Guy Adams: Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Doctor Moreau

On the morning of Moreau’s planned publication, the assistant allowed one of the animals to escape. It was a small Labrador, partially flayed, covered in surgical wounds and bristling with needles. The animal’s howls brought considerable attention. A shocked crowd gathering as they attempted to corner and placate the beast. It was in such a state of terror that a passing cab driver could see no other course than to put the animal out of its misery. It set a spark to months of suspicion and rumour amongst residents of the capital, and eventually a mob descended on his Greenwich home. The atrocities brought out into the daylight that morning damned Moreau’s reputation forever.

The journalist published and his editor took the opportunity to tap into public feeling and whip up a wave of anger against the doctor. It seemed to all concerned that the man had finally lost whatever skills he may have once possessed. London became too small to hold him. He left, setting sail for new shores, a mob of protesters jeering him off.

“Don’t tell me that Moreau was working for you?” I asked.

“Not to begin with,” Mycroft admitted. “But the journalist that exposed him was.”

“To begin with?” Holmes asked.

Mycroft smiled. “We must remember that for all his clear faults, Moreau was a genius and, as reprehensible as his methods may have been, there was no doubt that he was on to something potentially fascinating.”

“From what I recall,” I said, “his published theories were nothing but unscientific tosh. He was a spent force.”

“My dear Doctor,” Mycroft replied, “you really mustn’t believe all you read.”

CHAPTER THREE

“I was there,” continued Mycroft, “on the night Moreau left our country. I had thoroughly debriefed my agent as to the work Moreau had been conducting. While most of it was, as you say, so removed from practical science as to be evidence of a damaged personality, some was rather more interesting. The work he conducted after, on a small retainer from me, was vitally so.

“The offer I presented was simple. His chances of legitimate practice had been wholly ruined. If he wished to continue in science he would have no choice but to accept the small budget I offered and the direction I wished that research to follow. I wasn’t blind to his wilfulness and, once out of the country, there would be a limit to the level of control I could apply. Nonetheless, I supplied him with company—an assistant cum caretaker, a man I had worked with on a handful of occasions previously and whom I thought entirely trustworthy. Perhaps he was, though I now also know he was a drunk and, as can be the way with sufferers of that particular condition, far too easily led if offered a warm bed and a full bottle.

“They worked on a small island in the South Pacific, away from the attentions of civilisation, with nothing but a twice-yearly trip to replenish supplies. They were perfectly isolated. Nothing but the work I offered and the dangled promise of future vindication should that work bear fruit.”

“And what was that work?” Holmes asked.

“He was attempting to define the biological trigger for evolutionary change chemically, hoping to isolate and replicate it. The hope was that he might develop some serum or another that could improve our resilience; increase our immunity against disease; make us more impervious to extremes of temperature; or able to function for longer periods without food or water. The sort of small improvements that, frankly, might give an army all the advantage it needed in order to be victorious.”

“Why,” I exclaimed, “this is incredible! Did you really think such things were possible?”

“My dear Watson,” Mycroft replied with some irritation, “I considered such things entirely possible given the work Moreau had already completed. I am not one to waste Her Majesty’s money. Sadly, it was not to be. Moreau had other plans.

“One day I simply stopped receiving messages from Montgomery, my agent. I confess my first instinct was to assume a natural disaster had befallen them, a storm perhaps or even an attack by natives. Who was to say what dangers might lurk in so remote a part of the globe? It certainly seemed unlikely that they could survive without my financial assistance.”

“Surely you had some method of checking?” Holmes asked.

“I had one of our ships make a casual investigation when sailing past the island. I could hardly allow the crew to know the reason behind my investigation of course. I allowed an order to pass through navy command asking for the area to be assessed for military use. Included within that order was the need to check for signs of habitation. If Moreau, Montgomery and his native retinue were still alive then I felt sure they would betray the fact somehow, a trace of fire-smoke, fishing paraphernalia on the beach, something must certainly alert the crew. Of course, if they had been found, then my security would likely have been compromised, but I deemed it worth the risk. Uppermost in my mind at all times was the possibility that Moreau had sold his work to another power. Needless to say that is always a risk and one that I would have dealt with to the best of my ability had it arisen. Perhaps it has …”

“You have heard from Moreau?” Holmes asked.

“Nothing so simple,” his brother replied. “But this matter is complicated. Let me continue it in a strict manner.

“In total, Moreau was unheard of for eight years. Then, twelve years ago, the Lady Vain sank in the South Pacific, perhaps you remember?”

Indeed I did. The ship had collided with a derelict vessel only a few days out from Callao and, aside from a crammed longboat—later rescued by a navy vessel—all other passengers were lost. I recounted as much to Mycroft.

“All other passengers bar one,” he replied. “Edward Prendick, a wealthy young man who had taken to the study of natural history, as all wealthy men must take to the study of something unless they wish to lose their minds before they are thirty. He was found eleven months after the loss of the Lady Vain, adrift in that patch of ocean.”

“He survived out there for eleven months?”

“Indeed not, that would have been exactly the sort of feat of endurance I was paying Moreau to accomplish. Prendick claimed to have spent the time between the sinking of the Lady Vain and his later rescue on an island in the company of the disgraced Moreau, the drunk Montgomery and a collection of monstrous creatures, the like of which had him branded delusional before he had even reached port.”

“What sort of creatures?” I asked.

“Hybrids—absurd combinations of man and beast—the results, he claimed, of Moreau’s experiments in vivisection. He insisted that the island had become colonised by them, an entire culture of educated animals, walking upright like men. The creatures had risen up against their creator, with Prendick being the lone survivor.”

I laughed. “And Holmes accuses me of being far-fetched in my ideas,” I replied. “Even I wouldn’t dream of a story so wild.”

Mycroft met my incredulity with stony silence. Eventually he spoke. “Far-fetched or not, Prendick was telling the truth.”

I was quite unable to respond seriously to that. Even Holmes looked startled, staring at his brother through a slowly exhaled mouthful of smoke, perhaps to judge his sincerity. For myself I was in no doubt of that. Mycroft was not a man inclined to lie—though, on reflection, as a secret-service man he must have been perfectly adept at it. When talking to Holmes he was only too aware of the importance of precise facts. If he said a thing was the case, then it was. But how were animal-human hybrids even remotely possible? I couldn’t help but think he must have been mistaken. No doubt Moreau—a man clearly in love with both the scalpel and wild flights of imagination—had constructed a selection of faux creatures, like the monstrosities one hears of in American travelling shows. What had made such an impression on Prendick can have been no more than the absurd “fish-boys” and “bird-ladies” of the freak show. No doubt, to an untrained eye, such things might pass muster. I suggested as much to Mycroft but the large man simply shook his head.