“Dear God!” exclaimed Benson. “You told me you'd destroyed this!”

     The manservant had finished his duties in the kitchen. He'd been helping the cook and her assistant clean the pots and cutlery from the household's morning breakfast, a breakfast they shared with their employer. It was a habit that Sebastian Gloom knew was frowned upon by the upper classes but which he insisted upon nonetheless, rejecting vehemently the notion that the company of any person, no matter how low their social station, was beneath him. Also, those whose company society maintained would be more fitting for him tended to avoid him because of his various physical ailments.

     Gloom needed human companionship as much as any other man, though, and so by necessity chose the company of those who did not have the option of avoiding him. The staff seemed to enjoy his company, though, even though they tended to be tense and apprehensive as they sat around the large, oaken table. They were still afraid that he might be as offended as any other member of the gentry by a careless word, even though several years of his company ought to have disabused them of this notion.

     Benson had then spent an hour in the basement laboratory cleaning up and organising the tools and equipment with which his master occasionally liked to amuse himself. He had acquired the corpse of a werewolf just a few days beforehand, shot dead by members of the Church's monster hunting squad, and Gloom had spent the previous afternoon dissecting it.

     Now, though, his duties accomplished for the time being, he had returned to his master to see if there was anything else he required of him for the moment. If not, Benson was looking forward to spending an hour or two with friends and colleagues in the Manchester Volunteers; a group of stout fellows who patrolled the streets at night on the hunt for ravishers and muggers with the grudging acquiescence of the local police. Gloom occasionally had need of their assistance on some of his more physically demanding cases and so it was important to remain on friendly and familiar terms with them, and Benson enjoyed their company anyway.

     Sebastian Gloom was in his study, sitting in his wheelchair in front of the huge oaken table upon which lay a collection of old books that he was studying by the light of an electric candle. He smiled at the look of shocked betrayal on the face of his manservant. “You worry too much, my friend,” he chided with his whisperingly soft voice. There were dark rings under his eyes, though, and a slight tremble in his hands where he gripped his favourite ivory fountain pen, so wrong for someone still in their early thirties. "It's not the church that'll finish me off."

     Benson scowled at the sight of three pages of hand written notes beside him. Clearly his master had been working for some time. "No, you'll finish yourself off," he said. "You'll exhaust yourself to death." He picked up the sheath of papers Gloom had been studying and cast his eyes across them for a moment before dropping them again as if they were fouled with some vile putresdence. "But this doesn't help."

     “The gospel of Judas,” agreed Sebastian Gloom. “A controversial character, it is true, but think how different history would have been without him. I believe he was telling the truth, that he was indeed acting on the express instructions of Christ. The other apostles knew nothing of this, of course. Their reactions to the betrayal had to be genuine or the Romans would not have believed them.”

     “The church will kill you if they find out you've got this. They have people who ‘take care' of those they don't like. The idea that God manipulated mankind, emotional blackmail. My son died for you. Now you owe me. They would find the very suggestion hateful.”

     “Christ knew he would be resurrected in three days. He told Judas, that was the only reason he agreed to the plan. Christ didn't give his life, he gave his weekend, and all so that he could make people feel guilty enough to follow him.”

     “You still don't think he died to save us from our sins, then.” A grin forced its way onto his face despite his efforts to remain stern. They'd had similar conversations so many times before.

     “I still don't see the connection. How does his dying save us from sin? Where’s the cause and effect? If God wants to forgive us our sins, what's stopping him? Why does someone have to die? It just makes no sense to me. I thought for a while that his capture and execution was unexpected and unplanned, that the whole ‘he died for our sins’ thing was a face saving exercise on the part of his followers. This manuscript has forced me to amend my views, though. The worship of Jehovah was in decline. Other religions were flourishing. God needed a major stunt to restore his pre-eminence.”

     “How sure are you that it’s genuine? Could it be some elaborate forgery?”

     “I don't believe so. I took some of the less controversial pages to an expert. He says it’s probably genuine, and I think he's right.”

     “It's just too dangerous. Let me destroy it.” Benson took it towards the fire burning in the grate behind him.

     “No!” cried Sebastian Gloom, and he was then doubled over by a fit of coughing. Benson hurried back to him but he was already recovering, although the handkerchief he was holding to his lips was stained with flecks of blood. “Let me decide what is too dangerous and what is not. Put it back in its folder, if you would be so kind.”

     Benson reluctantly did so. “I'd like a cup of my herbal tea," Gloom then said. “Take me through to the sitting room, please, and bring it to me when it's ready."

     Still scowling his disapproval, Benson took the handles of the wheelchair and gently pushed Gloom out of the room. Outside was the main hall, most of which was still occupied by the huge skeleton of a ponderous plant eating dinosaur with ferocious horns on its head. Once, the building in which Sebastian Gloom resided had been a small museum owned by a man with more property than money and willing to exchange the one for the other, and it still amused Benson that his employer chose a place like this, rather than a normal apartment, for his home.

