Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (38 page)

The King squirms and writhes in his metal shell. The three legs are wired together, so it may not ‘walk’ free.

I have communicated by telegram with the Royal Society, setting a date three days hence for my Marsian lecture. I shall use the crystal egg and display the terrain and inhabitants of the Red Planet to those who would call themselves my scientific peers. I shall demonstrate the use of the copper tube — maybe singe the trousers of some of my more disbelieving colleagues, to make a point. Then, as the crowning moment, I shall present the King of Mars!

Surely, ennoblement must follow. I shall be Lord Flamsteed of Mars!

Considered congress with Mrs. H. and/or Polly, but was persuaded instead to cap off the evening with another infusion of Good Old Dr. Tirmoary’s.

I am Conqueror of Mars!

Being a reprint from the Reminiscences of Col. Sebastian Moran, Late of the 1st Bengalore Pioneers — continued

Pah! Ever read such rot, eh? Believe me, those were the
interesting
pages. The rest of Stent’s journal is fit only to start fires. His entries are stuffed with menus and ‘congresses’ and remarks about how brilliant, acclaimed, well-loved and admirable he is. By my count, the Astronomer Royal penned seventeen thousand heated words about a controversial boot-scraper installed, removed, installed again, relocated by six inches and finally removed from outside the servants’ door at Flamsteed House.

How did I get hold of the journal? Stole it, of course. Not that Stent was in any state to complain.

By pasting in these pages, I’ve saved myself a deal of pen-work, which is all to the good. More time down the pub, rather than filling up an exercise book with this scribble.

Of course, you knew me at once when I turned up in Stent’s narrative — doing my old ‘madman’ act, which has proved persuasive in many a tight spot. When I start frothing and raving, you wouldn’t want to be around. Avoided being fed to crocodiles once by throwing a similar wobbly. The queer … halting … voice … took more effort, and Moriarty had to coach us — me, P. C. P., Polly — in the proper hollow tones. We used Punch and Judy swizzles, as well.
That’s the way to do it!

As for the rest of it, the Professor only let us into as much of his grand scheme as he deemed necessary. Like his imaginary Squid King, Moriarty puppeteered his subjects, speaking words through us, chivvying Stent along until the fathead fancied himself Conqueror of Mars. Of course, Ogilvy didn’t know how flammable the gunk poured on his jacket really was. The cretin hopped around outside Flamsteed House, on fire from head to foot, until a bucket of merciful water was sloshed over him. By then, he was almost in as poor shape as the ash and cinder outline laid out on the gravel to represent his incinerated remains. Threw a sulk about that, he did. Still, can’t make an omelette and all that. In Ogilvy’s case, it’s true. He lost the use of his arms and hands, and so literally can’t make an omelette, or perform many other everyday tasks. That’s what you get for volunteering.

I’ve rarely had cause to remark upon Professor Moriarty’s genius for disguise and impersonation. There’s good reason for that. Anyone less wholly shoved up his own bum than Sir Nevil Stent would have seen through Moriarty’s beards and hoods and skullcaps and spectacles in a trice. That snake-oscillation mannerism
always
gave him away. He didn’t list card-sharping among his favored crimes, or he’d have known about ‘tells’ and taken steps to suppress his. On one occasion, I tried to raise the matter in as tactful a fashion as possible, venturing to suggest that the Professor moderate his ‘cobra-neck tell’ when incognito.

“What are you talking about, Moran? Have you been at the
diacetylmorphine hydrochloride
again?”

There was no sense in pressing the matter further. Genius or no, Moriarty truly didn’t know about the thing he did with his neck. I wondered if he was unconsciously trying to make it difficult for the hangman in anticipation of an eventual date with the gallows. Probably not. It was just a habit. Other men scratch their balls, fiddle with their watch-chains or chew their moustaches. That’s when it’s a good time to double up, throw the mortgage into the pot and slide an ace out of your cuff.

