Moriarty.
Rosie
She was aware of his presence, his spoor, even before she saw him across that dimly lit room and her blood ran cold. Though she had long suspected that he was the brains behind this operation, it was still a jolt to finally see him here, in the flesh, as it were, and not in the grainy line engravings she had saved so laboriously from the pages of the Police Gazette. And yet his cruel eyes seemed oddly fascinating under the heavy cadaverous brows, his face a death mask in alabaster, as he surveyed the girls brought before him as a tame hawk surveys the mice it will decimate for its master’s amusement.
Jacques
And yet it doesn’t fit at all, Jacques thought to himself, as he watched the haughty rocketeer parade the four girls for the men’s inspection. Pimping is a small-time racket, even when performed on a national scale. Why would the Napoleon of Crime even bother with it, let alone personally inspect the merchandise? And why just semipubescent girls from the East End? And why did none of them ever surface in the frequent police raids on the brothels of Paris or Berlin?
And, as if in answer, the Professor began to speak in a low measured voice, as though he addressed an audience of imbeciles who required every nuance of his meaning explained.
“Gentlemen,” he began, ignoring the girls and the blackbooted rocketeer. “Gentlemen, may I demonstrate my ultimate fighting machines, who will be ready to obtain the European victory you so hunger for in but two short months’ time. No patriotism-driven country lads easily scattered by a machine gun’s fury or money-driven mercenaries easily bought by a rival’s superior gold, these highly advanced soldiers of the future are undefeatable and completely incorruptible—”
“But, Professor, these are mere girls!” one of the generals interrupted with a derisive laugh, and would have said more had not Moriarty silenced him with a look that spoke volumes.
“Indeed,” he replied, his hawk’s eyes like steel ball bearings. “But observe tonight the miracle that is even now being performed upon hundreds upon hundreds of new infantrymen in our robotics workshops here in the catacombs so far below us. Commander?”
The rocketeer nodded, clicked her heels and pulled one of the girls roughly to the front of the assembled males. She ripped open the girl’s bodice in a shower of black buttons like some Grand Guignol lecher, the girl’s little breasts white and vulnerable in this strangely inhospitable room, with its row of grinning robots mixing drinks for non-existent guests and a pale bloodless moon illuminating the snow-capped peaks of the mountain ranges beyond the thick plate glass of the tall windows on the north face of the bar.
“Convert her,” Moriarty said quietly, and, before Jacques’ horrified eyes, the rocketeer swiftly produced a small rapier-like piece of platinum with a tropical scarab of iridescent electrodes at its head and plunged it straight into the heart of the girl, who immediately fell limp at her feet like a marionette whose strings have been unexpectedly and maliciously cut.
Again the generals protested, called out that this was mere murder, not warfare, until the Professor clapped his hands and the “dead” girl arose, her eyes now as white as Iona pebbles, her face expressionless.
“Now, gentlemen,” he said in his same emotionless tone, though now finally permitting something resembling a satisfied smile to transform the lower half his austere features, though his steely eyes remained cold. “Allow me to demonstrate. Commander. Open a window if you please. Soldier, advance, to the window, excellent, at ease. Now … jump!”
And, without hesitation, the girl plunged out and was lost in the blackness of the frozen ravine below.
Rosie
“Our robotics scientists have carried out endless experiments on paupers of all ages and sexes, and have found that girls at the peak of adolescent desire but yet still physically pure respond best to the chemicals we coat our control stakes with,” Moriarty was explaining to the dumbfounded generals who stood gaping like fish in a fairground hawker’s array of coloured bowls, their minds already reeling with the possibilities of an army of expendables who would obey their every command without question and walk unhesitatingly through hails of bullets to achieve their appointed prize.