     The dinosaur was too large to move, and having no other space large enough to contain it, the museum's former owner, Charles William Trent, had decided to simply leave it there. Sebastian Gloom could have disposed of it, if he’d wanted, or charged Mr Trent for storage of the huge creature, but he couldn't be bothered to do either. He had many more urgent matters demanding his attention, and so there it remained and there it was likely to remain for ever after, unless Mr Trent should one day come back to collect it.

     Benson was glad the creature was still there. He'd fallen in love with it upon first sight and always greeted it upon entering the building, as if it was one of Sebastian Gloom's staff. He paused a moment beside it, wondering what it must have looked like in life and whether it had once been possible for men to ride upon it like a horse. He contemplated the fact that, if not for the great flood, and if it hadn't been loo large and powerful to be allowed upon the Ark, creatures like it might still roam the world today. He stroked the bones as he passed, dry and cracked after thousands of years buried in river mud and thirty years in the building’s dry air, then resumed pushing the wheelchair deeper into the building.

     The sitting room was luxuriously furnished with bookshelves, oaken panelling on the walls and chairs with plush velvet cushions. Benson carefully lifted his frail employer into his favourite leather armchair, whereupon Gloom immediately reached for one of the newspapers that sat on the coffee table beside him.

     "Anything interesting in the news today?" he muttered to himself as he turned the huge, rustling sheets. "It's funny. When your life contains ghosts, vampires, poltergeists and cases of demonic possession, you'd think it would be good to go through a quiet patch. Nothing but the mundane worries of a normal life. After a while, though, it gets to be so boring and empty. I find myself longing for something occult and interesting. A good case of lycanthropy, perhaps, or a witch or two. We haven't had one of those for a few years."

     "I could manage the mundane, normal life for a little while longer, I think," Benson replied.

     Gloom chuckled in reply. "Let's see. Trouble in Africa. You don't get much more boring and normal than that. There's been a small battle in the American colonies. Brigadier Burton is putting down a minor uprising." He turned a page. "Cavendish, the great engineer and explorer, has reached the southern tip of Borneo in his airship “The Empress of India” and the wife of a whig politician, described as a woman of unimpeachable character and reputation, has been assaulted by burglars ransacking the servants quarters of her London house."

     "Nothing occult, then," said Benson with some relief.

     "Not so far, but I've only scanned the headlines. Let's see what a more thorough perusal reveals."

     "In the meantime I'll go get your tea."

     "Thank you, Benson."

     Benson nodded and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

     Before he could reach the kitchen, though, there was a knock on the front door and he went to answer it. Benson recognised the man standing on the threshold and his hand leapt instinctively for the small, single shot pistol he wore discretely in a belt holster. Their visitor already had his weapon in his hand, though. “Place it there,” he said, waving the barrel at the small entryway table. Benson did as he asked, then backed away from it.

     “Benson, isn't It?” said the intruder. “I studied Gloom's staff before coming. I wanted to know exactly what to expect."

     “Who is it?” came Gloom's voice from his sitting room.

     “Master Daniel Crowe,” replied Benson as his guest followed him in. “He has a gun.”

     "Take me to him," said Crowe, gesturing with the gun. "And keep your hands away from your body. You've probably got another gun in there somewhere."

     Benson turned silently and led the way.

     “Ah,” said Gloom, leaning forward in his armchair as the two men entered. “I wondered if we would have the pleasure of your company. Some people see revenge as pointless and ignoble, but I somehow knew that you were not one of them.”

     “You ruined me, Sebastian Gloom. All I wanted was to run a business. Make an honest living... “

     “What you did was scarcely honest. Manufacturing fossils and passing them off to the gullible as genuine artefacts. Your victims were naive, foolish and unsophisticated but nonetheless innocent.”

     “There's no law against what I did. I never said they were older than creation.”

     “Yes, you were clever there. You let your victims deceive themselves. And I have to admit that your creations were of high quality. You put a lot of thought into them. I've seen lesser works that were little more than fresh bones pressed into concrete. Your artificial rock was good enough that it would have fooled anyone who wasn’t a professional geologist. You were also clever enough to create transitional forms. Half bird, half reptile. Creatures frozen in the act of evolution. I, however, am a man of science, and science has long since established that everything in the bible is true. I knew your creations had to be fake before I'd even looked at them.”

     “And you told everyone. You ruined my good name. Now nobody will do business with me.”

     “For which you intend to kill us?”

     “Oh no, cos then the rozzers'll be looking for the killer. No, I reckon mister Benson here killed you, intending to steal all your money, and you shot him in self defence. After all, who can tell which gun a bullet came from? Tragic, very tragic, but the police'll just call it case closed and move on.” He aimed the gun at Benson. “If you would be good enough to stand over there...”

     There was a small sound of escaping air and Daniel Crowe looked down at himself in surprise. A small wooden dart was protruding from his trouser leg, just below the level of Gloom's coffee table. “Why you little...” He aimed the gun at him, but the poison had already left him too weak to pull the trigger and a moment later his corpse fell to the floor with a thud.

     “For all that the native tribes of Brazil are primitive and brutal, they nevertheless have one or two contributions to make to the home of a careful man,” said Sebastian Gloom thoughtfully. “Take care of that, will you, Benson? And then I think we could both do with a nice cup of tea.”