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About the Author

Mark Gatiss is a screenwriter, director, producer and actor. He is one member of The League of Gentlemen and has written for and acted in Doctor Who, Sherlock (the latter of which he co-created with Steven Moffat along with the acclaimed miniseries Dracula) and many others.

Dedication

For Diana

“Be quiet. No weeping here. Your tears come from your eyes only; when mine come I’ll be alone”.

To my heirs

To my heirs –

I am all too conscious, as I assemble this rambling narrative, that it may prove altogether too fantastical for the reader to believe. If these pages do indeed come down to you, descendants of the Thursday line (in the confident and expectant hope that a young lady will one day accept my unworthy hand!) then I trust that you will look kindly on your ancestor and do not look upon these scribblings, instead, as pointing to any softening of the brain.

I have attempted, in a regrettably haphazard fashion, to collect into a coherent story the various accounts which began in 1893 with my unfortunate brother’s disappearance and ended in a sooty alleyway in Bradford – and the altogether more mysterious disappearance of a tall blue box. Together these journal entries, phonographic recordings, scribbled notes, eye-witness accounts and best guesses constitute what the yellow press came to call ‘The Crimson Horror’ – and its curious prequel.

There is much here that is unaccountable. Much that is baffling and strange. But though you may suspect your unfortunate relative to have been under the influence of Mr Wells’ scientific romances or, more perfidious even than sensational literature, to have been in the thrall of the Green Fairy, all that you are about to read is TRUE.

Even the sillier parts.

Jonas Thursday. Islington. 1895.

Prologue

To Madam Vastra, I am always the Woman.

Or at least I should bleeding well hope so. She has a bit of a wandering eye even beneath that heavy veil. A very beautiful, glittering reptilian eye, I might add – but a wandering one all the same.

The Crimson Horror! Blimey, yes. How could I ever forget it? I remember the case well, being as how it was the first time that the Mistress, that is Madam Vastra, entrusted me, that is Jenny Flint, with a delicate mission on me own. By then, see, she had enough faith in me to know I wouldn’t muck it up. Or hoped I wouldn’t at any rate.

Up until now, it had mostly been the three of us. Me, the Mistress and Strax but with the Mistress very much taking the lead. We’d been set up there at No. 13, Paternoster Row for quite a few years and a very cosy little situation it had become.

Madam was the lady of the house – though veiled when outside owing to, well, what she like to call her ‘striking visage’. Strax – who had a striking visage all his own – was cook and butler and made a very dapper example of the London slavvy, I must say, despite his great potato head. And me, I did for Madam Vastra – general housekeeping, laying the fire and whatnot. I also did other things – but that come rather more under the heading of pleasure than work.

When we wasn’t at home, we was off having adventures, Madam being what she privately billed herself as, the world’s only consulting reptile detective. Clients had been thin on the ground to start with but word had eventually got around that if you had some queer business that needed sorting, if the official channels and the police could provide no succour, then Madam Vastra was your woman. Or your late-Cretaceous reptilian life form whose people had been the original rulers of Earth, if you want to split hairs.

But the Crimson Horror was a matter quite unlike any other we investigated.

It really began with— oh hang on, though. No! There was another case. A case that come first! Back in 1888, before old Straxxy was with us. And we didn’t know it at the time but it was sort of connected. It was a strange business (as all the good ones are), involving some of the highest and some of the lowliest in the land. And it was the case where I first clapped me peepers on the Doctor, having only heard of him by repute, as it were. So, if you’ve a moment or two to spare and you’re tucked up in bed or by a nice blazing hearth with a glass or three of madeira, I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll fill in the bits what I wasn’t concerned with in a sort of authory way, like Conan Doyle does or Dickens did or that other one that Madam likes who was a lot odder and always poorly.

You game?

Chapter the First

‘City of Dreadful Delights’

Being the reminiscences of Miss Jenny Flint, lady’s maid of Paternoster Row, London.

The year ’88 furnished us with a series of cases of greater or lesser interest. (This is me, you see, coming over all Authory!) Spring brought us the matter of Miss Gregory’s Disgrace, and then the business of the Man with the Manganese Teeth while all through the summer we was hard at it on the curious affair of the Sentient Battenburg. After these exertions, Madam had been all for a little holiday in Margate when an evening stroll through the streets of Whitechapel changed everything.

Outside the Pomegranate Music Hall, or the ‘Old Pom’ as we always called it – a bustling, lop-sided dear of a place that occupied the corner of Newark Street and Stepney Way – posters was plastered all over the slimy brickwork. One such stood out above all –

‘CUPID’S FROLIC!’ – ‘A musical mixture.

With beautiful scenery and charming effects.’

“MISS FLORRIE BOOTH – the jolly jack tar.”

“With a little bit o’ scrimshaw in me hand”.

