I never saw him again.
I ate my supper – a thin broth pumped down my throat (I have never tasted food) – on the veranda overlooking the peaks of the Wetterhorn and the Eiger and the Rosenlaui Glacier. I loved to watch the sun sink over the white crags, darkening and deepening the green alpine meadows. Away to the south, I could see thunderclouds forming, clenching into fists that would batter our village within the next twenty-four hours or so. It was a regular occurrence in these parts, and one I looked forward to immensely. My mother hated these attacks of low pressure, but they afforded me the closest proximity to understanding what it meant to be alive. I could almost believe that I felt the sensation of skin tingling under that bracing net of wet electricity. Part of me imagined – invited, even – the catastrophic visitation of one of those blue forks upon my body. I imagined the fire and heat coursing through my veins, effulgent, reinforcing. The lightning would either reduce me to a cinder or serve the miracle cure. Either possibility was eminently preferable to this endless, silent stasis.
Mother removed the feeding apparatus from my throat and withdrew. She knew I sometimes liked to take a nap upon receiving nourishment. Sometimes she asked if I would like her to read aloud, but she tended to shy away from the suggestion these days: my tastes are dark, and hers are not. She did not like to read Frankenstein to me, or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which she recited only recently, and that with evident distaste colouring her narrative. She accused me of wanting her to read stories that would serve only to remind her of my plight, and I must admit that I received a certain amount of grim pleasure from watching her squirm.
The air this evening was warm and sweet, but the potential in that burgeoning storm could already be felt in the fingers of wind tousling my hair. Gradually, I succumbed, my eyelids becoming heavier. I saw him then, on the cusp of a dream, so that I could not be sure that he was real, or some shade conjured by somnolence. There was no question who this man was, though I was mired in torpor. He moved rapidly, a thin, tall man, his shoulders hunched by years of academic study. He resembled Holmes, to a point. But there was something predatory in his gait. There was something hungry about it.
I watched him keenly, anxiety flooding my mind. When would Mr Holmes send his emissary to query me? Why was he so keen to know the whereabouts of this man, unless he signified a very grave threat? I could believe it. I saw the beast in him. I saw—
The figure had stopped abruptly, as if someone had called his name. Or – the paranoid whisperer at my shoulder insisted – as if he had read your mind. His face, at this distance, seemed like a pale, inverted teardrop; I could see that the frontal lobes of his head were massive, could almost see within, the diabolical machinations of his brain, churning like some confounded engine. His eyes were a furious, black area of shadow, like the cross-hatchings in a sketch by Hogarth. Did I feel the first frisson, then, of … well … what? Fear? Is this what fear felt like? A spike in the gut, in the vitals, the incipient juice of me? Some feeling that was no slave to the destroyed nerves in my body. Something primal and basic, born of the will to stay alive.
I thought then that the will in me to die might very well be countered by this ancient instinct in the flesh to survive.
He was coming towards me. I considered bluffing, pretending I was asleep, but I just knew he would be the type of person to see instantly through such a charade. When he reached the wheelchair, he did not ask my name. Instead, he took hold of the handles, disengaged the brake, and began wheeling me down the path in the direction of the meadow.
Uncle Tobias, the previous summer, had grafted the thick tyres from a wheelbarrow on to the chair, so that he was able to push me across the unforgiving terrain, broaden my horizons, and give me a different view of the world. Moriarty – for it must be he – took advantage of that customisation now, putting distance between us and the hotel. Again, I felt the unwinding of what must be fear in the pit of my stomach, like a nest of adders coiling against and around each other. Night was coming on; already the sun had descended beyond the mountains, limning their edges with golden fire. The blue of the sky was thickening. In the east, stars were beginning to make themselves known. He pushed me hard and fast, and I bounced in my seat like a bag of sticks, threatening to spill to the floor at every bump or swerve. We travelled for what seemed like hours. At one point, I lost my blanket, and the cold leapt at me like a wildcat, turning my hands blue. The water from my eyes began to freeze on my cheeks, stiffening them. For once, I was grateful that I could not feel pain.
