Forever.
The Reichenbach Falls. He’s there again. This is where it all begins, where it all ends.
The dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, hundreds of feet below.
How many feet? Eight hundred and nine. Precisely.
How does he know this?
He is skilled at mathematics. Mathematics is his playground. He remembers other numbers. Eighty-three, seventeen, twenty-three, thirty-seven, five, sixty-one, thirteen, eleven, two hundred and twenty-seven, eight hundred and nine. They are of prime significance. And then he thinks: That’s it! Primes!
All the numbers are primes. Why?
Holmes would figure this out in an instant, he thinks. But he is superior to Holmes. Superior.
Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street. Two hundred and twenty-one is a pseudo-prime number.
Primes are superior to pseudo-primes; purer, the real thing.
And more: 83 Albermarle Street is not Moriarty’s actual address. He has never lived there. He remembers now. He lived at 50 Albermarle Street! Why the change to eighty-three? Prime, yes, but there must be something more.
Eighty-three. Then he knows. A simple sliding over of the decimal place. Eight point three.
That is how long he will be in the air at Reichenbach before his collision. The math is simple. His mass, one hundred and twenty-eight pounds; the distance, eight hundred and nine feet; an air resistance of point one six pounds per foot; a gravity of nine point eight meters per second squared. Outcome: he will fall for eight point three seconds.
He is Wakefield because his mind has been asleep but knows that it must wake. In his dream life he lives at 83 Albermarle Street because he is better than Holmes, and because he will fall for eight point three seconds. In dreams, print is hard to read; thus the difficulty of seeing the writing in Hawthorne’s book.
Until now.
He has been asleep.
Wake yourself! he commands.
Reality sunders, regroups.
He is falling.
This is the truth of his existence.
This is the reality.
He has never left Reichenbach.
Falling.
His brain has apprehended that he will die in seconds, when his head smashes against the rock below. And to give himself an escape, it has created an elaborate fantasy for him to flee into. It has resorted to Wakefield. It has spun an entire universe out of it, nestled his consciousness inside a place where real time is not felt. A year in his Wakefield cosmos is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second of real time.
But the illusion was imperfect. It contained all the clues leading to its own unraveling. Wakefield, the man who must wake. The primes. The bees.
He has failed, then.
He is falling and he cannot stop.
Time is about to catch up with Professor Moriarty.
Moriarty plunges back inside the dream with whirlwind force. Twenty years spent in the fog makes its inhabitation comfortable and automatic, easy to re-enter at will.
Ah, yes. He is back in his rented room.
With quick, precise gestures Moriarty packs his scant belongings and leaves a brief note behind informing the owners that he will not be back. And here is a gift, a small token of my appreciation, he adds, and places the note atop the Hawthorne volume.
Several times during his stroll back to 83 Albermarle Street Moriarty hears rushing water and is almost tempted back into that Other World. But each time he resists, forcing himself to think of classical compositions that will appeal to his mathematical mind – Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and “Canonical Variations”, with their kaleidoscopic symmetries – and allow him to elude the danger.
He saunters about London without checking how long, for it is best to keep time periods undefined in his mind. Eventually, he makes his way to Benekey’s pub, which serves a fine wine and provides private booths. Walking to his chosen booth down the main room, lined with dark wood alcoves, he passes a mirror and there sees a reflection of his cold, gray eyes, filled with inexorable purpose. For a flicker of time the gray in his eyes reminds him of another grey, that of a mist. He pushes the image aside.
Sitting for a long time, drinking his wine, Moriarty asks himself: How long can I keep this up?
How long can he promote his self-hypnosis, continue to hold the gauze of this reality over his senses, so as to blind them to his predicament in the Other World?
Then his lips spread into a crafty smile. He must only keep it up for the rest of his natural dream-life, for when he dies inside this universe, it will matter not what happens to his body in the Other World. His consciousness will have expired.
Considering his current age, the period in question is unlikely to exceed ten, or perhaps fifteen, years.
With this insight, Moriarty’s body relaxes. He feels his whole fate turning on a pivot.
