While I observed, one man seemed to experience a lucid period, recovering just enough mental facility to beg for—
I could not hear it again. I plugged my ears. I fled.
Grimly, I confirmed to Mycroft that the patients in Ward 6 were the victims of Moriarty’s nameless compound.
The professor was again doubled over, weeping. He trembled uncontrollably, bleating apologies. He’d been sick several times. So had I, in the washroom just outside Ward 6. I did not share that fact with either of them.
“Vigelsø,” Mycroft said. “It isn’t far from here. Bloodhound is already en route. A gunboat,” he added, seeing my quizzical look. “But it falls to me to get Moriarty there. He can reset or disable the navigation system. Sorry, Watson, but you’re coming along.”
I nodded at Moriarty, who was still weeping. “Can he do it if he’s in that state?”
“How should I know, old man? You’re the physician. You’re the world expert, Watson. Even Østergaard’s still playing catchup. What’s the prognosis?”
I said, “Professor?”
“They were just numbers!” he howled. “Facts, figures … It was a high dose, Watson! You understand that, yes? I only wished to kill you! How you escaped exposure, I don’t …”
He descended again into paroxysms of grief.
Tears flowed: Moriarty’s and mine.
I had not escaped exposure at all, I deduced. Months of attending to Mary’s care …
I squelched my emotions. I turned to Mycroft and said: “We must hope our dear professor has one of his spells of lucidity soon.”
We returned to the Jannike and set out for the island of Vigelsø.
Some time after we left Æbelø, Moriarty recovered his composure. He stared ahead blankly. He approached catatonia.
But when I addressed him directly, he responded.
He grew stone-faced.
“I withdraw my apology,” said Moriarty. “The last several hours are foggy to me. Whatever I said, disregard it. I was not in my right mind.”
Mycroft and I shared a look of surprise.
Moriarty began weeping again.
Dawn broke the horizon just as we came within sight of the small island’s barren coast. The lightening sky showed the outline of a lighthouse. Offshore, Bloodhound could be seen, her great teninch gun still pouring smoke.
My eyes were red. My head throbbed. I felt a great weight in my chest.
Moriarty sprawled on the deck of the Jannike, catatonic again.
Mycroft held out my revolver. “Can I trust you with this, Watson?”
I took the pistol and held it as we approached shore.
On the shore, there was fighting. Bloodhound had landed troops, who advanced on what appeared to be a lighthouse. In the dim light, I saw flashes. Riflemen atop the lighthouse were firing back at the advancing troops.
Atop the lighthouse, glass shattered. Shards of it glittered in the dawn’s building rays. Fragments of stone and long strips of metal peeled away from the top of the tower.
Mycroft stepped over the sprawled professor and ran for the pilot-house, waving and gesturing. The Jannike picked up speed – near, now, to running aground.
Rifle shots ricocheted as the Jannike reached the pier near the lighthouse. It was too close for self-preservation, but even so, we were too late. Smoke and flame poured from the base of the lighthouse.
Our troops fell back, repelled by the blast. Bloodhound fired. The boom of its great gun was lost in the snarl from the rocket-ship. The shell went wide, detonating on the beach.
The roar of the firing rocket engines drowned out all speech and all sound, also. Beneath the ruins of what had been the light room atop the tower, the silver tip of the rocket-ship could be seen. It was a conical spearhead, polished and featureless but for a single hatch near the top. The rocket-ship trembled with the force of its firing engines.
It was, I admit, quite a wondrous sight. It might have been a vision of the future. Ten years hence, twenty, with passenger service from Hamburg to London in one hour. One hour hence: London as Bedlam.
Twin futures held me enthralled, and would not let go – even when Moriarty came up behind me.
He felled me with a spanner, while I gaped at impending doom or salvation – or both at once. His blow laid me out on the deck and, when Mycroft hauled me to my knees at the railing, my vision swam.
I no longer saw futures: just two Moriartys, swimming before me, scaling two ladders outside of two lighthouses. He neared the top as they resolved into one. Mycroft had field glasses. The professor was blackened, parts of his clothing alight. The spanner he’d hit me with – I presume – was tucked into the rear of his belt.
