The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

by Maxim Jakubowski

  ‘Do you know the place, sir?’

  ‘The church,’ I said. ‘By the old Ten Bells. That’s Jack’s point.’

  He nodded wordlessly. He hefted the unconscious Fagin over his shoulder and we began to make our way towards the church on Commercial Street.

  The night was thick with silence. They were close. I could feel them, watching, sniffing, waiting: waiting for me.

  5.

  Holmes died first.

  I took savage satisfaction from the fact, even as the world I knew was coming silently to an end.

  The meteorite streaked across the sky. From this close I could see its malevolent evil, the malformed shape of the rock spinning as it burned through the Earth’s atmosphere. Who could survive such a journey? All my planning, all my notes and schemes, have revolved around an enemy immeasurably powerful, yet fundamentally known. They would have machines, great and terrible machines to protect them from our hostile, alien environment. They’d have great tripod-like machines to scour the land, and death rays to cause unbearable destruction. All tools I could use, myself. Once my men had killed the invaders, using the power of surprise, I would have their technology, I thought. I would rule not from the shadows, but from the throne! And the British Empire – my empire – would rule the entire world – perhaps even beyond!

  The meteorite streaked across the sky and burst towards us like a fist. I heard screams, onlookers running. I expected the jolt of impact, the shock of an earthquake, yet I stood my ground. Then, impossibly, the meteorite seemed to slow as it passed through the air. For a moment, it hovered above us. It felt – as irrational as this may seem – as though that misshapen lump of rock was grinning.

  Then it floated down and settled on the ground, as gentle as a feather. Nothing moved. There was no sound.

  No hatches opened. No terrible machines emerged. Against the fence where he was leaning, Sherlock Holmes began to laugh.

  ‘Why aren’t they shooting?’ I said. I was speaking to Moran. ‘Why aren’t they shooting?’

  Of my men there was no sign!

  ‘Why won’t they shoot! Shoot, you d—ed c—ks—s, shoot!’

  Holmes’s laughter grew in volume and intensity. The man was quite deranged. Hysterical laughter spilled out of him and he shook, helplessly. The silent meteorite sat there on the ground of Horsell Common, still glowing red as though from some inner source of light. As I watched, thin tendrils of smoke, like questing tentacles, rose out of the rock and into the air. The red mist thickened, spreading in all directions away from the rock. One questing tendril reached Holmes. It seemed to tickle him, behind the ear, and Holmes giggled girlishly.

  Then, it entered him – penetrated him! – and Holmes screamed, a horrible, wordless cry.

  I saw his man, Watson, bolt and run. Holmes began to shake, the questing tentacle rummaging inside him, studying him, knowing him.

  Until it’d had enough.

  Abruptly, and with a soft, wet popping sound, Holmes exploded.

  Wet bloodied pieces of Holmesian matter flew everywhere like whale blubber; a piece of kidney hit my cheek and slid sadly to the ground. I wiped my face with my handkerchief.

  ‘Professor?’ Moran said.

  I stared, dumbfounded, at the silent rock. The bloodied miasma of that unnatural, evil fog continued to rise. Its tendrils reached the trees and pulled. I saw my men emerge from the cover of the foliage, their faces blank, their motions jerky, uniform. They were led by red trails of smoke that were, I realised, like leashes around their necks.

  An eerie silence had fallen over Horsell Common. And I realised I had underestimated these Marsian invaders.

  Then, hovering out of the mist, I saw a great big sucker form. It darted towards me with a sinuous motion, as though coming for a kiss.

  ‘Run, you fools!’ I said. ‘Run for your lives!’

  And so, all dignity forgotten, and the remnants of Holmes’s internal organs still on my face and clothes, I ran. I, James Moriarty, Ph.d., FRS, Chair of Mathematics at the tender age of only twenty-one and, since those long gone days, the greatest criminal mastermind the world had ever known – I ran!

  6.