To prevent this great dream from dissipating, he thinks. That is my task, nothing more.
His mind turns to mathematics once more. In his youth, he performed work on the binomial theorem. He has heard that the German mathematician George Cantor has made great advances in the understanding of infinity, as envisioned through set theory. If infinity can be so tamed, then there is ample hope for Moriarty.
The professor pays and departs Benekey’s. As he wends his way back home, he realizes that to strengthen the constitution of his belief, he must take up reading in a voracious way. The clearer the print on the page, the more firmly entrenched he will be inside the dream. And so he stops en route to purchase several fine books and journals.
During the last stretch of his trip, he thinks of Holmes, and Holmes’s attitude towards the retiring mathematical coach. He knows full well that Holmes’s horror at his crimes was lost in his admiration at Moriarty’s skills. He can think of no higher praise. In this place, Holmes too still lives. Perhaps one day Moriarty will pay him a visit.
But not today. Today he reunites with Mrs Moriarty and reclaims his life.
At last he arrives.
Pausing near the house, Moriarty discerns, through the parlor windows of the second floor, the red glow and the glimmer and fitful flash of a comfortable fire. He sighs in an anticipation of domestic contentment. Moriarty ascends the steps lightly, for, though twenty years have stiffened his legs since he came down them, his new convictions and determination more than compensate for the loss of vitality.
The door opens. As he passes in, in a parting glimpse of his visage we recognize his crafty, knowing smile, a smile that speaks of worlds within worlds to which only he is privy.
We will not follow Moriarty across the threshold. Suffice it to say that Moriarty has found his place, and his place is not ours.
The place is Reichenbach, the time is May 1891, and the theme is self-banishment.
A Certain Notoriety
David Stuart Davies
Planning for future security is essential in order to be successful in a criminal career.
Professor Moriarty
The lights in the theatre dimmed and the curtain rose. The set was the drawing room of a London town house. The butler entered. As he did so, Colonel Sebastian Moran, sitting in the first row of the stalls, touched his companion’s arm. ‘That’s the fellow,’ he whispered. He paused for a moment, allowing a gentle smile to touch his lips. ‘What do you think?’
At first his companion did not respond but stared with fascination at the man attired in the butler’s livery, while the stage gradually filled with other members of the cast and the drama commenced for real. The actor was very tall, thin with a balding high-domed head and moved with remarkable ease.
The butler’s role was small but his manner and bearing were impressive. After a few perfunctory lines, he made his way off stage. On his exit, Moran’s companion chuckled, the eyes gleaming with pleasure. ‘I think he will do very nicely. Very nicely indeed.’
Alfred Coombs was enjoying a glass of stout in the communal dressing room at the en
d of the show. He had sloughed off his butler’s outfit, swilled away the greasepaint and was dressed in his own rather shabby civilian clothes ready to return to his lodgings. He was deliberately slow in effecting the metamorphosis from Gerald the butler to Alfred Coombs the lowly actor, so that by the time the transformation was complete, the rest of the cast had gone, leaving him with the luxury of a peaceful dressing room and his bottle of stout. He loved this quiet time at the end of a performance. He felt he had the theatre all to himself. It allowed him to daydream of that time, not too distant he hoped, when he would have a dressing room of his own as befitting a principal player. There would be a dresser hanging up his costume, before bringing out his evening suit, which he would wear for a late supper at the Café de Paris or maybe the Ritz.
He took another swig of the rich dark ale, easing his mind into the fantasy. He had been long in the profession, never rising in the ranks, always below stairs as it were, but with Alfred Coombs hope sprang eternal. He really believed that one day he would take the starring role, be thrust centre stage into the limelight and accumulate all the glossy trimmings that went with being a star.