And, as if watching the scene in the jerking staccato motion of a promenade mutoscope machine, she saw herself rise suddenly like a meteor and send the rocketeer flying to the floor with a resounding blow. Saw, to her amazement, the earnest boy who had partnered that awful Shoreditch detective jump out of the shadows like a fairground apparition and grab the brass handles that operated the room’s fire-break shields, an iron- and asbestoscurtain thundering down from the roof and isolating them from the moustachioed soldiers and the recumbent rocketeer.
Jacques
And he had thought that she would fall to the floor in relief, but instead she looked desperately all about her like a mad thing, her whole body shaking with fury like a cat who had pounced on the acid-yellow family canary but has had its prey rescued at the last moment by some interfering human and now howls its displeasure.
And, then, suddenly, her demeanour completely changed and she became wild-eyed and almost delirious, jumping the upturned armchairs like an Olympic hurdler and making a grab for a supine figure that even now was trying to slide like some dark thing and seek the shelter of the shadows and safety.
“Oh no, not so easily, my man,” he heard her shout. Saw something like a glint of blue-hued metal flash in her hand as she palmed the cosh so carefully concealed up her sleeve and struck the figure, quickly grabbing it by the scruff of its thin neck and dragging it over to the open window.
“Rosie, no!” he shouted, recognising the Professor, as she dumped him unceremoniously on the open window frame, the bitter mountain wind ruffling the man’s elegant frock coat and making him look like a bedraggled crow as he teetered between life and death on the narrow precipice that was the windowsill.
And, even as he rushed to try and intercede, he heard a low rumble and realised that Moriarty, like one of his automaton soldiers, had no fear and smiled unrepentantly at the girl as she towered over him, blood from the gash in his forehead trickling lazily down his sallow cheek.
“So, so, young miss.” He almost smiled. “Who of yours have I so wronged that you slay me with such vehemence. What sainted mother have I corrupted, what virtuous sister defiled?”
And Rosie shook her head slowly, as her neat little hand stretched out and began to apply pressure, pushing his scarecrow’s body slowly out over the abyss with a steely deliberation that knew her prey would eventually find its fulcrum point and topple headlong into the glacier far below.
“Neither, sir,” she says now with a steady voice though her whole body shakes with emotion. “I slay you for my father, Sherlock Holmes. “This is for Reichenbach, Moriarty!”
And, to this day, Jacques is still sure that he heard the Professor laugh hysterically as he tumbled flailing into the dark gorge of that freezing night …
Rosenlaui
Conrad Williams
I was stillborn, after a fashion.
Unable to speak, unable to move other than this blinking of the eyes. I was told my paralysis was due to a cerebrovascular disease passed on to me by my mother. I come from poor genetic stock, you see. My mother was descended from a bloodline that barely deserved the name: it was diluted red juice, she always said. It was rusty tap water. Her grandparents had died in their forties; her parents had done the same. Her husband came from a family who seemed to suffer heart attacks for fun; he died when I was but a child.
My mind, at least, flourished while the flesh surrounding it withered. I did well at school, having been forced, from a very early age (thanks to my ever patient and guilt-ridden mother), into developing a means to communicate. This I managed via an alphabet-based system connected to the frequency of blinks I managed with either eye, a practice that consumed many hours of painstaking trial and error.
Though my sight is keen, I often suffer from a number of optic ally related problems: d
ouble vision, flashes, headaches and so forth. I cannot cough, spit or swallow with any degree of success. I do not eat solid food. I’m unable to control my emotions and find myself oscillating between bouts of laughter-induced hysteria and racking sobs. I am blessed to be in the bosom of a family that loves me dearly, and they have sacrificed a great deal to make me comfortable, to ensure a future, of sorts, for me. A great deal of money has been spent to adapt a room at my mother’s hotel (she and her brothers, Pascal and Tobias, have run the Schilthorn since the 1870s) so that it is comfortable for me. A special, raised bed – very heavy, so I am told – needed to be built on site. Ramps had to be added to the hotel infrastructure so that my wheelchair – itself of a bespoke design – could be more easily pushed around the grounds. My gratitude knows no bounds. But for my mother’s love and devotion to me, and the support and protection afforded to me by my uncles, I might well have been abandoned, destined to live a miserable life in the cold, cruel poorhouses in Bern or Lausanne.
