Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Jeff Campbell

  After the fall, when the world believed us both dead, I wonder, did you think about me? Did you assume I was gone, swept away, my flesh food for eels and crabs? Did you mourn me? No, I think not. You were too busy perpetrating your own great lie to consider the possibility of another’s. But, my friend, you should have done. Did you assume I was helpless outside of my own land, my influence and knowledge a web clinging only to London’s underside? Did you think I had no allies on the continent? So arrogant, to assume that only you could survive, yet so typical.

  That clear water was like a face of vast, crushing rock, was it not? Did it embrace you as it did me? Caress you? Lay its cold and nerveless hands upon you? I have warming visions of your limbs battered and of your movements as scalding an agony as I discovered mine to be. After the fall, after that melee of swirling, spinning white water, after the cold and the heat of it, when it washed me to shore, I remember lying on a muddy bank and wondering if I was to die there or be captured by your beloved forces of law and order, and in some small way I welcomed the thought of it. How terrible my pain was, and how easy to simply let myself drift away from it, to give up. Even death might have been preferable to me then. But, I asked of myself, is that the act of a man who achieved so much, who has striven so hard? No. I fight and I overcome and I get what I want.

  And now, of course, I want my revenge.

  I was eventually found by a farmer. He had a dog and it licked my face, its foul saliva stinking in my nose, and I could do nothing. Nothing! The farmer came to investigate what the dog was licking at on the riverbank, so I suppose I should show gratitude to the little cur. Without him, I would not have been taken by the farmer to his home and given succour by him and his wife. They were such gentle folk, so trusting, and such compassion and charity existed in them that I almost allowed them to live when I took my leave of their home. So many days of rest, of poultices and home-cooked meals, such unquestioning belief in my tale of a woman, and a woman’s relatives, who disliked me so much that they beat me. I am not much to look at, as your faithful pen has reported, but I am passionate! I can talk of love when I need to, and that poor man and his wife wanted to believe me because they were romantics at heart. So many of life’s simple inhabitants are, I find, as I’m sure you must also do. Once you have raised yourself above the herd, you can look down and see them for what they are, sacks of meat and blood, driven by lust and longing and hunger and piety and shame and fear. So easy to read and direct, so easy to use, like automata. It is simply a question of knowing how to wind them and the way in which to point them, after all. You know this, you who require so much adulation, so much love. You have your parlour tricks to make the fools stand in awe of you and I have my networks of the criminal and the venal, set upon bringing me the things I desire. We are not so different, you and I. We use them, only I at least am honest about it.

  But I apologise. I mean not to insult, only to illustrate that I consider us similar in some ways. We are, if not brothers, companions at the very least and should enjoy each other’s company this one last time understanding that we talk as equals. After all, we have both come back from the dead!

  The farmer’s food and bed had brought me back to health, and he and his wife were the very spirit of Christian hospitality, but do you know? Their blood was just as easily spilled as any other, and God provided neither them nor their yelping beast with protection as I let my knife dance or as I set their farm ablaze afterwards. No, don’t get up, my friend. This part of the tale is old now, these deeds long gone. That poor couple are mourned and past our caring … and of no concern to you. Wait. There is more to tell and besides, where will you go? Your door is locked and your home sealed tight.

  I assume you have checked? Yes? Found the doors immoveable, the bell unanswered, the house quiet and silent as only empty places can be? But where can she be, that delightful housekeeper? You are worried now, I think. Good, good. I will also assume you have not called for help. After all, you are the man who required so little assistance, was so capable and able, so determined that all solutions should be his to find. I wonder, did you look closely at the man who delivered this letter? Have you worked out yet what it was about him that bothers you so? And you are bothered, I know. Something, even now, tickles and scratches at you. What can it be? Patience, my friend, patience. Sit. Allow me to continue.

