by Guy Adams
“Aye, though they were quick enough to distance themselves from him when he started going on about cat people. The only one I’ve met is a nephew, Charles, he was sniffing around at the inquest. Trying to decide if there was any money to be had, if you ask me. I didn’t rank him as a suspect.”
I bundled Prendick’s notes along with those of Mitchell’s, added the newspaper and—on an impulse—the religious pamphlet.
“I’ll make a note of it,” said Mann, “though it would have only ended up gathering dust until we need to clear out to make more space.”
He admitted that he had a great deal of real casework to be getting on with, so I left Mann to it and made my way back to the Dog and Sheep to pass the time before the next train back to London.
I sat in a corner booth and began to read Mitchell’s notes on his time working with Moreau. It made for disturbing reading—a seemingly endless list of abuses towards the animal test subjects with little or no potential benefit that I could see. I washed the sour taste away with a pint of the excellent local beer and transferred my attention to Prendick’s writing.
Mann was right in that it read like a novel, and I found myself considerably engrossed in its narrative. Prendick wrote with a cold, slightly neurotic style but that was no great surprise given what I knew of the man’s personality. The notes told of his time on the ill-fated lifeboat from the Lady Vain followed by his rescue at the hands of Montgomery, who had been aboard a ship transporting provisions to the island where he lived and worked with Moreau. Put ashore by the boat’s crew—the surly captain unwilling to take Prendick any further after a disagreement with Montgomery— Prendick was trapped with the two scientists and their motley crew of natives. From there the narrative grew stranger still but, noticing that I would only narrowly avoid missing my train, I curtailed my reading and made a run for the station.
The journey back to London saw me return to the South Pacific, following Prendick’s saga as first he realised the identity of the man he had been stranded with, then encountered the products of that man’s work—the strange creatures that seemed to thrive in the central jungle of that small island. I fully understood why Mann had dismissed it as the notions of a lunatic, but I did not have that comfortable luxury. I knew from what Mycroft had told us that a great deal of Prendick’s notes were true. I was feeling ill at ease by the time I arrived at Liverpool Street—these were murky waters indeed.
Hopeful that Holmes would be at Baker Street, I was impatient to tell him of my day thus far and so engaged a cab at the station.
On arriving home, I paid the driver and let myself in. A loud crashing of furniture from upstairs told me that my colleague was indeed home. Such a noise didn’t disturb me in the least. Regular readers will be aware of the fact that Holmes was a law unto himself, and a frequently destructive one. I once had to console Mrs Hudson for an entire evening after he had destroyed one of her sofas with a wrecking hammer, wishing to test “the tensile resistance of mahogany”. Naturally he paid for such cruelties towards the furnishings, but it didn’t stop our landlady suffering frequent bouts of nerves.
“What are you doing this time, Holmes?” I asked as I entered. “If Mrs Hudson’s at home you’d better prepare yourself for a firm admonishing.”
“That’s already in hand, Watson,” my friend replied in a somewhat pinched voice.
The voice was pinched because of the large, leather mitten that held him by the throat. The mitten belonging to Kane, the deformed gang leader we had thought ourselves fortunate enough to have left behind in the tunnels beneath Rotherhithe.
“What perfect timing, Watson,” said Holmes. “Might you be good enough to come to my assistance?”
Since when did he have to ask? I dropped the papers I was carrying and marched over to wrestle Kane—a big man he may have been but I had no doubt the two of us would be a match for him. But he knocked me backwards as soon as I was in reach of those thick arms, sending me tumbling over a footstool to sprawl on my back on the hearth-rug.
“If you could perhaps try a little harder than that?” Holmes managed to ask, desperately trying to pull the clamped mitten from his throat before it crushed the life out of him.
