The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

Rosenlaui Conrad Williams

I was stillborn, after a fashion.

Unable to speak, unable to move other than this blinking of the eyes. I was told my paralysis was due to a cerebrovascular disease passed on to me by my mother. I come from poor genetic stock, you see. My mother was descended from a bloodline that barely deserved the name: it was diluted red juice, she always said. It was rusty tap water. Her grandparents had died in their forties; her parents had done the same. Her husband came from a family who seemed to suffer heart attacks for fun; he died when I was but a child.

My mind, at least, flourished while the flesh surrounding it withered. I did well at school, having been forced, from a very early age (thanks to my ever patient and guilt-ridden mother), into developing a means to communicate. This I managed via an alphabet-based system connected to the frequency of blinks I managed with either eye, a practice that consumed many hours of painstaking trial and error.

Though my sight is keen, I often suffer from a number of optic ally related problems: double vision, flashes, headaches and so forth. I cannot cough, spit or swallow with any degree of success. I do not eat solid food. I’m unable to control my emotions and find myself oscillating between bouts of laughter-induced hysteria and racking sobs. I am blessed to be in the bosom of a family that loves me dearly, and they have sacrificed a great deal to make me comfortable, to ensure a future, of sorts, for me. A great deal of money has been spent to adapt a room at my mother’s hotel (she and her brothers, Pascal and Tobias, have run the Schilthorn since the 1870s) so that it is comfortable for me. A special, raised bed – very heavy, so I am told – needed to be built on site. Ramps had to be added to the hotel infrastructure so that my wheelchair – itself of a bespoke design – could be more easily pushed around the grounds. My gratitude knows no bounds. But for my mother’s love and devotion to me, and the support and protection afforded to me by my uncles, I might well have been abandoned, destined to live a miserable life in the cold, cruel poorhouses in Bern or Lausanne.

Nevertheless, I wished I had died in childbirth. I did not want to live. As soon as I was able, I begged my mother to help me go to sleep for ever, to end my suffering. But she refused; she was horrified. It was a sign from God, she told me. If I had been meant to die, it would have happened in the womb. She begged me to put such thoughts out of my head – she was convinced that the mind, if focused on one particular subject for long enough, could achieve its ambition – scared rigid that I would be delivered straight to hell should I be granted my heart’s desire.

My mother’s paraenesis went unheard, I’m ashamed to say. Lying in bed or sitting immobile in my fortress chair were causing my muscles to atrophy. I once heard the doctor telling my mother that the heart might not escape the same fate. Though it was beating, and strong because of that, it was having to work extra hard to serve my failing body. The doctor suspected my heart might eventually be affected by the malaise of the flesh and either stop working so effectively, or stop working altogether.

I lay awake at night imagining my heart in my chest, perhaps deciding if it was time to give up. But such thoughts did not panic me. I knew death would be a release. I knew it was every parent’s concern that they might outlive their offspring, but I couldn’t imagine what life would be like once my mother was gone. I could only envisage misery, and the interminable, wretched pursuit of her to the grave.

Some nights, when my misery seemed to know no lower limit, and I felt stretched and on the brink of dissolution, like a drip of molten wax, I thought of my heart – imagined it in the prison of my ribcage – beating more and more slowly, until it trembled and stopped. I willed it to happen. I wanted it more than anything else. I would wake the next morning, feeling cheated by God, and convinced He wanted me to live so that He could be entertained by my travails.

It was after this episode that I began to really turn my focus inwards. I began to study my feelings and I realised that although I was an intelligent young man – given the limitations of my affliction – I was retarded in terms of experiencing the full gamut of emotions. I have already mentioned that I shifted between extremes, albeit without any discernible external stimuli to trigger it. My emotions were chaos. In short, I did not understand them. I could not interpret them. Like me, my feelings were inert, broken, paralysed. I had learned to “talk”, but there was no colour to my words. How could you develop a personality, how could you convey wit or spirit or character if you had never lived? My reaction to every situation was the same: dumb passivity. I could not engage unless I was engaged. I could initiate no kind of contact.

