“It is fortuitous that you bring up Bethlehem Hospital, Watson. We shall talk about that. But, first, take a seat. Professor Moriarty is unarmed, I assure you. He knows no arcane and invented martial arts, unlike my late brother.”
I reddened. “How dare you! I wrote that as a way to …” I realized I did not know the answer. “My readers refused to believe he was dead.” I gestured wildly at the professor. “I saw you fall, Moriarty! You, and Sherlock Holmes! Both of you. How did you escape?”
“Irrelevant!” Mycroft said. “There’s time for that later. If you would, Professor, please relate your crimes to Dr Watson.”
Moriarty’s eyes narrowed. He seemed haunted … almost human. Much to my chagrin, I realized that I had invented a man in my own mind, drawn from the few grandiose claims that Sherlock Holmes had made before his death. I knew nothing of the man himself.
Moriarty began: “What do you know about rocketry, Dr Watson?”
“Little,” I said. “Nothing. I saw a few in Afghanistan. That was quite some time ago.”
“You are aware that some believe man will one day use rockets to explore the heavens?”
“I think we have our hands quite full here,” I said, glaring at Mycroft, “if men like you are to go free.”
Moriarty ignored me. “For some time, rocketry was limited by its reliance on solid fuels. A Russian mathematician named Tsiolkovsky proposed a model by which a new high-density liquid fuel could be used, in combination with the de Laval nozzle used in steam engines, to propel a rocket faster than the speed of sound!”
“Impossible!” I said.
“Improbable, perhaps, on the face of it … but it pains me to tell you that not only is it possible, however unlikely – it has been done!”
“By you?”
Moriarty waved his hand dismissively. “My contribution, I’ll grant, was significant. The mathematical calculations required are complex, to say the least. After your friend destroyed my means of financial support—”
“Criminal!” I hissed. “An empire of thieves and killers!”
“—I was left with no choice but to seek out employment. I was approached by an agent of a foreign government—”
“Which government?” I demanded.
“One that does not yet exist,” Mycroft said. “Or no government at all, if you prefer.”
“Anarchists?”
“That is our deduction,” said Mycroft.
“He called himself Von Szabovich,” said Moriarty. “I believe that was a bit of an inside joke. He claimed, at various times, to be of German, Russian and Austrian origin, but his speech hinted at none of those. From our few meetings, I deduced the man’s accent to be fabricated, and his mother tongue to be English.”
“In fact,” said Mycroft, “his name is MacQuaid. He is known to us. He is an American chemist of Irish descent, educated at the finest schools there – or he was an American. He was expelled for his terrorist activities. That was after the Boston Fenians expelled him with extensive prejudice. The Irish want nothing to do with him, but he bears the Crown significant ill will.”
“That is putting it mildly,” said Moriarty. “This Von Szabovich shared with me designs for a liquid-fuelled rocket-ship intended to ferry up to twelve passengers at greater speed than even the fastest locomotive. He engaged me in performing necessary calculations for construction, fuel consumption, and navigation between Hamburg and London. I was sceptical, but, as I mentioned, I was in some dire financial straits. Once I saw his design, I realized it was possible to make his design work.”
I said: “Travel by air? Twelve passengers? Impossible.”
“As I said, improbable,” Moriarty replied. “And, yes, impossible. The original specifications called for twelve passengers. My calculations established that Von Szabovich’s design would carry only two.”
“Even that …”
“Once I deduced that the design was feasible, even for only two passengers, I became something close to a partner. In return,” Moriarty said, speaking now with some difficulty, “I sought Von Szabovich’s help as a chemical engineer to utilize the formula for a certain … compound … that had been designed by associates of mine in years past, but never manufactured … and most certainly never tested. They had no stomach for its proposed effects.”
I felt a great weight come upon me. My hand found its way into my coat. I gripped the butt of my pistol.
“What sort of compound, Professor?”
I shall never forget the look on his face. It was some amalgam, I believe, of self-satisfaction and guilt.
I stood up. “What compound, Moriarty? Tell me!” I had guessed an answer, but I doubted its probability. All else was impossible, however. Who else could do such a thing?
