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

His aim was true. The pendant burst into a thousand gleaming carmine shards and the woman was struck instantaneously dead, crashing to the floor.

The effect was immediate. An obscene wailing, followed by a sucking noise, made Holmes look up again. The Manitou was shrinking, disappearing, being siphoned away, almost certainly, into some other plane of existence in which only spirits dwelt.

As for the congregants, they took in what was happening and then — true to their debased natures — turned tale and fled, leaving the room by any exit they could find, in the same manner as a swarm of rats confronted in their nest.

It was over, thank God. Holmes used the sleeve of his raincoat to wipe perspiration from his brow. He remained where he was for half a minute, letting his breathing steady, and then he hurried down to help the kidnapped man.

A couple of hours later, Holmes and Capaldi found themselves sitting in front of the theatre. There was much activity around them, since the forensics boffins were still processing the scene. Two slim, attractive women, one auburn-haired, the other dark and slightly shorter, went past them into the building.

“We’ll get the others. They’ll be charged with being accessories,” the lieutenant assured him.

“I’m pleased to hear it.”

“Witch women?” Capaldi grunted. “Evil spirits? Man, that has to top even Moriarty.”

Holmes just became stiff-lipped. “Believe me, Lieutenant. Nothing, however inhuman or vile, ever quite manages that.”

“But he’s long gone, ain’t he?” the policeman smiled.

He was freshly surprised when Holmes responded with a brisk shake of his narrow head.

“Proposition one: I am immortal. Proposition two: Moriarty is my constant and unflinching Nemesis, as I am his. It therefore stands to reason that if I am still alive, then so…”

He let the final pair of syllables die unspoken on the hot night air. The two men gazed up at the purple sky, a depthless silence falling over them.

Which was finally broken when Capaldi asked, “Any idea where he might be?”

“Not a clue,” Holmes muttered.

* * * * *

TONY RICHARDS is the author of such novels as The Harvest Bride, Postcards from Terri and more recently Night of the Demons . His collection Going Back was nominated for the British Fantasy Award.

The Adventure of the Six Maledictions

by Kim Newman

Professor Moriarty did not readily admit his mistakes. Oh, he made ‘em. Some real startlers. You were well-advised not to bring up the Tay Bridge Insurance Fiasco in his gloomy presence. Or the Manchester and Provincial Bank Robbery (six months’ brain-work to set up, a thousand pounds seed money to pull off: seven shillings and sixpence profit). The Professor was touchy about failures. Indeed, he retained me — Sebastian ‘Dead-Eye’ Moran, Eton (interminably) and Oxford (briefly), decorated veteran of a dozen death-to-the-darkies campaigns, finest shot in our the Eastern Empire, et cetera et cetera — to keep ‘em quiet.

However, one howler he would own to.

He was ruminating upon it that morning, just as the sensational events I’ve decided to call ‘The Adventure of the Six Maledictions’ got going. Jolly good title, eh what? Makes you want to skip ahead to the horrors, but don’t … you won’t fully appreciate the gut-slitting, dynamiting, neck-breaking, rawhead-and-bloody-bones business without understanding how we got neck-deep in it.

In our Conduit Street rooms, we were doing the books, perhaps the least glamorous aspect of running a criminal empire. Once a mathematics tutor, Moriarty enjoyed balancing ledgers — as much as he could enjoy anything, the sad old sausage — more than robbing an orphanage trust fund or bankrupting a philanthropic society. He opened a leather-bound book, and did that side-to-side snakehead thing which I’ve had cause to mention before. Everyone else who has met him remarks on it too.

“I should not have taken Mr. Baldwin as a client,” he declared, tapping a column of red figures. “His problem was of minimal interest, yet has caused no little inconvenience.”

