Professor Moriarty is in his study, near an unlit fireplace, captiv ated by the narcotic-like effects of the settling dusk.
In days past, before his accident, nightfall would have inspired a subtle, appreciative smile in Moriarty, distilled from the recollection of his many years of nocturnal outings.
But that chapter of his life has ended. Ever since his accident a year and a half ago, Moriarty has become a shadow of his former self, a delicate organism stricken with an extreme sensibility to the vicissitudes of life. As a result, he has elected to sever all ties with his former associates – most of whom, in any case, believe him deceased – and to live a housebound existence, isolated from the world save for his wife’s ministrations. Moriarty once adored unpredictability and improvisation, the thrill of rising to the occasion and surpassing it. His new cocoon is habit. The slightest irregularity in his daily schedule disturbs him greatly. He craves the dull routine of existence. He abhors mental exaltation. His mind, or what remains of it, appears to thrive on what others might term stagnation.
And so tonight’s dusk should leave him indifferent, as happened yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. But it does not. The darkness he currently beholds appears … alive in some way, directed towards him. Shadows swim over the walls of a deserted Albermarle Street, dimming the already diffuse light of the street lamps, sliding across door jambs, and finally reaching, tendril-like, into the professor’s cavernous study.
Moriarty raises his arms, a gesture empty of effect. He is assailed by a wrenching sensation of vertigo deep within his breast. The Universe is spinning madly about him. The name of his wife forms on his thin lips, but before it can be born, he clamps his mouth shut, even as he keels over and falls to the floor. For if there is one thing of which he is certain, it is that he must face this – whatever this is – alone.
He twists on the carpet, feeling as though the ground is buckling beneath him.
Recourse to your ratiocination! he tells himself. This must be a sensory trick, an illusion, nothing more.
And so Moriarty stills his body, rubs his eyes and, with great effort, dispels the pitch black that seems to envelop his study, at first in swaths, then in receding flecks, until at last he has reclaimed the meager but sufficient illumination provided by his table lamp.
But the episode is not yet over.
Still splayed on the ground, as though an insect in wait of pins, Moriarty is assailed by a piercing cold and the sound of rushing water. Somehow, he thinks, the chill night air has transported itself into his body, cutting fine frozen rivulets in his lungs. His flesh is soaked in cold; he imagines himself cast into a vast, furious river, submerged in its icy currents.
Again, he summons the powers of his cognition. Again he defeats his foe.
By the time he rises and shuffles to the study’s door, he is trembling, and cannot escape an accursed residue of bonechilling damp. Fictive or not, it permeates his soul.
Moriarty coughs. Moments later, his wife appears beside him. She pauses to study the ghost of her husband, or rather the ghost of the ghost that her husband has of late become.
“Dear?” She need say nothing more; indeed, the monosyllabic question, cast against the severe repression of emotion evident in the professor’s pallid features, proves superfluous. For Moriarty has sealed himself off from his wife, and his hermetic encasement cannot be breached, by her or any other living soul.
“I must take my leave of this place,” Moriarty declaims. He studies his surroundings, as though aware of them for the first time in years.
His wife waits, eyes sullen but patient, for him to continue.
“Positively do not expect me by the return coach tomorrow,” he says. “Do not even be alarmed if I tarry three or four days. But, at all events, look for me at supper on Friday evening.”
She does not enquire as to the object of his impromptu journey.
That is a good thing, Moriarty muses, for even if she did, he would be unable to reply, ignorant as he is of this fact himself.
She fetches his drab greatcoat, a hat covered with an oilcloth, his top boots, and an umbrella. In the meantime, he prepares a small portmanteau.
Minutes later, upon reconvening outside Moriarty’s study, the atmosphere between husband and wife is one neither of warm appreciation nor frigid alienation, merely the acceptance by both of a mysterious, unappealable fate.
Without another word, Moriarty leaves. In such an inauspicious manner commences his great journey.
His travails do not take the professor far. A scant seventeen minutes after his departure, on a street not far removed from his own, he sees a residence that is accepting tenants and, after a not inconsiderable withdrawal of cash from his portmanteau, he is welcomed at these new lodgings.
His body is at his journey’s end, his mind merely at its beginning.
* * *
Moriarty does not understand the scope or implications of the project upon which he has launched himself. He can recognize, in a detached way, that his rash behavior starkly contradicts everything he has assessed to be true about his character since his accident; he has behaved impulsively, deviating from his most beloved schedule, utterly failing to plan ahead. He should feel anxiety and dread. He should be beset by the convulsions of the unknown.
But his recognition of these theoretical responses creates no actual preoccupation or burden within him. Feeling, on the contrary, leavened by his situation, he settles into his new bed with unaccustomed ease, and slips into a profound, blissful slumber.
The following morning Moriarty feels no temptation to turn his thoughts inward. He spends the day diverting himself with abstruse mathematical thoughts, and, when he retires that night, again finds sleep to be deep and unproblematic.
The following day takes a similar course, as does the next, and the next.
Friday arrives. Moriarty thinks of his wife, of the pain she will feel when he does not arrive for supper, the measures she will take to try to locate him. He is moved by her plight, but he cannot change his present heading.
