The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by edited by John Joseph Adams

  Yet I had no evidence. If I went to the police with only an unsolved page of code, I too would have been marked for death. I resolved to engineer Moriarty's fall in secret. So I wrote anonymous letters to key figures in his university town, hinting at shady dealings. The vile rumours spread, and soon Moriarty resigned his chair, retiring to London to become an army coach.

  I thought the loss of the professorship would have taught him a lesson, but I was wrong. Instead, he built a veneer of self-effacement after his resignation, and became supremely cautious. I wonder what hand I had in his perfection as a criminal mastermind?

  Reverend Dodgson stopped there, and I poured him another cup of tea. "Why didn't Arthur tell someone? Or write a letter detailing what he discovered?" I asked.

  "Moriarty would have silenced anyone who knew. Written declarations might have been found and destroyed. I suspect the forgery of my name was the only clue left intact," said Dodgson.

  "And still unsolved, I gather," I said.

  "You have it, Doctor Watson," agreed Dodgson. "I was hoping we could solve the key together."

  I was about to suggest enlisting Mycroft's aid, but young Arthur Doyle had meant the message for Dodgson, so it must draw upon the Reverend's personal knowledge. Perhaps all he needed were my insights into the problem, as wrong as they might be, to help him arrive at the right answer.

  "The misspelled name, Carlool. Was that the key word?" I asked.

  "No. It has to be a long text, as Moriarty said, to foil simple decoding."

  "Could the code be based on Wonderland or Looking Glass?"

  "Doubtful. Moriarty used the notebook while he was writing his dissertation, which was years before I wrote those books."

  What would Holmes say? He'd ask me how I'd send a message to a mathematician. With numbers, I'd reply.

  And there was the answer. "The point of departure from your nom-de-plume comes after Car. It isn't lool, but one-thousand and one!" I cried triumphantly.

  Dodgson's eyes widened. "I never thought of that."

  "Moriarty used Burton's The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night as his key, then," I said, remembering Dodgson's list of Arthur's books.

  "But that was published in 1885, years after Arthur's death. He would only know of Burton's travel writings," argued Dodgson.

  I thought about it further. "Poe write a story called The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade? Not an exact match to one-thousand and one, and I'm certain it was published in 1845. Didn't Arthur have a copy of Poe on his shelves?"

  "Books? Wait, Arthur read Leibniz!" said Dodgson excitedly. "Gottfried Leibniz invented the binary number system. In binary, one-zero-zero-one is the number nine. Also, one-thousand-and-one is the product of three consecutive prime numbers: seven, eleven, and thirteen. They would be consecutive odd numbers but for the conspicuous absence of the number nine. Arthur hid that number twice in plain sight!"

  "But how would nine be the key?" I asked.

  We wrestled over the new question. My thoughts kept drifting back to Holmes. What would he consider next? He'd be fascinated by that violin, of course—

  "The violin!" I cried. "It's no accident that the note was hidden in it; it's the missing clue. Moriarty loved music, didn't he?"

  "He did," said Dodgson.

  "If he wanted to remember a passage as a key, the lyrics of a song might be easiest to remember," I suggested. "And there's one symphony set to lyrics."

  "Beethoven's Ninth, Ode to Joy!" he exclaimed. "Friedrich von Schiller's poem set to music, in the original German. That's why Moriarty was confident that a Kerckhoffs statistical analysis of his key would fail. Letter frequencies differ from language to language."

  We immediately set about deciphering the page using Ode to Joy as the key. It took many tries to determine how the key aligned to the code, but we barely noticed the passage of time. At last, Dodgson finished deciphering the entire page.

  "What does it say?" I asked, breathless.

  "It alludes to Moriarty's triumphant murder of his mentor, someone who was as devilish as he was." Dodgson handed me the coded page and its solution. "Alas, the name does not appear on this page, but the rest of the notebook should reveal who made Moriarty what he was, how he died, and why."

  "And perhaps other crimes, other accomplices," I added. Now that we had the right key, we would learn at last about Moriarty and the trials that shaped him. "I'll let Mycroft Holmes know. Thank you, Reverend."

  "No, thank you for restoring a man's good name, Doctor Watson. Holmes would be proud," said Dodgson. "At long last, we've put Arthur Doyle's ghost to rest."

  Merridew of Abominable Memory

  by Chris Roberson

  Chris Roberson's latest novels are Three Unbroken, Dawn of War II, End of the Century, and Book of Secrets, the first in his Nekropolis series. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies, such as The Many Faces of Van Helsing, FutureShocks, and Sideways in Crime, and in a variety of magazines, including Asimov's and Interzone. He is a winner of the Sidewise Award for best works of alternate history, and his novel The Dragon's Nine Sons was a finalist for this year's award. In addition to being a writer, Roberson (along with his wife, Allison) is the publisher of indie press MonkeyBrain Books.