  There were lights behind the windows of the Ten Bells pub. They were a wan red colour, and moved with some inhuman, yet intelligent, purpose. Fagin had recovered consciousness by the time we arrived. Moran tied him securely with a rope to the gates of the brooding church. What priests there were inside this grand edifice no longer worshipped God as any human could conceive it. Poor Fagin cried most bitterly. As we left him there, he began to hurl insults and curses at our backs.

  We took shelter in the fallen-down remains of Spitalfields Market across the road, and waited. Moran had his air rifle out, and aimed the sights at poor Fagin’s forehead.

  ‘I never liked him,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Poor Twist.’

  ‘Poor all of us, when you come to think of it,’ I said.

  We lapsed into silence. It felt as though we were intruders in some dark, alien world, of the sort that philistine fool, Wells, wrote of in his little stories. Here and there bands of possessed creatures, barely human any more, moved about their masters’ unfathomable business. Fagin had stopped screaming. He must have realised he would only draw the tiger to him quicker. He now subsided into muffled moans, more eerie than his shouting had been. His was the sound of a trapped and wounded animal. The sound of the human race itself, I thought, in a rare moment of fancy.

  Make no mistake – it was the Marsians’ final goal: to rule us all, to control the world! Only Moran and I stood in their way – unlikely defenders of humankind.

  We had been running the Resistance for six months, yet we had been thwarted at every turn.

  Moran and I were now all that remained.

  7.

  The morning after the Marsian landing, Moran went to collect the papers while I reclined in bed. When he returned, his face was troubled. I looked at the front pages, yet there was no mention of the meteorite strike of the night before; no mention had been made of Woking, of Horsell Common, not even of that oaf, Holmes, and his untimely – if personally, to me, quite satisfying – death.

  ‘What is the meaning of this, Professor?’ Moran said.

  My mind worked rapidly. I had expected a technologically advanced species, yet my mistake had been to assume that their technology followed our path – the path of factories, parts, machines.

  Theirs, I realised instantly, was a technology of the mind: who knew what dark practices and terrible experiments these Marsians performed on their native world?

  I was a fool to expect tripods and death rays! These were parasites, creatures of pure mind!

  I almost laughed, in giddy exhalation. It was as though creatures such as Holmes and myself had transcended even the limitations of the flesh, had become beings of pure reason. At last, I thought, I had a worthy adversary!

  I had sent men back to Woking, but all remnants of the asteroid were gone, and nothing remained on the clear, clean surface of the common to suggest any foul play. Inspector Lestrade, I learned, was back at work, as though nothing had happened. My gunmen of the previous night had disappeared as though the ground itself swallowed them; which, I suspected, may have been the literal truth.

  There was nothing for me to do but bide my time, and organise, and wait.

  In the next few weeks, the newspapers began reporting increasingly strange, troubling events. Key members of trade and parliament mysteriously disappeared, only to return as though nothing had happened, with strange new policies in place. ‘It was like I went to sleep with my husband,’ said one tearful woman to the London Illustrated News, ‘and woke up with a stranger wearing my husband’s face. I don’t know him any more, he is someone else, someone completely alien.’

  The same affliction spread elsewhere, even to the lower classes. It may have affected the aristocracy from the very beginning, but no one was able to tell: they had always been strange and
aloof in their ways.

  More troubling still were the stories, soon circulating, of the man they called Jack. A ruthless killer, he – if it were a he, if there were only one of them, and not an army – moved swiftly and silently through the night, brutally slashing his victims to death. He operated mostly in the East End of London, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake, so that the newspapers began to refer to a ‘Spree of Frenzied Killings’ and ‘The Ongoing East End Massacre’ before, finally and abruptly, they ceased from making any mention of any unusual events, and began instead to promote the new government line of Obey, Produce, Conform.

  They – whoever they now were – had also began to hunt me down earnestly.

  My organisation was being infiltrated from without. My banker, Scrooge, had set up an elaborate scheme to capture me on a visit to the vaults. I escaped with Moran’s help, capturing the mean old man in the process, though not without having to kill about a dozen jerkily moving, Marsian-animated corpses. We locked Scrooge in a safe house and tortured him. The malevolent spirit housed in his body laughed in my face even as Moran got busy with the pliers.

