J. Campbell - Gaslight Arcanum - Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

“You built the room yourself?”

He nodded. “It took years. The entire house took years. But I’ve had time. I don’t sleep, never tire, don’t age.”

“And money? How did you come by that?”

“My father had a large estate,” he said. “By forging his name, I was able to acquire his share. When his brother died, I got it all, liquidated the family assets, invested. It was a slow process, but I had more time than any man has ever had. My wealth has grown, but these things are not important. The thing I need to show you is in here.” He paused beside another tank, leaned toward the portal, looked inside. “You spent nearly a month inside one of these tanks,” he said. “The same fluid in which I grow my creations nurtured your wounded body. I do not cut and stitch dead flesh any more than my father did, but by studying his journal I have learned the art of creating, growing, and kindling the spark of life. It was lucky for you that you missed the rocks when you fell from the cliff.” He looked toward me now, and in his expression I discerned a hint of the terrible thing that lay within the tank beside us. “I entered the whirlpool and hauled you from the flood,” he said. “And then, seeing the remains of your rival dashed upon the rocks, I went back in.”

“Professor Moriarty?” I whispered, speaking the name of the evil that had been my obsession.

“Yes,” the creature said. “I read his name in the note you left for Watson, and although I knew that the battered carcass on the rocks was that of your enemy, I felt compelled to save him, too. There was a time when life meant nothing to me, when I killed indiscriminately to torment the one who tormented me, but that’s behind me now. I understand that life is a gift that must be created at every opportunity, protected at all costs, and rekindled whenever possible. You healed because you were still in one piece. Your rival, however—” He glanced again at the portal, frowned, then bent toward me. “Come.” He wrapped me in his hands. “I’ll show you.”

This time the transit from floor to portal seemed to take longer. My mind was racing, reverberating with dread for what I would see when I looked through that window, but I resisted the urge to turn away as the creature brought me level with the glass.

Inside, Moriarty’s remains floated in a bath of milky fluid, drifting in the slow spiral of cycling nutrients. He had but one eye, lidless and swollen, peering out of a broken face. At least, I assumed it was a face, though other than the eye there was little to identify it. The nose and lower jaw had both been ripped away, leaving wounds that would never close, hollows in which I saw the wet workings of throat and sinuses. The head itself was elongated, the sides evidently pushed out by a concussive blow to the rock. The impact should have killed him, and I suppose it had, but Adam had brought him back, revived him, returned the fires of life to the cracked and broken kindling of his flesh.

“I could not leave him,” the creature said, his voice sounding distant even though he spoke close to my ear. “I did terrible things when I was young, but I have since sworn to become a force of life and healing. So I nursed him even as I nursed you, but I cannot keep him. He needs to face judgment, and that is your domain, not mine. When you leave, you must take him with you.”

A truncated body bobbed beneath Moriarty’s ruined head. I saw a pair of arms, one ending below the elbow, the other little more than a knotted stump beneath the shoulder. The torso was no more complete, scarred and tapering to a flesh-wrapped spine. No hips. No legs.

“Take him with me?” I asked. “Back to London?”

“To face judgment,” he said.

“But how?”

“That’s up to you.”

“But can he be transported?”

“Yes. He has stabilized. Soon he can be removed from the tank, swaddled in gauze, carried like an infant, a little heavier, perhaps, but not much.”

Moriarty stared. I sensed he recognized me, perhaps even heard what the creature and I were saying.

I pushed away from the glass, making it clear I’d had enough.

He lowered me to the floor.

“I can’t do it.” I said.

He crouched before me, a father stooping before a child. “You would rather leave him here, in my care, knowing that I am bound by personal honour to keep him alive? Restore him if and when I can? Let him return to the world if and when he is able to walk into it on his own?”

“You would let that happen?”

“I would,” he said. “I must. It is the way I’ve chosen.” He leaned closer, confiding. “He needs to face a justice that I am incapable of providing. Perhaps, in your hands, he will find it.”

The swaddled mass screamed as Adam wrapped it in gauze, and though a dose of morphine temporarily stilled the cries, they resumed before the carriage left the castle gate. I thought of what Adam had said about justice, realizing, as the deformity wailed and sputtered on the seat beside me, that there was no need for either Moriarty or me to return to London.

The road followed the river, and when I was certain we were far enough downstream from Adam’s estate, I told the driver to stop. He was one of Adam’s long-armed monstrosities, wrapped in a cloak to mask his shape. I suspected it was the same servant that had confronted me in the library, though it gave no indication of knowing me. Nor did it seem the least curious about my intentions when I carried the wailing parcel to a cliff overlooking a wide, rapid stretch of the Aare.

I knew now why Adam had supplied the loaded pistol: considering my pain, it would have been a shame to waste any more morphine on Professor Moriarty.

The gunshot echoed through the canyon.

The thing stopped screaming. I picked it up and hurled it over the cliff, its gauze unravelled as it fell, streaming out, whipping in the wind, collapsing when it struck a rock. It bounced once, then vanished into the current. It resurfaced briefly a few hundred feet downstream, smaller than before, then it vanished for good amid the churning waves.

I returned to the carriage.

“So it’s done?” the servant said.

I offered no answer, but climbed back into the carriage and shut the door.

The carriage rocked, then continued down the road.

I would not return to London. My work there was finished. I would go elsewhere, write to my brother, have him send what I needed. Perhaps, in seclusion, I would find the same redemption that had eluded M Adam’s creator. Perhaps, if I lived long enough, I would do justice to the gift of a second chance.

* * * * *

The LAWRENCE C. CONNOLLY novel Veins was a finalist for the Black Quill and Hoffer awards as well as inspiring the audio CD Veins: The Soundtrack . His new supernatural thriller Vipers was released in 2010. In addition he has two short story collections available, Visions: Short Fantasy and SF and This Way to Egress.

A Country Death

Simon Kurt Unsworth

The detective waited outside; he was, technically, a guest of the local force here and, although they had called for him, he would not enter without invitation. Whilst he waited, he looked around the place to which he had come. The building was set back from the road, both it and the gardens that embraced it small and neat. And what gardens! The edged beds full of flowers that blazed with colors, the smell of their perfume heavy, swollen. The lawns, green and dense, danced around both sides of the house, disappearing from sight in rich swathes that seemed to catch the light and feed upon it. The detective saw that his impression, gained on the journey here, was correct; this was a home designed for privacy. There were no other buildings nearby, and the roads that led to it were little more than tracks. Even the edgings of flowers gave the impression of a wall; beautiful, vibrant, but a wall nonetheless, a barrier between this place and the outside. Whoever lived here did not want intruders.