“That’s the spirit!” Challenger said. “We’ll show the arrogant pup where he stands.”
“I was talking to you,” Mann replied. “For a genius you’re not awfully clever. Now shut up and let’s get moving.”
Whether Challenger was simply shocked into compliance or actually saw the logic of Mann’s words was impossible to tell but, after a harrumph of indignation, he pushed past Kane and began to walk along the tunnel.
All of which served to prove to me why it is rarely worthwhile to work in company. Challenger was supposed to be a genius and yet, as far as I could see, his temper had replaced his brain to the point of rendering him a liability. How I wished for Watson and no other, at least with him by my side I knew I had someone on whom I could depend.
We had walked for only a few more minutes before Kane held up his hand for us to stop.
“Extinguish the lanterns,” he said.
“We can’t see without them,” Johnson insisted.
“You will have to manage. We are close now and father’s watchdogs will be on the prowl.”
Johnson looked to me and I could see no choice but to accede to Kane’s suggestion. I nodded and the lantern was extinguished.
The first few moments were severely disorientating as our other senses fought to compensate. The smell grew stronger, the sound of rushing water louder. Shuffling along that narrow footpath, it was an effort to keep moving, running my fingers along the brick wall to my right to keep a regular distance.
Soon other noises joined the rush of water and the sound of our footsteps. Some distance ahead I could hear something scraping along the bricks of the path. Was this one of the guard dogs Kane had warned us about? Could there be other animals living down here? There were rats of course, I had occasionally heard them call to one another in the dark. But the noise we heard now was certainly from something much bigger. The way it pulled itself along the path, it sounded like something limp, being dragged. Behind me I heard someone cock their revolver. Perhaps the creature heard it too because, all of a sudden, there was a high-pitched squeal and it came for us.
We still couldn’t see it but the noise was easy to follow. It launched itself and bounced off the wall to our left. Then dragged itself, quite impossibly, across the ceiling.
Someone fired and in the flash of the muzzle we could glimpse a mass—amorphous, slick and possessing altogether too many limbs. It roared, and both Wiggins and Johnson aimed their revolvers. Four shots were fired in quick succession, rapid bursts of light like fireworks, the afterglow of which hung green and blue before our eyes as the creature howled once more, clearly hurt.
“Stop firing!” Kane shouted, as the creature lost its grip and hit the water. We were doused by the splash that resulted from the creature’s fall. Blind, wet and panicked, we all held our backs against the wall, guns at the ready in case the creature came for us again.
“What the hell was that?” Wiggins asked. “Damned thing looked like an angry hot air balloon.”
It was a grotesque description but an accurate one.
“Who knows where he gets all his creatures from?” said Kane. “By
the time he’s finished blending them together, it’s all but impossible to tell what they were originally.”
“How many more of these things can we expect?” I asked.
“As many as you like if they’re as easy to kill,” Johnson said.
“They won’t be,” Kane said.
“I will face as many of the beasts as fate chooses to offer,” Challenger said. “I for one am absolutely fascinated by them!” He sighed. “If only I could examine the body of that one, who knows what we could learn from its cadaver?”
“As much as I sympathise with your hunger for information,” I said, “this is not a scientific expedition. Perhaps once our mission is accomplished, there will be time for such things.”
“I will make time,” Challenger said.
“Might I suggest we keep moving?” Mann said. “After all we have certainly just announced our presence to anything in the vicinity.”
“He’s right,” Kane added. “We certainly have no chance of attacking by surprise now. Those gunshots will have carried for miles down here.”
“In that case,” Johnson said, striking a match, “you won’t mind if I have my lantern back. I’m not walking blind into whatever’s up there waiting for us.”
Kane growled but said nothing, no doubt he could tell that there was little point in arguing; Johnson meant to have his way and he would not be swayed.
We continued along the tunnel, Kane keeping several feet in front with Johnson lighting the way behind him.
It was not long before we would come face to face with the next “guard dog”. In fact it had assuredly been heading towards us the minute it heard the first gunshot.