Did I fall asleep at one point? Or was I plunged into senselessness by the cold? Whatever it was, I emerged into calm. The sky was fully dark now, and the stars in all their countless billions seemed to be howling against their icy backdrop. I could make out the shape of the mountains where they blocked those pinpoints of light, but nothing else. He had taken me to the tongue of the glacier and left me here to perish. He had—
“I spoke with your mother,” he said. He was somewhere behind me. “As he did. Oh, she was most forthcoming. It is amazing, sometimes, the wag of the tongue when confronted with the spectre of appalling consequence.”
I have never felt so trapped within my own body. I wanted to scream and snarl and rage at him. I wanted to tear his face from his skull and send it to the hungry winds like a scrap from a standard born by a defeated army. IF YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO MY MOTHER – I signed, impotently.
“I know where Mr Holmes resides, and that lapdog of his, Watson. He is not much longer for this world, and, by God, I am ready to depart it too, should it come to that.
“Your mother spoke eloquently about you, young man,” he said. “She told me you spent a lot of time together, talking of life and death and all points in between. She said you were hell-bent upon ending your life, and would have done so by now if you were able to lift a finger against yourself. She told me that you didn’t even know what life was about. You had no frame of reference. You could not feel, yet you believed life was about nothing but feeling.’
I thought I heard the compress of snow underfoot. The ruffle of clothing in wind. I caught a glimpse of him, a shadow, wraithlike, at my shoulder. And for a moment I thought I could smell him too. He smelled of books and leather and, as in me, I smelled in him the sickly sweet redolence of death. Whereas I was inviting it, he was admitting it, he was cosying up to it within the folds of his heavy coat.
“Your mother talked of you as a child. They would bring you here, to the glacier, determined that the cold, fresh air would be beneficial. Of course, it wasn’t, but she kept bringing you. In blind hope. In stubborn belief. You became agitated, and she saw that as a good thing; she thought you were stirring from this pitiful state, this curse of being locked within yourself. She thought you might suddenly stand up, rejuvenated by the magic of frigidity, and be miraculously cured. But I suspect it was because you were distressed. You were brought to a place that seemed only to mirror your condition. The cold, cruel, still mass of ice. The suffocation of life beneath it. The smothering. The glacier mocked you. It, after all, enjoyed some minute advance. The incremental creep through the mountains. More movement than you could ever dream of.
“I could leave you here,” he said. “Nobody would think to check this location. You would be dead within the hour, of exposure. But I am no monster, despite what he says.”
I felt the charge of his gloved fists upon the handles once more. We turned away from the great mound of the glacier, pale under the night as if it were blessed with its own light source. “I ask you … no, sir, I warn you not to involve yourself in this affair. My issue with Mr Holmes is a private one. He has put you in jeopardy to serve himself, which goes to show you, I think, that the true nature of monsters is not such a subject given to black and white hues.”
I think the cold was getting to me, though I could not feel it. I was no longer shivering, and I was drowsy, as if injected with sedatives. I had read somewhere that once you stop shivering then the b
ody is not far away from serious hypothermia, and that tiredness is a sign. But again it looked as if I would be cheated of death; Professor Moriarty was playing with me. When we got back within view of the hotel, I could see frantic movement in the grounds. Staff and guests were roving around with lanterns. I heard my name being called above the clamour of the wind.
“You can be a glacier,” he told me. “Or you can be a waterfall. It is your choice, though you might not think it so.”
I heard the snap of something behind me, and a rustling. He didn’t say anything else. I smelled smoke, and a golden glow built, casting my shadow before me. I heard a cry: “There! Over there! Look. Fire!” And then many figures were dashing across the meadow towards me. Moriarty was long gone by the time they reached me. I was swaddled in blankets and my mother’s scent was here, though I could not yet see her. She was crying. I heard her crying all the way back, and it followed me down into sleep.