I grasped the poker and set at the man’s shoulders. I would like to say that, as a medical man, I was only too aware of the safe areas to hit Kane but it would be a lie. At that point I cared little for the gang leader’s longevity, I simply wished to see him fall and my friend removed from his potentially lethal grip. Kane roared and the noise was deafening. He dropped Holmes and turned to face me. I was pleased I had succeeded in one of my aims, though concerned that I would soon be in just as dire a situation as Holmes had been.
Holmes fell to the floor, rubbing at his throat.
“If you could return the favour?” I asked.
“Certainly,” he replied and made a dash for his bedroom.
Perplexed—and not a little irritated—I did my best to keep Kane at bay by swinging the poker forward and back in a large arc. He batted at it with those large hands of his and kept coming. I imagined that deformed face beneath the veil of netting he wore— that terrible, open wound of a mouth, gnashing and drooling as he backed me into the corner.
“Holmes!” I shouted. “My revolver’s in my undergarment drawer!”
“Of course it is,” he replied, having returned to the room, “but I have something altogether more effective.”
I saw he had the small pipe he had used before, the device he had refused to explain, in his petulant mood. He raised it to his lips and blew.
If it were—as I had originally suspected—some form of blowpipe, there was no sign of a dart. Nonetheless, Kane stopped dead in his tracks. With an animal howl he raised his hands to his head and then toppled backwards, crashing to the floor like a felled tree.
“What the devil is that?” I asked.
Holmes held it up with a chuckle. “I present the Perry Canine Remonstration Pod, purloined off the good professor during our meeting at the museum.”
“The what?” I was baffled at my friend’s explanation, baffled all the more when he reached forward and yanked the net-lined hat Kane had been wearing. Underneath was the head of a gigantic hound!
PART THREE
THE TERRIBLE FATHER
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“You knew?” I asked Holmes. “Even when we were in the sewers you knew that Kane was one of these monstrous hybrids?”
“I guessed as much from his mannerisms,” he agreed. “The way he moved, the way he sniffed the air, his preternaturally sensitive hearing … On the subject of which, should we ever again find ourselves faced with an opponent able to hear a pin drop at a thousand yards kindly don’t call me by name, I may as well have left the brute a business card.”
I hadn’t been aware of having done so but there was little point in arguing. I apologised and squatted down to give Kane a closer examination. The head was exactly like that of a dog, a bull mastiff, given its size and crumpled features. The hair was short and black with a dusting of white on its muzzle.
“What luck you had that whistle,” I said. “How long do you think it will last?”
“Oh, next to no time at all I imagine,” he said, dashing off to fetch a heavy pair of derbies he kept on top of the bookcase. “And it wasn’t luck,” he shouted, climbing his way past his collection of foreign dictionaries. “We were promised monstrous animal hybrids and one of the professors has a device for disabling dogs. I would have been stupid not to take it.”
“And if Kane had been half cat?” I asked as he dropped back down and began to fix the handcuffs around the creature’s wrists.
“Well,” he said, getting to his feet, “then I would have dangled some thread in front of it.”
I had loosened its collar, eager to judge the physiognomy beneath its heavy coat. At the base of its furry throat there was a heavy knot of scar tissue betraying where a large incision had been made. Was it simply a dog’s head attached to a hu
man body? Surely not, for now I realised the point of its heavy leather mittens. Removing one I was presented with the large black hand of an ape. Everything about Kane was built for strength and aggression it seemed.
The creature began to move, the eyelids flickering and opening slowly. I stood up and took a couple of steps back. Curiosity was one thing, but I didn’t want its teeth at our throats over my unanswered questions. There would be time enough for further examination once it was secure in police custody.
“Shall I send Billy to fetch the police?” I asked, referring to Holmes’ page boy. “Surely the sooner the brute is locked up the better?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Holmes, dropping into his armchair and lighting his pipe, “I rather thought it might be to all our advantages were we to pool our resources.” He looked pointedly at the creature between us, now clearly conscious and eyeing us both cautiously. “Wouldn’t you say, Kane?”
