Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

by Kim Newman

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did you believe it?” he asked. “Before tonight, before meeting me face to face, did you believe such things were possible?”

  “No.” I said. “I took it for fiction.”

  “But you did read the book?” he said, pressing the point that seemed to matter a great deal to him. “And you recall how my father became a student of the human form, its growth and decay? How he studied the dead to create life? Not to reassemble pieces that had once lived, but to make a new kind of man — wiser, stronger, more beautiful than any that had ever been born of natural means.”

  “But by your father’s own account, the creature was neither wise nor beautiful.”

  “Yes,” Adam said. “But that was his madness talking. He disowned me, and I suffered as a result. And he did, too. I saw to that. Before it was over, we had lured and pursued each other to the brink of ruin. I survived, but only by virtue of his handiwork. He had endeavoured to make me immortal, and so he had. In that, at least, he had succeeded.”

  We crossed the threshold into the adjacent room, into the drone of compressors and electric current. Vats lined the walls, metal tanks that appeared to be fashioned from locomotive boilers, each fitted with portals too high for me to look through.

  “Do you recall the part of my father’s story that deals with size?” he asked.

  “You mean about the difficulties of working in human scale?”

  “Yes.” He paused beside a portal. “I have the same problem.” He bent down, bringing his face level with mine. “I’ll show you.” He extended his hands. Together, they encircled my torso. “Do you trust me?”

  I looked him in the eye and discerned no trace of malevolence. “All right,” I said.

  He took hold, lifting me from the floor. I felt like Dante in the hands of Antaeus, putting my faith in a force that could crush me if it wished. But the grip was gentle, warm. I gave myself over to it as the giant man held me to a portal. Inside, I saw one of the orangutan creatures, like the servant I had left sedated in the library. It was naked but sexless. Indeed, the parts of its body that were human size lacked any detail at all. The arms and head, however, were fully realized.

  “They are the best I’ve been able to do,” he said. “Their internal organs are no larger than yours, yet they fail quickly. I would give them normal-sized arms and heads, but I need servants who can think, speak, and use their hands. Until I can maintain function at smaller scales, I need to compromise.” He pulled me away from the portal, lowered me back to the floor. “I’m making progress,” he said. “One day I’ll be able to create servants who can travel freely through the world of ordinary men, go into town, procure supplies. Until then, I must make do with written correspondences and the trust of a few local business men.”

  “They come here?” I asked, realizing there was no way he himself could blend inconspicuously with the company of men.

  “Yes,” he said. “We meet in the library. It’s better that way. Some of them know the ruse. A few don’t. I trust, given the money they make on my investments, that none of them really care that I am a monster.”

  “You built the room yourself?”

  He nodded. “It took years. The entire house took years. But I’ve had time. I don’t sleep, never tire, don’t age.”

  “And money? How did you come by that?”

  “My father had a large estate,” he said. “By forging his name, I was able to acquire his share. When his brother died, I got it all, liquidated the family assets, invested. It was a slow process, but I had more time than any man has ever had. My wealth has grown, but these things are not important. The thing I need to show you is in here.” He paused beside another tank, leaned toward the portal, looked inside. “You spent nearly a month inside one of these tanks,” he said. “The same fluid in which I grow my creations nurtured your wounded body. I do not cut and stitch dead flesh any more than my father did, but by studying his journal I have learned the art of creating, growing, and kindling the spark of life. It was lucky for you that you missed the rocks when you fell from the cliff.” He looked toward me now, and in his expression I discerned a hint of the terrible thing that lay within the tank beside us. “I entered the whirlpool and hauled you from the flood,” he said. “And then, seeing the remains of your rival dashed upon the rocks, I went back in.”

  “Professor Moriarty?” I whispered, speaking the name of the evil that had been my obsession.

  “Yes,” the creature said. “I read his name in the note you left for Watson, and although I knew that the battered carcass on the rocks was that of your enemy, I felt compelled to save him, too. There was a time when life meant nothing to me, when I killed indiscriminately to torment the one who tormented me, but that’s behind me now. I understand that life is a gift that must be created at every opportunity, protected at all costs, and rekindled whenever possible. You healed because you were still in one piece. Your rival, however—” He glanced again at the portal, frowned, then bent toward me. “Come.” He wrapped me in his hands. “I’ll show you.”

  This time the transit from floor to portal seemed to take longer. My mind was racing, reverberating with dread for what I would see when I looked through that window, but I resisted the urge to turn away as the creature brought me level with the glass.

  Inside, Moriarty’s remains floated in a bath of milky fluid, drifting in the slow spiral of cycling nutrients. He had but one eye, lidless and swollen, peering out of a broken face. At least, I assumed it was a face, though other than the eye there was little to identify it. The nose and lower jaw had both been ripped away, leaving wounds that would never close, hollows in which I saw the wet workings of throat and sinuses. The head itself was elongated, the sides evidently pushed out by a concussive blow to the rock. The impact should have killed him, and I suppose it had, but Adam had brought him back, revived him, returned the fires of life to the cracked and broken kindling of his flesh.