  I was in the most perfect of places, of course. In London, I was too well known, even at my most secretive, to move freely. But washed up and healed so far from home, so near to the best universities, to the best brains? You almost made it too easy, my friend. With my newly restored health, it was simple to make contact with one or two trusted associates, to access funds long since set aside for a rainy day, and then to go hunting. Not for you, oh no. Do not flatter yourself, my friend. I am no blindly furious fool, kicking open doors or shrieking a battle cry across the rooftops. No, you were never my target then.

  I hunted scientists.

  It took me many months, travelling to Ingolstadt, Paris, Berlin, Innsbruck, Edinburgh (carefully, my friend, carefully, leaving no trace), Liechtenstein, through the peace of tiny villages and the bustle of cities in my search. My trail crossed the continent, joining place to place with the simple thread of my desire. While you recuperated, I was driving myself through stormy nights and sunlit days to seek that which would enable me to carry out my plan. I found a piece here, another there, from scientists who were sometimes prepared to speak to me, sometimes not. Do you think the scientist is immune from the lure of money, incidentally? Let me tell you, they are not! Even the most moral of men falls before the lure of gold upon gold, opening their scientific minds to me as surely as any other desperate, acquisitive idiot. And, in time, I had everything that I needed. Equipment, ideas, evidence.

  Knowledge.

  Have you thought more about the delivery man? Has that great brain put the pieces together? Was his skin not a little grey, his gait just a little slow and lumbering? Was he as alert as you might expect him to be, even for a menial? Was he polite? Deferential? Did he speak at all?

  Was he breathing?

  I finally found what I was looking for in a garret room. I won’t tell you where, or the name of the student because that isn’t important. No, what matters is what he and I created, with my new-found knowledge and his skills, what he showed me in a tangle of tubes and wires and sparks and the smell of oil and blood and fire and with the light flickering and leaping about us. First, he slit the throat of a rat and let me handle its lifeless flesh, proving beyond a doubt to me that it was dead. Then, he placed it into a nest of cabling and clips and needles. Then he turned dials and the air grew dense with a humming like flies. He dripped liquid into the corpse; let the power of the storm course through it, tenderly caressing it with our desires. The rat was difficult to see, buried in that mess of equipment, lost in shadow and copper and glass. It was little more than a smudge of dirty brown fur, still and silent and yet bearing the weight of expectation and hope. For minutes, it remained a motionless thing and I was sure we had failed. I was ready to rage, to spit in the universe’s face, but then I saw it move just a little; a tiny spasm in one foot.

  Shadows seemed to gather about us as it twitched again, a black shroud that obscured and revealed as the thing began to move. It kicked and then kicked again, more and more until finally it began to thrash. The scientist rapidly disconnected the wires and needles, no doubt thinking I would put what I was seeing down to trickery. But, even loosed, the creature moved. It rolled over, righted itself, walked as though drunk across the surface of the makeshift laboratory table before settling onto its haunches and glaring at me. The skin and fur of its neck was a terrible ragged wound below is savage little jaws, but its eyes were glittering with life.

  The rat did nothing except stand. “They come back with little drive, little energy” said the scientist. “They’re little more than puppets. They respond only to the most basic of impulses.”

  “Feed it,” I
instructed. He did so, holding tiny scraps of meat between his fingers before the rat’s tiny head. It did not move for a moment and then, as though waking, it launched itself forward, chewed and tore at the meat. I was amused to see pieces fall from the hole in its ravaged throat moments later to lay, unnoticed, at its feet. We placed a large pile of meat before it, and it ate as methodically as any machine might, ceaseless and constant. It snapped at my fingers when I reached for it, and only stopped its tearing and swallowing when its creator slapped it hard, sending it skittering across the table and onto the floor where it righted itself and then crouched, again motionless. We offered it more food, but it would not take it until it was thrust under its nose, and then it carried on its mechanical ripping. Its claws tore into the meat and its wicked little teeth shredding the flesh before it, but do you know the strangest thing, my friend? It ate not as though it was hungry but as though it was a chore, one it was under orders to accomplish but not one it was enjoying. There was no appetite there, no hunger. No passion. It was awful, really, watching that poor animal, the things that had been so vital in its first life removed. It was a creature without lustre, without animus, without desire, vapid and sluggardly and foul and Godless. It was a damned thing, in truth, and we had created it.

