Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

“No man knows, for no man lives to say,” I said.

“But you observed them in action, did you not? And you have done so more than once. You are the best man to hazard a guess,” he said, and motioned as if to a hesitant student.

I chewed my lip, considering. Then I said, “They are not large, or else are possessed of protean proportions. The swiftness of their movements put me in mind of an octopus I saw once. But they have eyes, and need very little light. They also have an … odour.”

The Professor nodded as I spoke, and his finger twitched in the air, as if scratching out calculations. “Strong too, I should say,” he added, when I had finished.

“I thought that went without saying,” I said.

“Mm.” Moriarty leaned back, eyes still closed. “What of their nature? What drives them? Is it hunger alone, or are they possessed of more than their share of malevolence? Why lurk in a black house, in the black woods, so far away from their chosen prey? Answer that, and we may have them.”

“I cannot speak to their nature, I fear,” I said. “Only to mine.”

Moriarty’s head bobbed. “Of course, of course. It is of no import, not for this trifling matter. We do not need to understand them to burgle them.” He twitched his head towards the grimy single window of the Soho flat in which we had chosen to meet, and looked out, over the wilds of London. “Still … to understand a thing is to own it,” he said, after a moment, in a musing fashion. “I understand London, Mr Nuth. As you understand the ways of property and its redistribution.”

“Your ownership is not in dispute,” I said. “I am content with my fiefdom, small as it is.”

“Yes, the finest house in Belgravia Square, save the pipes, I am informed.”

I tensed as the words left Moriarty’s lips. Was it a warning? Or more akin to the unsheathing of a cat’s claws, as it stretched in contentment? In the end, I decided it was neither. It was merely Moriarty amusing himself, and again, teaching me a lesson. I inclined my head again, and he smiled.

“Leave it with me, Mr Nuth. I shall have your solution by week’s end, I feel. And then, together, we shall take a trip out of town, into the country, and these old dark woods of yours. We shall visit the gnoles, Mr Nuth, and teach them a lesson that they will never forget.”

And, true to his word, and warning, it was by week’s end that one of the Professor’s aides, an inconsequential man by the name of Parker, arrived at the house in Belgravia, and slipped in through a second storey window. Parker, a garrotter by trade, or so he proudly informed me upon arrival, had brought news – the Professor had solved my problem.

We caught the train from Victoria, Parker and I. As the iron snake wound its way towards a certain village, on the edge of a dark wood, Parker provided entertainment of sorts, after proving himself to have remarkable skill with the Jew’s Harp. When we reached the station nearest the village that backed upon the forest of the gnoles, we found transportation awaiting us in the form of a horse and trap.

It was late afternoon by the time we reached that peculiar village, where all of the houses face away from the raw, untilled fields that separate it from the grim forest. Not a window or door is allowed to open on those trees, for reasons best left to your imagination. Having some small experience with the forest in question, and its masters, I found myself in sympathy with the dull-eyed villagers, who watched the goings-on in their market square from behind half-closed doors, and curtained windows.

The Professor had made the square his classroom and workshop, and stood atop a long-dry fountain, gesticulating with his cane, as his men scurried about a cumbersome cauliflower of iron and brass. As Parker and I drew closer, I saw that the cauliflower was anything but, for what member of the Brassicaceae family had ever possessed great grinding treads and an armoured shell the likes of which to put any crustacean to shame?

“A borrowed design, of course,” the Professor called out, over the noise of the preparations. “A stew, you might say, from the hands of several cooks – a bit of Da Vinci and Brunel, a dollop of Archimedes and a smidgen of Oriental know-how from a certain Sikh of my acquaintance.” The Professor slithered over to meet us, head bobbing in excitement. “Parker, distribute the firearms – one to a man! – and get aboard.” Moriarty extracted a pocket watch from his waistcoat and eyed it, and then the sky, suspiciously. “The sun sets quickly here, Mr Nuth. Dashed quickly, but we shall make good time, once we are under way.”

“Under way,” I exclaimed. “You cannot mean—?”

“Oh but I do, Mr Nuth, I do indeed. Get aboard with you, man,” he said, gesturing with his cane towards a round hatch in the great monstrosity’s side, where the ever-gregarious Parker was waiting for us. “Our time draws short.”

The interior of the beast was as uncomfortable as I had imagined, a cattle car of hard surfaces. Most of the space was taken up by the wide bank of controls – levers, pistons, cords and the like, the purpose of which I could scarcely fathom, set beneath a reinforced and barred slit, which allowed one to see what lay directly in front of the machine. Moriarty took up a position before this odd conglomeration like a captain at the helm of his vessel and signalled for Parker to seal the hatch. Behind us, the men Moriarty had hastened aboard took their seats on the hard benches that had been provided for just that purpose. “I took my inspiration from the Bohemian Hussites, who waged war from armoured wagons,” the Professor said. “History, of course, is full of such lessons for those with but the wit to learn.”

“An armoured wagon,” I said, as a great rumbling roar set the whole conveyance to shaking. From somewhere within its depths, I heard the telltale gurgle of a boiler, and knew that the machine was powered by steam and coal, like a train compacted into a third the size and twice the mass. “Surely we cannot think to sneak into the house of the gnoles with such a device,” I said, as the world gave a lurch and a rattle and the great machine began to move. Like a snail, at first, and then with a tortoise’s lumbering pace.

“I told you, the problem was threefold,” the Professor said, over the noise of the great engine. “How to approach undetected, how to enter safely, and how to depart unmolested. The answer, of course, was to do none of those things, but to plan for the reverse. As I said, subtlety will not serve in this instance … thus, the way of the brute, the basher, and the bagger.” He reached up and hauled on a dangling whistle cord, filling the open field before the forest with a keening shriek. We were moving faster now, at a wolf’s lope.

“You think they will hear us and leave?” I shouted, fighting to be heard over the infernal engines. “That they will flee, leaving us free to pick their lair clean?”

“Ha! No,” he said. “Cast your mind to my second question, Mr Nuth … why do they live where they do, so far from their preferred source of sustenance? The answer, when considered carefully, is simple – they cannot go anywhere else! No, they will not flee, because they cannot. It is often the way of such folk. So they will muster their defences, our gnolish foes, and prepare for war. For war is what I intend to wage – total and unrelenting. I shall teach them the lessons of Troy, of Sarnath and of Peking. Where guile fails, force prevails. We shall smash through their knotty walls and shoot, stab and burn them in the best piratical tradition.” He swung out a hand, indicating Parker and the others, all of whom were armed and certainly fierce enough for the comparison, I judged.

“That answers the first two parts of the problem,” I said. “What of the third part? How will we escape? Unless you intend to exterminate them root and branch?” The thought filled me with no small amount of trepidation. Even armed and armoured by the monstrous engine, I felt the forest bearing down on me as we drew near to it. It was old and hard and wild in a way that not even Moriarty’s diabolical sciences could defend against. And from the look that passed quickly across his face, I knew the Professor felt the same way.