Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (15 page)

Robbed of its puppet, the King had no way to converse. Its eyes bulged in mute, frustrated fury.

‘Your highness, you are captured!’ I told it. ‘You will surrender yourself to my authority.’

The spell of the crystal egg was broken. A last unsteady image held for a few moments, then bright red light replaced the vista of Mars. The whirring sped up after the picture was lost. Something flapped loosely inside the telescope before it shut off entirely.

Mrs H. returned, broom over her shoulder, and the puppet’s hood in her grip. She reported that she had seen the puppet – a demented tramp, she believed – hightailing it down the drive. He was unimportant, I knew. No more than a set of vocal chords.

Polly was recovered from her upright faint, but still in a dazed state. She did not relish the memory of communion with the creature which lay dead in a jumble in the fireplace. All she could say was that its touch was slimy and sharp. I suggested a dose of Dr Tirmoary’s, but she turned it down – she has promised her mother not to have truck with such potions, apparently. Mrs H. similarly passed up the opportunity to taste her own medicine, but I felt another dose would be restorative and invigorating. I am becoming quite partial to its effects. A certain gaiety is upon me after each infusion. Of course, I am in a heightened state of excitement just now, in the midst of these great events.

War is over before it is begun! I have captured the Marsian King!

Also, I have one of the copper tubes. A gun of Mars. I must find out how the hot-beam works. The burned patch on my study wall has a chemical smell, as if some reactive compound were smeared on the paper and left to ignite – but I sense the truth of the process is to do with transforming light into heat. I shall experiment with this device in safer, less expensively decorated premises.

The King squirms and writhes in his metal shell. The three legs are wired together, so it may not ‘walk’ free.

I have communicated by telegram with the Royal Society, setting a date three days hence for my Marsian lecture. I shall use the crystal egg and display the terrain and inhabitants of the Red Planet to those who would call themselves my scientific peers. I shall demonstrate the use of the copper tube – maybe singe the trousers of some of my more disbelieving colleagues, to make a point. Then, as the crowning moment, I shall present the King of Mars!

Surely, ennoblement must follow. I shall be Lord Flamsteed of Mars!

Considered congress with Mrs H. and/or Polly, but was persuaded instead to cap off the evening with another infusion of good old Dr Tirmoary’s.

I am Conqueror of Mars!

Pah! Ever read such rot, eh? Believe me, those were the
interesting
pages. The rest of Stent’s journal is fit only to start fires. His entries are stuffed with menus and ‘congresses’ and remarks about how brilliant, acclaimed, well loved and admirable he is. By my count, the Astronomer Royal penned 17,000 heated words about a controversial boot-scraper installed, removed, installed again, relocated by six inches and finally removed from outside the servants’ door at Flamsteed House.

How did I get hold of the journal? Stole it, of course.

By pasting in these pages, I’ve saved myself a deal of penwork, which is all to the good. More time down the pub, rather than filling up an exercise book with this scribble.

Of course, you knew me at once when I turned up in Stent’s narrative – doing my old ‘madman’ act, which has proved persuasive in many a tight spot. When I start frothing and raving, you wouldn’t want to be around. Avoided being fed to crocodiles by throwing a similar wobbly. The queer... halting... voice... took more effort, and Moriarty had to coach us – me, PCP, Polly – in the proper hollow tones. We used Punch and Judy swizzles, as well.
That’s the way to do it!

As for the rest of it, the Professor only let us into as much of his grand scheme as he deemed necessary. Like his imaginary Squid King, Moriarty puppeteered his subjects, speaking words through us, chivvying Stent along until the fool fancied himself Conqueror of Mars. Of course, Ogilvy didn’t know how flammable the gunk poured on his jacket really was. The cretin hopped around outside Flamsteed House, on fire from head to foot, until a bucket of merciful water was sloshed over him. By then, he was almost in as poor shape as the ash and cinder outline laid out on the gravel to represent his incinerated remains. Threw a sulk about that, he did. Still, can’t make an omelette and all that. In Ogilvy’s case, it’s true. He lost the use of his hands and so literally can’t make an omelette or perform many other everyday tasks. That’s what you get for volunteering.