I thought more deeply. I thought of the broad issues of life; the crucial signifiers. I thought of death dispassionately, with a strange kind of curiosity. I thought of love with a greater sense of mystification. Mother, every day, before she turned in, would ruffle my hair, kiss my cheek and say, “I love you.” I never reciprocated. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know then how important for her it would have been had I signed the words I love you too.

In my room, I watched, incessantly, the bend of the larch trees under stiff north-westerly breezes. I could stare for hours at the trees, and the sun and shade flickering across the mountains behind them, and the clouds. I was jealous, and fascinated by, any kind of movement; my eye was fast upon it, wherever it might originate. These momentary distractions apart, I felt doomed. To die in my father’s footsteps, relatively young from heart disease, meant that I was yet to spend over two more decades upon this Earth. Little was I to know how much my world would be changed over the course of a few days …

Who could have known that the events of those coming days would create ripples to be felt across the world? I can’t help feelings that the reason for the ripples – the stone cast at the centre of it all – was me. If it weren’t for me, then the dreadful business at Reichenbach would not have happened … could not have happened. I saved one man and sent another to his death – or at least that’s what it looked like to me at the time. Everyone believed they both died that day, the light and the shade. The virtuous and the diabolical.

And so the strangers came to our village. This is no great shock, of course. I live in an agreeable part of the world, a beautiful place with fresh air and attractive scenery (we have mountains and meadows, alpine flowers and goats, a spectacular waterfall and, in the shape of Rosenlaui, a glacier of awe-inspiring note); we receive many visitors eager to partake of its rejuvenating qualities. I spend a great deal of my time in the small lobby of the hotel, people-watching. I suppose you could say I was attuned to the small fluctuations that occur in the general current of humanity which drifted through our hotel. Such as that created by the two fellows who arrived on the 3 May. I was drawn to them instantly. One was tall and rangy, the kind of fellow you know is aware of everything and everyone in a room without ostentatious scrutiny; his companion was somewhat shorter, more rotund, and reminded me of the pictures of walruses I had seen on the walls of the library in Zurich. He wore a perplexed expression that struck me as likely to be a permanent fixture. I watched them talk to my mother for a while, and she made little flip-flop gestures with her hands, a gesture I had seen many times before; it meant there were no rooms vacant. The shorter man’s face lost its perplexity to a thunderstruck mien but the taller man – immaculate in his Inverness cape – smiled congenially and bent to ask my mother a question. She pointed through the window in the direction of Innertkirchen and the men bowed slightly and readied themselves to leave. Just then, the taller man espied me and tapped his companion on the shoulder. The perplexed look returned, but he remained where he was standing. The taller man approached me, that convivial smile countered somewhat by the greedy curiosity in his eyes.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he said, in a rich, sonorous voice, “at your service. Forgive me, but I couldn’t help noticing your predicament. You are a C4 quadriplegic, are you not?”

I was taken aback, not only by his direct and pinpoint diagnosis – my mother would have never volunteered such intimate information – but that he had approached me at all. Though I spent a lot of time in the lobby only my family engaged me in conversation. This was, I persuaded myself, because I was unable to enjoy any interaction – brief or otherwise – with people who were unaware of the method of “speech” I employed. But more likely it was because people didn’t understand what they saw, and they feared me.

I decided to have some fun with Herr Holmes.

YOU WILL EXCUSE ME IF I DO NOT GET UP.

“Of course, young fellow,” he replied, instantly. “It’s heartening to see a man with a complete spinal injury who has retained a sense of humour.”

He told me he admired my “silent, sombre observation” of the lobby and that he sensed in me a kindred spirit, a man enthused and intrigued by the human condition. He only regretted the fact that he would be unable to stay at our hotel.

“I wonder if you might do me the enormous courtesy of a favour, for which I would pay you the princely sum of thirty francs.”

I was stunned by his apparently instant deciphering of my code; doubly so now that such a promise of money had entered our conversation.

HOW CAN I HELP?

“I’ve noticed you are a keen observer, and you have probably picked up on a number of physical traits and behavioural peccadilloes displayed by your hotel guests. My colleague, for example, Dr Watson. No doubt you’ve been struck by his seemingly perpetual aspect of befuddlement?”

