Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [124]
The other hand wrapped around my tie. He pulled down and I fell to my knees before him. He pushed my head to the side, exposing my neck. I heard him growl like a punk in a stag film. I thought of what Landau had become and struggled with everything I had, but I couldn’t pull away. I pulled at his arm, screaming.
Then, a horrible, swishing noise, and I was drenched with a vile smelling filth. The man in black fell to his knees opposite me … but his head was missing. The top of his old fashioned black suit was drenched in blood, and great gouts of it spurted from the horrible, gaping hole that topped his shoulders. Then the body fell back, still gushing red muck.
I put my hands on the floor to keep steady, and that’s when I saw his head lying about three feet away from his body. The red eyes were open with a look of surprise. Then I looked up. The old man was wiping blood from a sword with a long, lavender handkerchief. He then tossed the handkerchief aside and lowered the sword back into the heavy black walking stick that concealed it. “Useful thing,” he said. “Very handy in Whitechapel back in ’88. Now there was a madman. I say, are you well enough to fetch that can of petrol from the car? This all must be burned, you know, both the bodies and the boxes. Then we’ll call the fire brigade before it gets too out of hand. I don’t want to repeat all the trouble I had in San Francisco in ‘06. Don’t see why I was blamed for all that, but there you are. Need a hand up?”
The Red Planet League
The Red Planet League
by Kim Newman
(Being a reprint from the Reminiscences of Col. Sebastian Moran, Late of the 1st Bengalore Pioneers)
As my many devoted readers — hullo mater, gout still playing up, eh what? — know, Professor Moriarty excelled in two fields of human endeavour.
Mathematics, for one. Never was there such a fellah as the Prof for chalking up sums, or the rigmarole with more squiggles than numbers. Equations. Did ‘em in his head, for fun … damn his eyes.
Neverthehowsoever, your humble narrator — Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran, to whit: me — would wager several pawn tickets held on the family silver that you lot have little or no interest in fractional calculus or imperfect logarithms. You’d all be best pleased if I yarned up the other field in which James Moriarty was top of the class.
Crime. Just the word gets you tingly, don’t it?
Well, tough titty … as the house-captain who tried to roger me when I was a whelp at Eton used to say, because this story is all about mathematics. I got my pen-knife to the house-capt’s goolies, by the way. Preserved my maidenly virtue, as it were. Blighter is Bishop of Brichester these days. Wouldn’t care to be a boy soprano in his choir. That’s beside the point: maths is the thing!
Get your thinking caps on, because I might put in some sums. Make you show your workings in the margin and write off for the answers. It will cost an extra 3d and a stamp just to find out if you’re as clever as you think you are. Probably, you ain’t. Most fellahs (including — I’m not ashamed to admit it — me) aren’t as clever as they think they are. Moriarty, though, was exactly that clever, a rara avis indeed. More dodos are around than blokes like that. According to Mr. Darwin, that’s good joss for the rest of us. Elsewise, we’d have long since been hunted to extinction by the inflated cranium people.
Drifting back to the subject in hand, Professor Moriarty was Number One Heap Big Chief in both his vocations. Which meant there was something he was even better at than complicated number problems or turning a dishonest profit — making enemies.
Over the years and around the world, I’ve run into some prize-winningly antagonistic coves. I recall several of that species of blood-soaked heathen who bridle under the yoke of Empire and declare war on ‘the entire White Christian Race’. Good luck to ‘em. Pack off a regiment of curates and missionaries led by Bishop Bum-Banger