  “I could not leave him,” the creature said, his voice sounding distant even though he spoke close to my ear. “I did terrible things when I was young, but I have since sworn to become a force of life and healing. So I nursed him even as I nursed you, but I cannot keep him. He needs to face judgment, and that is your domain, not mine. When you leave, you must take him with you.”

  A truncated body bobbed beneath Moriarty’s ruined head. I saw a pair of arms, one ending below the elbow, the other little more than a knotted stump beneath the shoulder. The torso was no more complete, scarred and tapering to a flesh-wrapped spine. No hips. No legs.

  “Take him with me?” I asked. “Back to London?”

  “To face judgment,” he said.

  “But how?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “But can he be transported?”

  “Yes. He has stabilized. Soon he can be removed from the tank, swaddled in gauze, carried like an infant, a little heavier, perhaps, but not much.”

  Moriarty stared. I sensed he recognized me, perhaps even heard what the creature and I were saying.

  I pushed away from the glass, making it clear I’d had enough.

  He lowered me to the floor.

  “I can’t do it.” I said.

  He crouched before me, a father stooping before a child. “You would rather leave him here, in my care, knowing that I am bound by personal honour to keep him alive? Restore him if and when I can? Let him return to the world if and when he is able to walk into it on his own?”

  “You would let that happen?”

  “I would,” he said. “I must. It is the way I’ve chosen.” He leaned closer, confiding. “He needs to face a justice that I am incapable of providing. Perhaps, in your hands, he will find it.”

  The swaddled mass screamed as Adam wrapped it in gauze, and though a dose of morphine temporarily stilled the cries, they resumed before the carriage left the castle gate. I thought of what Adam had said about justice, realizing, as the deformity wailed and sputtered on the seat be
side me, that there was no need for either Moriarty or me to return to London.

  The road followed the river, and when I was certain we were far enough downstream from Adam’s estate, I told the driver to stop. He was one of Adam’s long-armed monstrosities, wrapped in a cloak to mask his shape. I suspected it was the same servant that had confronted me in the library, though it gave no indication of knowing me. Nor did it seem the least curious about my intentions when I carried the wailing parcel to a cliff overlooking a wide, rapid stretch of the Aare.

  I knew now why Adam had supplied the loaded pistol: considering my pain, it would have been a shame to waste any more morphine on Professor Moriarty.

  The gunshot echoed through the canyon.

  The thing stopped screaming. I picked it up and hurled it over the cliff, its gauze unravelled as it fell, streaming out, whipping in the wind, collapsing when it struck a rock. It bounced once, then vanished into the current. It resurfaced briefly a few hundred feet downstream, smaller than before, then it vanished for good amid the churning waves.

  I returned to the carriage.

  “So it’s done?” the servant said.

  I offered no answer, but climbed back into the carriage and shut the door.

  The carriage rocked, then continued down the road.

  I would not return to London. My work there was finished. I would go elsewhere, write to my brother, have him send what I needed. Perhaps, in seclusion, I would find the same redemption that had eluded M Adam’s creator. Perhaps, if I lived long enough, I would do justice to the gift of a second chance.

  * * * * *

  The LAWRENCE C. CONNOLLY novel Veins was a finalist for the Black Quill and Hoffer awards as well as inspiring the audio CD Veins: The Soundtrack. His new supernatural thriller Vipers was released in 2010. In addition he has two short story collections available, Visions: Short Fantasy and SF and This Way to Egress.

  A Country Death

  Simon Kurt Unsworth

  The detective waited outside; he was, technically, a guest of the local force here and, although they had called for him, he would not enter without invitation. Whilst he waited, he looked around the place to which he had come. The building was set back from the road, both it and the gardens that embraced it small and neat. And what gardens! The edged beds full of flowers that blazed with colors, the smell of their perfume heavy, swollen. The lawns, green and dense, danced around both sides of the house, disappearing from sight in rich swathes that seemed to catch the light and feed upon it. The detective saw that his impression, gained on the journey here, was correct; this was a home designed for privacy. There were no other buildings nearby, and the roads that led to it were little more than tracks. Even the edgings of flowers gave the impression of a wall; beautiful, vibrant, but a wall nonetheless, a barrier between this place and the outside. Whoever lived here did not want intruders.

  Whoever had lived here, of course. Although there were few details in the summoning telegram, the force was unlikely to have called upon him for anything less than an unexplained, unexplainable, death. The solving of these things was what had made his reputation, it was where his skills lay, and it was where his interests took him. It was what made him valuable.

  “Sir?” The speaker was an old man, older even than the detective, probably brought out of retirement to act as constable. The war had depleted the manpower available to the force, despite its protected status, and as the conflict went on anyone with experience, no matter how minor or how long ago it was gained, was being called back to add substance to the ever-diminishing thin blue line. It should be a matter of national thanks, thought the detective sourly, that the same calling that has removed the men who had up ‘til that point defended the virtues of law and order has also removed most of those who strove hardest to attack them. Ah well, in all things balance. Aloud, to business now, he said, “What’s happened?”