He reached the railing and leapt atop the great silver rocket. He withdrew the spanner and fitted it into what looked like a hatch. The flames at the base grew more intense.
The hatch came open. Moriarty dove inside the nose of the vessel just as the rocket-ship started to rise. The walls of the lighthouse gave way. Silver fins became visible at the base as the great silver body rose into the air.
Its speed increased. Day had come. Bloodhound fired again, but the rocket-ship had ascended to the point where the teninch gun could not reach it.
The vessel rose into the air at an increasing pace. The silver ship became lost in the flames of its engines … and then, all heaven was engulfed in sun-fire.
I covered my eyes. Mycroft pushed me down. Shrapnel rained down around the Jannike, striking the water with great force. The remains of one great silver fin ripped through the trawler’s front railing and hit the water so close to us that I felt the spray and the steam hissing around it.
Under its skin, the rocket-ship possessed a metal skeleton. It fell on the shattered remains of the lighthouse. More shrapnel followed.
Numbly, I said: “Moriarty said flame would destroy the compound. Was he telling the truth?”
Mycroft shrugged. He reached into his coat and took out a handkerchief.
“Trust, Watson, is the luxury of the mad and the desperate. For the time being, you and I are neither. Let’s get out of here.” Nodding at the ball of smoke overhead, Mycroft added: “Rest in peace, Moriarty.”
“Rest in peace,” I repeated grimly. “To both our dead.”
Jannike reversed her engines and rounded the spit.
We made for open water.
The Shape of the Skull
Anoushka Havinden
This story pains me to tell. I beg the forgiveness of your compassionate understanding, reader, as I suffer the recently refreshed regret of long-buried weakness.
Some might say that the need to unburden myself is a purely selfish act. But as I heard the reports from Europe of the final fall of that man whose name has haunted me, the memories floated up unbidden. There is always the hope that this may stand as a cautionary tale to those callow enough to be at risk of repeating the many mistakes that I made. And so, let me begin:
As a newly appointed tutor, freshly wax-whiskered and thrilled with the task charged to me – that of educating the privileged boys of the High School Of ****** [Editor: Name redacted to protect the reputation of this august institution], I had not an inkling of the potential of the human mind. I’d a head stuffed brimful of theories that I found very pleasing, yet I could not have conceived of either the depths of the mind’s depravity or the heights of its genius. Needless to say, Moriarty was to teach me plenty on both accounts.
My first glimpse of the child may have been the true beginning of my own education. He stood at the head of the steps, on the first day of term, as his father’s carriage drove away. Around us were scenes of the most heart-rending misery – boys fighting tears, mothers with pink spots high on their cheeks, nurses badtempered and blustery, cases and bags all in disarray while everyone got on with the grim task of separating charges from guardians with the minimum amount of emotional drama.
I was there at the conclusion that my earnest, if naive, philosophy had brought me to: th
at I should use my own gifts to further the well-being of others. I believed, with all my righteous scholar’s heart, that I could and should be the helpmeet and adviser of these unformed charges, as troubled or as slow or undeveloped as they may be. To shape young minds! To pass on the knowledge of the ages!
As you can tell, I was inexperienced. In any case, I was struck immediately by the singular appearance of this one. Moriarty, his high forehead smooth and domed, stood with eyes fixed on the gate. It seemed he’d been deposited by a faceless driver, who left without ceremony or farewell. The boy’s appearance was, from the first, unsettling. His soft hair was a shade of mud that has settled at the bottom of a pond. His bone structure was as fine as a bird’s, his cheekbones sharp and proud, his eyes deep set and also startlingly pale. He had the face of an old man, as yet unlined. That high forehead suggested, to one with an interest in the art of phrenology, a mind that was practically outgrowing the skull’s cavity – I itched at once to consult the china head in my study, to measure and compare it with that of the child in front of me. Which areas were so enlarged, and what effect would it have on the character?