‘ALL-BRITANNIA APTITUDE CONTEST – at the Pomegranate Halls.

Every night at 8 under the stewardship of Mr Gideon Mortlock!’

By the merest chance, the Mistress and me happened to be walking past the Old Pom that night, strolling back towards the Underground, arm in arm, after we’d been to a meeting of the Fabians. We was full of excited chatter about the new world what we was going to help build, of the fairer and more just society that Britain would become – and of what a looker that Annie Besant was, who had been speaking with such passion at the town hall meeting. That was when we heard the cry that all people dread – unless you’re us. For this particular cry is often the call to adventure!

‘Murder! Oh Gawd, MURDER!!’

Madam turned to me and I could see her eyes gleam even through her heavy black veil. ‘Murder?’ she said.

I smiled, a little guiltily. ‘No doubt … ’orrible. Let’s have a gander. Could be a juicy one.’

Madam sighed theatrically and put a hand to her breast. ‘Ah me, there speaks the modern world.’ Then she hitched up her skirts and pulled me forward. ‘Come on then!’

The cry of ‘Murder!’ rang out again and we followed it to a small alleyway round the back of the Hall. A very young copper, with one of them smooth blushing faces that boys only ever have at that age, was standing in the shadows, his bulls-eye lamp held in one, gloved hand. A small crowd had gathered round him, including a toothless crone, who turned her wrinkled face away from whatever lurked there in the dark. And what the lamp light revealed was a corpse. A corpse without a head!

The copper looked at what his lamp revealed – turned and was nosily sick on the cobbles.

Madam and me was by his side in a moment. ‘My dear fellow,’ said Madam. ‘You do look peaky. Allow us to be of service.’ She turned to me. ‘Look after the officer, would you, my dear?’

‘Very kind of you, miss, I’m sure,’ said the lad ‘… but I’m quite recovered now.’

Nevertheless, I dutifully took him to one side, all caring and solicitous-like – so that Madam could have a good shufty at the body.

’I suppose his head must be around here somewhere,’ I heard Madam mutter, then she bent down and seemed to take something from the corpse’s loud, checked suit.

‘’Ere!’ said the copper. ‘You shouldn’t be interfering with—’

Madam prodded the corpse with her cane and blood fountained messily from the severed neck. The copper promptly spilled his guts again.

‘Well, good night, Officer,’ said Madam, turning away. ‘Hope you get your man.’ She winked at me – and I took the copper’s arm.

‘Come on, love,’ I said to the poor kid. ‘I’ll sort you out. You know, I thought you boys went round in pairs?’

‘Yes,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘Gerald usually does this with me but he’s poorly … ’

Ten minutes or so later, I met Madam on the street corner. ‘Well?’

For answer she unfolded her gloved hand, revealing a screw of bloodied paper. ‘Got this from the corpse’s pocket,’ she whispered.

I flattened it out. On it was scrawled a bold message:

‘MORTLOCK IS NOT WHAT HE SEEMS’

*

The next night found us at the Pom itself, having purchased two thruppenny tickets for the main event. The whole place was humming with life, a blur of light and colour and laughter and stray fights, like one of them pictures by Sickert, heaving with patrons, right up to the Gods, singing their lungs out, spitting and hawking and chucking peanuts across the aisles at each other. Drink was plentiful, guzzled down from flat brown bottles and a man with a sloshing tin-can roamed round the place crying ‘Portaaaaar! Portaaar!’ Lots of the crowd was waving home-made banners proclaiming ‘The best of luck to Mr Winthrop!’, ‘We love you, Anne!’, ‘Huzzah for the Boneless Wonder!’ and things like that. As the orchestra tuned up in the pit the crowd yelled, ‘Now then, you cat-gut scrapers! Let’s have a ha’p’orth of liveliness!’

On stage, as we come in, a Chinese knife-throwing act was taking a bow. There was whoops of appreciation and applause and as we pushed our way past the well-oiled patrons, the ruddy-faced, one-armed Chairman, Billy Skittles – the brass buttons on his old, red soldiering coat polished to buggery – staggered to his feet in his little box by the side of the stage and banged his gavel. Behind him was a painted back-drop proclaiming ‘THE ALL-BRITANNIA APTITUDE CONTEST’.

‘Pete and his Tongs, ladies and gentlemen! All the way from the H’imperial Palace at Peking! Via Camden Town, that is!’

The boozy crowd laughed.

‘Ave I seen anyfink so h’illustrious? Never in all my puff!’ continued Billy. ‘Not since the Battle of Inkerman! Inkerman where I lost this!’ Here he patted his empty sleeve. ‘Which ’as left me feeling … ’

‘ALL RIGHT DOWN ONE SIDE!’ joined in the crowd.