“What did you create, Moriarty?” My pistol was in my hand.
Mycroft was out of his chair before I could aim. I had never seen Mycroft move quickly before. Now, he was so swift his movements blurred.
Mycroft’s arm seized mine in an arcane embrace; I felt a great pain in my elbow. With a sweep of one enormous leg, he struck the backs of my knees. I collapsed into a kneeling position. The pistol discharged once, into the ceiling, before Mycroft seized it from me. I was deafened.
Moriarty stared, unperturbed.
Mycroft said: “He killed your wife, Watson, naturally.”
Now on all fours, I trembled.
Mycroft bent down and patted me soothingly. “Justice in due time,” Mycroft said. “For now, the Crown has business with both of you. There’s a boat waiting. Make haste!”
Staring at Moriarty in dismay, I said: “You are the Devil!”
Moriarty glanced at Mycroft. “Me or him?”
“You!” I said. “Both of you!”
Moriarty said mildly, “If it improves matters, Watson … I was trying to kill you.”
In 1805, the Royal Navy bombarded Copenhagen and seized neutral Denmark’s shipping fleet to aid Britain against Napoleon. Now, in that same harbour, there waited for us a modest steam trawler called the Jannike.
It was some trouble getting there, given that Copenhagen’s version of the Diogenes Club was in quite an uproar – its first ever of such magnitude. In such an establishment, discharging a firearm was an act for which there was no precedent and no official rule. It took even Mycroft some effort to extract us from the resultant tumult. This was achieved only once I had been formally banned from re-entry for life.
When we finally made our escape, there came with us three younger men of the club, who turned out to be in Mycroft’s employ. Their names, as Mycroft informed me, were Adams, Baker and Cowell. We did not greet each other. We did not shake hands. The men remained true to the club’s tenets even outside its walls; so did the crew of the Jannike. This was to my own taste, given my bilious spirit.
The ease and discretion with which the Jannike handled its passengers told me that they were almost certainly smugglers of one form or another. This would not otherwise have concerned me, but the night’s events had shaken my faith in Mycroft’s reason. Until tonight, I had always trusted Mycroft to deal with trustworthy scoundrels.
Sherlock Holmes’s assertion that Mycroft was more than he appeared seemed far more credible now after tonight’s events. My old friend had claimed that, at times, Mycroft is the British government. If that was true, there was far more than just culpability for Mary’s death at stake.
Mycroft retained my pistol, despite my many requests for its return. Perhaps he was wise. I watched Moriarty’s every move with simmering fury.
The Jannike weighed anchor.
I sat in the hold, glaring, thinking of tragedies passed.
Mary had taken a year to die. It was not the last year that a husband would wish for.
By the end, the diagnosis would remain acute encephalitis of unknown but presumably infectious origin. The contagion in question had never been identified.
Onset had been rapid and catastrophic. My wife had become violent, assaulting me and
harming herself. She rushed into the street and assaulted passers-by, screaming. Later, she attacked the staff at Bethlehem. She was restrained. The mouth I had kissed for a lifetime became that of a monster.
After three days, she recovered from her first period of violent agitation and came to her senses. She wept for a time, in remorse and fear. We spoke. For twenty-three hours, she remained rational.
Then change came again. Her condition worsened over the course of an hour. She grew still more agitated. Her second attack was more violent than the first. Sedation provided no relief. The most powerful opiates had no effect on the patient’s arousal. Only physical restraint kept my wife from destroying herself – and harming or killing her tenders at Bethlehem in the process.
That was the first week.
For a year, her oscillations varied. She passed through periods of bestial disposition, ranging from one hour to one week, only to return briefly to periods of lucidity. In the former, she would take no normal food, only meat, freshly killed but uncooked.
With the return to lucidity, she expressed revulsion at what she had become … and fear of her condition’s return.
And return it did, always.
My heart broke each time.
