crashing to the floor like a felled tree.
“What the devil is that?” I asked.
Holmes held it up with a chuckle. “I present the Perry Canine Remonstration Pod, purloined off the good professor during our meeting at the museum.”
“The what?” I was baffled at my friend’s explanation, baffled all the more when he reached forward and yanked the net-lined hat Kane had been wearing. Underneath was the head of a gigantic hound!
PART THREE
THE TERRIBLE FATHER
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“You knew?” I asked Holmes. “Even when we were in the sewers you knew that Kane was one of these monstrous hybrids?”
“I guessed as much from his mannerisms,” he agreed. “The way he moved, the way he sniffed the air, his preternaturally sensitive hearing … On the subject of which, should we ever again find ourselves faced with an opponent able to hear a pin drop at a thousand yards kindly don’t call me by name, I may as well have left the brute a business card.”
I hadn’t been aware of having done so but there was little point in arguing. I apologised and squatted down to give Kane a closer examination. The head was exactly like that of a dog, a bull mastiff, given its size and crumpled features. The hair was short and black with a dusting of white on its muzzle.
“What luck you had that whistle,” I said. “How long do you think it will last?”
“Oh, next to no time at all I imagine,” he said, dashing off to fetch a heavy pair of derbies he kept on top of the bookcase. “And it wasn’t luck,” he shouted, climbing his way past his collection of foreign dictionaries. “We were promised monstrous animal hybrids and one of the professors has a device for disabling dogs. I would have been stupid not to take it.”
“And if Kane had been half cat?” I asked as he dropped back down and began to fix the handcuffs around the creature’s wrists.
“Well,” he said, getting to his feet, “then I would have dangled some thread in front of it.”
I had loosened its collar, eager to judge the physiognomy beneath its heavy coat. At the base of its furry throat there was a heavy knot of scar tissue betraying where a large incision had been made. Was it simply a dog’s head attached to a human body? Surely not, for now I realised the point of its heavy leather mittens. Removing one I was presented with the large black hand of an ape. Everything about Kane was built for strength and aggression it seemed.
The creature began to move, the eyelids flickering and opening slowly. I stood up and took a couple of steps back. Curiosity was one thing, but I didn’t want its teeth at our throats over my unanswered questions. There would be time enough for further examination once it was secure in police custody.
“Shall I send Billy to fetch the police?” I asked, referring to Holmes’ page boy. “Surely the sooner the brute is locked up the better?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Holmes, dropping into his armchair and lighting his pipe, “I rather thought it might be to all our advantages were we to pool our resources.” He looked pointedly at the creature between us, now clearly conscious and eyeing us both cautiously. “Wouldn’t you say, Kane?”
The voice when it came had an animal growl that, now I knew its biological background, was not in the least surprising. What I had taken before as a gruff tone was nothing less than the sound of human speech being forced through a dog’s throat.
“What advantage would there be for me?” it asked.
“Oh come now!” said Holmes. “What interest do I have in your petty underground activities? I’m dealing with a far bigger picture than street crime, however well-organised, however brutal. I want your creator, I want the man who made you who you are. Give me him and you can go free for all I care.”
“Holmes!” I exclaimed. This was hardly the first time my colleague had taken the law into his own hands, but there was a world of difference between defending those who had committed dark acts for the best of reasons and protecting a violent street criminal simply because his information might be useful. No doubt the police may have had cause to strike such bargains in the course of their investigations—I am not naive as to the methods they sometimes have to employ in order to achieve the greater good—but I was distinctly uncomfortable at being complicit in such an arrangement.
“We must look to the case as a whole, Watson. There is a great deal more at stake here than a little pickpocketing and smuggling.”
“How right you are,” Kane said. “If my father has anything to say about matters, then all of England will soon be shaken by the throat.”
“Father?” Holmes said. “You think of him as that?”
“In the sense that he created me, not with any emotional feeling. I’ll happily tell you all you want to know about him.”
Holmes brought his knees up to his chin and sucked hard on his pipe. “Then kindly do so,” he said, making a theatrical, beckoning gesture with his hands. “Tell me all you know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I call him my father but in that he was one of many. That is why he grew to hate me. Fathers, like gods, are quick to grow angry at others who claim their title. The special creatures he has sired, the pure-bloods, who find their life through scalpel and needle, are perfect in his eyes. He loves them dearly. But those like me, his mongrels, built from a butcher’s shop of ingredients, to him we are nothing, we are empty and worthless creatures.
“But I am far from empty, I am filled with lives lived. I remember the warmth of the litter and the taste of sweet milk. I remember the feel of thick grass parting before me as I run, the sound of a rabbit’s heartbeat in my ears and the taste of its fear once it’s in my mouth. I remember the sun on my back and salt wind in my face—a face that now rots, torn away and left to decay; the feel of tarred rope in my hands and the solid decking shifting beneath my feet as the waves throw me towards the sky. I remember the pull of rope around my throat and the glint of a belt buckle in the gaslight; the feel of leather cracking against my back.
“I remember that last best of all and I tell you, Gentlemen, no man will strike me again without knowing consequences, not now I have the strength to strike back.
“How I fell into the hands of that final, terrible father of mine is simple enough. Some of me was sold to him by the man with the eager belt and strong swinging arm. The rest was acquired by criminal means. I have a memory of the taste of beer in my mouth, shore leave and the need to spend the few pennies in your pocket. I was abroad in the backstreets, unsteady due to drink and hopeful of finding someone to keep me warm for a few hours. Then there was the most terrible pain on the back of my head and the next thing I know, I’m waking up on a bed of straw, the stink of animal scat and rotten food in my nostrils. If I had owned the nose you see now, this fine organ that would know what your landlady was cooking for supper as soon as twitch, then I think that smell would have driven me mad. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe what the sailor found distasteful would have been like fresh fruit to me now—so many things have changed, my tastes more than anything else.
“As he screamed and shouted, yanking at the irons that had been placed around his hands and legs—irons like these, Gentlemen, and do not think that I will tolerate them long, for I won’t—the hound that had cowered in fear at the sound of its master’s tread cowered still, its simple mind not knowing what lay ahead. But then, how could it have predicted it? No beast, walking on two legs or four, could have had the first idea what was in store.
“The future was darkness. The prick of a needle, like an insect bite, that hid the cut of a scalpel. There were many times when I experienced consciousness, for the process was not one operation but a whole string of them. I awoke with shifting agonies from the many incisions all over my body. The terror felt when the mind of that old sailor, a man who remembered everything from the burn of rope to a woman’s cheeks gracing his palms, looked at the abomination now attached to his wrists—terrible, ugly, brutal things! Hands made for violence and harm. Hands