Nevertheless, I wished I had died in childbirth. I did not want to live. As soon as I was able, I begged my mother to help me go to sleep for ever, to end my suffering. But she refused; she was horrified. It was a sign from God, she told me. If I had been meant to die, it would have happened in the womb. She begged me to put such thoughts out of my head – she was convinced that the mind, if focused on one particular subject for long enough, could achieve its ambition – scared rigid that I would be delivered straight to hell should I be granted my heart’s desire.
My mother’s paraenesis went unheard, I’m ashamed to say. Lying in bed or sitting immobile in my fortress chair were causing my muscles to atrophy. I once heard the doctor telling my mother that the heart might not escape the same fate. Though it was beating, and strong because of that, it was having to work extra hard to serve my failing body. The doctor suspected my heart might eventually be affected by the malaise of the flesh and either stop working so effectively, or stop working altogether.
I lay awake at night imagining my heart in my chest, perhaps deciding if it was time to give up. But such thoughts did not panic me. I knew death would be a release. I knew it was every parent’s concern that they might outlive their offspring, but I couldn’t imagine what life would be like once my mother was gone. I could only envisage misery, and the interminable, wretched pursuit of her to the grave.
Some nights, when my misery seemed to know no lower limit, and I felt stretched and on the brink of dissolution, like a drip of molten wax, I thought of my heart – imagined it in the prison of my ribcage – beating more and more slowly, until it trembled and stopped. I willed it to happen. I wanted it more than anything else. I would wake the next morning, feeling cheated by God, and convinced He wanted me to live so that He could be entertained by my travails.
It was after this episode that I began to really turn my focus inwards. I began to study my feelings and I realised that although I was an intelligent young man – given the limitations of my affliction – I was retarded in terms of experiencing the full gamut of emotions. I have already mentioned that I shifted between extremes, albeit without any discernible external stimuli to trigger it. My emotions were chaos. In short, I did not understand them. I could not interpret them. Like me, my feelings were inert, broken, paralysed. I had learned to “talk”, but there was no colour to my words. How could you develop a personality, how could you convey wit or spirit or character if you had never lived? My reaction to every situation was the same: dumb passivity. I could not engage unless I was engaged. I could initiate no kind of contact.
I thought more deeply. I thought of the broad issues of life; the crucial signifiers. I thought of death dispassionately, with a strange kind of curiosity. I thought of love with a greater sense of mystification. Mother, every day, before she turned in, would ruffle my hair, kiss my cheek and say, “I love you.” I never reciprocated. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know then how important for her it would have been had I signed the words I love you too.
In my room, I watched, incessantly, the bend of the larch trees under stiff north-westerly breezes. I could stare for hours at the trees, and the sun and shade flickering across the mountains behind them, and the clouds. I was jealous, and fascinated by, any kind of movement; my eye was fast upon it, wherever it might originate. These momentary distractions apart, I felt doomed. To die in my father’s footsteps, relatively young from heart disease, meant that I was yet to spend over two more decades upon this Earth. Little was I to know how much my world would be changed over the course of a few days …
Who could have known that the events of those coming days would create ripples to be felt across the world? I can’t help feelings that the reason for the ripples – the stone cast at the centre of it all – was me. If it weren’t for me, then the dreadful business at Reichenbach would not have happened … could not have happened. I saved one man and sent another to his death – or at least that’s what it looked like to me at the time. Everyone believed they both died that day, the light and the shade. The virtuous and the diabolical.