Nevertheless, Moriarty acquitted himself adequately in the multiple roles of ‘C. Cave’, filthy shop-keeper, ‘long-necked cabbie’, dispenser of jovially ominous sentiments, and ‘Hooded Man of Mystery’, mouth-piece of Martian Royalty. (Stent never did persuade anyone else to say ‘Marsian’.) As you can tell from the diary, the worthy Mrs. Halifax, pouting Polly, Italian Joe (Signor Galvani), P. C. P. and some nobly self-sacrificing specimens of
vampyroteuthis infernalis
also strutted and fret their weary hours on the stage.

It’s a shame there wasn’t any money in it. The whole palaver cost the firm a great deal, exhausting the proceeds of five good-sized blags, and sinking Moriarty into debts we had to work hard to pay off. I know we have a reputation as rotters and crooks and all, but it doesn’t do to default on payments owed someone who
likes
to be called the Lord of Strange Deaths. Hellish vampire squid wouldn’t have been the half of it.

For the Prof, the pay-off came at Stent’s lecture.

This time, the Royal Astronomical Society wasn’t a grand enough platform for Sir Nevil, but we were back in Burlington House. The edifice is also H. Q. of
the
Royal Society, a body so sniffily superior it feels it doesn’t even need to give you the full name — which, as it happens, is The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge — when you are expected to prostrate yourself before the hallowed altars of high science and furthermore purchase an illustrated souvenir program booklet to memorialize the hours you spent snoozing through a lecture. Chairman at the time of these occurrences was Thomas Henry Huxley, and you know what the Astronomer Royal thought of
him
. I don’t doubt Huxley thought the same right back at Stent, who — for reasons which by now must be glaring — was not as popular with the general community of test-tube sniffers and puppy-vivisectors as he was with his home crowd of star-gazing toadies.

Again, we took our seats. Sans disguises, on the assumption Stent wouldn’t notice us in the crowd — at least, not until the crucial moment. The hall was packed, as if word had leaked out that Lola Montez would be tightrope-walking nude over the audience while Jenny Lind sang all eighty-six verses of ‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’. Every branch of science was represented, for Stent had announced his lecture would radically affect all of them equally. A lot of text-books would need revising (or burning) after this one, the rumor-mill insisted. To me, the mob looked like an unkempt crowd of smelly schoolmasters on a spree, but the Prof clucked and tutted to himself, listing the great names who had shown up. Besides our home-grown brain-boxes, there were Yanks, Frogs, Krauts, Eye-ties, dressed-up darkies of assorted hues and an authentic Belgian — all trailing more degrees, honors, doctorates and professorships than you could shake a stick at. It would have been humbling if they weren’t mostly aged and chalk-covered. We had salted the room with a few of our own fellahs, who carried hat-boxes or picnic hampers and were a bit fidgety in clean, respectable clothes. A squeaky-voiced draper’s clerk tried to squeeze in on a platform ticket, but was properly ejected for being a lower-class bounder.

This time, Stent went for dramatic effect.

The house-lights dimmed, and a spot came up on the lectern. The Conqueror of Mars posed dramatically, in a vestment-like long white coat.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “we are not alone…”

He whipped a dust-cloth from the ‘reflecting telescope’ which incorporated the ‘crystal egg’. In the end, Polly had been forced to draw him a picture to show how she had ‘accidentally’ made it work. Between shows, someone had to reset or replace the strip of exposures inside the box and put in a new incandescent bulb — which meant getting Stent away from his toy. Fortunately, he’d quite a nose for Dr. Tirmoary’s Infusions and was often in a daze.

“I give you … the Planet Mars!”

Stent toggled a lever and electric current made a motor grind. Red images were cast on a white board erected on the platform. Squid crawled across a sandbox, gagging for water. There were gasps of awe, though a few coughs of scepticism too. A few sequences wound backwards, which gave an eerie, unnatural effect — as if pictures that moved weren’t unnatural enough.

I’d seen some of these views ‘taken’ by Mr. Paul A. Robert of Brighton. Urchin assistants had to hand-color the scenes, picture by picture. Robert has a glass-roofed studio under construction on the downs. I had to be blindfolded and driven up and around country lanes before visiting it because he fears some Yankee swine is out to poach the process and present it as his own invention. Good luck to him, I say. Apart from making a fool of the Astronomer Royal, all Robert’s whateveroscope is good for is giving anyone who stares too long at the stuttering pictures a blinding headache. I daresay few in the audience had seen the like. There was still that damned whirring and flapping as exposures passed in front of the incandescent. The bloody racket is why Robert’s Box Pictures in Motion will never ‘catch on’, if you ask me. They’ll never replace the stereopticon.