As he was contemplating this eventuality, almost a nightly ritual, there came a knock at the dressing room door. With a sigh of annoyance at having his rêverie disturbed, Alfred dragged his feet down from the make-up table and wandered to the door. On the threshold were two figures: a man and a woman. The man was a bluff-looking fellow with wiry blond hair, a heavy moustache and bright blue eyes, which shone out of a ruddy face. But it was the woman, standing behind him, who captured Coombs’s attention. She was a striking figure, tall, dark-haired and palefaced; beautiful in a cold and clinical fashion. Her dark eyes gazed upon him in a hypnotic manner that seemed to penetrate Alfred’s tired brain as though gaining access to his very thoughts.
‘Good evening, Mr Coombs,’ said the man. ‘We did enjoy your performance tonight.’
Alfred did not know how to react to this compliment. He had never received one for his acting abilities before and it crossed his mind that the comment was tinged with sarcasm and that he was being ridiculed.
‘Indeed, you show great promise,’ continued the man with enthusiasm. ‘We were so impressed that we have a proposition, which we feel will enable you to demonstrate fully and indeed develop your thespian talents.’
‘You are theatrical agents? Producers perhaps?’ enquired Coombs, his heart skipping a beat.
The man smiled and cast an amused glance at his companion whose face remained immobile.
‘Not exactly,’ said the man.
‘Then … then what is this all about?’
The woman moved forward, the rustle of her costume filling his ears.
‘We are offering you a unique role, one that will bring you a certain notoriety and significant remuneration.’ Her voice was low and mellifluous and Coombs, who was something of an expert on accents, thought he could trace a faint Irish lilt. The words ‘significant remuneration’ excited him.
‘What is the role?’
The woman gave a hint of a smile for the first time. ‘It is that of a certain mathematical professor. A creation of my own.’
Sherlock Holmes flopped down in a chair in Inspector Patterson’s office in Scotland Yard. He sighed heavily.
‘I reckon you could do with a brandy,’ observed the inspector with a wink, withdrawing a bottle and two glasses from the bottom drawer of his desk.
‘I’ll take a nip, thank you, Patterson,’ said Holmes wearily, ‘but I don’t think brandy will solve our problems.’
‘You got nothing more out of Barney Southwell then?’ said the policeman gloomily, passing over a glass of brandy.
Holmes shook his head. ‘I reckon Southwell told me as much as he knew or was allowed to know.’ He banged his fist down hard on the desk in frustration. ‘This is happening now on a regular basis: a number of robberies in the city carried out by small-time professionals who individually would have neither the wit nor the foresight to organise these projects. They are mere puppets dangling on strings controlled by someone else. But they are part of a growing organisation, which in time I am convinced will, like rats in the sewers, overrun the city.’
‘That’s quite a dramatic claim.’
‘I am not given to exaggeration, Inspector. My theory is based on fact and evidence. Someone is organising the itinerant malefactors of the city into some kind of criminal association, no doubt utilising the safety-in-numbers principle. It is a masterstroke. The work of a genius and it is my task to track him down.’
Violet Carmichael laughed. It was a full-blown demonstration of her amusement and not a ladylike tinkle or a repressed chuckle. ‘It is all going brilliantly, Moran. The coffers are overflowing thanks to the success of our little mercenary exploits. This enterprise grows in importance. So much so that we have attracted the attention of no less a personage than Sherlock Holmes.’
‘As you thought you would,’ agreed Moran, lighting up a cigar.
‘As I knew I would.’ The eyes flashed arrogantly. ‘Now we need to take things further. I believe it is time to set out the birdlime to catch our fine-feathered friend. Is Coombs here?’
Moran strode to the door, opened it and, leaning forward, made a beckoning gesture. Alfred Coombs entered. His appearance was much altered and he seemed somewhat nervous and apprehensive as he approached the large desk behind which sat his new mistress, his new employer, Violet Carmichael.
She gazed at him and gave a nod of approval to her companion. ‘You have done an excellent job, Moran. The fellow looks every decrepit inch a mathematics professor. The shoulders slope nicely, features are pale and ascetic-looking. What about the voice? Come, sir. Give me a little dialogue.’