  “Step away from my banker’s body, you Marsian bodysnatcher!’ I screamed in frustration. Tendrils of red mist rose out of Scrooge’s nose as though mocking me, and the man’s eyes opened and stared straight at me. His mouth moved, but the words that came were spoken by another, alien intelligence.

  ‘Join us … Moriar … ty. Obey … Con … form!’

  ‘Never!’ I said, and brought down my knife, hard, stabbing the reanimated corpse in the heart. The body shuddered and was still – yet the red mist continued to rise out of the body, and now it was making its way to me!

  How we escaped that room – those clutching red, ethereal tentacles! – is not a story to be lightly told. When at last we departed, running down the wharf side of Limehouse with Scrooge’s hobbling dead corpse in pursuit, I had sworn that I would take the war directly to the enemy.

  I, Moriarty, would not be defeated so easily!

  8.

  The story of the Resistance is a long and glorious one, yet, ultimately, futile. In six months, the world had changed for ever. My men were dead or subverted, the Resistance broken, and I was on the run. Our dear Queen, it was said, was safe – had departed the palace in the midst of night, to regions unknown. French ships stood watch in the Channel, to stop anyone from escaping to the shores of Europe and bringing the plague with them. The French were only waiting for a chance to step in and invade us in the guise of saviours.

  And then Jack ran wild.

  We watched from the shadows. Somewhere nearby a clock struck midnight. But now, it was always midnight in London.

  A dark shape materialised on the steps of the old church.

  Resolved into the features of a blank-eyed man, and then another, and another. Slowly, they came down the steps, and I almost laughed.

  For they knew I was there. They had sent my own men down those steps: Roylott, the poisoner; the German spy, Oberstein; Gruner, the notorious sadist; Beppo, the Italian snatcher; even that red-headed confidence man, John Clay!

  Good men, ruthless men, dedicated men, who once feared and obeyed me – now lifeless shells, animated by the malignant force of these Marsians.

  They fell on the bleating, hapless Fagin. His screams tore the night. The shadows gathered behind us. Hands reached and grabbed Moran and me. We struggled against them in vain.

  ‘Was this part of your plan, Professor?’ Moran hissed, in pain. They pushed us along, towards the church steps. My feet stepped in poor Fagin’s remains, leaving a trail of bloodied footsteps, pulling along trailing entrails.

  ‘We have not lost yet, Sebastian,’ I said.

  He shook his head. His shoulders slumped and he let them push him forward. The fight was no longer in him. Colonel Moran had given up. It was a pitiful sight to see.

  I followed along. I had no choice.

  Up the stairs and into the church.

  Ethereal red lights and fog, drifting … the air was humid, with an unearthly stench. Was this what the air of Mars smelled like? I pictured a world inhabited by spores, by leeches floating in the fetid air, carried on the winds. The mists parted and merged. We were pushed along, deeper into the church. Down the ancient steps to the cellars, no sound but the beat of my heart in my chest, the thrum of blood in my ears, air flowing in and out of my lungs, in and out through nose and mouth, and I was aware, more than ever, of my own weak flesh and blood, my mortality.

  Down to ancient catacombs, the carved space of sewers underneath the city. They must have preferred it down there, I realised: slowly the under-city was being converted into a Marsian landscape. I saw with horror the glowing green moss spreading along the walls, smelled the fetid corruption of slowly rotting bodies.

  Our descent ended. Down there, in the dark, it was impossible to tell where we were. Somewhere deep under London.

  This was Jack’s point.

  I waited. Moran stood beside me. My men – what remained of my men – stood around us in a guard. I wondered if we were to be welcomed or executed. Perhaps both, I thought. I heard the tread of soft, unhurried footsteps. A small, tan figure, with only the hint of a limp, emerged from the thick foliage of creepers and vines.

  It wore a familiar face, but it took me a moment to place it, until he smiled: I had last seen him at Horsell Common, running.

  ‘Hello, Moriarty,’ Dr Watson said.

  9.

  I said, ‘Hello, Jack.’

  He smiled. He had nothing of the softness of the old Watson about him. A greater intelligence animated this being, a pernicious, alien mind, bent on destruction.

