by Eric Brown
“Why, yes, I do recall them. I remember thinking what a pretty girl, but with such a look of concern on her face. And the fellow clutching her hand was fair dragging her along—”
“A somewhat ugly character, with a swollen forehead and sunken eyes?”
“The very fellow, sir. The very spit. I did wonder at the time what a lovely looking girl like her was doing with such a character. Under duress, it struck me.”
“I don’t suppose you know in which direction they went on leaving the station?”
“Well, I do know they took a taxi from the rank just there. The man bundled her into the back of the cab, and off they went.”
Holmes looked through the station entrance to the taxi rank. “I don’t suppose you noticed which cab they took?”
“Well, it was one of the Red Line cars, sir, ’cause I remember thinking how the girl’s red coat matched the cab’s paintwork.”
“You’ve been extraordinarily helpful, madame. Thank you,” Holmes said, and inserted another shilling into her collection box.
“Why, thank you, sir, and good luck,” she added as we hurried from the station.
We crossed the pavement to the taxi rank, where a dozen cabs were lined up in the afternoon sunlight. I counted vehicles of at least three companies touting for trade, with among them four cars of the Red Line company.
Holmes spoke to the first Red Line driver, showing him Miss Fairfield’s photograph, only to receive a taciturn shake of the head for his troubles. He moved on to the next Red Line employee and exchanged a few words. This fellow screwed up his eyes and examined the photograph for a duration, his lips pursed judiciously.
He passed it back to Holmes. “Was she with an ugly lookin’ cove?”
“Indeed she was. I take it you saw them?”
The driver grunted. “Might have,” was all he would vouchsafe.
With a show of legerdemain worthy of a stage conjurer, Holmes produced a crisp ten-shilling note and held it before the cabbie’s staring eyes.
“And where did you take them, my good man?”
The driver made a grab for the note, but Holmes was too fast for him and withdrew the prize.
“Took ’em to the Martian place,” the man said.
Holmes smiled. “The ‘Martian place’? Very descriptive, sir. There are, at the very least, half a dozen sites in the vicinity that might be described as the ‘Martian place’.”
“Very well, then, it were the Martian Research Institute, okay?”
Holmes thanked the driver and handed over the ten-shilling note. “You want me to take you there?”
“Not quite yet, but thank you.”
Holmes drew me into the shade of the station, for the sun was fair beating down and he had dutifully donned his deerstalker at the start of the journey.
I stared at him. “‘Not quite yet’?” I said. “But Holmes, you said that this trip was but a reconnaissance mission. You can’t seriously be considering bearding the lion in his den?”
“Watson,” he said, “do you recall the curious case of the Woking jewel thief, which a few years ago you wrote up for The Strand – rather melodramatically, I thought – as ‘The Mystery of the Invisible Man’?”
“Of course I do, Holmes. One of my better efforts – but what the blazes—”
“You recall that I gave you the slip and vanished for a day or so, later reappearing to report that I’d come to this very town, assumed a disguise, and apprehended the ‘invisible’ thief as he was about to embark on his most daring heist?”
“Yes, but—”
“I availed myself of the services of a rather good costumier in town, Watson. This way.”
Without waiting for me, he stepped out into the flow of traffic, halting a car with an imperious hand, and continued across the road. I waited until the vehicle had passed, the driver shaking his fist at Holmes, and joined my friend as he set off at speed along the High Street. After a hundred yards he turned down a side alley and paused before a narrow shopfront.
“Still in business, Watson, and open, what’s more,” and so saying he pushed open the door and stepped into the cramped premises.
Costumes of a dozen varieties and from as many countries were displayed on tailor’s dummies, the scent of naphthalene hung in the air like cloying incense, and a hundred facemasks ogled us from the walls.
A shrivelled gnome of a man looked up from a ledger and exclaimed, “Why, as I live and breathe. Mr Holmes! It’s been a while.”