And it seemed to me, though I could not have known, that what was rushing through his head was not the usual piteous ache of longing for his family or the trepidation of the rest of the boys, little snarling and hollow-eyed wretches as they were. I felt, as he turned to survey his new situation, more a rapid and shrewd calculation, as if he were counting many things at once. His eyes seemed to take in everything with the same flickering dark stare, as small and slippery as the beads of an abacus. The fine, carved whinstone of the building, its gargoyles, the slight deterioration of the window fixtures, the good cloth of the drapes, the quality of the carriages leaving through the gate. Looking around, as he was, I saw as if through a camera lens, the boys and women broiling on the steps, each a tiny storm of hungers and sorrows and fears. And, at the top of the steps, the head, like a walrus in his grey coat with his impressive whiskers, as immovable as a rock amidst the storming sea.
Moriarty seemed to catalogue all of this, somehow, with his quick and narrow gaze. A pencil, the end sharpened to an arrow’s point, twitched in his fingers, and I noted the book protruding from his pocket. Was he truly taking notes? My eyes widened in surprise, and it was then his met mine.
I am ashamed to admit that I could not hold that gaze. I was, it was to be supposed, his superior, in age, social station and position. Yet I felt as if I were myself counted, and found lacking. As though he were noting and ticking through my secret weaknesses: my own unease at this, my first job, my uncertainty of how to inspire fear and respect, as it seemed the housemaster wished that we should. Deep down, could he divine the uncomfortable struggles between my desperate Romantic’s heart and my brain’s suspicion that the clockwork universe did not perhaps share my beloved morals? And then, he showed me his teeth. It was not a smile. The points of his incisors shewed, as if a warning.
Would that I had heeded it, reader!
Instead, alas, I felt the lurch of righteous pity. I divined that I was in the presence of a child perhaps disturbed, but surely in want of sustenance – emotional and literary, moral and intellectual salvation! What hunger he must have for a loving guide! What enormous need of help! Inevitably, this sparked the fire of my foolhardy ambition. The resolve to nourish this woeful-looking brat was born in me in that moment, and I believe he saw it happen. Certainly, he took full advantage of the weakness he seemed to have registered within me. In any case, our fates were joined that day – me, the redeemer, he the enfant terrible in need of generous and charitable guidance.
The first term was enough to prove my initial suspicions of his disturbed nature accurate. In order to achieve the position he apparently desired – that of ruler of the school, albeit in a manner both invisible and free of responsibility – Moriarty had presumably calculated that his first task was to sow fear, disruption and discord among children, staff and tutors alike. At the time, no one would have credited a child his age with such a depth and detail of vision. But now, looking back at the dark catalogue of his adult life, I can only concur with that learned Austrian who has asserted that the damaged child will unfailingly become the malevolent man, and exorcise his demons in ever worsening manner.
In the first few weeks of September, the school was beset with problems that had not – I was assured, by various white-faced and weeping serving maids – ever darkened the building before in its long and glorious history. The cook, an able and godly woman, left in a cloud of hysteria after the entire sixth form were poisoned by rice pudding. The head’s secretary, a loyal servant of excellent standing, lost his wits entirely after mysteriously failing in duties he’d carried out for twenty years. After an unpleasant scene in the common room, he was sent swiftly and discreetly to a retirement home and never returned. The boys, meanwhile, fought relentlessly. Money was stolen, personal treasures disappeared, accusations blizzarded through dormitories, only for the various items to reappear, insolently, on the nightstand of some rival boy. Gossip proliferated. Gangs formed and battled, on the stairs, in the gymnasium at midnight, on the sports field.
A detached observer might have perhaps noticed that throughout all of this, Moriarty remained unaffected, an island of preternatural calm. Perhaps the merest curl of a smile was caught in that thin mouth of his, like the hook at the end of a fishing line. He was, somehow, nobody’s fag. The butt of nobody’s cruel jokes – although the boys that year seemed close to a pack of frightened feral dogs, and blood drawn, punches thrown, almost nightly. This, in a beloved palace of learning, dedicated to the highest arts of humanity! I had planned to study the Greek plays that first term, but decided immediately to concentrate on less inflammatory works.