I’ve rarely had cause to remark upon Professor Moriarty’s genius for disguise. There’s good reason for that. Anyone less wholly shoved up his own bum than Sir Nevil Stent would have seen through Moriarty’s beards and hoods and skullcaps and spectacles in a trice. That snake-oscillation mannerism always gave him away. He didn’t list card-sharping among his favoured crimes, or he’d have known about ‘tells’ and taken steps to suppress his. On one occasion, I tried to raise the matter in as tactful a fashion as possible, venturing to suggest that the Professor moderate his ‘cobra-neck tell’ when incognito.

‘What are you talking about, Moran? Have you been at the
diacetylmorphine hydrochloride
again?’

There was no sense in pressing the matter further. Genius or no, Moriarty truly didn’t know about the thing he did with his neck. I wondered if he was unconsciously trying to make it difficult for the hangman. Probably not. It was just a habit. Other men scratch their balls, fiddle with their watch chains or chew their moustaches. That’s when it’s a good time to double up, throw the mortgage into the pot and slide an ace out of your cuff.

Nevertheless, Moriarty acquitted himself adequately in the multiple roles of ‘C., Cave’, filthy shopkeeper, ‘long-necked cabbie’, dispenser of jovially ominous sentiments, and ‘Hooded Man of Mystery’, mouth-piece of Martian Royalty. (Stent never did persuade anyone else to say ‘Marsian’.) As you can tell from the diary, the worthy Mrs Halifax, pouting Polly, Italian Joe (Signor Galvani), PCP and some nobly self-sacrificing specimens of
vampyroteuthis infernalis
also strutted and fret their weary hours on the stage.

It’s a shame there wasn’t any money in it. The whole palaver cost the Firm a great deal, exhausting the proceeds of five good-sized blags, and sinking Moriarty into debts we had to work hard to pay off. I know we have a reputation as rotters and crooks and all, but it doesn’t do to default on payments owed someone who likes to be called the Lord of Strange Deaths. Hellish vampire squid wouldn’t have been the half of it.

For the Prof, the pay-off came at Stent’s lecture.

This time, the Royal Astronomical Society wasn’t a grand enough platform for Sir Nevil, but we were back in Burlington House. The edifice is also HQ of
the
Royal Society, a body so sniffily superior it feels it doesn’t even need to give you the full name – which, as it happens, is The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge – when you are expected to prostrate yourself before the hallowed altars of high science and furthermore purchase an illustrated souvenir program booklet to memorialise the hours you spent snoozing through a lecture. Chairman at the time of these occurrences was Thomas Henry Huxley, and you know what the Astronomer Royal thought
of him.
I don’t doubt Huxley thought the same right back at Stent, who – for reasons which by now must be glaring – was not as popular with the general community of test-tube sniffers and puppy-vivisectors as he was with his home crowd of stargazing toadies.

Again, we took our seats.
Sans
disguises, on the assumption Stent wouldn’t notice us in the crowd – at least, not until the crucial moment. The hall was packed, as if word had leaked out that Lola Montez would be tightrope-walking nude over the audience while Jenny Lind sang all eighty-six verses of‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’. Every branch of science was represented, for Stent had announced his lecture would radically affect all of them equally. A lot of textbooks would need revising (or burning) after this one, the rumour-mill insisted. To me, the mob looked like an unkempt crowd of smelly schoolmasters on a spree, but the Prof clucked and tutted to himself, listing the great names who had shown up. Besides our home-grown brainboxes, there were yanks, frogs, krauts, eye-ties, dressed-up natives from far-flung lands and an authentic Belgian – all trailing more degrees, honours, doctorates and professorships than you could shake a stick at. It would have been humbling if they weren’t mostly aged and chalk-covered. We had salted the room with a few of our own fellahs, who carried hat boxes or picnic hampers and were a bit fidgety in clean, respectable clothes. A squeaky-voiced draper’s clerk tried to squeeze in on a platform ticket, but was properly ejected for being a lower-class bounder.
^[7]

This time, Stent went for dramatic effect.

The house lights dimmed, and a spot came up on the lectern. The Conqueror of Mars posed dramatically in a vestment-like long white coat.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘we are not alone...’

