Surely the twist to this tale is that I myself became a monster; a murderer, cold blooded and methodical. Upon returning from Ireland that was something I contemplated upon for some time, even sinking into a deep depression that resulted in the temporary loss of my lodgings at 221B Baker Street and many a night lost in the haze of opium.

I concluded however, that I was not a monster, no matter how brutal my actions might have been. For it was in those opium dens that I came to a new realization. Indulging in the pleasures of morphine whilst sitting in the comfort of my apartment, like I had done so many times, I had missed out on one of the most enlightening aspects of an opiate addiction; that being the company of the types who frequent such establishments. Over games of cards I heard the most interesting tales, mostly from Chinamen, but also those of European and African heritage as well when they saw fit to sink themselves to such depravities.

Tales, for that is what I would have labeled them before my experiences with the Brody clan, of fantastical creatures, monsters if you will, from all corners of the Earth. They were happily spun for my amusement; now that I had stopped to listen. Never having understood the fascination with such things in days before I now found myself listening to them intently, absorbing everything that I could. From the Aswang of Filipino lore to the Zahhak of Persian mythos I heard them all, or so I had thought. Finding myself with a new passion, knowledge of the paranormal, I recuperated from that particularly harsh bout of ill spirits and dedicated myself to research.

I visited every library in London and, likely owing to my appearance and odor, both of which was reminiscent of that of a vagrant, found myself tossed out of most of them promptly.

It did not take long to realize that were I to be able to fully indulge my latest fascination I would have to appear to be a respectable member of society once again. No small amount of prostration was required on my part to convince Mr. Hudson to return to me my room. Still, he had been kind enough to retain most of my wardrobe even when the rest of my belongings had been sent to auction. In the following months I took on some cases, the types that I had in the past, so as to refill my coffers. All the while, however, I threw myself headlong into my research with every spare moment that I could find. I read every book on the subject of legendary beasts in every language that I was fluent in, that being English, French and, of course, Latin. There were some in Italian and German too, which meant that I simply had to take on the task of teaching myself those tongues as well.

I had no way of sorting which creatures might truly exist and which were simply legend and nothing more, let alone of knowing if I would ever chance to come across one in person again. The answer was given to me when I was investigating what seemed to be a fairly mundane issue, a case of stolen art. Imagine my surprise when my chief suspect, a Monsieur Louis Gillard, revealed himself to be nothing less than a Loup-Garou; a particularly vile, and coincidentally French, version of what an Englishman would call a werewolf. I still muse that had I encountered Gillard in my younger days, before spending night after night reading the materials that I had come to obsess over, that I would have found myself ill-equipped to end him and it would have instead been my obituary listed in the paper.

Stumbling upon him in the dimly lit and crowded warehouse at the back of Granger & Son’s Curios, a filthy little shop in Saffron Hill, he’d not appeared to me at first to be anything other than a moderately well-dressed young man. Why he chose to reveal himself to me, his true self that is, I to this day have no idea. Nevertheless, he did. With tufts of dark brown fur protruding from the collar and sleeves of his shirt, his face twisted into a cruel perversion that reminded one of both man and canid, he glared at me through glowing red eyes. That was of course the most disturbing feature of a Loup-Garou, the eyes. And at that moment a striking thought ran through my head. Of the volumes upon volumes of information regarding mythical beasts that I had assimilated into my storehouse of knowledge how much of it was accurate? How much pure legend? Half-truth? There was no way for me to be certain.

Luck, as it often does however, seemed to be with me that afternoon. As Gillard rushed toward me, streaks of light from holes in the distressed walls of the structure further illuminating his beastliness, I located to my immediate left a silver candelabra sitting atop a dusty armoire. Grasping it tightly I struck at his face, only narrowly avoiding his own flailing limbs as they clawed for my eyes. As he fell to the floor writhing in pain and clutching his right cheek I knew that at least part of what I had read was true. Were-creatures, it seemed, did indeed have an extreme allergic reaction to silver. Quickly I dismantled the object in my hands and, finding its most tapered end, I plunged it down into the Frenchman’s heart, upon which he almost immediately stiffened and died, emitting only one wheezing growl as he expired.

That day, like before, I found myself with a body to dispose of. Not an activity that I was overly familiar with, having spent the vast majority of my adult life catching killers rather than being one. Again I doubted. The man was a monster, of that there was no doubt whatsoever, as he remained in his beastly form even after death, but a part of me could not refrain from wondering whether or not I had done the right thing.

