Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

J. summoned a hefty constable, who laid a hand on the madman’s shoulder. The fellow writhed in the grasp of the law, and a look of heightened terror passed over his face. It is no wonder men of his stripe should fear the police, but the extent of his pantomime of fright struck me as excessive even for his situation. Curiously, the constable seemed humpbacked, tailored uniform emphasising rather than concealing a pronounced lump on one shoulder. I assumed the Metropolitan Police imposed strict physical requirements on their recruits. Perhaps this fellow’s condition has worsened in recent years? Something was not quite right about his hump, which I could swear wobbled like a jelly on a plate. His eyes were glassy and his face pale — indeed, our lawful officer was evidently in as poor a shape as our degenerate semi-assailant.

‘Don’t let them take me,’ begged the madman, ‘they wraps round you… and they bites… and they sucks your brains… and you ain’t you no more. I’ve seen it!’

‘Let’s… be… ’avin… you… my… lad,’ said the policeman, voice like a prolonged death rattle, monotonous and expressionless. ‘You… don’t… want… to… be… a-… botherin’… these… gentlemen…’

The madman’s face contorted in a silent scream.

There was something peculiarly hideous about the constable’s voice, as if he were a music hall dummy manipulated by a wicked ventriloquist.

‘Mind… ’ow… you… go… sirs!’

The policeman lifted the madman — not a small individual, by the way — one-handed. He marched off stiff-legged, bearing his whimpering prisoner down the Strand. As he walked, his hump seemed to shift under blue serge as if it were a separate entity. I had a sense of evil eyes cast at me.

J. asked me if I had any idea who the maniac was.

He had something of a military mien, I thought — though come down in the world, perhaps having frazzled his brains out in some sunstruck corner of the Empire. It came to me that I had seen him before — perhaps in the audience at one of my many popular lectures, perhaps skulking on the street waiting for the chance to accost me. J. pointed out that he had known who I was, but — of course — everyone in England knows the Astronomer Royal.

‘It should definitely be “Marsian”,’ I insisted. ‘The precedents are many and I can recall them in order…’

J. remembered he had forgotten another appointment and left before I could fully convince him. Must send him my monograph on planetary possessives. Some still rail against ‘Mercurial’ and ‘Jupiteric’, though a consensus is nearly reached on ‘Moonian’ and ‘Venutian’. By the end of this century, we shall have definitively colonised the sunnar system for proper naming!

September 7: later.

I had thought to dispel completely the unpleasant memory of this afternoon’s strange encounter… but the words of the madman resounded.

By some happenstance, this was literally true.

The long-necked cabbie who conveyed me back to Greenwich bade me a jovial farewell with ‘keep watching the skies, sir.’ An unusual turn of phrase to hear twice in one day, perhaps — but a sentiment naturally addressed to a famous astronomer in the vicinity of the biggest telescope in the land.

Galvani, the Italian foreman of the gang who have completed — at last! — the electrification of Flamsteed House, handed me a sheaf of wiring diagrams marked ‘for the attention of the householder’ and clearly said ‘look to the Red Plan, et… es essential for to understan’ the current en the house’. There was, indeed, a red plan in the sheaf, but it seemed to me he had stressed the first part of his sentence, which echoed the words of the madman, and thrown away the second, which conveyed his particular meaning.

Then, before supper, I was passing the kitchens and happened to overhear Mrs Huddersfield, the new housekeeper, tell the butler to ‘look into the crystal’, referring to our fresh stock of Waterford glassware, a scant instant before Polly, the new undermaid, exclaimed ‘egg!’ in answer to a question about the secret ingredient of the face paste which keeps her complexion clear. To my ears, these separate voices melded to produce a single sentence, the madman’s ‘look into the crystal egg’.

Lady Caroline is at her sister’s. I dined alone, unable to concentrate on supper. Every detail of the business on the Strand resurfaced in my mind.

I was shocked out of my reverie only by the sweetness of dessert — and looked down into a crystal bowl to see a quivering scarlet blancmange, with a curiously eye-like glacé cherry at its summit. In its colour, the dish reminded me of the planet Mars, and, in its movement, the somehow unnatural hump of the strangely spoken police constable.

Only then did I remember the paperweight snatched out from the grasp of the odious Ogilvy yesterday.

A mass of crystal, in the shape of an egg!

A crystal egg! Could the madman of the Strand have been referring to this item of bric-a-brac?

Unable to finish my dessert for thinking.

September 7: Still later. A great discovery!

After supper, I repaired to my study, where I keep my collection of antique and exotic optical and astronomical equipment: telescopes, sextants, orreries and the like. Signor Galvani’s men have disturbed them greatly while seeing to the electrification of the room.

A new reflecting telescope arrived this morning, a bulky cabinet affair on trestles, with an aperture where a separate lens must presumably be attached. It is an unfamiliar design — a presentation, in honour of my achievements in mapping the night skies, from an august body who call themselves the Red Planet League. I have had my secretary respond with an autographed photograph and a note of thanks. Entering the study, I saw at once that the workmen had mistaken this gift for a species of lamp, and wired it up to the mains. I would be inclined to chide Galvani most severely, had this error not nudged me on the path to discovery.

I unwrapped the supposed paperweight and made close examination of it under the steady illumination of the electric lamps. Cave, the vendor, had mentioned an ‘inner light’ — a phenomenon I soon discovered for myself. It is a trick of the optics, of course — if held up to the light, the interior of the crystal egg coruscates, seeming to hold multiple refractions and reflections.

By accident, when Polly reached into the room and turned off the lights at the wall switch, I discovered the crystal had the unusual property of retaining luminosity even when the light source was gone. I did not measure the time of glow-decay, because the undermaid was fussing and apologising for not seeing I was still in my study when she plunged me into darkness. She whimpered that these newfangled inventions were not like proper gas. I fear Lady Caroline’s ‘indoor lightning’ theory has infected the servants with irrational terror.

‘What’s that egg?’ exclaimed the maid, meaning my crystal. ‘And why’s it lit up?’

I ventured to explain something of the laws of refraction, but saw my learning was wasted on this simple soul. Nevertheless, it is to Polly that I owe my next, most extraordinary discovery. She picked up the crystal egg, rather boldly for a person in her position I might say.

‘Doesn’t it go here, sir?’ she said, slipping the egg into an aperture of the Red Planet League’s reflecting telescope. It was a perfect fit. Before I could chide her, Polly had fiddled with a switch which triggered an incandescent lamp inside the cabinet — projecting a beam through the crystal, which diffracted out into the room. Suddenly, the opposite wall was covered by a swirling, swarming red cloud. Polly yelped, and fled — but I hadn’t the heart to pursue and chastise her.