Michael Kurland - Professor Moriarty Omnibus

Moriarty smiled. "I fancy you were looking up the wrong Shelley," he said.

"The wrong—"

Moriarty reached over to the bookshelf and tossed a book across to me. "Try this one."

I looked down at the book. On the cover, in an ornate Gothic type, was the title: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

-

Moriarty was out all this morning, and he came back with a painting by Lenore Lestrelle. It is all green and brown and blue blotches and seems to be some sort of pastoral scene. I am afraid that he intends to hang it in the dining room.

Now entertain conjecture of a time

When creeping murmur and the poring dark

Fills the wide vessel of the Universe.

From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night

…

— William Shakespeare

PROLOGUE

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat.

— John Dryden

The tall, thickset man in the gray frock coat walked slowly between the double row of headstones. He looked neither to the left nor the right, but stared at something ahead of him that the older man who walked beside him could not see. They stopped at a newly turned grave, not yet covered with sod, and the tall man crouched and placed his hands flat on the bare earth.

"This is it," he said, turning his vacant eyes on his companion. "This is where she lies."

"I'll take care of it, right enough," the old man said, squinting at the ground to note the number on the painted board that marked the place where the headstone would be. "Like she was my own daughter. My word."

"Flowers?"

"Ivery day. My word."

"She likes flowers." The tall man rose and turned to his companion. "I'll meet you at the gate," he said.

The old man stared at him for a second, and then said "A' course," and walked away.

The frock-coated man turned back to the bare earth. "I am here," he said.

The day was somber and the fog was dense. What light there was gladly fled before the encroaching dusk.

"I have discovered another one for you," he whispered. "Another death for your death. Another throat for the blade. It doesn't help. God knows it doesn't help. God knows—" The man's face contorted. "God! — God!" He fell to his knees, his hands twin tight-fisted balls before his eyes. "Someday I'll stand before the God who made what befell you part of His immortal plan; and then — and then—"

He stood up and slowly willed his fists to open. Semicircles of blood had formed where his nails had dug into his palms. "But until then, the men," he whispered, "the godlike men. One by one they shall fall like reeds before the avenging wind. And I am the wind."

He held out his hand and there was a bouquet of flowers between his fingers, which he placed gently down on the moist earth. Beside the bouquet he laid a small gold amulet with an intricate design. "Here is another," he said. "From the last one. The last murderer. The last to die before the wind. This is the sign by which we know them, you and I. The mark of Cain. The hell-mark of the damned."

Standing again, he brushed off his trousers. "I love you, Annie," he murmured to the bare earth. "I do not do this for you; I know you would not ask it, the killing. I do not do it for me; I have always been a gentle man, and it does not ease me. I do not like the blood, the moment of fear. But it is all I can do. I cannot stop myself. I have become the wind, and they shall all die."

He turned and slowly walked away.

ONE — NIGHT AND FOG

There was a Door to which I found no Key; There was a Veil past which I could not see.

— Edward Fitzgerald

Throughout much of March in the year 1887 the city of London was covered by a thick, almost tangible fog that swept in from the North Sea. It chilled the flesh, dampened the spirit, and oppressed the soul. It all but obscured the sun by day, and by night it occluded the stars, the moon, the streetlamps, and the minds of men. Things were done in that fog, in the night, that were better left undone.

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, the eighth of March, the fog blanketed the city; a moist discomforter that swallowed light and muffled sound. Police Constable William Alberts walked his rounds with a steady, measured stride, insulated from the enveloping fog by his thick blue greatcoat and the Majesty of the Law. The staccato echo of his footsteps sounded sharp and loud in the empty street as he turned off Kensington Gore into Regent's Gate and paced stolidly past the line of stately mansions.

P.C. Alberts paused and cocked his head. Somewhere in the fog ahead of him there was — what? — a sort of gliding, scurrying sound that he could not identify. The sound, perhaps, of someone trying to move silently through the night but betrayed by a loose paving stone.

He waited for the noise to be repeated, turning to face where he thought it had come from and straining his eyes to pierce the black, fog-shrouded night.

There! Farther over now — was that it again? A muted sound; could someone be trying to sneak past him in the dark? A scurrying sound; could it be rats? There were rats even in Regent's Gate. Even the mansions of the nobility had the occasional rats' nest in the cellar. P.C. Alberts shuddered. He was not fond of rats.

But there — another sound! Footsteps this time, good honest British footsteps pattering around the Kensington Gore corner and approaching the spot where Constable Alberts stood.

A portly man appeared out of the fog, his MacFarlane buttoned securely up to his chin and a dark-gray bowler pulled down to his eyes. A hand-knitted gray scarf obscured much of the remainder of his face, leaving visible only wide-set brown eyes and a hint of what was probably a large nose. For a second the man looked startled to see P.C. Alberts standing there, then he nodded as he recognized the uniform. "Evening, Constable."

"Evening, sir." Alberts touched the tip of his forefinger to the brim of his helmet. "A bit late, isn't it, sir?"

"It is that," the man agreed, pausing to peer up at Alberts's face. "I don't recollect you, Constable. New on this beat, are you?"

"I am, sir," Alberts admitted. "P.C. Alberts, sir. Do you live around here, sir?"

"I do, Constable; in point of fact, I do." The man pointed a pudgy finger into the fog. "Yonder lies my master's demesne. I am Lemming, the butler at Walbine House."

"Ah!" Alberts said, feeling that he should reply to this revelation. They walked silently together for a few steps.

"I have family in Islington," Lemming volunteered. "Been visiting for the day. Beastly hour to be getting back."

"It is that, sir," Alberts agreed.

"Missed my bus," Lemming explained. "Had to take a number twenty-seven down Marylebone Road and then walk from just this side of Paddington Station. I tell you, Constable, Hyde Park is not sufficiently lighted at night. Especially in this everlasting fog. I am, I will freely admit, a man of nervous disposition. I nearly jumped out of my skin two or three times while crossing the park; startled by something no more dangerous, I would imagine, than a squirrel."

They reached the entrance to Walbine House: a stout oaken door shielded by a wrought-iron gate. "At any rate I have arrived home before his lordship," Lemming said, producing a keychain from beneath his MacFarlane and applying a stubby, circular key to the incongruously new lock in the ancient gate.

"His lordship?" P.C. Alberts asked.

Lemming swung open the gate. "The Right Honorable the Lord Walbine," he said. He lifted the keychain up to his face and flipped through the keys, trying to locate the front-door key in the dim light of the small gas lamp that hung to the left of the massive oak door.