Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

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.

Whoever had lived here, of course. Although there were few details in the summoning telegram, the force was unlikely to have called upon him for anything less than an unexplained, unexplainable, death. The solving of these things was what had made his reputation, it was where his skills lay, and it was where his interests took him. It was what made him valuable.

“Sir?” The speaker was an old man, older even than the detective, probably brought out of retirement to act as constable. The war had depleted the manpower available to the force, despite its protected status, and as the conflict went on anyone with experience, no matter how minor or how long ago it was gained, was being called back to add substance to the ever-diminishing thin blue line. It should be a matter of national thanks, thought the detective sourly, that the same calling that has removed the men who had up ‘til that point defended the virtues of law and order has also removed most of those who strove hardest to attack them. Ah well, in all things balance. Aloud, to business now, he said, “What’s happened?”

“We don’t know,” replied the constable. “It’s awful, like nothing we’ve seen, any of us. The others, they left me here to wait for you. We wouldn’t have sent for you but we can’t … we don’t…” The man tailed off, and the detective saw that there were tears in his eyes. He was extremely old and his lined face had a sagging, waxen look. Taking another breath of the fine summer air, letting the sounds of bees and birds wash around him and clothe him in their freshness, the detective said simply, “Show me.”

The inside of the cottage was as neat as the garden, although considerably more cluttered. Bookshelves, crammed with books and journals and papers, piled two or three high in places, lined the already narrow hallway. An occasional table groaned under a mass of post and newspapers. More books and papers sat on most of the stairs. Here were the first signs of disarray, the detective saw, with piles disrupted and tilted and some of the papers scattered down the steps. There was no telephone, he saw, and no pictures on what little there was of free