After my wife’s first few fluctuations between madness and sanity, some of her spells began to retain aspects of the latter while she was clearly possessed of the former. She screamed obscenities. Progression was unpredictable. She retained enough mental capacity to hurl vicious personal insults and abuse at me. She screamed secrets shared between husband and wife, in the unkindest terms. She abused my colleagues and her keepers.
Infectious diseases were never my specialty, but with such motivation, I sought out the best experts and learned very quickly. I could not deduce a possible agent. No form of encephalitis evinced variations of this style or magnitude. The pro dromal phase of rabies had been known, in very rare cases, to last more than one year before death, but had it been rabies, such acute variations between madness and lucidity were inexplicable. In any event, there had been no bite, no reasonable indication of rabies transmission.
Priests were called in. All fled in horror.
Her attacks persisted month after month. Her periods of lucidity grew rarer, but clearer. In some ways, this was far worse. During her returns to sanity, she began to accept what she could anticipate. She rejected it.
“James,” she had choked through the variegated mess of foam, spit and blood that her mouth had become. “Don’t hold out hope where none exists. Leave me to heaven, James. Do this for me. End it before I return again?”
Those were her last words. She lapsed into madness again.
Years of discretion in matters of medical tragedy, I found melting away, as if they’d never happened. I was a boy again, weeping over a woman I knew and yet did not know. With her heart, Mary had loved me, yet her mind was no longer her own. I knew she was right.
I honoured her request. I broke my most sacred vow.
My many years adjunct to the practice of professional detection had given me practical skills in the matter of poisons that proved undetectable to all but the most aggressively deductive mind. That made it easy.
I knew the compound to use. Reader, do not expect me to relate it here; should it fall to you to perform such a crime, you will find it a great mercy that you do not know the way. My footsteps will not lead you.
How would Sherlock Holmes solve such a murder? Would he detect the compound, deduce my crime, unmask the villain? And would he indict me? Would he, then, also indict Hippocrates – for the madness that was medicine in such cases?
If Mary persists in the Beyond, cured and at last, again, well – if she has been left to Heaven – perhaps she and my friend Sherlock Holmes now share deductions incomprehensible to the living.
For that, I envy her.
In the Spartan hold of the Jannike, I had returned to my own form of lucidity. I retained a bestial disposition simmering under the surface.
“What’s our destination, Holmes?” I demanded, feeling a pang of regret upon calling him that.
“A tiny island,” said Mycroft. “It’s known as Æbelø.” His pronunciation was markedly exotic. “It is uninhabited except for a medical facility.”
“And why is our friend still alive?”
“Watson, do not be sarcastic. It does not suit you. I assure you, Professor Moriarty is not my friend. He is alive because he knows MacQuaid’s liquid rocket-ship design. He can disable it.”
“Possibly,” said Moriarty. “As I keep telling you, Holmes, mathematics is not engineering.”
“For the time being,” said Mycroft, “I shall take what is within my grasp. The professor also knows the compound in question. If my reports from Æbelø are accurate … we shall find ourselves in need of him.”
“How can we trust him with either, Mycroft? How do we know he won’t—”
“We trust him, Watson. Not you. We. The Crown trusts him, and only so far as we must. I ask you to trust me that Professor Moriarty is a changed man.”
“Why would I ever do that?” I asked.
“Because, my dear man, I am Mycroft Holmes,” he said with great pomp. “What I need you to do, Watson, is to examine Æbelø’s patients and tell me if their condition appears … familiar.” Mycroft’s face took on a dark aspect. “By the way, Watson, I am very sorry for your loss.”
Ignoring Mycroft’s belated condolences, I turned my attention to Moriarty.
“How did you do it?” I demanded. “Did she ingest it? What was the compound? Where did you get it?”
Moriarty was distracted, furiously scrawling equations in his notebook.
“These are very good questions, Watson, but you must forgive me if I am not wholly forthcoming. At this time, details are all that keeps me alive. I will say these things, Watson. The compound is at present unnamed. I obtained the formula from an Austrian chemist named Hoelscher. The substance is inhaled or ingested, but more effective if inhaled. Atomized in an envelope, it likely passes unnoticed. I sent it to you in a letter; your wife, as it seems, opens your mail – or did. It persists in water, but flame will destroy it. The syndrome it causes is incurable.”