When I awakened, a man was sitting opposite me, peering at me as if I were an arresting specimen in a museum. He said: “I was sent by Mr Holmes. He said you might have a message for me.”
MY JACKET POCKET.
The man stood up and reached for my jacket. He withdrew an envelope. It was the money Holmes had paid me to be his watchman.
“No message?”
I did not reply. I waited until he had left. I fell into a sleep so deep it was like sinking into the cold fathoms of a lake.
Word began to trickle through the following afternoon, like the first thaw waters of spring from the crags, that Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis, Moriarty, were dead. Evidence of a struggle had been found at Reichenbach at midday, and a few artefacts belonging to the eminent detective. I had seen the falls once, when I was very young, and I had been cowed by its power and fury. If you were driven underground by that torrent of water, you would never surface again. But it had excited me too. That movement. That ceaseless thrashing energy.
I saw Dr Watson, bereft, exhausted, being ushered with his suitcase to the train station where he would begin his journey back to London. I wanted to offer him some crumb of comfort, but others more able than I were doing that job already, and so much better. After he had gone – I watched the puffs of steam from the locomotive dissipate like my own thought bubbles in the boiling Meiringen sky – Mother suggested I take to my bed for a rest. My fingers and toes exhibited signs of frostbite, and she thought it would be injurious to my good health to remain outdoors, but I was firm. I WISH TO SIT ON THE BALCONY. I would not be diverted. After a while, she gave up trying to change my mind and left me alone. I’m sure she was thinking that I might be abducted once more, but Moriarty was gone, and Tobias had replaced the rugged wheels on my chair with the original castors. I was unlikely to be making any more unscheduled trips again.
The storm hit Meiringen an hour later, leaden cloud bringing artificial night to the village. I watched the skin on my arms pucker, the hairs rise as if in supplication to the power swelling in the sky. This time I felt it, an echo of the fear I had known in Moriarty’s presence, as if he dragged its trickery around with him like a humour or a scent. Lightning flashed and the thunder it created was instantaneous. Rain dropped as if shocked out of the clouds by the sound; heavy, brutal, pummelling rain. I had never felt so alive and, for a moment, I was grateful that I could never utter the name of the person who had triggered that in me. Fear was survival. Fear was life. I could feel. I could FEEL.
In the hiatus after a second lightning flash, I saw something different in the scenery imprinted upon the darkness behind my eyes. A figure was standing still to my left beneath the awning of the bakery a little way up the road from the hotel. The flash of lightning. A refreshed scene in acid white: the figure now closer. There was something wrong with its physique.
Flash. Everything remained the same: the great mass of the mountains, the reach of the trees, the wet template of buildings known to me as intimately as the pattern of freckles on the back of my hand. And this figure. Closer yet. Bent over and buckled like a child’s model shaped from clay.
I tasted his name upon my tongue though I could not utter it. So much like some play upon the Latin phrase reminding us that we have to die.
Flash. A step nearer. Now I could see his face. The prominent lobes of his forehead split and bloodied. The cliff of his face blackened by bruises. An arm broken so badly it resembled a flesh scythe curling up around his back. Bone was visible in the soaked swags of his exposed skin, as if he were carrying some strange bag of splintered antlers with him, to ward off bad luck.
He looked at me with those massive gaping shadows deep in his face. In the next window of light, he had raised his good hand and let it fall haltingly, like a child’s representation of rain or, perhaps, the deluge of a waterfall.
When the lightning returned again, he was gone.
The Protégé
Kate Ellis
Spring 1911
‘I am a man of science. But I do appreciate art.’
The speaker was an elderly man. His face was long and thin, topped with sparse grey hair and there was a sharpness, a watchfulness in his eyes that suggested great intelligence.
The young man he addressed looked sideways at him. He wore a puzzled frown as though he had not quite understood what the other had said.