  A mind, if I were being honest, not entirely unlike my own.

  ‘A merry dance you led us, Moriarty,’ he said. I saw the red flames behind his eyes. ‘But all joy must sooner or later come to an end.’

  ‘So this is it?’ I said. ‘What will you do, kill me? You think yourselves invincible?’

  ‘But my dear Moriarty,’ the alien said. ‘You completely misunderstand our position. We read of your work with great interest. Your Treatise on the Binomial Theorem! Your Dynamics of an Asteroid! Your mind is a great and precious thing! We could use a man such as yourself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We are beings of the mind. Bodies are merely an inconvenience, don’t you think? Tools, to be used and discarded. Join us, Professor! And we would make you immortal.’

  I stood still. Beside me, Moran stirred. He looked up with dull, defeated eyes. I pitied him then. I pitied Twist, Scrooge, Holmes and all the others. I stood alone before the alien mind.

  ‘What would I have to do?’ I said softly.

  Watson’s grin was a wet, grotesque thing. His tongue snaked out, a red, obscene thing. It spooled out of his mouth and kept on coming, like a snake. When it touched the skin of my cheek, it stopped, and I felt him shudder. I stood still, hating him, hating them all. The tongue found my ear and entered it, and the world changed forever.

  10.

  You may remember that day. The day the Marsians died. The day you returned home, through streets strewn with the corpses of those you once knew, those who had been taken. Host bodies, empty of the malign influence that had animated them during the Marsian occupation. The Regent’s Canal was choked full of these corpses, and red, dying Marsian weeds rose from the subterranean depths in which they had found shelter, questing helplessly for the sun.

  There were mass funerals held that day, and in the days to come. The host bodies were carted south of the river, to Blackheath, and were burned and buried in a common grave.

  Bacteria! that fool, Wells, wrote, in his chronicle of the war.

  Yet there is a word, an old Latin word, which I like. It is Virus.

  I remember emerging from the subterranean depths, somewhere near Simpson’s, where I often dined. The sky was streaked with red. Moran was by my side. I am not sure how we got there. Moran carried me, perhaps. I was both there an
d not there.

  I was everywhere!

  My mind had been sucked into the aliens’ consciousness matrix. For a moment, I saw through their eyes, distributed all across London and beyond, extending even to the Midlands (though why anyone, human or alien, would wish to go there I’m sure I don’t know). In their memories, I saw the red planet, its sandstorms and dust, its crawling, patient life forms, living in abject terror of the telepathic fungal leeches of which I was now, myself, a part!

  Yet I saw beauty, too, a strange sort of pride of these aesthetic beings, who saw themselves as warrior-monks, separated from the great Marsian mind to launch themselves all but blindly at our planet. I saw, and was for a moment tempted.

  Yet I am Moriarty, and I serve no manner of man or leech.

  Within their matrix, I began to reproduce. To replicate. My consciousness spread like a sickness through their telepathic web. I was everywhere, I was everything! By the time the Jacks realised what I was doing it was already too late. I was replacing their mind with my own, rewriting their being with mine. I would not become the Marsians’ puppet – they would become mine!

  You may remember that day. Perhaps you were never there, but only heard of it later. The day Jack fell. The day the bodyrippers died.

  Later, there had been all kinds of stories. How bacteria killed them, or a bomb, or Sherlock Holmes. Each one as ridiculous as the other.

  For myself, I came to, blinking and confused, my head pounding as from the worst imaginable hangover. I could not contain their great mind. I had destroyed it, and then withdrew, back into my own skull, diminished.

  I am still the Chair of Mathematics at the university where I teach. With the death of that fool, Holmes, there is no one left to know my name, or my occupation. My web of influence spreads everywhere, from the lands of the Zulu to the great courts of the Raj. My name is whispered in awe and fear in the gutters of London.

  Yet sometimes, late at night, I raise my eyes up to the sky, searching in the mesh of stars for that alien red planet. There is a longing in me now, new and unsettling. Sometimes I wish they would come back. Sometimes, I think, if they’d only ask me again, I would like to go with them.