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Desperate to exonerate my actions I spent several weeks looking into the lives of not only Monsieur Gillard but also those of the Brody clan. For you see in my learnings I had come across not only information regarding the physical appearance, constitutions, and weakness of these hellions, but also of their habits, and like any human who chose to do harm to others they would have surely left behind clues. The guilt of Mr. Brody and his mother had been evident, but with his family, as with the Frenchman, I had no facts at my disposal save for the verity that they were lusus naturae...monsters.

Having learned from many an account that Bugbear were partial to the flesh of orphaned children, and London being never in short supply of raggamuffins, I decided to do some sleuthing around the property of the departed Mr. Brody. To my horror, but not my astonishment, located in a shallow pit in the Earth at the rear of the house were the skeletal remains of no less than four unfortunate young souls. The legends had held true, something that made me uneasy on my ride to Cork. If the Bugbear myth had been correct then what of the Loup-Garou? The information was less specific, but in many of the lore books it was said that he who drew the blood of the Loup-Garou was damned to become one himself for a period of one hundred and one days and nights. Not infrequently on that trip did I examine myself in the mirror for signs of any change. There was none.

Just as had been in London the ancestral home of the Brody’s revealed a shallow pit, this one filled with the leavings of more meals than I wished to count, many of them dating back hundreds of years by the look of the artifacts that lay alongside them. That left only Monsieur Gillard, but he presented a problem. The lore relating to the Loup-Garou was vague in regards as to what exactly it was that they did. It was said that they, unlike the common Werewolf, were capable not only of transforming their bodies at will as opposed to being chained to the lunar cycle, but that they retained full cognizance of their actions in their bestial form. That implied that Gillard may not have been driven to perform homicidal acts like the Bugbears had. He had attacked me in the warehouse, yes, but that was not particularly out of character for a criminal caught in the act.

The man had been residing in a boarding house, so I would find no pits dug into the back yard. Cursory examination of his room, under the guise of being an inspector of the Scotland Yard, revealed nothing to me either. No mortal remains in the floorboards, no collections of teeth or body parts rendered into stew. It was only on my way out the building that I noticed a woman entering who, curiously, appeared to my eyes to be several years older than the photograph I had seen of her in the study. This would not have struck me as unusual had she not been wearing the same hat as she had in the photograph, a style that arrived only a year and a half before.

Then it hit me, a superficial connection in my mind. I recalled coming across a partial legend, only two paragraphs, that had described a wolf-like creature that suckled on the blood of the living while they slept at night; stealing from them their life so that it might extend its own. The passage had not been directly connected to the Loup-Garou but had instead come from an account written down by a visitor to one of the islands of the French West Indies. My mind flashed back to the landlady. A woman of some age, for sure, as she’d inherited the house from her departed husband, but the style of her dress was more akin to a lady in her fifties than one in her, as she appeared to be, late seventies.

Convincing the two women to allow me a medical examination was not one of the more simple things I had done in my life, but after some rather livid persuasion they consented. Marks upon the neck, barely visible and hidden within the hairline, told the tale. I had discovered the habits of the Loup-Garou and by my account he had made away with no less than a decade and a half of the older lady’s life and perhaps five years or so of the younger’s. The women believed their rather peculiar age progression to be the result of miasmas emanating from the tannery a few blocks distant and I had no intention of trying to change their minds. I left them bewildered, but with the assurance that no more of their years would be stolen from them in the dead of night.

That was the end of my self-doubt, at least as a daily occurrence. I had taken six lives and without fail every last one of them had been guilty of atrocities. The legends of monsters, full of dire warnings, appeared to not only be based in fact but also to hint at the existence of a completely mysterious side of reality that few were ever privy to understand. Being Sherlock Holmes I could not let that stand, for I harbor a sincere loathing of not knowing things.

That brings me to this very evening. Moments ago I stepped from a cab on a corner two blocks from my destination and, quieting the rattle of weapons concealed within my coat, made my way down the street to the home of one Edward J. Cokes; a middle aged man, never married, who ran of all things...a boarding house. I’d been following him for some weeks after reading a newspaper article about a Doctor John Watson and his investigation into the effects of industrial chemicals on the welfare of London’s denizens. He’d cited in that article the residents of the very home that I now stood in front of, attempting to observe casually the occupant within. The good doctor had written on the premature greying of hair and wrinkling of skin afflicting the people who resided at Mr. Coke’s boarding house, this time blaming the effects on a nearby glue factory.

I’m afraid not, good doctor. For I know precisely the force that is plaguing the people you examined. I don’t blame you though. No man in the world is as familiar with what I hunt tonight as I. I can see it in the way he moves, I can smell it on him.