Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [121]
“Yeah.”
He flipped the light switch and the living room chandelier came alive. “Appalling taste,” he said, looking around. “But I do like the chandelier. The Professor tried to kill me with one just like it in ’05.”
Something crashed overhead. I reached for my .45; the old man blandly looked up.
There, at the top of the stairs, was Landau. He had changed his clothes since last night, so the two bullet holes in his chest were now hidden. There was a long, jagged line of stitching where he tried to sew up the hole my bullet left in his head. The torn bits of flesh had been pulled away, leaving pale white pockmarks. His teeth, white and bestial, gleamed. His eyes were red and they squinted when they took in the old man.
“Mr. Landau,” he said, leaning on his cane as he stepped closer. “This is a rather lamentable state of affairs, and I assure you that I understand it all came about through no fault of your own. You were only doing your job and fell victim to a most despicable nobleman. He has a history of exploiting and then victimizing such as you. Perhaps the Fabians had a point after all. At any rate, I’m afraid that we must swim through bitter waters before we reach the sweet, and what must be done must be done. A heavy heart and all that, but it can’t be helped.” The old man turned to me. “Shoot him dead, there’s a good fellow.”
I didn’t think this was the time to point out that I had already shot him three times, but I didn’t argue. I brought my gun up and aimed for his head once again. I fired three shots, knocking him against the stairwell wall. The first shot took off the top of his head, splattering the wall with what looked like gray, moldy bread. The second tunneled into the stitching he used to fix the first head wound, and my third shattered his cheekbone, pulling out the check and forever exposing half of his teeth. Then Landau slowly slid down the wall and crumpled on the stairs.
The room was filled with smoke. I lowered my gun as the room cleared; I could hear the old man’s raspy breathing. “Did we do it?” I asked, but the old man shushed me with a hand.
I looked up at Landau. His right hand twitched, then his left. Slowly, he grabbed the banister and pulled himself upright. His head was nothing more than a ruin — hair pulled away from the first shot, most of his forehead missing now and half his face cleared away to the skull. The half of his mouth still there smiled wickedly. And then … he hissed. Deep and guttural, it was a sound like nothing I ever heard before.
The old man turned to me. “Here it comes.”
Before I could say anything, Landau leapt from the top of the stairs, sailing across the length of the living room with hands outstretched, and careened directly into me. He knocked me over, my .45 flying across the room. In seconds he was kneeling on my chest, his horrible breath like the blast of a slaughterhouse choking me. I couldn’t focus my vision, bits of brain dribbled from his head and splashed into my face. I screamed and grabbed his lapels to pull him off, but it was like he was made of stone.
I writhed underneath Landau as he tore at my collar with one hand, and pushed up on my chin with the other. He drooled a bit as he got closer to my throat.
And then, a sound like rain, or a pipe leaking. I shook some of the goo out of my eyes and squinted up. It was the old man, standing over us like the referee at Friday night’s fight. He was slowly emptying his whiskey flask over Landau’s back. With a nonchalant gesture, he tossed the flask over his shoulder and took one of my cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He lit that with a wooden match, and then dropped the match on Landau.
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