The first sign that it was nearby came from Challenger rather than Kane. “The water,” he said. “Something is making its way towards us.”
We stopped and listened. I was immediately aware of what Challenger had noticed. (No doubt I would have heard it earlier had I not been concentrating on what lay ahead.) “The splash of the water is getting louder. Something large is swimming its way towards us.”
“I became extremely attuned to the sound of the water during my trips up the Amazon,” Challenger said. “At night, enemy tribes would try to sneak up on us, canoeing slowly up the river. It got so that you listened for any change in the tempo and quality of the waves. Noticing something untoward could be the difference between life and death.”
I could not help but be drawn into speculation with regards the nature of the creature that made its way towards us. What manner of thing would it be? Fish or fowl?
Even when it attacked it was hard to tell, there was a sudden rush of water and Johnson shouted, holding up his lantern in order to direct the light as clearly onto the beast as possible. It rose from the sewage as if elevated by wires. Whatever legs powered it up into the air, they were strong indeed.
It made no noise but a mouth that might well have belonged to a shark—a thin gash of scar tissue and tiny, glinting teeth—snapped at the air as it launched itself at Johnson.
He was quick to fire, but Johnson was not a shootist. His childhood had been one where disagreements were settled with fists and clubs. He had never had cause to develop the skill of drawing a clear aim under pressure. The shot went wide, perhaps
it grazed the creature but it certainly didn’t slow it down. It was almost on him as I took my own shot.
Now, of all my skills, shooting is the one I have practised the least. Mainly due to the anger of my landlady with regards the state of the walls afterwards. Nonetheless, when possessed of a clear mind and a focussed aim, I can be reassuringly formidable. My bullet went directly into the creature’s head, a lumpen, disgusting thing that could have been part ox as much as shark. I wasn’t the only one to fire—I felt two other bullets pass me. The impact of the rounds had little effect on the creature. It continued its progress towards Johnson even as he fired a second shot. This one, at closer range, hit it in its open mouth. There was a high-pitched whine and the creature landed on him, its mouth still snapping—a soft clapping of cartilaginous lips and a grinding of its rows of teeth. Johnson screamed, an unnerving sound to come from such a brute of a man.
“Hold your fire!” I shouted. There was no need to waste further ammunition, my shot had been perfect and must have destroyed the brute’s brain. What was left was no more than its death throes, the last few vestiges of life before it gave up completely. Of course, in those last moments it could still do more than enough damage, as the scream from Johnson had attested.
“Get it off him!” Wiggins shouted, pushing past me and moving towards where the creature had fallen on his comrade. Kane beat him to it, grabbing the slimy beast by one of its limbs and tugging it back into the water where it fell with a splash.
“It has probably killed him,” he said. “That scream had the sound of death to it.”
“Trust you to wish me the best,” came Johnson’s voice, weak but
steady. “It’s taken a blasted chunk out of me but I’m not done for yet.”
“Let me take a look,” I said, picking up the fallen lantern and holding it over Johnson so as to examine his wounds. If Watson had been with us then I have no doubt that he would have been able to perform a more thorough investigation. Even with my limited knowledge I could see that Johnson would bleed to death unless we got a tourniquet on him. I told them as much.
“We haven’t time for this!” Kane growled. “The rest of the creatures will be right behind him.”
“All the more reason to work quickly then,” I said. “We don’t leave our wounded to die, certainly not when a few weeks and a regular change of dressing would see him back on his feet again.” I like to think Watson would have been proud of my sensitivity.
“Simple as that?” Johnson asked. “Told you it weren’t nothing, didn’t I?”
“I have the very thing,” said Challenger. He dropped to his knees, swung his backpack from his shoulder and began to hack at it with a knife. In a few moments he had removed one of the leather straps that bound it shut. “Is there space to cinch that above the wound?” he asked.
“Just about,” I replied, running it around the top of his thigh and inside his crotch.