And so the strangers came to our village. This is no great shock, of course. I live in an agreeable part of the world, a beautiful place with fresh air and attractive scenery (we have mountains and meadows, alpine flowers and goats, a spectacular waterfall and, in the shape of Rosenlaui, a glacier of awe-inspiring note); we receive many visitors eager to partake of its rejuvenating qualities. I spend a great deal of my time in the small lobby of the hotel, people-watching. I suppose you could say I was attuned to the small fluctuations that occur in the general current of humanity which drifted through our hotel. Such as that created by the two fellows who arrived on the 3 May. I was drawn to them instantly. One was tall and rangy, the kind of fellow you know is aware of everything and everyone in a room without ostentatious scrutiny; his companion was somewhat shorter, more rotund, and reminded me of the pictures of walruses I had seen on the walls of the library in Zurich. He wore a perplexed expression that struck me as likely to be a permanent fixture. I watched them talk to my mother for a while, and she made little flip-flop gestures with her hands, a gesture I had seen many times before; it meant there were no rooms vacant. The shorter man’s face lost its perplexity to a thunderstruck mien but the taller man – immaculate in his Inverness cape – smiled congenially and bent to ask my mother a question. She pointed through the window in the direction of Innertkirchen and the men bowed slightly and readied themselves to leave. Just then, the taller man espied me and tapped his companion on the shoulder. The perplexed look returned, but he remained where he was standing. The taller man approached me, that convivial smile countered somewhat by the greedy curiosity in his eyes.
“Sherlock Holmes,” he said, in a rich, sonorous voice, “at your service. Forgive me, but I couldn’t help noticing your predicament. You are a C4 quadriplegic, are you not?”
I was taken aback, not only by his direct and pinpoint diagnosis – my mother would have never volunteered such intimate information – but that he had approached me at all. Though I spent a lot of time in the lobby only my family engaged me in conversation. This was, I persuaded myself, because I was unable to enjoy any interaction – brief or otherwise – with people who were unaware of the method of “speech” I employed. But more likely it was because people didn’t understand what they saw, and they feared me.
I decided to have some fun with Herr Holmes.
YOU WILL EXCUSE ME IF I DO NOT GET UP.
“Of course, young fellow,” he replied, instantly. “It’s heartening to see a man with a complete spinal injury who has retained a sense of humour.”
He told me he admired my “silent, sombre observation” of the lobby and that he sensed in me a kindred spirit, a man enthused and intrigued by the human condition. He only regretted the fact that he would be unable to stay at our hotel.
“I wonder if you might do me the enormous courtesy of a favour, for which I would pay you the princely sum of thirty francs.”
I was stunned by his apparently instant deciphering of my code; doubly so now that such a promise of money had entered our conversation.
HOW CAN I HELP?
“I’ve noticed you are a keen observer, and you have probably picked up on a number of physical traits and behavioural peccadilloes displayed by your hotel guests. My colleague, for example, Dr Watson. No doubt you’ve been struck by his seemingly perpetual aspect of befuddlement?”
I couldn’t smile, but Mr Holmes detected humour in me; reflected it perhaps, in the twinkling of his eye.
“I’d like you to keep watch for a man who is … shall we say … looking for me. This man is very much like me, though it pains me to say so – he is tall, quite thin and has a bookish air; he is after all a quite brilliant professor of mathematics. His name is Moriarty, but he might well be travelling under a different moniker. Boole, perhaps, or Wild, or Newcomb. Perhaps even Zucco or Atwill. But no matter which pseudonym he hides behind, you will know this if you see him: there is something of the devil in his make-up. He moves as if hell is at his heels.”
HOW WILL I GET WORD TO YOU?
I had known him but five minutes and already I felt compelled to help him. There was something urgent about him, something infectious. His curiosity, I aver: I wanted to know more about him. Where he was from, where he was going, why he was so far away from his native country.
“We will be taking rooms at the Englischer Hof,” he said. “I shall endeavour to send someone to receive reports from you every evening.”
And, with that, he stood up, thanked me, and placed thirty francs in my jacket pocket. He rejoined his companion – whose air of consternation deepened – and then they left, Mr Holmes turning to touch his hat and smile my way.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 21