The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

The Skeleton of Contention Rhys Hughes

The heroes of Chaud-Mellé find their costumes in locked boxes in the shadows of walled-up markets or under floorboards in the houses of invisible aunts. They sometimes digest food they have not eaten and they can do other strange, troubling things.

Often they languish in prisons, misunderstood and despised, where they pass the time fighting time itself, the dripping ceilings and boot creakings that count it for them.

Costumes might be found even there.

The prisons of Chaud-Mellé are full of real men chained to iron balls, iron men chained to pulsing globules of flesh washed up on the shores of stagnant inner seas, and tiny men who have painstakingly hollowed out rooms in their own black spheres and dwell inside, peeping from frosted glass portholes and dreaming that two imprisonments, like two negatives, can be combined into one freedom.

But freedom is not always a positive.

Meanwhile, in the cinemas there are enough colours to balance out the greys and glooms of the dark places, enough pure sighs to cancel the groans of the unwashed spaces, and awe in abundance to enhance the prodigious mystery of indigenous faces in a city where not to be odd or dangerous is to be eccentric. Cinemas are popular.

The audiences in this city that is also a mountain republic have an insatiable appetite for new films, the latest productions from France and Italy, the gaudier the better, the brighter the nicer, the thicker the palette the thinner the communal despair. They fill ten thousand seats every night, rowdy as bullfight spectators, lips pursed in mocking whistles, slamming folding chairs, stamping, bawling, slapping from their shoulders flakes of fake pale skin shaken from the trembling alabaster cherubs that cling to the ceiling like divinely warped geckos.

Now the safety curtain is lifted and the projector beam becomes a bridge of motes to the screen and the huge hush is more startling than the former hubbub as muscles relax and bodies slump deeper into ripped plush chairs and the first comprehensible images appear.

The cinemas are the only places in Chaud-Mellé where people achieve satisfaction while all pointing in the same direction.

Real living heroes are not welcome.

The Bone of Contention hoped to meet enough compatible people over the years to form a Skeleton of Contention that would clatter most challengingly over the bridges of the cobblescaled city. Kindred spirits and sibling souls he sought with increasing fervour, almost to the point of forgetting to be what he was, an enigmatic hero.

The cobbles of the streets and alleyways were not placed there by human agency. A shower of small meteorites deposited them and the roads were later designed to follow the chance patterns. This neatly explains the pointless twists and turns.

The Bone wore a costume of black silk, a mask the colour of marrow and on his chest was stitched the symbol of a femur. He had difficulties climbing, jumping and swinging, but he played all types of xylophone with amazing dexterity, unfortunately.

His rancour at the injustices of urban life was extreme.

In his heart might be located bitterness, anger, love, loneliness, desire for unknown things that always seemed about to reveal their true characters, a fluctuation between the conviction he had wasted his youth and spent it superbly, deep frustration at the inadequacies of his own idealism; and these conflicting feelings might be easily seen as solid objects by an emotion lens, which is a device never yet invented by any scientist, mad or otherwise.

The Doctors of Progress were meeting this very night.

In the lowest room of the highest tower of the ancient university on the steepest hill below the moon, they gathered, cloaks limp without the arousing wind, spectacles shining.

“It seems a chemist in Stuttgart has refined the process further. More than a billion new colours are available!”

“This is good, but a billion is not a trillion; and in fact is as far from being so as a strudel is from being a knockwurst.”

“How can we be sure that—”

“Only through further experimentation may we—”

Tempers were bubbling, boiling.

“Gentlemen!” The voice imposed itself like a wedge into the debate, propping open the gates of mouths.

They looked to see who had spoken.

Professor James Moriarty.

They knew him as you know him, as everyone knows him, and he was everything he ought to be, and more. The domed forehead shone but did not glisten, despite the overheated atmosphere that prevailed in a chamber where so many feared the scorn of their peers.

His cane rested against the table.

With only a single droplet of sweat to trickle down his nose and hang on the tip like a miniature vessel of molten glass, he leaned forward and the effect in the half-light was peculiar, as if perspective was wrong, as if he had learned to loom suddenly from a great distance.

Then he spoke and the movement of his lips appeared to lag slightly behind the utterance of the words, as if he was a character in a foreign film that had been badly dubbed. He said:

“The invention of new colours is doubtless a worthy pursuit in a world that has faded due to the erosions of war and its resultant shortages; and yes, the utilisation of these bright and uplifting pigments in various industries is a boon to civilisation and something for which we should be grateful. Textiles, photography, publishing, cosmetics, and many other sectors of commercial enterprise will continue to benefit enormously, but are we going to focus our minds on superficialities? We are above that.”