  William Faulkner wrote, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." The past is always with us, the only guide we have for judging how we should act in the present and in the future. And yet our understanding of even our own pasts is gravely limited by our memory. Many people would likely be shocked to be confronted with just how unreliable their memory can be. Eyewitness testimony is often hopelessly confused, and many innocent people have gone to prison on the basis of false memories of childhood abuse. On the other hand there are people with staggeringly precise memories, who can recite pi to thousands of decimal places, or remember what they were doing on any day for the past several decades. Often such exceptional memory comes at the price of some other cognitive impairment. Sherlock Holmes, upon his return from the dead in "The Adventure of the Empty House," remarks on various criminals of his acquaintance whose names begin with M. "Moriarty himself is enough to make any letter illustrious," says Holmes, "and here is Morgan the poisoner, and Merridew of abominable memory." What follows is the story of this Merridew—a tale you won't soon forget.

  The old man reclined on a chaise-longue, warmed by the rays of the rising sun which slanted through the windows on the eastern wall. In the garden below, he could see the other patients and convalescents already at work tending the greenery with varying degrees of attention. The gardens of the Holloway Sanatorium were the responsibility of the patients, at least those tasks which didn't involve sharp implements, and the nurses and wardens saw to it that the grounds were immaculate. Not that the patients ever complained, of course. Tending a hedge or planting a row of flowers was serene and contemplative compared to the stresses which had lead most of the patients to take refuge here, dirty fingernails and suntanned necks notwithstanding.

  No one had asked John Watson to help tend the garden, but then, he could hardly blame them. Entering the middle years of his eighth decade of life, his days of useful manual labor were far behind him, even if he wasn't plagued by ancient injuries in leg and shoulder. But it was not infirmities of the body that had led John here to Virginia Water in Surry; rather, it was a certain infirmity of the mind.

  John's problem was memory, or memories to be precise. The dogged persistence of some, the fleeting loss of others. Increasingly in recent months and years, he had found it difficult to recall the present moment, having trouble remembering where he was, and what was going on around him. At the same time, though, recollections of events long past were so strong, so vivid, that they seemed to overwhelm him. Even at the best of times, when he felt in complete control of his faculties, he still found that the memories of a day forty years past were more vivid than his recollections of the week previous.

  John had been content to look upon these bouts of forgetfulness a
s little more than occasional lapses, and no cause for concern. When visiting London that spring, though, he had managed to get so befuddled in a fugue that he'd wandered round to Baker Street, fully expecting his old friend to be in at the rooms they once shared. The present tenant, a detective himself as it happened, was charitable enough about the episode, but it was clear that Blake had little desire to be bothered again by a confused old greybearded pensioner.

  After the episode in London, John had begun to suspect that there was no other explanation for it than that he was suffering from the onset of dementia, and that the lapses he suffered would become increasingly less occasional in the days to come. In the hopes of finding treatment, keeping the condition from worsening if improvement were out of the question, he checked himself into Holloway for evaluation.

  Warmed by the morning sun, John found himself recalling the weeks spent in Peshawar after the Battle of Maiwand, near mindless in a haze of enteric fever, something about the commingling of warmth and mental confusion bringing those days to mind.

  His reverie was interrupted by the arrival of an orderly, sent to fetch John for his morning appointment with the staff physician, the young Doctor Rhys.

  As the orderly led him through the halls of Holloway, they passed other convalescents not equal to the task of tending the emerald gardens outside. There were some few hundred patients in the facility, all of them being treated for mental distress of one sort or another, whether brought on by domestic or business troubles, by worry or overwork. Not a few of them had addled their own senses with spirits, which brought to John's mind his elder brother Henry, Jr., who had died of drink three decades past.

  There were others, though, who had seen their senses addled through no fault of their own. Some of the patients were young men, not yet out of their third decade, who seemed never to have recovered from the things they did and saw in the trenches of the Great War. Their eyes had a haunted look, as they stared unseeing into the middle distance.

  John well remembered being that young. If he closed his eyes, he could recall the sounds and smells of the Battle of Maiwand as though it had occurred yesterday. As he walked along beside the orderly, he reached up and tenderly probed his left shoulder, the sensation of the Jezail bullet striking suddenly prominent in his thoughts.

  Finally, they reached Doctor Rhys's study, and found the young man waiting there for them. Once John was safely ensconced in a well-upholstered chair, the orderly retreated, closing the door behind him.

  "And now, Mr. Watson, how does the day find you, hmm?"

  "Doctor," John said, his voice sounding strained and ancient in his own ears. He cleared his throat, setting off a coughing jag.

  "Yes?" Rhys replied, eyebrow raised.

  "Doctor Watson."

  Rhys nodded vigorously, wearing an apologetic expression. "Quite right, my apologies. How are you today, then, Dr. Watson?"

  John essayed a shrug. "No better than yesterday, one supposes, and little worse."

  Rhys had a little notebook open on his knee, and jotted down a note. "The staff informs me that you have not availed yourself of many of our facilities, in the course of your stay."

  It was a statement, though John knew it for a question. "No," he answered, shaking his head.