“Careful where you go strapping that, Mr Holmes,” said Johnson. “I don’t want to lose anything more precious than my leg.” He gave a chuckle that turned into a moan as I pulled the leather strap through its buckle and fixed it as tightly as I could.
“He needs taking back to the surface,” I said. “There’s no use in his continuing with us. Wiggins can take him.”
The young lad’s face fell at the idea of his leaving us, but I could
tell that his loyalty towards Johnson outweighed any argument.
“I could always come back,” he suggested, “once I’ve stashed him somewhere safe.”
I pulled him close and whispered in his ear, disguising the move with a hug. I trusted Kane didn’t know me well enough to appreciate how distasteful I find that sort of thing.
My natural inclination is simply to write down what I said to him at that point but I know that Watson would never forgive me—he does so love to leave things out to increase dramatic effect during his climaxes. It seems childish and unnecessary to me, but I will accede to his tastes as this account is, by the lion’s share, his.
I turned to Kane, curious to tell whether he had heard me. His face, however, was impossible to read.
“Let’s keep moving,” I said, pointing ahead and pushing past Kane so as to lead the way.
I gave one last glance at Wiggins, who winked at me. Then he lifted Johnson up and began to head back the way we had come.
So, our party was now two members down. It could have been worse —one of us could have been dead.
I was sure that, by leading the way, I might limit any future accidents. After all, bar Kane, I was the one who had some idea of what we were walking towards.
“We are nearly there,” he said, that growl of a voice coming from just behind me. “There is a hole in the tunnel wall just around the next bend. It used to be part of a factory I think—huge storage areas and chambers, abandoned until we came.”
“We came?” I asked. “I thought you were born down here?”
There was a slight pause. “Indeed, it was just a turn of phrase.”
He was growing less cautious now we were nearly there. I took that as a good sign. After all, it would be easier all round if we could just drop the pretence.
We turned the corner and Kane pushed past me. “I will lead,” he said. “It is difficult to find if you don’t know where it is.”
We gathered at the entrance, the hole covered by a draped length of sacking. “We are here,” said Kane. “We should enter quietly, my father may have left someone on guard. If we can sneak up on them quietly we stand a fair chance.”
“Quietly?” asked Mann. “It’s been as noisy as the Boer War down here so far.”
Kane simply stared at him so I took it upon myself to take control.
“We will do as Kane says,” I told them. “Whatever happens, stay calm.”
The time had come. I suspected I knew what would lie on the other side of that wall. I was fairly certain that I had the measure of how events would play out once we stepped into Mitchell’s lair. Now I would find out if I had been right.
One by one, we stepped beyond the sacking, entering the pitch-darkness of the room beyond. There was a smell, that sweet animal scent of the zoo. From the way the sound of our footsteps echoed I could tell the room we were entering was of a reasonable size. I knew as much when there was the sound of a struck match and the beam of a lantern shone upon us. Then another, and another, and yet one more …
We were surrounded by the beast men, holding up their lanterns and looking at us with their animal eyes.
“Ah, Holmes,” said Mitchell, still wearing his foul pig’s-head mask, “so good of you to join us.”
Kane went to stand by his master’s side.
“You really should have stayed within the safe walls of Baker Street,” Mitchell continued, his voice distorted as it echoed around the inside of that swinish cowl. “Now that you are all here I can do whatever I wish with you, my experiments can recommence with fresh supplies! You are entirely at my mercy!”
All of which, naturally came as something of a relief.
I don’t think I have ever been so disturbed as during those few hours after my capture. Through my association with Holmes I have found myself in perilous situations many times. I have been chased by a wild dog on Dartmoor, shot at by vengeful big game hunters with air rifles, threatened by Thuggee occultists and even injected by Elwood Dunfires, the notorious Babel Poisoner. For all that, I was never more aware of the fragility of my own existence than when faced with the singular madness of Albert Mitchell!
He talked at some length as we travelled in his coach, listing mankind’s crimes against nature with the fervency and imbalance that can only come from the truly lunatic.