I felt a dizzying sense of relief. Moriarty read my face too quickly.
His manner changed quickly. He said to me with surprising warmth: “I speak the truth, Watson. There is no cure. I am sorry for killing your wife, but it was an accident. What is very important is that you need not blame yourself for ending her suffering.”
“What are you suggesting?” I snapped. Then, I remembered to whom I was speaking: the Devil. I sighed. “How did you know?”
“Watson … you, of all people?” Moriarty shook his head. “It was quite elementary, my dear man. I deduced it.”
Inside, I boiled. Moriarty’s warmth was gone; he showed no sympathy. That brief flicker of human compassion was gone from his face. Mine was hot with anger.
I demanded: “What is the compound?”
“As I said, it has not, at present, been given a name. What you must know is that it affects the emotional cortex of the human brain. In the dose your wife received – unfortunately, and again, my apologies – it reduces emotional inhibition to the point where the victim’s cognitive faculties become quite irrelevant. In short, it increases emotion, decreases rational thought. At the weaponized dose, socially learned inhibitions are obliterated, until the—”
The professor’s throat seemed to close. He clutched his chest. He started trembling. He convulsed. He doubled over.
“Mycroft!” I cried. “What is going on?”
Mycroft said, “Let the man speak, Watson.”
Moriarty remained doubled over, shaking and weeping. Medical instinct told me to intervene, or at least to examine the patient. Instead, I held tight to the crate on which I sat. I watched.
When Professor Moriarty finally straightened, he stared at me with glassy eyes and wet cheeks.
His voice trembled as he said: “Sorry,
I’m sorry, Watson. I’m so sorry. It seems I was … in the … compound’s manufacture, I … mine was a low dose, but … I can’t control myself …” He started shaking his head violently, tears scattering. “I won’t do violence, Watson. You needn’t worry about me any more. I’ve tried; believe me, I’ve tried. Sometimes I can’t even think. I try, but I grow overwhelmed. I received only the smallest exposure, but … Watson, I’m sorry!”
“Go to hell,” I told him.
Moriarty doubled over again and began to weep.
Mycroft clapped me on the back. “As I said, Watson, let the man speak. Tell me, is that not a pleasure to see?”
At Æbelø, the Jannike moored alongside a rickety old pier. We disembarked. A Gideon lorry waited for us. We piled in the back and it whisked us through the night at terrifying speed and bonerattling intensity. In my younger days, I would have found such a ride distasteful at best. Now, it was excruciating. How poor Mycroft survived it, I’ll never know. He had surprised me several times tonight, but by then he looked quite worse for wear.
The facility we approached bore a wrenchingly familiar aspect: one that hovered between prison and hospital.
It was both.
Mycroft introduced me to one Dr Østergaard, who spoke excellent English. Østergaard explained that he was in charge of the “Sektion til Særlige Patienter” – “Section for Special Patients” – in Ward 6.
It was a madhouse, in every connotation.
Beds were crammed as close together as possible. Each patient was cuffed at four points – wrists and ankles. They strained against their cuffs, rabid. Teeth snapped and bit. Some had been forced to wear muzzles. Even those made an unholy noise, through structures insufficient to cope with their bestial howling. Now and then, peals of human laughter would echo through the torrent of animal noises. From the depths of Ward 6, I heard screamed obscenities. Some metal frames had been reinforced with extra struts; Østergaard explained that this was because patients exhibited exceptional strength, as had Mary.
“Disease progression is rapid,” said Østergaard. “From a patient’s first presentation with dizziness to the condition you see here takes only a few days. After that, further progression can take months. Periods of lucidity are followed by severe instances of disorientation. Our best diagnosis is encephalitis of unknown infectious origin. Until last month, we had seen only five cases in the entire country. We could not implicate an infectious agent, or any connection between the patients. Then, this month – well, here they are. All from Vigelsø Island, yet we can find no vector of transmission—”
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 45