The uninteresting, inconvenient Ted Baldwin was a union ‘organiser’ in Pennsylvania coal country. As ever in America, you can’t tell who were the worst crooks: the mine-owning robber barons or the fee-gouging workers’ brotherhood. In our Empire, natives dig dirt, plant tea and fetch and carry for the white man. Red Indians don’t take to the lash and the Yanks fought one of the century’s sillier wars over whether imported Africans should act like proper natives. Now, America employs — which is to say, enslaves — the Irish for such low purposes. A sammy takes only so much field-slog before up and cutting your throat and heading into the bush. Your bog-trotter, on the other hand, grumbles for seven hundred years, holds rowdy meetings, then decides to get very, very drunk instead of doing anything about it. On the whole, I prefer natives. They might roast you on a spit, but won’t bore the teats off you by blaming it on Cromwell and William the Third. Yes, I know Moran is an Irish name. So is Moriarty. That comes into it later, too.

Baldwin’s union — the Vermissa Valley Scowrers (don’t ask me what that means or if it’s spelled properly) —were undone by a Pinkerton operative who, when not calling himself John McMurdo, went by the unbelievable name of Birdy Edwards. The Pinkerton Detective Agency is a disgrace to the profession of Murder for Hire. If you operate in a country where captains of industry and hogs of politics make murder legal so long as it’s a union organiser being murdered, what’s the point, eh? Moriarty never lobbied for laws to make it all right for him to thieve and murder and extort.

Posing as a radical, Edwards infiltrated the Scowrers. Most of the reds wound up shot in their beds or hanged from mine-works, but Baldwin was left in the wind at the end of the blood-letting, with a carpet-bag full of union funds. In his situation, I’d blow the loot on women and cards, but Baldwin was of the genus bastardii vindice . Just to rub it in, this Birdy flew off to England with Baldwin’s sweetheart. Hot on the trail, and under the collar, Baldwin came to London and called on the Firm of Moriarty and Moran. A wedge of greenback dollars hired us to locate the Pink, which we did sharpish. Sporting the more plausible incognito of John Douglas, Edwards was sunning himself at Birlstone, a moated manor.

An easy lay! Shin up a tree in the grounds and professionally pot the blighter through the leaded library window as he sits at his desk, perusing La Vie Parisienne . Aim, pull, bang … brains on the wall, Scotland Yard Baffled, notice in The Times , full fee remitted, thank you very much, pleasure to do business with you! But, no , the idiot client got all het up and charged off to Birlstone to do the deed himself. Upshot: one fool face blown through the back of one fool head. Yes, sometimes they have guns too. A careful murderer is mindful of the risk inherent in turning up at a prospective murderee’s front door with a red face and a recital of grievances.

With the client dead, you might think we’d close the account and proceed to the next profitable item of deviltry. Not how the racket works. We’d accepted a commission to kill Edwards-McMurdo-Douglas. Darkly humorous remarks about persons not being dead when Professor Moriarty has been paid to polish them off were heard. Talk gets started, you lose face. Blackguards with inconvenient relatives take their business elsewhere. The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. or that Limehouse chink with the marmoset would be delighted to accommodate them.

So, at our own expense , we pursue Edwards, who has booked passage to Africa. This is where you might remember the bounder. He — ahem — fell overboard and washed up on the desolate shore of St. Helena. We could have shoved Birdy off the dock at Southampton and been home for tea and — ahem, encore — crumpet in Mrs. Halifax’s establishment for licentious ladies. Not obtrusive enough, though. Nothing would do for the Prof but that the corpse be aimed at the isle of Napoleon’s exile, and he spent hours with charts and tide-tables and a sextant to make sure of it. Moriarty was thinking, as usual, two or three steps ahead. There was only one place on Edwards’ escape route anyone — specifically, anyone who scribbles for the London rags — has ever heard of. A mysterious corpse on St. Helena gets a paragraph above the racing results. A careless passenger drowned before embarkation doesn’t rate a sentence under the corset endorsements. Advertising, you see. Moriarty strikes! All your killing needs satisfied!