I couldn’t smile, but Mr Holmes detected humour in me; reflected it perhaps, in the twinkling of his eye.

“I’d like you to keep watch for a man who is … shall we say … looking for me. This man is very much like me, though it pains me to say so – he is tall, quite thin and has a bookish air; he is after all a quite brilliant professor of mathematics. His name is Moriarty, but he might well be travelling under a different moniker. Boole, perhaps, or Wild, or Newcomb. Perhaps even Zucco or Atwill. But no matter which pseudonym he hides behind, you will know this if you see him: there is something of the devil in his make-up. He moves as if hell is at his heels.”

HOW WILL I GET WORD TO YOU?

I had known him but five minutes and already I felt compelled to help him. There was something urgent about him, something infectious. His curiosity, I aver: I wanted to know more about him. Where he was from, where he was going, why he was so far away from his native country.

“We will be taking rooms at the Englischer Hof,” he said. “I shall endeavour to send someone to receive reports from you every evening.”

And, with that, he stood up, thanked me, and placed thirty francs in my jacket pocket. He rejoined his companion – whose air of consternation deepened – and then they left, Mr Holmes turning to touch his hat and smile my way.

I never saw him again.

I ate my supper – a thin broth pumped down my throat (I have never tasted food) – on the veranda overlooking the peaks of the Wetterhorn and the Eiger and the Rosenlaui Glacier. I loved to watch the sun sink over the white crags, darkening and deepening the green alpine meadows. Away to the south, I could see thunderclouds forming, clenching into fists that would batter our village within the next twenty-four hours or so. It was a regular occurrence in these parts, and one I looked forward to immensely. My mother hated these attacks of low pressure, but they afforded me the closest proximity to understanding what it meant to be alive. I could almost believe that I felt the sensation of skin tingling under that bracing net of wet electricity. Part of me imagined – invited, even – the catastrophic visitation of one of those blue forks upon my body. I imagined the fire and heat coursing through my veins, effulgent, reinforcing. The lightning would either reduce me to a cinder or serve the miracle cure. Either possibility was eminently preferable to this endless, silent stasis.

Mother removed the feeding apparatus from my throat and withdrew. She knew I sometimes liked to take a nap upon receiving nourishment. Sometimes she asked if I would like her to read aloud, but she tended to shy away from the suggestion these days: my tastes are dark, and hers are not. She did not like to read Frankenstein to me, or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which she recited only recently, and that with evident distaste colouring her narrative. She accused me of wanting her to read stories that would serve only to remind her of my plight, and I must admit that I received a certain amount of grim pleasure from watching her squirm.

The air this evening was warm and sweet, but the potential in that burgeoning storm could already be felt in the fingers of wind tousling my hair. Gradually, I succumbed, my eyelids becoming heavier. I saw him then, on the cusp of a dream, so that I could not be sure that he was real, or some shade conjured by somnolence. There was no question who this man was, though I was mired in torpor. He moved rapidly, a thin, tall man, his shoulders hunched by years of academic study. He resembled Holmes, to a point. But there was something predatory in his gait. There was something hungry about it.

I watched him keenly, anxiety flooding my mind. When would Mr Holmes send his emissary to query me? Why was he so keen to know the whereabouts of this man, unless he signified a very grave threat? I could believe it. I saw the beast in him. I saw—

The figure had stopped abruptly, as if someone had called his name. Or – the paranoid whisperer at my shoulder insisted – as if he had read your mind. His face, at this distance, seemed like a pale, inverted teardrop; I could see that the frontal lobes of his head were massive, could almost see within, the diabolical machinations of his brain, churning like some confounded engine. His eyes were a furious, black area of shadow, like the cross-hatchings in a sketch by Hogarth. Did I feel the first frisson, then, of … well … what? Fear? Is this what fear felt like? A spike in the gut, in the vitals, the incipient juice of me? Some feeling that was no slave to the destroyed nerves in my body. Something primal and basic, born of the will to stay alive.

I thought then that the will in me to die might very well be countered by this ancient instinct in the flesh to survive.

He was coming towards me. I considered bluffing, pretending I was asleep, but I just knew he would be the type of person to see instantly through such a charade. When he reached the wheelchair, he did not ask my name. Instead, he took hold of the handles, disengaged the brake, and began wheeling me down the path in the direction of the meadow.