On Saturday morning, Moriarty awakens to find himself unshackled. Friday represented a test, and he has passed. Now he can at last allow himself to understand what he is doing here.
Comprehension dawns throughout the day, but unlike the real aurora, delivers cold rather than heat in its wake. For Moriarty’s purpose is now clear: he is to investigate the symptoms of the physical distress that he suffered on the night of his departure, to analyse them, banish them and then resume his life. Though his attack was physical, the underlying cause must surely be mental. If it were not, he could not have overcome the vertigo that had penetrated his chest, or dried himself from the illusory wetness that clung to him, by mere thought. And yet he had.
So he will stay in these lodgings, he resolves on Saturday evening, as long as he must in order to vanquish the disease.
The symptoms return, on and off.
That sound of rushing water, like a whisper inside Professor Morarity’s mind; the viscerally unsettling queasiness of a man infinitely far from terra firma.
Every day Professor Moriarty beholds his home, though he makes sure that his perambulations are timed so as to miss Mrs Moriarty. Despite the precaution, once or twice he glimpses her either leaving or entering their domicile at 83 Albermarle Street, and he feels a stab of remorse at the sight of her forlorn countenance.
Days and weeks and months go by, and Moriarty, increment by increment, makes progress in the deconstruction of his maladie imaginaire.
An unsentimental examination of his symptoms – the severe vertigo, the sound of rushing water – has made it clear that he must focus his mental energies on the one memory he has until now most assiduously avoided. The memory of his accident at Reichenbach.
Accident. The word itself, he realizes now, is denial. What Moriarty really means is struggle, fight, violence, fall; the clash of an irresistible force with an immovable object.
What he really m
eans is crime.
Attempted murder.
Near-death experience.
There. He can think these things now, without guilt or shame.
But then, why should he have censored himself in the first place? Moriarty wonders.
There is nothing wrong, after all, with murder. Everyone dies, and if some passengers on the inevitable train of doom are conveyed by Professor Moriarty’s adroit hands to a compartment nearer the train’s front, then, surely, that is no great tragedy. If examined closely, he is convinced that his life’s actions have also regressed other passengers towards rear compartments. It would be as ill-advised to feel guilty over the former as it would to celebrate the latter. Life itself is but a splendid calculus, in which minute adjustments of one’s position and velocity, expertly wielded, recompense the wise, while rendering the timorous their instruments.
Nevertheless, something haunts Professor Moriarty – and it haunts him severely – about his attempted murder of his great accuser, his implacable adversary, Sherlock Holmes.
Years pass. Moriarty continues to live mere streets from his former abode. He is never spotted, identified, or called upon. By now Moriarty’s death has been reckoned with by his wife. His estate has been settled, his name dismissed from memory. His wife has adopted a mantle of autumnal widowhood without the expectation of ever lifting it from her bosom.
In short, a vast gap has opened up between Professor Moriarty and the world to which he once belonged.
And now something unexpected and terrifying arises within that chasm.
It happens on a Tuesday evening, shortly after supper. Moriarty takes all his meals in his room, and he has just fastidiously wiped his lips. He is preparing to settle into that mild postprandial stupor that often results from overindulgence, when he hears the familiar susurration of rushing water. But this time the sound is right behind him.
Startled, he turns.
In his room, the walls recede, the floorboards disappear and a tremendous abyss opens before him.
For an instant, Moriarty is standing on nothing.
And then he falls.
He tumbles head first into the abyss.
Rocks race before him and gray mist sprays his skin. The sound of rushing water that lured him into this precipitous dive moments ago intensifies a hundredfold: enormous, cascading waterfalls crash inches behind him.
Dear God! There is no mistaking this place, or what occurred here. It is happening all over again. He has just struggled with Holmes on the fall’s brink; Holmes has attempted and failed to defend himself with baritsu; they have fallen together.
The world spins, and Moriarty clutches at the empty air, hoping to discover a foothold, an outgrowth of rock, anything.
Then he closes his eyes and thinks. This must be a dream, an hallucination! There is no physical dimension to his experience. It is a projection of his mind. And it is on those terms that he must combat it.
This thought has a peculiar effect. He is still falling, but more slowly than before.
He focuses his mind again. His velocity of descent decreases once again.
But is it really him that is slowing down – or the world?
The roar of the waterfall is muted, deepened, transformed. Its spray still cools his skin, but its particulate nature feels finer, less overwhelming.
Time, Professor Moriarty thinks. I am slowing down my perception of time.
With a few more moments of practice, he finds that he can bring himself almost to a halt. The more intensely he concentrates on the problem, the more time slows down, and the more time he has to keep perfecting his craft.
Finally, practically frozen in mid-fall, darkness descends upon him, and he thinks no more.
Moriarty wakes in pain. His room feels hot beyond reason, and so he opens the window.
Moments later, thirteen bumblebees swarm in, buzzing loudly.
He remains calm. The bees approach him, encircle him, then depart.
Raising a hand to his forehead, Moriarty determines that he is feverish.