The voice when it came had an animal growl that, now I knew its biological background, was not in the least surprising. What I had taken before as a gruff tone was nothing less than the sound of human speech being forced through a dog’s throat.
“What advantage would there be for me?” it asked.
“Oh come now!” said Holmes. “What interest do I have in your petty underground activities? I’m dealing with a far bigger picture than street crime, however well-organised, however brutal. I want your creator, I want the man who made you who you are. Give me him and you can go free for all I care.”
“Holmes!” I exclaimed. This was hardly the first time my colleague had taken the law into his own hands, but there was a world of difference between defending those who had committed dark acts for the best of reasons and protecting a violent street criminal simply because his information might be useful. No doubt the police may have had cause to strike such bargains in the course of their investigations—I am not naive as to the methods they sometimes have to employ in order to achieve the greater good—but I was distinctly uncomfortable at being complicit in such an arrangement.
“We must look to the case as a whole, Watson. There is a great deal more at stake here than a little pickpocketing and smuggling.”
“How right you are,” Kane said. “If my father has anything to say about matters, then all of England will soon be shaken by the throat.”
“Father?” Holmes said. “You think of him as that?”
“In the sense that he created me, not with any emotional feeling. I’ll happily tell you all you want to know about him.”
Holmes brought his knees up to his chin and sucked hard on his pipe. “Then kindly do so,” he said, making a theatrical, beckoning gesture with his hands. “Tell me all you know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I call him my father but in that he was one of many. That is why he grew to hate me. Fathers, like gods, are quick to grow angry at others who claim their title. The special creatures he has sired, the pure-bloods, who find their life through scalpel and needle, are perfect in his eyes. He loves them dearly. But those like me, his mongrels, built from a butcher’s shop of ingredients, to him we are nothing, we are empty and worthless creatures.
“But I am far from empty, I am filled with lives lived. I remember the warmth of the litter and the taste of sweet milk. I remember the feel of thick grass parting before me as I run, the sound of a rabbit’s heartbeat in my ears and the taste of its fear once it’s in my mouth. I remember the sun on my back and salt wind in my face—a face that now rots, torn away and left to decay; the feel of tarred rope in my hands and the solid decking shifting beneath my feet as the waves throw me towards the sky. I remember the pull of rope around my throat and the glint of a belt buckle in the gaslight; the feel of leather cracking against my back.
“I remember that last best of all and I tell you, Gentlemen, no man will strike me again without knowing consequences, not now I have the strength to strike back.
“How I fell into the hands of that final, terrible father of mine is simple enough. Some of me was sold to him by the man with the eager belt and strong swinging arm. The rest was acquired by criminal means. I have a memory of the taste of beer in my mouth, shore leave and the need to spend the few pennies in your pocket. I was abroad in the backstreets, unsteady due to drink and hopeful of finding someone to keep me warm for a few hours. Then there was the most terrible pain on the back of my head and the next thing I know, I’m waking up on a bed of straw, the stink of animal scat and rotten food in my nostrils. If I had owned the nose you see now, this fine organ that would know what your landlady was cooking for supper as soon as twitch, then I think that smell would have driven me mad. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe what the sailor found distasteful would have been like fresh fruit to me now—so many things have changed, my tastes more than anything else.
“As he screamed and shouted, yanking at the irons that had been placed around his hands and legs—irons like these, Gentlemen, and do not think that I will tolerate them long, for I won’t—the hound that had cowered in fear at the sound of its master’s tread cowered still, its simple mind not knowing what lay ahead. But then, how could it have predicted it? No beast, walking on two legs or four, could have had the first idea what was in store.
“The future was darkness. The prick of a needle, like an insect bite, that hid the cut of a scalpel. There were many times when I experienced consciousness, for the process was not one operation but a whole string of them. I awoke with shifting agonies from the many incisions all over my body. The terror felt when the mind of that old sailor, a man who remembered everything from the burn of rope to a woman’s cheeks gracing his palms, looked at the abomination now attached to his wrists—terrible, ugly, brutal things! Hands made for violence and harm. Hands made to beat and punch, something he had more than enough anger for.
