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

My inadvertent test-firing of the flame cannon must have drawn attention.

The compartment door — a concertinaing, semi-transparent sheet of something chitinous like isinglass — was crinkled aside. A dark silhouette stood in the breach, eyes angry in mask-slits, gun in hand.

I shot first and a ragged red hole opened in his chest. My ears rang from the report. My kill collapsed, in a mess. No, not a kill. I’d plugged a decoy. Tumbling to the mistake, I threw myself to one side.

I heard a puff. A six-inch nail juddered in a bulkhead, a breath away from my ear.

‘Nice bit of kit,’ I said. ‘But only at close-range. For a distance shot, an air rifle can match any gun. But air pistols are one-shot toys.’

The dead man’s gun — empty, I’ll be bound — was fastened skilfully to his hand with twine. His skin was white, so he wasn’t Ram Singh. That made him Upshall. The shadow man had put his clothes on the pilot, but kept the chest armour which had saved him earlier.

I stepped through the door, into the worm’s head.

The ringer hadn’t had time to pump his pistol again. Of course, I’d have come a cropper if he’d had a brace of the things… but he hadn’t. He carried a back-up gun, but that was tied to the late Major Upshall’s hand.

There was a stench in the air, worse even than the foul smell elsewhere on the Kallinikos. A dead body lay across the floor, face smashed into a contraption of glass tubes, tanks and copper wires. Acid was eating through his head. So much for Ram Singh of Supplies.

In command of the train was the fake Finglemore, the fake fake Carnacki. The shadow man now showed another face. Beaky nose, high brow, hawk eyes. He could have been anyone. He wore Upshall’s overalls.

He had one hand on what I took to be the throttle of the Kallinikos, and the other about the throat of a stocky, olive-skinned gent. This could only be George Lampros: Keeper of the Flame, Greek patriot, political naïf, valuable item.

‘Stay back, Colonel Moran, or I’ll kill him.’

His fingers squeezed the Greek’s plump neck, thumb working up around the ear for a snapping grip.

‘Let me take care of that for you,’ I said, and shot Lampros in the face.

VIII

I’d just killed the only man in the world who knew the secret of Greek Fire. We’d have to make do with all the other ways of setting light to each other’s houses. I recommend a bucket of coal oil poured through the letterbox, some rags shoved in afterwards to soak it up a bit and a slow taper to give you time to be somewhere else when the blaze catches. No doubt a new, even-more-devastating method of burning half the world would come along in a minute.

The shadow man was surprised, though. Hawk eyes a-goggle. I had a warm thrill — as if I’d lost every hand for an afternoon and evening, but a single turn of the cards had put me back in chips.

I took aim, again. It would have to be another head shot, since he still had armour under his overalls.

Forestalling his execution, he chucked Lampros at me.

He had a caber-tosser’s strength. The heavy Greek landed on me like a sack of melons. A lot of blood from the grapefruit-sized hole in his face got in my eyes.

The ringer wrenched the throttle-handle loose and stood over me with the broken-off iron bar raised like a club. I tried my best to shift the dead Greek so I could kick the spy master in the shins. He brought the handle down, but I got Lampros’ head in the way.

He didn’t try that again, but turned his club to the controls of the Kallinikos. He battered a brass panel, smashing dials and knocking off switches. Sparks cascaded from a broken meter. Then he grabbed a canvas strap, pulled himself up like an acrobat and disappeared through a hole in the roof.

I freed myself from the corpse and assessed the controls. Even if they hadn’t been ruined, I wouldn’t know how to toot the whistle let alone throw the brakes. On recent experience, I’d be likely to yank the wrong chain and blast us all to flinders.

I peered through the green-tinted, eye-shaped portholes which studded the worm’s head. The Kallinikos was making express time. It was also tipping from side to side alarmingly. I had doubts it was up to anything but a straight stretch. Lighter, and more flexible, than an ordinary train — those scale-like armour plates rattling against each other — it might come off the rails at any moment.

I went back to share the news with the Moriarty brothers and found them bickering. It might have all gone back to the unsettled matter of who scoffed the last picnic pastry on that outing to the Great Exhibition for all I knew.

‘James, James, James,’ I shouted. ‘Everyone on the crew is dead. The ringer’s on the roof. He wrecked the controls; I assume he took the brakes. The train’s going to crash.’

‘Lampros?’ the Colonel asked anxiously.

‘Moran said everyone on the crew, James,’ the Professor said. ‘Further elucidation is neither necessary nor, in the circumstances, desirable.’

That put Moriarty medius in his place.

‘There’s a swing bridge ahead,’ the Stationmaster said. ‘At this time of night, it’ll be open. Boats come up the Ross for the china clay.’

‘Thank you for that touch of local colour,’ I said. ‘Open — that doesn’t mean open for railway traffic, does it? It means we’re hurtling towards a bridge that won’t be there?’

Young James nodded.

‘Tell me something useful,’ I said. ‘How soon will we reach this open bridge?’

‘How fast are we going?’

‘No bloody idea. Fast.’

‘Impossible to tell, then. Soon.’

Jumping off the Kallinikos was not an option. It would mean, at best, getting smeared along the side of the track like breakfast marmalade.

‘Our present enemy does not strike me as bent on self-destruction,’ the Professor said calmly. ‘He will have a safe way out.’

‘At this speed, he can’t grab a low branch without breaking his fool neck,’ I said.

‘The Kallinikos has two engines,’ the Professor responded. ‘Two complete sets of controls. He will be making for the other set. Does he know how to drive the train?’

‘He was making a fair fist of it before I barged in on him.’

‘Then, he will reverse our direction.’

‘That can’t be done unless the other engine is disengaged,’ the Colonel said. ‘If its controls are smashed, then that is not possible.’

‘Can the engine be decoupled?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Then, he will free himself from the Kallinikos and effect an escape…’

Young James spelled out the obvious ‘…leaving us to go into the river!’

The Colonel made his way, monkey-like, from strap to strap to the rear of the carriage. He tried to wrench aside the door. It was jammed shut.

The Professor went to the hole through which the shadow man had got onto the train, and set about enlarging it enough for me to get through.

I reloaded my revolver.

‘He’ll know you’re coming,’ Moriarty said.

‘Of course,’ I replied, handing him my hat.

I stuck my head through the hole. A rush of air hit me like a wave full of pebbles. The Kallinikos was racing through a deep cutting. A wall of banked-up earth was barely two feet away from the train. If I touched it, I’d be scraped loose and mangled. So I took care to hug the worm’s metal hide as I crawled up on top.

I threw myself flat on the train roof and dragged myself towards the rear engine. By touch, I found the hole where the shadow man had got inside — a long cut made between plates. Typical of the Department of Supplies. For all its armour and revolutionary design, the war-worm was more pregnable than the average third-class carriage on the 8.15 to Dog-Walloper’s Bottom.