He whipped a dust cloth from the ‘reflecting telescope’ which incorporated the ‘crystal egg’. In the end, Polly had been forced to draw him a picture to show how she had ‘accidentally’ made it work. Between shows, someone had to reset or replace the strip of exposures inside the box and put in a new incandescent bulb – which meant getting Stent away from his toy. Fortunately, he’d quite a nose for Dr Tirmoary’s Infusions and was often in a daze.

‘I give you... the Planet Mars!’

Stent toggled a lever and electric current made a motor grind. Red images were cast on a white board erected on the platform. Squid crawled across a sandbox, gagging for water. There were gasps of awe, though a few coughs of scepticism too. A few sequences wound backwards, which gave an eerie, unnatural effect – as if pictures that moved weren’t unnatural enough.

I’d seen some of these views ‘taken’ by Mr Paul A. Robert of Brighton. Urchin assistants had to hand-colour the scenes, picture by picture. Robert has a glass-roofed studio under construction on the Downs. I had to be blindfolded and driven up and around country lanes before visiting it because he fears some Yankee swine is out to poach the process and present it as his own invention. Good luck to him, I say. Apart from making a fool of the Astronomer Royal, all Robert’s whateveroscope is good for is giving anyone who stares too long at the stuttering pictures a blinding headache. There was still that damned whirring and flapping as exposures passed in front of the incandescent. The bloody racket is why Robert’s Box Pictures in Motion will never ‘catch on’, if you ask me. They’ll never replace the stereopticon.
^[8]

After the images from the crystal egg passed, Stent was assailed by questions. Some were about the creatures, but most were about Robert’s Box – which several in the audience had heard of before. One or two had even seen the thing demonstrated while the inventor was soliciting funds for development of his annoying wonder of the age. When Stent repeated his assertion that the Box was a ‘reflecting telescope’, someone called him a ‘blithering idiot’. He looked displeased. Several helpful souls shouted out the principles on which the Box worked. A couple of young fellahs got into a heated argument about ‘persistence of vision’ and ‘Muybridge strips’. No one cared much about
what
they had seen (it could have been a chuffing train or a couple snogging, for all they cared) but many were intrigued by the process whereby moving images were cast on a board. Stent had caused a sensation, but not the way he expected.

Moriarty smiled to himself.

Seeing things not going his way, Sir Nevil hastened on to what would have been his grand finale.

‘Sirs, men from Mars are among us! They have been here quite some time!’

Hoots, whistles, laughs.

Stent lifted another dust cloth from an exhibit.

‘This is the King of Mars,’ he announced.

There was sudden hush. The window in the bell had a magnifying effect, and the hideous red face of the creature trapped inside loomed. The buccal orifice clacked angrily.

For a moment, everyone was struck quiet and frozen. Swollen alien eyes, set in angry red facial frills, seemed to range over the assembled scientific multitudes, as if ready to direct a ‘hot beam’ across their ranks and wipe out the great minds of Earth before calling down a sky-fleet of bloodthirsty horrors. Red tentacles writhed, ready to crush human resistance before hauling up the Martian standard on the blackened ruins of Burlington House.

The Robert’s Box was forgotten, and this new horror held the attention.

Stent, seeming to sense he was on the point of winning a few converts, radiated a certain smugness, as his thick hide recovered from the earlier pinpricks. His shirt front puffed out a bit, like a squid rising above its spawning depth, and he allowed himself to look on the audience with his old superior attitude. If this King of Mars could cow the Royal Society, then Stent might transfer his allegiance from the lesser, terrestrial monarch he had hitherto served. If his mighty brain went unappreciated on this poor planet, then perhaps he should look elsewhere for patronage...

Then, just as Stent was on the point of recapturing his audience, the Professor stood up and shouted, ‘Where’s his party hat?’

Stent was horror-struck at the sight of an enemy he’d thought bested. His mood turned. For a moment, I assumed he’d seen through the whole business and understood how he’d been gulled, but it was a passing doubt. The Astronomer Royal remained firm in his convictions. He believed what Moriarty had made him believe.

‘I insist,’ he said, holding up a copper tube, ‘this is a visitor from another world.’

Seconds ago, he had been taken at his word. Now, the sceptics and rationalists – for is this not an age of doubt? – were inclined to get close to the old gift horse and pay close attention to his choppers.