Old Billy beamed at this, then turned to the Royal Box (or what would have been the Royal Box had not the Old Pom been such a heinous dive). ‘Now then, and what did our wenerable judges make of them, eh?’

We all looked up. Seated in the box was three persons. One was a ginger Irishman. The second, a pretty but sort of expressionless woman on the wrong side of forty. The third was a dark-haired, glowering man with huge black moustaches.

‘Pete and ’is Tongs,’ continued Billy Skittles. ‘Mr O’Kane, sir?’

The Irishman rubbed his bristly red chin and grinned. ‘Oh I loved them. LOVED THEM! I’d say I loved them a hundred and fifty billion per cent. No, two hundred and fifty billion—’

‘Thank you!’ cried Billy, cutting him off. ‘Miss Polly?’

The woman seemed about to speak but her creaseless face remained unchanged. At last, she stuck two thumbs up. The crowd cheered. Madam and me joined in.

Then Billy turned to the last judge. ‘And finally … Mr Mortlock?’ Madam and me exchanged a glance.

But this cove remained silent. The crowd murmured expectantly as he stroked his luxuriant moustaches like a villain in a melodrama.

‘I’m afraid … ’

The audience groaned in despair.

‘… you won’t be … ’

Deeper groans!

‘… disappointed to learn … ’

Hope in our breasts!

‘… that you’re going through … ’

Deep joy!

‘… to the stage door … ’

No!

‘… to take a cab …’

Now we was baffled.

‘… to go around the block – and then join the others on stage in the final of the All-Britannia Aptitude Contest!’

Everyone cheered. We joined in. You couldn’t help getting swept up in it all, see.

Billy banged his gavel for a bit of hush and gripped his lapel. ‘Capital! Capital! Now then – really, listen – we his spoiling you – the time ’as come, my friends! Her what you has hall taken to your ’earts and then some! Have I seen ’er like? Not since Inkerman, where I got this ’ere stump, no indeed!’

The audience began to shush each other, thrilled with expectation. Billy Skittles cleared his throat and bellowed: ‘The Siren of Cripplegate herself. Miss … Anne … Dante!!’

At this pronouncement, silence fell like snow. And in that moment, a beautiful, crystal clear voice rose from nowhere. It was singing some opera or other and I turned to Madam, as I often do, for elucidation. ‘O Mio Bambino Caro,’ she breathed, closing her eyes in joy. The sound was simply incredible. Like listening to a frozen white waterfall tinkling into life. As pure and wonderful as you could possibly imagine.

And then the singer herself swept on-stage; a stunning brunette, with an impish look, dressed in a flowing white gown, what you might imagine on an angel. The whole theatre was filled with her fantastic, swooping voice as though she was spinning something delicate and fragile as lace in the air over our heads.

At last, she reached the end of her aria (that’s what Madam says such tunes is called) and the crowd went crazy. Stamping their feet and applauding like the Queen herself had come on, though her Majesty never got such a boisterous hat-tip as the crowd at the Old Pom gave, I’ll wager. Miss Dante looked very pleased, as well she might, and gave a neat little curtsey and a cheeky little smile before dashing off stage left.

‘What talent! What flair!’ cried Billy Skittles. ‘But will this hand-maiden of Terpsichore make it through to the grand final? Only our judges can decide … ’

I looked once again at the box where Mr O’Kane, Miss Dolly and Mr Mortlock was gazing down, like a jury at some weird Alice in Wonderland trial. Getting to their feet, the judges stood up and began to file out of the Royal Box. Evidently it was the interval.

‘But first, a little treat!’ cried Billy. ‘You loved ’em last year! You’ll love ’em all over again! I give you, last year’s winners: the sensational “Dee-Vertiss-Mont”!’

There was a blast of brass from the pit and a troop of strapping Acrobats began to tumble and roll onto the stage in a blur of pink tights and fleshings. Two trapeze-swings dropped from the flys.

Madam turned to me and whispered in my ear. ‘As arranged then, my dear? I’ll make my way backstage. You stay here and keep an eye on things.’

‘OK.’

Though what exactly I was meant to keep me eye on other than a lot of very athletic lads

in almost the altogether, I don’t know.

There was a drum roll and one of the Acrobats – a lithe boy with tumbling golden curls – jumped on board the first hanging swing, swooping dangerously back and forth across the stage.

He was then immediately joined by another one – a great big fella with curved moustaches like a circus strong man and thighs you’d be hard pushed to get both hands around – swinging in the opposite direction. We all gasped as the two Acrobats flung themselves from the safety of their swings, crossing in mid-air and then deftly landing on the opposite trapeze.

We’d only just recovered from this display when, suddenly, a woman screamed!

I looked up again. Someone had tumbled from the flys!

It was a fella by the look of it – and he landed heavily on a sand-bag, suspended from the end of a rope. I couldn’t make out much of him – just a tweedy jacket and narrow trousers but, at once, the rope he dangled on began to swing dangerously back and forth, like a huge pendulum.

