the word; and Dr. Albert Montleroy, a fair-haired Englishman, young around the eyes.

  As they disembarked from the train, however, it was the lady who caught my attention. Fair-haired, with a clean line of jaw and clear eyes, she was aged perhaps twenty-two, but her beauty was not the sort that required youth to recommend it. She wore a very practical walking dress in sage green, fashionably tailored, and her gloves and hat matched her boots very well. I noticed that she carried her own gun case as well as her reticule.

  “Ah, Magnus!” Von Hammerstein charged down the iron steps from the rail coach and clasped my hand heavily, in the European style. “Allow me to present your charges.” Remembering himself, he turned to the American, and I saw that she was traveled enough to recog
nize his courtesy. “Fraulein, this gentleman is the noted author and hunter of heavy game, Mr. Magnus Larssen. Magnus, may I present the talented contralto, Miss Irene Adler.”

  “So what is this I hear about a mankiller, shikari?” The older Waterhouse boy, James, was talking. “On the train, we heard a rumor that a dozen men had been found mauled and disemboweled!”

  “Lad,” his father warned, with a glance to the woman. She looked up from her scarcely touched sherry.

  I think Miss Adler winked. “Pray, sir, do not limit the conversation on my behalf. I am here to hunt, just as the rest of you, and I have visited rougher surroundings than this.”

  Montleroy nodded in the flicker of lantern light. The boys had collected the supper dishes, and we were each relaxing with a glass. “Yes, if we’re to have a go at this man-eater, let’s by all means hear the details. It’s safest and best.”

  “Very well,” I allowed, after a moment. “There have been three victims so far, and a number of cattle. It seems that the tigress responsible is wounded and taking easy prey. All of the bodies have been mauled and eaten; that much is true. The details are rather horrible.”

  Horrible indeed. The eyes had been eaten out of their heads, and the flesh off the faces. The bodies had been dismembered and gnawed. If it had not been for the fact that the only prints close to the bodies were those of the wounded tiger, I might have been tempted to think of some more sinister agency: perhaps agents of a Thuggee cult. I was not, however, about to reveal those facts in mixed company, Miss Adler’s high opinion of her own constitution notwithstanding.

  Across the room, I saw the younger Waterhouse boy, Conrad, shudder. I shook my head. Too young.

  Thick leaves and fronds brushed the flanks of our elephants as they stepped out of the cool of the jungle and into more dappled shade. The ground cover cracked under their feet as we emerged from the sal trees into a small meadow. From there, we could catch a glimpse of the grasslands sweeping down a great, horseshoe-shaped valley to the banks of the Banjar River.