Uncle Tobias, the previous summer, had grafted the thick tyres from a wheelbarrow on to the chair, so that he was able to push me across the unforgiving terrain, broaden my horizons, and give me a different view of the world. Moriarty – for it must be he – took advantage of that customisation now, putting distance between us and the hotel. Again, I felt the unwinding of what must be fear in the pit of my stomach, like a nest of adders coiling against and around each other. Night was coming on; already the sun had descended beyond the mountains, limning their edges with golden fire. The blue of the sky was thickening. In the east, stars were beginning to make themselves known. He pushed me hard and fast, and I bounced in my seat like a bag of sticks, threatening to spill to the floor at every bump or swerve. We travelled for what seemed like hours. At one point, I lost my blanket, and the cold leapt at me like a wildcat, turning my hands blue. The water from my eyes began to freeze on my cheeks, stiffening them. For once, I was grateful that I could not feel pain.

Did I fall asleep at one point? Or was I plunged into senselessness by the cold? Whatever it was, I emerged into calm. The sky was fully dark now, and the stars in all their countless billions seemed to be howling against their icy backdrop. I could make out the shape of the mountains where they blocked those pinpoints of light, but nothing else. He had taken me to the tongue of the glacier and left me here to perish. He had—

“I spoke with your mother,” he said. He was somewhere behind me. “As he did. Oh, she was most forthcoming. It is amazing, sometimes, the wag of the tongue when confronted with the spectre of appalling consequence.”

I have never felt so trapped within my own body. I wanted to scream and snarl and rage at him. I wanted to tear his face from his skull and send it to the hungry winds like a scrap from a standard born by a defeated army. IF YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO MY MOTHER – I signed, impotently.

“I know where Mr Holmes resides, and that lapdog of his, Watson. He is not much longer for this world, and, by God, I am ready to depart it too, should it come to that.

“Your mother spoke eloquently about you, young man,” he said. “She told me you spent a lot of time together, talking of life and death and all points in between. She said you were hell-bent upon ending your life, and would have done so by now if you were able to lift a finger against yourself. She told me that you didn’t even know what life was about. You had no frame of reference. You could not feel, yet you believed life was about nothing but feeling.’

I thought I heard the compress of snow underfoot. The ruffle of clothing in wind. I caught a glimpse of him, a shadow, wraithlike, at my shoulder. And for a moment I thought I could smell him too. He smelled of books and leather and, as in me, I smelled in him the sickly sweet redolence of death. Whereas I was inviting it, he was admitting it, he was cosying up to it within the folds of his heavy coat.

“Your mother talked of you as a child. They would bring you here, to the glacier, determined that the cold, fresh air would be beneficial. Of course, it wasn’t, but she kept bringing you. In blind hope. In stubborn belief. You became agitated, and she saw that as a good thing; she thought you were stirring from this pitiful state, this curse of being locked within yourself. She thought you might suddenly stand up, rejuvenated by the magic of frigidity, and be miraculously cured. But I suspect it was because you were distressed. You were brought to a place that seemed only to mirror your condition. The cold, cruel, still mass of ice. The suffocation of life beneath it. The smothering. The glacier mocked you. It, after all, enjoyed some minute advance. The incremental creep through the mountains. More movement than you could ever dream of.

“I could leave you here,” he said. “Nobody would think to check this location. You would be dead within the hour, of exposure. But I am no monster, despite what he says.”

I felt the charge of his gloved fists upon the handles once more. We turned away from the great mound of the glacier, pale under the night as if it were blessed with its own light source. “I ask you … no, sir, I warn you not to involve yourself in this affair. My issue with Mr Holmes is a private one. He has put you in jeopardy to serve himself, which goes to show you, I think, that the true nature of monsters is not such a subject given to black and white hues.”

I think the cold was getting to me, though I could not feel it. I was no longer shivering, and I was drowsy, as if injected with sedatives. I had read somewhere that once you stop shivering then the body is not far away from serious hypothermia, and that tiredness is a sign. But again it looked as if I would be cheated of death; Professor Moriarty was playing with me. When we got back within view of the hotel, I could see frantic movement in the grounds. Staff and guests were roving around with lanterns. I heard my name being called above the clamour of the wind.