  “We don’t know,” replied the constable. “It’s awful, like nothing we’ve seen, any of us. The others, they left me here to wait for you. We wouldn’t have sent for you but we can’t … we don’t…” The man tailed off, and the detective saw that there were tears in his eyes. He was extremely old and his lined face had a sagging, waxen look. Taking another breath of the fine summer air, letting the sounds of bees and birds wash around him and clothe him in their freshness, the detective said simply, “Show me.”

  The inside of the cottage was as neat as the garden, although considerably more cluttered. Bookshelves, crammed with books and journals and papers, piled two or three high in places, lined the already narrow hallway. An occasional table groaned under a mass of post and newspapers. More books and papers sat on most of the stairs. Here were the first signs of disarray, the detective saw, with piles disrupted and tilted and some of the papers scattered down the steps. There was no telephone, he saw, and no pictures on what little there was of free wall space. The constable led him upwards, stepping carefully over the scattered papers.

  “Was it like this when you got here?” the detective asked.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the constable. “I touched as little as possible and didn’t move anything. I know that’s important in this sort of thing. When there’s been a … when someone’s died.” He stopped at the top of the stairs. “It’s in the study,” he said, gesturing to the farthest door. “I can’t go back in, don’t make me, please sir.”

  “The man doesn’t have a live-in,” said the constable, swallowing audibly as the detective pushed open the door. “He has a woman, Mrs. Roundhay, who comes daily. She came this morning, but he wasn’t up like he normally is.”

  “When had she last seen him?”

  “Yesterday, when she left. About four, she reckons. She came back this morning at about nine and couldn’t find him. The back door was open so she came in and looked around but he didn’t answer when she called. She checked all the downstairs rooms before she went upstairs and into the study and found him. Found his body.” There was another swallow, this one liquid and loose, and the detective called, “That’s fine, Constable. Go downstairs and get yourself some water, I’ll join you there soon. Many thanks.”

  The study was, if possible, more cluttered than the hallway or stairs, with all the available space seemingly taken up with books, papers, journals and ornaments. The body was on the floor in front of the desk, twisted in a heap of loose sheets and spilled tobacco, and something that had been spilled from an overturned tin and which looked like old, dried grass. A chair had been knocked back and lay against the nearest bookcase. The room smelled of vomit, although the detective could see none, and something else, something sweet, sickly and sharp. The remains hardly looked human.

  Whoever the man was, he had clearly died in agony. His flesh, what the detective could see of it, was distended and yellowing; pockmarked with tiny dots of blood. The face was bloated to the point where the skin looked as though it might split. It looked somehow poisonous, the wattle of the neck ballooning over the collar in angry ridges. His hands were also swollen, the knuckles lost in the tide of grotesque, puffy flesh. His mouth was open and his tongue protruded, and even that was swollen, covered in the tiny dots, black pores against the rich and fetid purple. One eye had swelled entirely shut; the other had managed to retain an opening on the world, and in the tiny arc the detective saw, against a reddened sclera, the blackened pitch of a pupil grown vast in terror and pain and death. It was like nothing he had seen before.

  After noting his initial impressions, the detective went downstairs and spoke with the constable again. “It’s a strange one, to be sure,” he said. The constable nodded; a look of gratitude on his face. Strange or not, that expression said, it’s someone else’s responsibility now; not mine any more, but yours.

  “I’m sure that there’s a rational explanation though,” the detective continued. “We simply need to apply ourselves and find it. Logic will prevail.” He paused, thinking, and then said, “It may take some time, though. Can you make arrangements for t
he coroner to collect the body, and tell him I’ll talk to him when he has completed his investigations?”

  “Yes, sir. I called him, he’s on his way.”

  “Excellent. In the meantime, we have work to do here. We shall have to inspect the premises fully, and talk in more detail with the housekeeper. We shall need to build a picture of the victim, of his last days, of his life. Oh, incidentally, what do we know about him?”

  “He came from London originally, sir, and retired here about ten years ago. He kept himself to himself mostly, didn’t have many visitors but received lots of post. He almost never left this place.”

  “And the day of his death, the days earlier? How was he? As normal?”

  “No, sir. Well, not on the day of his death, anyway. He was, well, distracted. Worried.”

  “Sterling work, constable, sterling work! I see you are going to be an asset to this investigation. I presume you got this from the housekeeper?”

  “Yes, sir, I’ve been chatting with her over tea while you’ve been upstairs with the … with him.”

  “Good, good. So, to work! Perhaps we should start at the beginning, yes? Tell me, what was the victim’s name?”

  “Holmes, sir. Sherlock Holmes.”

  As Brabbins further questioned Swann, two morgue attendants arrived and took Holmes’ body away in a silent ambulance, the red cross on its gleaming white side a vivid scar against the verdant fields.

  “He was either outside and came in, or the attack started in the kitchen. From there, he went along the hallway,” Brabbins said to Swann. “I’d imagine he was staggering by that point. Look, there are streaks of boot polish along the skirting where he’s kicked it, and on at least one of the shelves, the books are in disarray. More disarray,” he amended, looking at the masses of books that sat on each shelf. “See, these books here are damaged, knocked over, probably as he grasped at the shelf to keep himself upright. There are smears from his fingers here, and here, yes?”