  In the sanatorium, there was more than enough to occupy one's day. Those seeking exercise could use the cricket pitch, badminton court, and swimming pool, while those of a less strenuous bent could retire to the snooker room and social club. In his days at Holloway, though, John had been content to do little but sit in an eastern-facing room in the mornings, in a western-facing room in the afternoons, sitting always in the sunlight. It was as though he were a flower seeking out as many of the sun's rays as possible in the brief time remaining to him. The less charitably minded might even accuse him of seeking out the light through some fear of shadows, since by night the electric lights in his room were never extinguished, and when he slept it was in a red-lidded darkness, never black.

  "Tell me, Dr. Watson," Rhys continued, glancing up from his notes, "have you given any further thought to our discussion yesterday?"

  John sighed. Rhys was an earnest young man, who had studied with Freud in Vienna, and who was fervent in his belief that science and medicine could cure all ills. When John first arrived in Holloway weeks before, he had taken this passion as encouraging, but as the days wore on and his condition failed to improve, his own aging enthusiasms had begun to wane.

  Had Watson ever been so young, so convinced of the unassailable power of knowledge? He remembered working in the surgery at St. Bartholomew's, scarcely past his twentieth birthday, his degree from the University of London still years in his future. The smell of the surgery filled his nostrils, and he squinted against the glare of gaslights reflecting off polished tiles, the sound of bone saws rasping in his ears.

  "Dr. Watson?"

  John blinked, to find Rhys's hand on his knee, a concerned look on his face.

  "I'm sorry," John managed. "My mind . . . drifted."

  Rhys nodded sympathetically. "Memory is a pernicious thing, Dr. Watson. But it is still a wonder and a blessing. After our meeting yesterday I consulted my library, and found some interesting notes on the subject. Are you familiar with Pliny's Naturalis historia?"

  John dipped his head in an abbreviated nod. "Though my Latin was hardly equal to the task in my days at Wellington."

  Rhys flipped back a few pages in his moleskin-bound notebook. "Pliny cites several historical cases of prodigious memory. He mentions the Persian king Cyrus, who could recall the name of each soldier in his army, and Mithridates Eupator, who administered his empire's laws in twenty-two languages, and Metrodorus, who could faithfully repeat anything he had heard only once."

  John managed a wan smile. "It is a fascinating list, doctor, but I'm afraid that my problem involves the loss of memory, not its retention."

  Rhys raised a finger. "Ah, but I suspect that the two are simply different facets of the same facility. I would argue, Dr. Watson, that nothing is ever actually forgotten, in the conventional sense. It is either hidden away, or never remembered at all."

  "Now I am afraid you have lost me."

  "Freud teaches that repression is the act of expelling painful thoughts and memories from our conscious awareness by hiding them in the subconscious. If you were having difficulty recalling your distant past, I might consider repression a culprit. But your problem is of a different nature, in that your past memories are pristine and acute, but your present recollections are transient and thin."

  John chuckled, somewhat humorlessly. "I remember well enough that I described my own condition to you in virtually the same terms upon my arrival."

  Rhys raised his hands in a gesture of apology. "Forgive me, I tend to forget your own medical credentials, and have a bad habit of extemporizing. But tell me, doctor, what do you know of Freud's theories concerning the reasons dreams are often forgotten on waking?"

  John shook his head. "More than the man on the Clapham omnibus, I suppose, but considerably less than you, I hazard to guess."

  "Freud contends that we are wont soon to forget a large number of sensations and perceptions from dreams because they are too feeble, without any substantial emotional weight. The weak images of dreams are driven from our thoughts by the stronger images of our waking lives."

  "I remember my dreams no better or worse than the next man."

  "But it seems to me, based on our conversations here, that the images of your past are stronger and more vivid than those of your present circumstances. The celebrated cases in which you took part, the adventures you shared. How could the drab, gray days of your present existence compare?"

  John rubbed at his lower lip with a dry, wrinkled fingertip, his expression thoughtful. "So you think it is not dementia which addles my thoughts, but that I forget my present because my past is so vivid in my mind?"

  Rhys made a dismissive gesture. "Dementia is merely a name applied to maladies poo
rly understood. The categories of mental distress understood in the last century—mania, hysteria, melancholia, dementia—are merely overly convenient categories into which large numbers of unrelated conditions might be dumped. More a symptom than a cause." He closed his notebook and leaned forward, regarding John closely. "I think, Dr. Watson, that you forget because you are too good at remembering."

  Rhys fell silent, waiting for a response.

  John was thoughtful. He closed his eyes, his thoughts following a chain of association, memory leading to memory, from this drab and grey present to his more vivid, more adventure-filled past.

  "Dr. Watson?" Rhys touched his knee. "Are you drifting again?"

  John smiled somewhat sadly, and shook his head, eyes still closed. Opening them, he met Rhys's gaze. "No, doctor. Merely remembering. Recalling one of those 'celebrated cases' you mention, though perhaps not as celebrated as many others. It involved a man who could not forget, and who once experienced a memory so vivid that no other things could be recalled ever after."