The fella, whoever he was, clung on for dear life. Then there was a tearing sound as his boot caught on the sandbag and the contents began to drizzle out across the stage. Someone else shrieked at this new development. We all knew what it meant. As the sand ran out, so did the chump’s best means of staying on the rope!

The curly haired Acrobat then swung, literally, into action. Manoeuvring to hang by his feet, he sent his trapeze sailing towards the stranded fella – stretching out his muscly arms to catch him. He swooped towards the stranded chap, who kept one hand clinging to the rope then reached out the other towards the Acrobat.

Their fingers almost touched …

Almost.

We all gasped. This was even better than the acts what went before!

But they didn’t quite make it. The two fellas’ outstretched fingers remained tantalising inches apart. Curly Hair swung back the way he’d come and the audience groaned. More sand spilled to the stage. The fella’s grip on the rope slackened.

Now the second Acrobat did his stuff – but this time he gripped onto the trapeze with his hands and splayed out his massive long legs, the muscles bulging like cantaloupes in his pink tights, to catch the poor unfortunate who was hanging by a thread. Big Thighs opened and closed his lallies like a pair of scissors and nodded to the man, reassuringly, as if to say, ‘I’ll catch you!’

As the last of the sand tumbled out, the stranded fella carried the momentum of his rope towards Big Thighs – and hurled himself into the embrace of his saviour’s legs!

We all ‘ooohed’ and ‘aaahed’ as the fella and the Acrobat swung back and forth, the fella clinging onto his rescuer’s thighs in the sort of arrangement I’d only previously seen in private photographic displays.

Quick as a flash, Curly Hair called down to his tumbling pals on stage and, with whoops and hollers, they began to assemble themselves into a human pyramid! In the blink of an eye, they had formed a great, tottering mountain of biceps and straining calves. Curly Hair lowered himself from the trapeze and took his place at the top of the human pyramid, arms outstretched, ready to catch the dangling bloke above.

The crowd was totally hushed as, with perfect precision, Big Thighs let the fella slide gently down his legs – hand over hand – and onto the shoulders of his pal Curly Hair below.

For a moment, the fella stood there in triumph at the apex of the pyramid, grinning like an idiot, his glossy hair shining in the limelight. The crowed went crackers. Then his ankles began to wobble.

Curly Hair clasped his hand around the fella’s booted shins to steady him –

– but it was too late. The pyramid began to totter and, with a great cry, the daft bloke fell over the acrobats, landing with an ungainly thump on the stage.

A great press of people rushed forward onto the stage and Billy Skittles come out from his little box to usher us back.

‘Please! Please! Make room! Make room! This ain’t Balaclava!’ he protested.

I’d like to say the mob was concerned for the chap’s welfare but it was just as likely they wanted to see if he’d ended up a pile of brains and shattered cartilage on the bare boards.

The tweedy fella looked OK, if a bit winded. He was a very striking looking cove, with sparkling little eyes and a long face that put me in mind of a handsome horse. His dicky bow had come undone and he sat up, looking a bit dazed.

I went to help him up but suddenly another arm shot out in my place. It belonged to Madam, standing by my side, helping the stranger to his feet and lifting her veil just a fraction.

‘Doctor!’ she cried.

He peered at her and a huge grin split his face. ‘Vastra!’ The fella re-tied his bow tie and grinned. ‘This is a bit of luck!’

Disappointed that he had survived, the crowd began to melt away.

‘This,’ said Madam, laying a gentle hand on my arm, ‘is Miss Jenny Flint.’

The Doctor leapt to his feet and waved a long, bony hand at me. ‘Hello! Lovely to meet you!’ he said, then put his arm round Madam’s shoulder and under the gaggle of the remaining mob whispered, conspiratorial-like: ‘There’s something very funny going in this theatre.’

Chapter the Second

‘Mr Gideon Mortlock Presents Himself’

Madam had told me all about the Doctor of course. How he’d found her after she’d been disturbed from her slumbers by workmen digging a new extension to the Underground. How he’d convinced her that she really didn’t need to wreak revenge on us ‘upstart apes’ for taking away her world and that she might find life in London not too bad after all. And so it had proved, her taking to it like an ichthyosaur to water – so to speak. After that, they’d been in a number of scrapes together. I recall how, one summer evening, Madam had pulled out a great sheaf of papers from her travelling trunk and took me breathlessly through some of them. ‘The Affair of the Cringing Jesuit’. ‘The Matter of the Mahogany Wasp’. ‘The Curious Case of the Inconsequential Widow’. ‘Now there was an adventure!’ breathed Madam, the firelight sparkling in her eyes. ‘Six months of hard work from Scotland to Ecuador – and an alien consciousness at its evil heart!’

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