  I wonder, my friend, if you realise what it means? That brought out from the grasp of the afterlife, even those most basic urges are difficult to rouse? And if the damned cannot feel those urges, then they must come from God, yes? What a fine joke, to discover that God himself is behind our basest pleasures! What a glorious folly that religious proselytisers have been engaged in, telling us to leave behind that which brings us close to God! Our religious leaders, urging us to abandon God Himself! Ah, but what of our poor rat? Oh, it carried on eating without pleasure, nipping at my fingers when goaded but showing none of its kind’s normal verminous fury. How reduced a thing it was, this pitiful, cursed shadow of its previous self that we had made. And, in creating it, how like Gods we had become.

  Do you want to know of the next months, of my funds and his zeal, of the nightly trips to a laboratory we built in a warehouse, of the things we did and the ways we did them? I do not imagine you do, you who only ever liked the details you found out for yourself, never the ones handed to you by others. You need only know that it took months, and more money than even I expected before our first success. Oh, yes, success. Not rats, although you can rest assured many of those creatures died and died again during our experimentation. No, I mean the success of bringing back a man.

  Human life is cheap in any city. Walk one hundred yards from the most opulent dwelling and you find the dross, the lost men and women, those for whom life is focused upon the numbing wonders of alcohol. There are so many, wherever you go, have you noticed? And have you noticed also how little anyone cares when one of them vanishes?

  He was a wharfman, long past his prime, barely able to stand were it not for the wall of the alleyway we found him in. We enticed him with the promise of easy labour and easier gin, bade him come with us to our warehouse one night when the streets were quiet and the moon low. We showed him the wonders of what we had made, promised him a long and glorious service and led him to salvation at the end of a blade. Then, with the love of a mother swaddling a child, we bound him into our cradle of science and, old friend, we brought him back.

  Was he breathing, he that handed you the letter? Was he? Did he smell of something other than the smell of poverty? Was there something of the charnel house about his scent, smothered by cheap perfume? Come, man, you can normally tell the very contours of an individual’s life just by looking at him! Cast your mind back, do your parlour trick, astound yourself with your observations!

  Was he alive?

  Our wharfman was dead; just as dead as can be yet we let the light of creation whirl about him, and we filled the air with a stench of machinery and heat and the sparking touch of storms and we flooded him with chemical compounds and herbs and water that danced with the pure, forging reason of the absolute. In that vast, constructed womb shadows shifted and clung to the dead flesh, slithering over it with the sound of great snakes or plummeting birds, wrapping themselves around the torso and the head. Glinting with malignant flashes of colour, red and blues and yellows that seemed to have no source and that fell back into nowhere. The air grew heavy as we watched, pressing down on my shoulders and dragging at the skin of my face until I thought I could bear it no longer and wanted to cry out in pain and then I watched as his legs and then his arms began to move. His fingers clenched and unclenched as though to wrap themselves around the shadows and lever himself back into the realm of the living, his eyes flickered, opened, closed, opened. Surrounded by the paraphernalia of man’s ingenuity, I watched as he came back.

  My God, man, I watched as he came back to life. Our wharfman, body crossed by the scars of his life and by the new wounds we had given him, sat up, pulling the pipes and needles and tubes from him as he arose, the dried, crusted blood breaking around those final punctures, scattering the last piss from his bladder and the last night soil from his bowels, groaning and drooling and reaching out for me as though he were an infant and I his father. He was repulsive and yet such a sight to behold and no father was ever prouder of his offspring! Filthy, emaciated, loosed from heaven or hell back to this place, neither God’s nor Lucifer’s, abandoned and damned. Mine.

