George Mann - Associates of Sherlock Holmes

The man – a big man, indeed, though not of the type Fraser sought – stood before the boy and lifted the axe. I took up my gun and sighted down on him.

My detractors do not like to credit me with any human feeling, but it’s true: I hesitated because I saw no way to kill the man without also killing the boy. My gun could put a good-sized hole in an elephant or a rhino, and I had no doubt, given my angle of fire, that the slug would pass through the man and hit the boy. My indifference towards the fate of the American child didn’t stretch to a willingness to kill him myself, you see. I thought the wild man was going to slay the child with the axe, as he had Newman and Fraser, and if so, I resolved to kill him immediately after.

Instead, the big man cut the ropes with one blow of his long-handled axe, snatched the boy up under his arm as easily as I’d carry a newspaper, and loped away, vanishing into the trees. I almost wasted a shot, but chose to hold off rather than reveal my position. As far as I knew, the big man was ignorant of my existence, and I had no wish to alert him to my presence. I considered returning to camp, to the horse, to the train station, to London… but there might be some investigation by the local authorities, even in this uncivilised backwater, and my visit was hardly a secret. Many witnesses had seen me join Fraser at the station. I had managed to avoid entanglements with the law until that point, and while some involvement might be unavoidable in this case, I preferred not to be considered a criminal. If I killed the wild man and saved the child, I would be hailed as a hero, rather than suspected as a kidnapper or killer.

And, in truth, I’d travelled thousands of miles to shoot something, and hadn’t yet fired my gun. I was eager to make some kind of kill.

Some say man is the deadliest creature to hunt, but that’s balderdash. Hunting men is easy. In wartime there are ample targets and opportunities, and if they sometimes shoot back, that’s only sporting. In peacetime, especially in a civilised city like London, people don’t expect to be hunted, and as a result, they’re as easy to pick off as a rabbit locked in a hutch. No, there are more dangerous creatures than man.

Nevertheless, I treated the big man with all the respect I would have given a tiger or any other formidable predator. He left little sign of his passage, but he could not entirely muffle the voice of the boy, and the occasional cry in the distance allowed me to correct my course and remain on their trail.

I fancied that I moved with the stealth of a big cat myself, but now I freely admit the wild man was my better in that regard. The child’s cries grew louder, and I saw a flash of movement ahead. I thought the big man must have paused, perhaps for rest, or to kill or silence the child. I crept within range, then dropped my walking stick to the ground and readied my rifle.

Something felt wrong. Perhaps Fraser was right, and it is possible, sometimes, to tell you are being watched. It occurred to me that perhaps the wild man was aware of my pursuit and was playing the same trick on me that Fraser had tried to play on him: tethering the boy, and letting his cries act as bait, this time to draw me .

Apprehensive of ambush, I started to turn and look behind me, and so the wild man’s axe struck me in the right shoulder instead of the back of my neck. The blow staggered me, the cold blade biting viciously into flesh and scraping on bone, but I did not fall. A few inches to the left and it would have chopped my neck and killed me.

I tried to turn and defend myself. My arm was numb below the agony of my shoulder, hampering my attempts to lift the long gun, which would have been useless at such close range anyway. The big man loomed over me, raising up the axe, his eyes bright and furious between the filthy mess of hair above and beard below.

I scrabbled for my revolver, reaching across with my damnable clumsy left hand, and dodged his axe swing at the same time. I managed to draw the revolver, but he slapped it out of my hand, sending it into the undergrowth. Then he struck me across the face so forcefully my vision went black.

I don’t know why he didn’t kill me, though I can guess. When my senses and vision returned, I was down in the dirt and saw the wild man running after the boy, who was attempting to escape. The wild man probably stopped short of finishing me off in order to go after the boy. I groped for my rifle, but it was gone; the big man wasn’t entirely devoid of caution, and had hurled my gun away. I saw no sign of my revolver either.

My walking stick, however, was nearby. The wild man hadn’t seen it as a threat, and why would he? It was well made but seemed otherwise unremarkable. Readers of this account are likely familiar with my famous air rifle, crafted for me at the professor’s behest by the blind mechanic Von Herder, but they may not be aware that Von Herder made me other weapons, too. While the air rifle required some preparation to transform from walking stick to weapon, with some mechanisms to be attached and adjustments to be made, the walking stick I’d taken with me into the woods was a simpler device. Its body concealed a long barrel, and it contained a single slug and a single charge of powder. The boom-stick wasn’t particularly accurate, and firing it even once would shatter the end of the stick, damaging the whole mechanism irreparably: it was a weapon of last resort. Indeed, since by design it could never be test-fired, I couldn’t even be sure the boom-stick would work as promised, especially after so many years.

But what choice did I have? I crawled through the brush towards the stick, took it in my hands, twisted off the ornamental head to reveal the firing mechanism, and pointed the other end at the wild man as he crouched over the boy. There was still some chance I would hit the child, but by that point, the desire to harm the one who’d harmed me was greater than any other concern.

The boom-stick’s recoil was vicious, but the results were most satisfactory. The large slug struck the man’s head and very nearly disintegrated it, and his body fell into a bloodied heap. I let out a weak huzzah, but my consciousness was already ebbing; the blow to my head and the loss of blood from my shoulder conspired to draw me down into blackness. I called to the boy to go get help, but then realised the wild man had tied him up again. The child struggled against the ropes binding his arms and legs, weeping and wailing.

This would be my death, then. With a gun in my hands, and my prey dead along with me. A decent enough ending for an old shikari like myself. My only regret was that I wouldn’t die on English soil.

I freely admit that the next portion of my account is unreliable. I can report only what I witnessed, or seemed to witness. I settled into a darkness that I fancy was death’s anteroom, but a searing pain pulled me out of it. Someone was turning me over, lifting me up, and I complained bitterly, for death seemed preferable just then to agony. I smelled something musky, animal and pungent. I opened my eyes and looked around as best I could. Someone was carrying me over their shoulder, as easily as I’d carry a child. I looked at this stranger’s back, which seemed to be covered in thick, coarse hair. The ground seemed far away from my face – at least three or four feet too far away, if the person carrying me was a man of ordinary stature. I turned my head and looked into the face of the kidnapped boy, who was slung over this figure’s other shoulder, and gazing at me wide-eyed in fear or wonder.

Words in Fraser’s voice drifted through my mind: There are also tales of the creatures acting to help those lost in the woods, but I don’t much credit those.