But the older man continued. ‘I think this work is particularly interesting. The look on the interrogator’s face. The innocence of the child. He has no idea what is happening and why the strange man is asking these questions but, in his naivety, he will likely tell the truth in an unwitting act of betrayal. The only thing he knows, even at his tender age, is fear. See how his sister weeps. She recognises the danger.’
A small smile played on the speaker’s thin lips as he turned his head to see his companion’s reaction. But he saw nothing. The shabby young man with the greasy dark hair was staring blankly at the large canvas, lost in the scene.
‘And When Did You Last See Your Father? It is a strange title, don’t you think?’
The young man turned his eyes on the speaker. ‘Please. My English is not good.’
A flicker of recognition passed across the older man’s face. ‘I detect a German accent. You are German, mein Herr.’
The answer was a vigorous shake of the head. ‘Nein. I am Austrian.’
‘How long have you been in Liverpool?’ The older man spoke in German, fluent and faultless as a native.
‘For four months only,’ the young man replied in his own tongue. He was in his early twenties and he fidgeted nervously with the sleeve of his threadbare jacket. His body was thin and gangling and he looked as if he was in need of a good meal. A controllable creature, the old man thought. He’d met his kind before: desperate for approval; desperate to belong.
‘You are an artist, I think,’ the old man said, noting the tense, paint-stained fingers.
The young man’s small eyes brightened at the question. ‘Yes, I am a very fine artist. But there are many who do not appreciate true talent. So many ignorant men who follow only the latest fashion.’
‘I know precisely what you mean. My gifts too have long been underestimated.’ The old man’s lips twitched upwards in a bitter smile.
After a short silence he turned his attention once more to the painting hanging before them on the gallery wall. The picture of the small boy in the costume of a seventeenth-century Royalist being questioned by a Parliamentarian soldier with a cunning gentleness calculated to extract the Judas betrayal from the guileless babe. ‘Could you paint something like this?’
The young man nodded eagerly. ‘Yes. I think so.’
There was a pause while the older man studied his companion more closely. What he saw obviously pleased him because he came straight to the point. ‘If I supply the materials, could you produce a replica of Yeames’s masterpiece? A close approximation good enough to fool the casual observer?’
He saw pride in the young Austrian’s expression and a visible straightening of his
slouched spine. ‘I would enjoy the challenge.’ He suddenly frowned. ‘But I have nowhere to work on such a large canvas. My accommodation is cramped and …’
‘Do not worry. I have a large house where you can work. The only thing I ask is that you say nothing of the matter to anyone. Is that agreed?’
The young man nodded eagerly. ‘Agreed. I hope you will not think me impertinent, but why do you wish for this copy?’
The older man smiled, showing his small, yellow teeth. ‘That is none of your concern. I will pay you well and you will ask no questions.’
‘You will pay?’
The older man saw the greed in the other man’s eyes. Or maybe a desperation that had grown from poverty and rejection. He named a sum and saw the light of avarice flicker brightly.
‘I will meet you in front of this gallery tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. Do not be late.’
‘I will be punctual, mein Herr.’ He hesitated. ‘I will need to make sketches. I cannot copy this from memory.’
‘That has already been taken care of.’ The old man turned to leave.
‘I do not know your name.’
‘Names are not necessary. Until tomorrow.’ He marched out of the gallery at a speed that belied his apparent age, leaving the younger man staring at the painting.
The young man arrived on the flight of steps in front of the Walker Art Gallery ten minutes before the appointed time. He wished to be punctual. Besides, he’d been eager to escape his brother’s claustrophobic flat, away from his sister-in-law’s hostile glances, the baby’s screams, and the smell of damp and stale cooking.
He watched the traffic on William Brown Street; horse-drawn trams and carriages mingling with the noisy new-fangled motorcars of the wealthier classes. At nine on the dot, a small black carriage pulled by two black horses drew up at the bottom of the steps. The coachman’s black muffler was pulled up to his nose, protecting his nostrils from the thin spring mist drifting in from the river and masking the wearer’s features. The carriage door opened to reveal the old man, who leaned forward and beckoned the young man in.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 22