After the images from the crystal egg passed, Stent was assailed by questions. Some were about the creatures, but most were about Robert’s Box — which several in the audience had heard of before. One or two had even seen the thing demonstrated while the inventor was soliciting funds for development of his annoying wonder of the age. When Stent repeated his assertion that the Box was a ‘reflecting telescope’, someone called him an ‘blithering idiot’. He looked displeased. Several helpful souls shouted out the principles on which the Box worked. A couple of young fellahs got into a heated argument about ‘persistence of vision’ and ‘Muybridge strips’. No one cared much about
what
they had seen (it could have been a chuffing train or a couple snogging, for all they cared) but many were intrigued by the
process
whereby moving images were cast on a board. Stent had caused a sensation, but not the way he expected.

Moriarty smiled to himself.

Seeing things not going his way, Sir Nevil hastened on to what would have been his grand finale.

“Sirs, men from Mars are among us! They have been here quite some time!”

Hoots, whistles, laughs.

Stent lifted another drop-cloth from an exhibit.

“This is the King of Mars,” he announced.

There was sudden hush. The window in the bell had a magnifying effect, and the hideous red face of the creature trapped inside loomed. The buccal orifice clacked angrily.

For a moment, everyone was struck quiet and frozen. Swollen alien eyes, set in angry red facial frills, seemed to range over the assembled scientific multitudes, as if ready to direct a ‘hot-beam’ across their ranks and wipe out the great minds of Earth before calling down a sky-fleet of tentacled horrors. Red tentacles writhed, ready to crush human resistance before hauling up the Martian standard on the blackened ruins of Burlington House.

The Robert’s Box was forgotten, and this new horror held the attention.

Stent, sensing that he was on the point of winning a few converts, radiated a certain smugness, as his thick hide recovered from the earlier pinpricks. His shirt-front puffed out a bit, like a squid rising above its spawning-depth, and he allowed himself to look on the audience with his old superior attitude. If this King of Mars could cow the Royal Society, then Stent might transfer his allegiance from the lesser, terrestrial monarch he had hitherto served. If his mighty brain went unappreciated on this poor planet, then perhaps he should look elsewhere for patronage…

Then, just as Stent was on the point of recapturing his audience, the Professor stood up and shouted “where’s his party hat?”

Stent was horror-struck at the sight of an enemy he’d thought bested. His mood turned. For a moment, I assumed he’d seen through the whole business and understood how he’d been gulled, but it was a passing doubt. The Astronomer Royal remained firm in his convictions. He believed what Moriarty had made him believe.

“I insist,” he said, holding up a copper tube, “this is a visitor from another world.”

Seconds ago, he had been taken at his word. Now, the sceptics and rationalists — for is this not an age of doubt? — were inclined to get close to the old gift horse and pay close attention to his choppers.

An elderly Frenchman from the front row got up and took a closer look at the bell, squinting through pince-nez.

“This is a ‘hot-beam’ device,” said Stent, voice cracking. “A weapon of Mars!”

He aimed it at the now-bewildered crowds, as if willing it to burst them into flame. Of course, we weren’t smeared with the slow-acting chemical concoction which provided the fire when the pretend-guns were used in Flamsteed House.

“This is a squid,” announced the Frenchman. “Someone has cruelly dyed it red. An uncommon specimen, but not unknown.”

Some laughter was forthcoming. A paper dart, folded from a program, zoomed from the back of the room and sliced past Stent’s head.

“This is the Marsian King,” Stent told the onion-eater. “Roi Marty. You, sir, are an unqualified dolt. You know nothing of alien worlds.”

“
Eh bien
, perhaps,” the Frenchman admitted. “But I,
monsieur
, am Professor Pierre Arronax, greatest living authority on denizens of the deep. In debate about the courses of the stars, I would allow you are far more expert than I. However, in matters of marine biology, you are a child of five and I am an encyclopedia on legs. This, I repeat, is a squid. An unhealthy squid.”