Snipers Aren't Tigers, and if They Were, I Wouldn't Be One of Them
Seven years ago, Jim placed an advertisement in a dismal rag of no importance.
I am looking for a man who will do anything, it said. Preferably in silence. He went on to mention other desirable attributes: an open schedule, a sliding moral scale, and proficiency with firearms.
Most of the applicants were insufferably dull; the sort of men that thought weekends in the TA or ownership of a particularly vicious dog might put them in the running. Sadly, some of the least fit amongst them also felt the need to enclose photographs of a startlingly personal nature. By this point, Jim had dismissed petty blackmail as unworthy of his considerable abilities, so he quickly banished these to the cleansing fires of the electronic bin.
It was quite by accident, then, that he happened to encounter precisely the man he was looking for in an antiquarian booksellers on Fulham Road one rainy Tuesday.
At the time, Sebastian Moran was leafing through an early Jane's Guns. This was the first thing Jim noticed. He was tall (taller than Jim, at any rate), dressed in practical (unfashionable!) clothes, and old broken-down combat boots. His skin was the brown that comes of living under a merciless desert sun, and when he looked up from his book, his eyes were very green indeed.
Jim asked him for the time. A bit obvious, but what the hell.
Sebastian's voice was public school, but in a flat, whispered sort of way that Jim found strangely pleasing. More pleasing still was the fact that he didn't have to refer to a watch to provide the correct time.
Jim wandered around the shop for a bit after this, secretly stealing glances at the intriguing stranger and pretending to an interest in old land surveys that was frankly rather unbelievable. After some time, Sebastian Moran approached the bookseller with the following items:
The edition of Jane's he'd been looking at earlier
Une Saison En Enfer
A green leather-bound book entitled Trailing the Tiger
It was this last item that was later to be the source of much confusion.
For the moment, Jim confined himself to remarking upon the startling and unique vulgarity of Arthur Rimbaud. He did this in French. When Sebastian Moran answered him in grammatically correct (if oddly accented) kind, Jim invited him to have coffee. He very nearly added, "Not like that," but remembered that unasked-for protestations to the contrary tended to mean that one's interest was, in fact, very much like that. And really, Jim was in the market for an employee, not a complicated shag.
Sebastian, it seemed, did not drink coffee, but he did drink milk. Odd, but scarcely important. Jim rattled off his observations about the man (particularly his years of military service and the scar over his left eyebrow), and concluded with a question: Are you looking for a job?
As luck would have it, he was.
Jim suggested a number of dangerous scenarios and criminal activities, and was pleased to see that Sebastian Moran was entirely amenable to these propositions. He was also, it seemed, rather good with explosives. Jim offered him a competitive wage, lodging, and all the guns and books a man could want.
He couldn't resist concluding the meeting with a remark about tigers. Sebastian said, "I killed one once." What he should have said was, I sacrificed it to my nameless appetites.
Their partnership was brilliant, bathed in blood and magnificent efficiency. Sebastian's skill with a gun was unparalleled, and his disregard for common moral standards deliciously convenient. Jim particularly enjoyed the man's calm acceptance of his most capricious demands and his competency with tea preparation. Over the years, Jim developed a tendency to rib him shamelessly about tigers. This appeared to ripple his uncanny calm like nothing else.
One day the two found themselves in a public pool. Jim was engaged in a complicated battle of wits with Sherlock Holmes, renowned consulting detective. It was still in the planning stages, but he hoped to draw him into a deadly confrontation over the Carl Powers affair. The pool would make a fantastic stage for his little drama.
At the same time, Jim found himself haunted by a recent series of photographs that had emerged on the Internet, most of them captioned. They involved a snarling tiger plunging into water after a bit of meat, its face humorously distorted by motion and pressure. And because Jim was bored, he decided to do something rash.
Sebastian had been characteristically taciturn all day. Because Jim was the sort of man who could never resist poking an anthill, he had managed to refer to him as "Tiger Boy" at least seven times since lunch. With a great deal of cunning, he let his rather expensive watch fall into the pool under the pretence of checking the water temperature.
"Could you get that?" the Irishman drawled. "Only this suit is terribly expensive, and I've never been one for swimming."
Sebastian looked at him with unearthly feline eyes and said, "I'd really rather not."
"Afraid to get your whiskers wet?" Jim asked, in one of his better mocking tones.
"No."
"You can swim, can't you?"
"Of course I can. Don't be ridiculous."
"Well, Sebastian, it would be a shame if I had to give that lovely new L96A1 to someone else." This was a bit unfair.
"I'm the only one who would do it justice," Moran said quietly.
"Not to mention the first edition Coleridge I've just located. Rime of the Ancient Mariner, leather bound and illustrated."
This was it. Jim prided himself on recognising (and exploiting) his employees' deepest desires. It was both a talent and a hobby.
Sebastian Moran knelt and unlaced his boots. "I can't be held accountable for the consequences," he said slowly.
"Whatever. Just do it," Jim said, preparing the camera on his mobile. This was going to be insanely funny after he ran it through Photoshop and posted it on his blog. He took a moment to admire his henchman as he stood poised on the brink of the pool, shirtless and toned. Not like that, mind you. That would be ridiculous.
"If I must, I must," Sebastian said, and dove.
What happened next was extremely confusing. Later, Jim remembered lightning flashes, chanting in eldritch voices, and the distinct impression that the pool had somehow cracked to reveal a sort of deep-sea trench. Dark and improbable shapes squirmed beneath the surface of the water, and merciless stars roiled in the heavens.
Sebastian had become something else, something grotesque and eerily beautiful, upon contact with the water.
Jim dropped his phone, all photographic intent forgotten. He found his lips struggling around foreign, improbably structured syllables. He felt compelled to make sacrifice, to tear open his own flesh in supplication.
Being Jim Moriarty, he snapped out of it.
Gazing upon Sebastian's strangely altered visage and shocking array of tentacular appendages, he said "How many guns can you fire simultaneously with those?"
As it turned out, the answer was astonishing...and really rather useful.
Notes:
There was a fantastic animated gif on Tumblr that someone had made of Sebastian Moran with octopus arms. This was meant to explain how there managed to be so many red dots in the Great Game pool scene. I can't find the link, unfortunately, so if you know where it is, let me know.
Really, it was a short leap to go Lovecraftian on it.
I am having a laugh at the expense of the counter-fanon version of Sebastian Moran I created for my story, Fearful Symmetry. Hence the poetry.
Finally, I am going to assign blame for this to scuttlesworth, who wrote to tell me that this was one of the story titles that needed to be made real. Here you are! I regret surprisingly little.