“Three years, two months and five days, if my memory serves, Mr Karbalkian. We have come to avail ourselves of your excellent services.”
“It’d be an honour to assist,” said the gnome.
Thirty minutes later we were attired, and made-up, in disguises that would have fooled our mothers. Holmes sported a tweed jacket and plus fours, a bald pate and his deerstalker. The addition of a gumshield and cotton wool stuffed into his cheeks, along with make-up that gave his face a puce complexion, completed the transformation. He looked like a somewhat dissolute country squire with a fatal predilection for fine port.
Holmes had supervised my own disguise, electing to further exacerbate my weight gain of recent years to the point where I resembled Tweedledee, outfitted in a ridiculously blaring checked suit and bowler hat. If Holmes passed as a disreputable minor aristocrat, I was an even more disreputable fairground crier.
As we completed our disguises in a cramped back room, Holmes said, “You have your electrical gun, your Webley and, most importantly, the simulacrum’s battery?”
I patted my suit in turn. “Check, check, and check.”
“Capital. We are all set, then.”
“But set for what?” I asked somewhat fearfully as Holmes thanked Mr Karbalkian, settled the bill, and led me from the premises.
“What else but entry into the Martian Research Institute, Watson?” he said as we hurried back to the station and the taxi rank. “I intend only what I suggested earlier – a reconnaissance mission.”
“But how the blazes will we gain admittance into the institute?”
Holmes waved this aside. “We will unpick that knotty problem when faced with it,” he said breezily as we reached the rank.
The cab driven by the rather grudging fellow who had earlier relieved Holmes of ten shillings was now at the front of the rank, and we slipped into its commodious back seat.
Holmes gave our destination as the Martian Institute and sat back as the car beetled silently from the rank and inserted itself into the stream of traffic flowing down the High Street.
I found it reassuring that the driver obviously did not recognise us in our disguises.
“The Martian Institute?” he grunted over his shoulder. “Don’t normally get ’umans going to the institute, I don’t. Plenty of smelly Martians, of course. Odd thing is, I had a couple o’ ’umans in yesterday, bound for the Martian place. Ugly chap and his flighty piece. Bit of all right she was, mind.”
“You don’t say?” Holmes said, affecting a high-pitched tone.
“I do. And another odd thing is, I had this geezer asking after her just an hour ago. Waving his spondulicks around like he owned the world, he was.” The driver chuckled. “Took his ten bob, I did, and told him I’d taken the couple to the institute – but I didn’t tell ’em the whole tale.”
“You didn’t?”
“Didn’t like the cut of his jib,” said the cabbie. “Bit arrogant, he was.”
I cast Holmes a swift glance, suppressing the urge to smile.
Holmes said, casually, “And what was the whole tale, good sir?”
“This ugly chap and his bit o’ all right, they went to the institute like I said, but they didn’t go in the main entrance, did they? No, slipped into a side door, furtive like.”
“A side door?”
“That’s right, just along from the main entrance it was.” The cabbie grinned over his shoulder. “I reckoned they were sneaking in there for a bit of you-know-what!”
&nb
sp; “Quite,” said Holmes as we approached the high iron gate flanked by stone pillars. A gravelled drive processed up a slight incline to a foursquare grey building that had all the dour gravitas – even on this sunlit summer’s afternoon – of the Victorian asylum it had once been.
We rolled up the drive and approached the building. A dozen Martian cars were drawn up in the turning circle, and beyond the bulk of the building I espied the cowls of several Martian tripods.
The door of the institute opened and three Martians shuffled out, their appearance against the quintessentially English backdrop of the country house striking me as somewhat incongruous, not to say grotesque.
I admit that, at this point, my heart was thumping and a hot sweat had broken out across my brow.
As the driver braked before the main entrance, Holmes leaned forward and pointed to a door ten yards to the right of the main entrance.
“Is that by any chance the portal by which the man and the girl entered yesterday?”