“You can be a glacier,” he told me. “Or you can be a waterfall. It is your choice, though you might not think it so.”

I heard the snap of something behind me, and a rustling. He didn’t say anything else. I smelled smoke, and a golden glow built, casting my shadow before me. I heard a cry: “There! Over there! Look. Fire!” And then many figures were dashing across the meadow towards me. Moriarty was long gone by the time they reached me. I was swaddled in blankets and my mother’s scent was here, though I could not yet see her. She was crying. I heard her crying all the way back, and it followed me down into sleep.

When I awakened, a man was sitting opposite me, peering at me as if I were an arresting specimen in a museum. He said: “I was sent by Mr Holmes. He said you might have a message for me.”

MY JACKET POCKET.

The man stood up and reached for my jacket. He withdrew an envelope. It was the money Holmes had paid me to be his watchman.

“No message?”

I did not reply. I waited until he had left. I fell into a sleep so deep it was like sinking into the cold fathoms of a lake.

Word began to trickle through the following afternoon, like the first thaw waters of spring from the crags, that Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis, Moriarty, were dead. Evidence of a struggle had been found at Reichenbach at midday, and a few artefacts belonging to the eminent detective. I had seen the falls once, when I was very young, and I had been cowed by its power and fury. If you were driven underground by that torrent of water, you would never surface again. But it had excited me too. That movement. That ceaseless thrashing energy.

I saw Dr Watson, bereft, exhausted, being ushered with his suitcase to the train station where he would begin his journey back to London. I wanted to offer him some crumb of comfort, but others more able than I were doing that job already, and so much better. After he had gone – I watched the puffs of steam from the locomotive dissipate like my own thought bubbles in the boiling Meiringen sky – Mother suggested I take to my bed for a rest. My fingers and toes exhibited signs of frostbite, and she thought it would be injurious to my good health to remain outdoors, but I was firm. I WISH TO SIT ON THE BALCONY. I would not be diverted. After a while, she gave up trying to change my mind and left me alone. I’m sure she was thinking that I might be abducted once more, but Moriarty was gone, and Tobias had replaced the rugged wheels on my chair with the original castors. I was unlikely to be making any more unscheduled trips again.

The storm hit Meiringen an hour later, leaden cloud bringing artificial night to the village. I watched the skin on my arms pucker, the hairs rise as if in supplication to the power swelling in the sky. This time I felt it, an echo of the fear I had known in Moriarty’s presence, as if he dragged its trickery around with him like a humour or a scent. Lightning flashed and the thunder it created was instantaneous. Rain dropped as if shocked out of the clouds by the sound; heavy, brutal, pummelling rain. I had never felt so alive and, for a moment, I was grateful that I could never utter the name of the person who had triggered that in me. Fear was survival. Fear was life. I could feel. I could FEEL.

In the hiatus after a second lightning flash, I saw something different in the scenery imprinted upon the darkness behind my eyes. A figure was standing still to my left beneath the awning of the bakery a little way up the road from the hotel. The flash of lightning. A refreshed scene in acid white: the figure now closer. There was something wrong with its physique.

Flash. Everything remained the same: the great mass of the mountains, the reach of the trees, the wet template of buildings known to me as intimately as the pattern of freckles on the back of my hand. And this figure. Closer yet. Bent over and buckled like a child’s model shaped from clay.

I tasted his name upon my tongue though I could not utter it. So much like some play upon the Latin phrase reminding us that we have to die.

Flash. A step nearer. Now I could see his face. The prominent lobes of his forehead split and bloodied. The cliff of his face blackened by bruises. An arm broken so badly it resembled a flesh scythe curling up around his back. Bone was visible in the soaked swags of his exposed skin, as if he were carrying some strange bag of splintered antlers with him, to ward off bad luck.

He looked at me with those massive gaping shadows deep in his face. In the next window of light, he had raised his good hand and let it fall haltingly, like a child’s representation of rain or, perhaps, the deluge of a waterfall.

When the lightning returned again, he was gone.