Anyway, Moriarty. He spent much of his time in his room. How he came to have his own ‘room’ is itself unexplained. The boys, especially the first years, were confined to the coldest, most miserable barracks on the upper floors. Yet Moriarty, due to vague murmurs about his health and a queer determination on the part of the housekeeper who oversaw the dormitories, found himself installed in a quite comfortable little cabin on the first floor. It overlooked the stairs, being in truth a glorified closet, and, from there, he could survey the comings and goings of almost everyone in the school.
He had soon taken his measure of the staff and established a network of allies and lackeys who fed him steadily with information, gossip and any other useful thing that he decided he required.
There were never any overt signs to identify Moriarty as the artist behind all the chaos, although a thoughtful observer might have considered the utter absence of involvement telling in itself. Thus, the head found himself in a most untenable position – tortured by suspicions he could not voice without making accus ation, bound by a moral and financial debt to the boy’s family, and caught between his own wish to suppress any burgeoning trouble and the need to root out the demon at the heart of the multifarious plots and schemes.
‘This school,’ he said one night, while clutching a glass of whisky that I expect was not his first of the evening, and peering hard at the dying embers in the fireplace, ‘has been my life. The damn thing may be the end of me, too.’
As Christmas approached, it certainly seemed the institution was in jeopardy. Three boys left, after some hysterical scenes involving parents, newspapers and, if I recall, a nest of rats. A small fire broke out in the library, after which Moriarty was – rather than being implicated and interviewed – somehow excused from his English lessons.
But once he had the place running to his liking, things seemed to settle. Although, in retrospect, it was the uneasy tension of a prison with malcontent inhabitants awaiting the next disaster, rather than the true peace of a contented community of fellows dedicated to self-improvement.
Over the next few terms, he and the head came to a place of watchful, antagonistic stalemate. Moriarty showed no interest in the arts, and, privately, I was relieved, although curiosity oc
casionally tormented me – what damage had been done to the boy’s soul to have him act this way? Was it possession by a demonic force? Blood circulation, a disease of the brain? If he were feeble-minded, we were past the days of beating or bleeding the idiocy out of him. Besides, he seemed unnaturally intelligent. On occasion, after reading on the Phenomena of Soul and Mind, I mused on the causes of cruelty within one so young.
But, for the most part, I merely gave my lessons. They utterly lacked the fervour of my initial resolve, for I had learned the safety of sinking into the shadows. The boys adapted, as children do, and apart from one or two who were removed or begged to leave, carried on with their education as best they could.
Inevitably, Moriarty grew bored. Though he wanted for nothing – keeping a store of fine port, sugared almonds and cigars in his little closet, and a small army of boys to do his bidding, shine his shoes, write his letters home, and read the paper to him – he found himself outgrowing his role as secret oligarch soon enough. It was then that he took to mathematics, with an astonishing ease – apparently the one discipline for which he would not prefer to enlist another child to carry out the curriculum on his behalf. Within a month, his mathematics tutor was petitioning the head to have him apply to a school on the Continent known for its mathematical prowess. Whether that was out of a genuine belief in the boy’s ability, or whether the poor man, who had developed various nervous tics and smelled frequently of sour alcohol, merely wished to relieve himself of the boy’s presence, I cannot say. In any case, Moriarty refused to consider moving.
Now, he was the ex officio maths genius of the school, and still waging a half-secret war against order and institution. When he at last pushed his luck to the limit and beyond, calling his maths tutor ‘a buffoon’, mocking him openly in class and questioning his reasoning, qualifications and ability, the head had no choice – in the face of threatened resignation of the tutor – but to suspend the boy from all maths classes. This would likely not have bothered a boy like Moriarty, who truth be told was far ahead of any teaching on the subject that could have been offered him in our school. Unfortunately for all of us, though, his suspension coincided with another event. The combination resulted in a most calamitous series of events.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 46