“Then, a few hours later, awake again and the knowledge that he has acquired a tail, an angry, thrashing thing that beats at the back of his legs like a whip, spurring him on like a slave. Oh that makes him angry, that makes him boil! But still there is no freedom and soon the darkness descends again and the knives part flesh and sew meat.
“I understand the problems of such operations, the impossibility of making one creature’s muscles tug at another’s limbs, and I cannot begin to explain how he makes it work. I know that he was not always successful. There are many chambers that run alongside his workroom filled with his failures. Creatures that shout, or mew, or bark, or chirp like birds as they hurl their useless flesh against the walls, flesh that bubbles and rejects itself, falling off in lumps or swelling up in angry, purple balloons. Some of these creatures are useful deterrents, terrifying monstrosities that act as guards and weapons, happy to vent their terror and fury on whatever or whoever he wishes them to attack. Others are little more than walking supply cupboards, living cultures that he raids for parts and organs whenever he has need. You do not know real misery, Gentlemen, until you have lain on cold stone and listened to the sound of abomination praying for death! Abomination that bears more than a passing resemblance to your own reflection in the glass.
“That final series of operations: where my throat bristled and burned with nerve-endings yanked together like a boatman’s twine; my eyes raged in their sockets at the bright lights, my mouth screaming wider than the height of my own head. It took him a week to change that head, a connection at a time, a cut here and a cut there.
“And then there was the work he undertook within my skull, replacing one brain with parts of another. I have lost a few handfuls of this tissue along the way, Gentlemen. I heard them fall onto the cool stone behind me while he cut and tore. But don’t think it’s made me a fool, for I manage only too well with what I have. It hurts, by God it does. My head feels like its splitting most of the time. But, after a while, pain becomes just another thing you accept. You know how a stench in a room can vanish after you’ve been in it a while? The familiarity makes the nose ignore it. Pain is like that once you’ve suffered
it for long enough. I think his work has helped there too. I am not as sensitive as I once was. Sometimes when I pick up an object, I crush it quite by accident, it’s so difficult to feel.
“Finally, it was done and I have the face you see now—a face that roars, a mouth with teeth that can tear through flesh like a fistful of knives. Not that I often have cause to use them, not on living flesh at least. I may be a monster in the eyes of most, but I try to be a civilised one. Oh yes, you doubt that, given my profession. Well, perhaps I am not the perfect citizen but I don’t hurt for the sake of it, however tempting it might be. And it is tempting, Gentlemen, you have no idea how strong the urge rises within me when I look upon your fragile, pink faces. Sometimes I think there’s nothing that would feel better than taking them between my jaws and snapping these teeth of mine shut. I always knew anger, all of me—the sailor and the hound. But now we are combined. Lord! I sometimes wonder that there can be so much rage in any one creature.
“But I control it. Yes, because I will not be the worthless creature my father considers me. I will be better than they could ever have dreamt. I will be a thing of wonder, not an atrocity; a thing that makes a man’s lip curl in disgust.
“For that’s the first thing these new eyes saw, looking up into the face of the man that stitched them into place—disgust. You might think that a man would take some pride in his work, would create a thing he wanted to see. Apparently not. When my father looked down on this, this … body, this … creature that he had spent so many weeks—so many hours of work, so much effort—creating, his only response was repulsion and disappointment. I ask you, what is the point of that? What did he think he was building with his offal-stained fingers?
“No matter. I was a thing to be ignored. He gave me lowly tasks, manual jobs that suited my strong arms. Outside of those tasks I was ignored so I made the most of the fact. I hunted in the tunnels, learning the geography of the under-city, where I still make my home. Why would I rise to the city above? I belong down there, flushed away with the rest of the waste, hidden in the dark, forgotten.