Coombs took a step forward and nodded gently, his head beginning to sway from side to side in a strange reptilian fashion. ‘Mr Sherlock Holmes,’ he said, in a voice that resembled a creaking door, ‘you hope to beat me. I tell you, you will never beat me. I am your nemesis. I am your doom.’
Violet Carmichael clapped her hands together with pleasure. ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘Your transformation from Alfred Coombs into this … this creature is magnificent. I particularly like the movement of your head as though you were some venomous lizard seeking a fly.’
Coombs grinned. ‘Just a little touch of my own,’ he said. ‘I thought it gave the fellow a certain kind of danger.’
‘So it does. So it does. Well, Moran, I am more than ever convinced we are ready. Do you feel ready, Mr Coombs?’
‘I do, ma’am.’
‘Good. There is just one thing. You will no longer respond to the name Coombs. From this moment on you are Professor James Moriarty.’
‘Of course I am.’ The deep-set eyes glimmered brightly and the head shifted unnervingly from side to side.
Sherlock Holmes also had a great facility for disguise, although his friend Watson always secretly believed that he tended to overdo the theatrical touches. The characters that emerged from the detective’s bedroom ready to go out on to the streets of the city were always to Watson’s mind a little larger than life. He certainly thought so when Holmes presented himself as a rough labourer in readiness for his latest excursion. There was perhaps too much rouge around the cheeks and on the nose and was that amount of stomach padding really necessary? Certainly the straw-coloured wig could have been abandoned, but Holmes seemed particularly pleased with his transformation and even the good doctor had to admit that the creature before him looked nothing like Sherlock Holmes.
The detective’s destination that evening was the Rat and Raven, a shabby public house in the east end of the city which was the bolthole of a certain Percy Snaggles, a nasty little nark who had been of great service to Holmes in the past.
It was about ten at night when the detective entered this squalid establishment. The heat and the smoke were the first thing that assailed him, followed by the frenzied, raucous rattle of conversation. There were deep-throated oaths mixed with
high-pitched female laughter from gaudy tarts, who were either having a respite from their labours or attempting to pick up new trade. Holmes made his way to the bar and in a rough cockney voice, typical of the other inmates of this alehouse, ordered a glass of porter. While he waited for his drink, he cast his keen gaze around the room. It did not take him long to spot Snaggles. He was slumped in a corner with a one-eyed man, apparently playing a game of cards. Holmes paid for his drink and, squeezing himself through the boozy throng of clients, approached the nark. On seeing this strange-looking cove bearing down on him, Snaggles pulled himself upright in his chair, his eyes wide in apprehension.
‘Need to talk,’ said Holmes, maintaining his cockney accent, while he made the secret sign with his hand that told Snaggles who he really was. The nark’s features quivered and he glanced over at his companion. ‘Half a mo, Wally, while I conduct a bit o’ business with this geezer here.’
The one-eyed man looked up from scrutinising his hand of cards. ‘You take your time ’cause when you get back I’m gonna fleece you rotten.’ He laughed, revealing a row of crooked, blackened teeth.
Holmes and Snaggles made their way through the crowd to the door and into the comparative quiet of the street.
‘His name is Moriarty. Professor Moriarty,’ said Snaggles breathlessly, his voice emerging as a harsh whisper. ‘He’s the one who sets up the jobs for us, organises things. We’re like members of his army and woe betide us if we don’t obey orders.’ He made a throat-slitting gesture.
‘Have you seen this Moriarty?’
‘Just the once. A funny-looking cove: very tall, large head, bent shoulders and moves funny.’
‘Moves funny?’
‘He don’t seem to be able to keep his head still. It keeps wobbling about.’ He demonstrated the movement.
‘Where are his headquarters?’
Snaggles gave a brief grunting laugh. ‘You must be joking. No one knows. It’s being a tight-close secret that makes him so successful. But I tell you this: it ain’t just robberies that he’s into. He has his fingers in many pies: blackmail, counterfeit dosh, murder even. I can tell you that he’s in charge of most of the crime in London. He’s a dangerous fellow, Mr Holmes. If I were you I’d steer clear of him.’
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 53