  Do you believe me, I wonder? No. Yours is a brain used to tallying and collating and enshrining the order of a thing or an event, worshipping its linear nature. Even now, I am sure you are rushing over the past years in your mind, dragging forth tiny pieces of trivia from that cool mind of yours. Was there an article about the revivification of frogs some years ago in an obscure scientific journal and how it could not be achieved? Was not a doctor expelled from a university for grave robbing perhaps three years ago, his defence being that he needed corpses for research, a defence his colleagues jeered at? Is what I have related here possible?

  And what of me? Can you find my spoor in amongst the tracks and trails you have followed these last years? Can you? No. I have stayed as loose and unknowable as fog, left no trace of myself that you could find and offer no proof of what I say bar this: an impossibility, a dead man, brought you the letter you currently read.

  Try as we might, we could not bring anything back to its former state. Those that we revived, whether rat or human, were simply flesh. As an experiment once, we left a returned man to stand, alone, in a corner, and he rotted where he stood. He would neither eat nor move without prompting, and eventually the flesh decayed, sloughed from his bones and liquefying around him in a dank, miserable pool. My poor scientist, so desperate to bring them back as they had been in life; and so disappointed when he could not. His great failure, he called it, but not I. I, who had different desires, saw only the positive in his failings. After all, even if those that we returned showed little drive of their own, they could be driven.

  While my companion tinkered, night after night, I engaged in my own tasks. Dead men, I found, cannot be bribed with the offer of money or food or love, but they can be forced to act by violence, by the most primitive methods, the ones that have sustained humankind since time immemorial. You can train them to approach or remain, to attack or defend, to eat or to leave, to carry out myriad simple tasks if only you have the patience to wait and the time and will to spend upon them. I trained them to do my bidding, using the simplest of terms as though training dogs or paupers, and soon had an army of them carrying for me, fetching, lifting and setting down, tasks all carried out with obedience and devotion. Delivering letters, perhaps.

  Of course, my scientist could not be allowed to live. I, too, am scientifically inclined at heart, and recognised in his zeal a threat. So, as a surgeon might a gangrenous limb, I removed him. Can you imagine, he wanted to use this great discovery for the public good! The public, that great unwashed and ragged collection of rutting, senseless fools! What use had they of this great advance, they who had d
one nothing, contributed nothing besides their own flesh to its genesis? No. I watched and I learned (for the process itself is not hard to achieve once you understand it) and then I made my move.

  Beat a man, even a dead one, long enough and he will come to hate living men, as far as those without souls can hate. Make him hate enough and then place him in a room with a man, and he will attack, tearing and ripping at his enemy with long-dead fingers and teeth as grey as slate and a tongue that shifts and wriggles like a grave worm! Oh, my friend, you should have seen my poor scientist, seen his fall to his creation’s sordid embrace, heard him scream as his intestines were torn from him and were slopped about him like so much offal! And my glorious, wonderful beast went at him with no mercy, no mind for the injuries inflicted upon his dead flesh in the struggle, no cessation of violence until I entered and forced him back and into his cell!

  There is, don’t you think, a certain irony in this? We, who are the only men alive to have come back from the dead, shall find our fate intertwined with those of the genuinely dead yet who move still. I, binding myself to them, creating them, training them, letting them become machines of my hate and my revenge, and you, so soon to meet them. So soon.

  But, of course, I am forgetting. You have already! One of the more controlled of my children, given the instruction to deliver a letter and then seal the house and guard against anyone entering. Oh, and to dispatch your servants of course. Silently, silently, with fingers around throats and knives in hearts, so that you knew nothing. In kitchen or scullery, he has dealt with your household, left none but yourself alive in the building. And now he waits, outside.

  You have checked, of course. Can you see him, lurking still and dark in the shadows of the doorway? You are not, though, panicking because above all, you are a proud Englishman, and we meet our fates with our resolve intact and our upper lips stiff, do we not? Besides, I may be lying, yes? Playing one last joke upon you, having one last jest at your expense?