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

No movement.

I turned to Venn, to suggest he watch our backs. Red Shuck could come at us from any direction.

The reddleman’s face was an open-mouthed mask of surprise. He saw something behind me. A whining, straining, inhuman sound assaulted my ears. I turned and brought up my gun. A heavy length of wood smacked into my skull.

A human figure rose out of the mist, head hung to one side. It was veiled, wore a long black dress and held Venn’s stave.

I wondered if silver bullets were good for ghosts.

Before I could fire, the apparition swung. I took a whack to my head. Hot wet blood gouted from my ear and I went down. This time, I went out too.

XIII

I woke up in an earth-floored, flame-lit space. My cold, wet clothes were now hot, wet clothes. Blood crusted in my ear, under a field dressing. My fingers were splinted and bound.

I tried to sit up, which hurt.

Venn, bent over the fire, stirred a cauldron of broth. With his flame-lit, scarlet face, he could pass for a pantomime demon. The sulphurous smell was thick. Runic scratchings marked rock walls. Stick-figure men chasing big-mouthed, pointy-eared dogs twice their size.

‘Where are we?’ I asked.

Venn noticed I was awake. ‘Red’s Hole. Old, old place. Be my home, for now. Plenty live here afore me, back to Bible times.’

That was a comfort.

‘It might sound ungrateful to ask, but why aren’t we dead?’

‘Brokeneck Lady. Drove off Shuck. Patched you up.’

I’d expected to be torn to pieces by the beast which brought down Nakszynski. Unconscious, I couldn’t have put up a fight.

‘Where is this spectral Flo Nightingale now?’

‘Outways,’ Venn said, jerking his thumb towards a woven curtain of vines.

‘She have much to say?’

‘Not so you’d note. Ghosts, generally, don’t.’

My head hurt from more than the thwacking now. I’d failed to make the proper deductions…

By my watch, it was getting on in the evening. I still had my half-hunter, though my guns had been taken.

I was hungry enough to try the reddleman’s soup.

The curtain rustled. A white, long-fingered hand gathered a fold and switched it aside. Into Red’s Hole came the Brokeneck Lady…

A wet dress dragged on the ground. The veil hung to the waist on one side but almost up to the ear on the other. I’ve seen hanged men. Their heads loll just the same.

Venn glanced up, but kept stirring.

The ghost’s head rolled, as if it were trying to set skull on spine like a cup and ball game. For a moment, the head was in its proper position. Then it inclined in the other direction. And back again. Then, evenly, it nodded from side to side. The veil swung.

I knew that cobra-neck wobble!

The veil was lifted.

‘Moriarty,’ I shouted. ‘You f--ing c-t!’

Professor Moriarty showed teeth and hissed. His eyes were flint.

‘What I mean to say is… damn it, what’s the meaning of this?’ I blustered. Few call the Prof a ‘f--ing c-t’ and live to write their memoirs. ‘How? Why? What the…’

‘Fair questions, Moran,’ he said. ‘They shall be answered.’

Moriarty unfastened his dress, pinching a row of little black buttons out of their eyelets. Underneath, he wore his town clothes.

I saw his dress and veil were shiny, waterproof material. More practical than unearthly. In his cocoon, the bastard kept snug and dry. Whereas I felt like shit. Wet shit that’s been trodden in.

‘You hit me,’ I said. ‘Twice!’

‘You were about to waste silver, Moran.’

It was like him to be more concerned over expenses than the threat to his life. Even with my left hand, I’d have shot him square.

‘One can learn more observing from concealment than out in the open,’ he expounded. ‘With you in the field, Moran, no one looked for me.’

So, I’d been the hare to flush out this hound. I wasn’t surprised. Being used this way came with the position of Number Two. Everyone in his employ was expendable. I wasn’t even angry he had acted according to his nature, just as I would to mine. That didn’t mean I liked being so used, or would forget.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I came down on the same train as you,’ he said. ‘In the next compartment. I overheard every word which passed between you and our client. Stoke, in fact, mentioned the significant point of the smell in The Chase…’

‘Hold on a mo, Moriarty! You couldn’t have got off at Stourcastle. We’d have seen you.’

‘I travelled on to Sherton Abbas and made my way back to Trantridge via hired trap. I have been in The Chase ever since.’

I couldn’t imagine the habitué of lecture halls and laboratories in the wild woods, even with his waterproof frock.

‘Where did you sleep?’

‘I did not sleep. I took an injection. Too much had to be found out and tested. I exploited rumours of the ghost of Theresa Clare to conceal my presence.’

He would never admit it, but I knew Moriarty derived some thin, watery thrill from ‘dressing up’. Like his deduction craze, it came on him as if he were in a competition whose terms were set by another he wished to better. Usually, he was rotten at dissembling. He couldn’t do voices and the snake-neck thing gave him away. This performance was well above his average. The Polish Jew in Irving’s The Bells wasn’t half as eerie.

‘How did you make the noise? The ghost sound?’

The Professor’s lips set in a tight line — his approximation of a smile. From his pocket, he produced a wooden box with a crank-handle. He worked it and a whine filled the cave. It set my teeth on edge.

‘You don’t imagine I would dismantle an Amanti on a whim? The violin was sacrificed to this invention.’

Mercifully, he shut the toy off.

‘Wouldn’t rattling a chain and going “woo-woo” have been a damn sight cheaper?’

‘This is not for your ears, Moran. Nor any human ears.’

‘Communicating with spirits now, Moriarty? I’d not take you for a table-rapper.’

‘This instrument has nothing to do with ghosts. It is for dogs.’

XIV

It was full dark in The Chase.

Venn remained in his hole. He was not Red Shuck’s master. Our commission was to kill the dog only. Therefore, we’d no quarrel with the radical reddleman.

Moriarty returned my guns. I could balance the rifle on my bandaged paw and pull the trigger with my left hand — but accuracy would be an issue.

‘Saul has queered my game,’ I complained. ‘What happened to the idiot? Did Red Shuck get him?’

If Saul made it home, he’d be taken for the party’s sole survivor. That would really put the wind up our client, who was panicky enough to start with.

Moriarty lead the way with a dark lantern, as if he knew The Chase as well as Saul. In his few hours as Weird Witch of the Woods, he’d explored thoroughly.

He stopped in his tracks and shone the beam at a thicket between two old tree trunks. Red scuffs showed on bark.

‘Blood?’ I asked.

‘Reddle.’

‘Venn?’

The Professor shook his head. ‘Smell it,’ he said.

I bent to sniff. That damn pong!

‘I can’t understand why Venn doesn’t whiff this,’ I said.

‘He’s lived in it for years,’ Moriarty said. ‘He no longer notices.’

I touched fingers to sludgy stains. Wet powder, not blood. That goes sticky and stops being red.

‘Sheep dye,’ Moriarty said. ‘Not presently being used on sheep.’

He lifted aside the bushes, which were uprooted but tethered together. They disguised a gate fixed between the two trees. He unlatched it. We entered a concealed enclosure.

Moriarty shone his light around.