Any life is made up of a single moment, Moriarty reflects. His is indubitably his fall at Reichenbach.
It comes to filter his every experience of the quotidian world, until barely a day goes by – an hour – that he is not transported back to that place, recreated by his mind with utter and bewitching fidelity.
Nineteen years have passed since Moriarty left his wife. He is not much changed in outward appearance. The frontal development of his head, if anything, has increased, and his eyes are perhaps more sunken than before. But he is recognizably the same man.
Today he wakes with an uncanny clarity of mind. His disease will soon be behind him, he intuits. The definitive remedy to his mental problem is at hand. Somewhere outside, a message is waiting for him, and he must simply locate and decipher it.
He sets about the task with diligence and alacrity. The sun shines with unaccustomed vigor, and the sky is unblemished by even the faintest cloud gossamer.
Moriarty walks briskly, but with no particular destination. He stops here and there, memorizing details of what he sees, searching for patterns.
Twenty-three minutes into his jaunt, he encounters a cluster of bees as bright as the sun. He counts eleven of them. They follow him for a full minute, without any apparent intention of provoking harm, and then disperse into the skies.
Thirty-seven minutes after leaving his lodging, he finds himself near a book-vendor’s stall. As if in a trance, he ambulates towards it. Five minutes into his visual perusal of the titles on display, he locates a tattered copy of the second edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, and, without knowing why, purchases it.
Sixty-one minutes into his walk, bees return, this time hundreds of them.
Moriarty contemplates them, placidly. As before, they pose no threat. They hover for a while then fly away.
Moriarty studies his notes. He shuffles the facts like cards.
The numbers must mean something.
His former address: 83 Albermarle Street.
He lives seventeen minutes away from that residence.
The time intervals between significant events during his recent constitutional: twenty-three, thirty-seven, five, sixty-one.
The number of bees during each encounter: thirteen, eleven, two hundred and twenty-seven.
Holmes’s destiny is softer than Moriarty’s. Water will break Holmes’s fall, shattering his bones, and he will sink below the surface, evanescing from the world in quiet poetry.
Moriarty, however, will strike rock. His cranium will be split and a string of bloodied brains will be ejected forth from it as if from an air gun, and he will rebound from the rock and land twisted on solid ground, face caved in.
Moriarty doesn’t know how he knows this, but he does.
Wake up! Wake up! He sees his skull-opened corpse staring up at the heavens, at himself.
No! Not real.
Just a dream.
Wake up. Wake up.
Moriarty’s eyesight has declined with age. Multiple times he tries to read the Hawthorne tome he purchased during his recent outing. But the words on the page appear blurry, indistinct.
He sighs and puts the book down.
Twenty years have now elapsed since Moriarty exiled himself from his former life.
His investigation is nearly at an end. His being tingles with the promise of impending revelation.
He thinks about Holmes. Moriarty remembers imagining, a long time ago, that Holmes might take up some solitary profession, like beekeeper. He might retire from the business of being a London consulting detective and move to the Sussex Downs. Is that where he is, then? Is that what he’s doing?
Yes; the bees. Maybe Moriarty’s adversary had found a way to teach them to follow his commands. Perhaps he instructed the bees to find Moriarty, to relay a message to him. If so, what was it?
Moriarty grows impatient in his room, suddenly feels caged. In a fit, he takes the Hawthorne book, which has
so taunted him with its nebulous print during the last few days, and flings it at the wall. It falls open. Disbelieving his eyes, Moriarty finds that he can easily read the page on which it has landed, without even having to bend down.
Enraptured, he picks it up and reads, hungrily. The page marks the opening of a story called “Wakefield”, composed by Hawthorne in 1836. The story tells of a man who walks out of his house one day, leaving his wife behind, moves into a building a few streets away, and then returns to her twenty years later, without explanation or purpose.
Moriarty recognizes himself at once in the tale’s pages. Stunned, he places the book on his bed and staggers away from it, as though it were a living entity. He, Professor Moriarty, is Wakefield. But how could Hawthorne have foreseen—
No, he thinks. Hawthorne did not predict anything. Moriarty has been enacting the story, playing it out, drawing on it from some secret recess in his memory and patterning his life after it for some inscrutable reason.
Trembling, he reads it again.
This is how it ends, then? He simply walks back to 83 Albermarle Street and reunites with Mrs Moriarty?
Something is wrong. In the story, Wakefield suffers no mental malaise, no symptoms of previous trauma. But clearly Moriarty does, for it was those symptoms that instigated his separation in the first place.
My mind is the chief suspect in this investigation, Moriarty declares. My mind has fastened on to a fiction and treated it as reality. The story of Wakefield.
Wakefield. He repeats the name. He rolls it on his tongue. Wakefield.
Fiction as reality, he thinks.
A story, told as truth.
The breakthrough is imminent now. He is shaking like a man in the throes of delirium tremens, his whole body heaving, contracting, quivering.
Delirium. Another key word, lodged into his brain. There for a reason.
Think, Moriarty! You are alone, attempting to unveil a great mystery. You are an outcast of the Universe. Like Wakefield.
His mind produces a scene: a long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward. Forever.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 52