“The very one, sir,” said the cabbie. “That’ll be nine pence, thank you.”
Holmes climbed from the cab, leaned towards the driver’s window, and dropping the aristocratic tone said in his own voice, “The ten-shilling note I gave you earlier, my good man, will be more than sufficient remuneration.”
Hiding a smile, I heard the driver curse Holmes roundly and set off at speed back down the drive.
“Frivolities aside,” Holmes said, turning to stare at the grim facade of the Martian Institute, “the game is afoot, Watson. This way.”
I followed my friend towards the black-painted door.
Chapter Twenty-One
A Multiplicity of Moriartys
“The cabbie’s letting slip Moriarty’s use of the door was a stroke of luck, what?” I said as Holmes reached out and turned the door handle.
“Luck which has run dry, Watson. The door is locked.”
Assuming as nonchalant a gait as was possible under the circumstances, there being a party of five Martians approaching the institute’s entrance, we sauntered away from them towards the corner of the building. Holmes peered around the chiselled cornerstones, deemed the way safe, and gestured for me to follow.
I did so and, once out of sight of the Martians, leaned against the brickwork and mopped my brow.
“This is hardly the ideal pursuit for a man of my years,” I said.
“Pfaugh! You should find such activity meat and drink, my friend.”
“I prefer to indulge in a more sedentary banquet,” I said, peering along the side of the building.
To our left was the east wall of the institute, stretching for perhaps thirty yards with windows set at regular intervals along its length. To our right, just yards away, was a high stone wall. Beyond the building, down the narrow perspective of the gravelled strip before us, I made out a lawn and ornamental garden and, beyond them, a cobbled courtyard. The one-storey buildings surrounding the courtyard must once have belonged to the asylum, but they had now been pressed into service as the Martians’ Tripod Manufactory. A cacophonous metal clangour filled the air. Several tripods stood about the courtyard, eerily still, and sections thereof were piled beside the outbuildings. To my immense relief, no Martians were in sight.
Holmes took my elbow and indicated the nearest window, a few yards away. “We must proceed with the utmost caution, Watson. After me.”
We approached the leaded window and Holmes squinted through the pane. He muttered an oath, and I too peered through the window.
I made out a classroom equipped with rows of desks. These were occupied by the unlikely figures of Martian students bent over their work, their tentacles busy with what appeared to be calculating machines. It was not the Martians, however, that had provoked my friend’s exclamation – though the sight of the extraterrestrial pupils was somewhat bizarre – but the figure standing before a blackboard at the front of the class.
Their teacher was none other than Professor James Moriarty.
I ducked beneath the sill and stared at Holmes. “Good God!” I said. “Moriarty!”
“The man himself – or one of his simulacra.”
He delved into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew the detection device that Miss Hamilton-Bell had given him yesterday. Crouching beneath the level of the sill, he lifted a hand, directed the device towards the front of the class, and depressed the stud.
The light glowed blue.
“As I guessed,” Holmes said, “one of his mechanical copies. I somehow thought that the original Moriarty would not lower himself to act as a menial teacher.”
“But is he the ‘Moriarty’ who came here yesterday with Miss Fairfield?” I wondered aloud. “There is a one in three chance of it being him, after all.”
Holmes clucked at me. “I rather think not,” he said, and before I could question him he was away, duck-walking across the gravel to the next window.
I joined him, my knee joints creaking woefully, and peered through. This room was evidently some kind of laboratory, with rows of benches bearing fulminating retorts, test tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks. A dozen Martians were at work before the benches, and passing among them was the familiar figure of the professor, pausing to instruct here, demonstrate there, and occasionally pausing to address the classroom at large.
Again Holmes activated the detection device and again the blue light indicated the professor was but a simulacrum.
We moved on to the next window.
Holmes peered through, while I nervously watched our backs. I feared that at any moment a Martian would appear around the corner and call on us to account for our skulking presence. And what then? Could we claim mere curiosity? I quailed at the thought.
“Take a look, Watson,” Holmes said, “and see what you make of that.”
I did as instructed, and beheld Professor Moriarty before a blackboard covered with abstruse mathematical diagrams and equations. The class this time comprised just three pupils, evidently partaking of an advanced lesson.
“The original?” I said.
“I’m afraid to say that I very much doubt it,” Holmes said, and directed the detector at the teacher.
The light glowed blue. “Yet another mechanical copy,” he said.
“But how many of the accursed things are there?” I exclaimed.
Holmes shook his head. “It is testament to the man’s genius in various branches of the sciences and mathematics that the Martians, in many ways more sophisticated in these disciplines than ourselves, have seen the value of reproducing him. The very thought sickens me.”
“What I’d like to know,” I said, “is what in blue blazes the monster has done with Miss Fairfield?”
“Follow me,” Holmes said, “and eventually we might find out.” Panting with the effort of emulating my friend’s crouching shuffle, and casting fearful glances over my shoulder, I followed him to the next window, and then the next and the next. The scene in each was similar: in every classroom we beheld a simulacrum of Moriarty imparting the jewels of his wisdom upon his Martian disciples.
I looked ahead. There were but two further windows to investigate.
“I fear, Watson, that in order to locate Miss Fairfield we might at some point be forced to enter the building, if that is possible. Note that many of the windows are barred. If the postern doors are locked, like the one we tried, then only the front door remains as a point of entry.”
“I must admit, I don’t fancy breezing in through the front door,” I said.
“Nor do I, Watson, but needs must.”
We moved to the next window – the penultimate one along this side of the building – and Holmes peered through. “What-ho!” he cried in a theatrical reprise of the aristocratic tone he had used earlier. “Success, of a sort. But I don’t like the look of what’s taking place in there, Watson.”
I lifted my head and cautiously squinted into the lighted room.
“Good God!” I cried.
I found it difficult at first to full
y comprehend what my eyes were relaying to my tired brain: the hunched figure of Professor Moriarty was bent over the sloping console of a silver machine the size of a grand piano, busy adjusting dials and verniers. On various screens on the console before him, moving graphs imparted who knows what arcane information, and from time to time lights flashed on and off. Moriarty’s huge potato-like head moved back and forth in febrile excitation as his hands danced over the controls like those of some mad concert pianist.
It was not the professor, however, or what he might be doing, that captured my attention. For beyond the crazed professor was not just one Miss Fairfield, but two.
I sagged back beneath the level of the windowsill and said to my friend, “We’ve found her, Holmes, but a part of me wishes that we hadn’t!”
I peered again, trying to comprehend what I saw.
The two Miss Fairfields were imprisoned side by side in a reticulation of chromium bars set against the far wall. They were spread-eagled, their arms and legs outstretched, shackled at ankle and wrist. The woman to the right wore a red summer dress, while the figure to the left was as naked as a newborn babe. On the heads of each woman was a device which resembled at first sight a crown or tiara, a silver strip connected to a medusa confusion of wires: these snaked from the head of the clothed Miss Fairfield, up over the frame and down to the second, naked woman.
“What the deuce is he doing to the poor girls?” I asked – though in my heart of hearts I could hazard a guess. I recalled the chromium frame from when we had been gassed in the Martian Museum of Science.
Holmes gave me a troubled look. “Recall what Miss Hamilton-Bell told us earlier,” he said, “about the Martians having brought the duplication process to Earth? I fear – no, I know – that that is what is happening here. Moriarty is copying the mind of the original, clothed in the red dress, to the naked simulacrum. Now we know why he abducted her.”
I cursed him. “At least now we’ve found the original Moriarty,” I pointed out.
“But have we?” Holmes said. He raised the detector, pointed it into the room, and pressed the stud. The light glowed blue and I cursed again.