He rested his arms on the oaken table and smiled.

There was an anguished pause.

One of the others present made bold to answer: “What are you proposing?”

“Something grand.” And he made no grand gesture to accompany his words; and this lack of a gesture served as the gesture itself, in the same way that an absence may more acutely define a presence and the depiction of the space around an object outline that object with awful clarity. There was a snuffling behind him and he nodded.

The eyes of the notables peered in that direction.

“Was it necessary to—”

“I am sorry to say that it was.” Moriarty was the only one who did not look back. “Because this city of yours is infested with heroes who are fools but inconvenient all the same; and although our chamber is difficult to enter without permission, it still takes only boldness and determination to bypass the other security measures and burst in upon us. One extra safeguard is not a bad thing. A last line of slobbering defence.”

“He has the girth of a Cerberus!”

“Yes, he does, rather.”

Yellow eyes shone weakly in the gloom and though they were a sickly hue, the beast itself was in robust health, a mass of blackness with the occasional gleam of tooth and sparkling chain of saliva, a drool consisting of prismatic pearls on a slimy cord that pooled at the front paws of the slavering bulk. Felt rather than seen or heard, the hound imposed its presence by increasing the pressure on the ambient shadows.

Moriarty had chained him to a bronze ring on the wall, which was the last reminder of days when Chaud-Mellé students rode horses to the college and stabled them in lecture theatres.

His existence was a magnetic anomaly in the room.

Attracting anxieties like iron filings.

“Most heroes who live here,” ventured an old fellow, “have been put in jail. I assert that one can be too cautious and that some precautions are a graver danger than the thing they avert.”

“I never saw a more malevolent beast,” said another.

“Barely a dog at all but a—”

Moriarty replied crisply, “He is a black Šarplaninac, a breed from the mountains of Albania, but this is unimportant. What I wish to discuss with you is the subject of profits through science.”

Only with glacial urgency did the attention of the attendees return to a contemplation of the business at hand, the plotting and planning of crimes to supplement their meagre academic salaries.

“I intend, gentlemen, to bend the fourth dimension to my will.”

“Time travel!” came the communal gasp.

“Of a special kind, yes.”

“But that is absurd and outrageous!”

Moriarty shrugged and his shrug demonstrated purer tedium than the widest yawn. It seemed to agree with the sentiment that had been expressed and yet despise it at the same time; and also to be weary of the contradiction. Everyone waited for him to speak but he was plainly in no rush. He drew the moment out by rubbing his jaw slowly.

Then he said, “Nonetheless, I have found a method.”

“A time machine? Surely not!”

Now he rubbed the nape of his neck, eyes shut.

His other hand was busy tapping the tip of his walking cane against the wooden floorboards, a gentle rhythm.

“Gentlemen, you are not amateurs, you are not beguiled by fantasies, I will never be able to trick you with words. Of course I am not talking about using a time machine in order to enhance our prospects. It would be useless for such a purpose. In fact, I have one with me and it has never been of any benefit at all. Permit me to demonstrate.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a thin silver spoon and a metal spring, then placed them on the table with an air of mock reverence and pushed the handle of the spoon into the spring so that the coils encircled it like the solidified orbits of agitated air molecules.

Then he stood straight and nodded benignly at nothing. “May I have your opinion, gentlemen?”

“That is a time machine?”

“Not exactly.” He gazed sadly down at the conjoined objects. “But it might as well be, for it is no less effective than a real time machine and just as useful to us, which is to say, not at all.”

The murmuring was subdued but deeply unhappy.

“You jest with us, but why?”

Moriarty sighed. “Very well. If I must explain everything, then I shall. Were our little gathering to agree to employ a time machine in the evolution of our plans, we would have to invent the device ourselves, for I am utterly convinced that one does not exist elsewhere.”

He rocked on his heels and continued. “Pay attention now. Suppose a machine of this kind was actually developed. We rejoice at the belief we are free to create all sorts of havoc in the past, to manipulate events in previous ages in order to enhance our present prospects; but that assumption is a gross error; for the instant we attempt to propel the device against the flow of time our hopes fly apart. They disintegrate even as the body of the machine does, for its component parts have a personal history that is no less real than the history of the greater world in which they exist.

“Do you follow? The nuts and bolts, cogs and wires, all the elements that constitute the body and engine of the device only come into conjunction with each other at the instant when the contraption is created. Thus the time machine cannot be sent back to a time earlier than that, because the separate parts necessarily exist in different locations.

“So when a brave explorer mounts the vehicle and, gripping the lever resolutely in his hands with a faraway look in his eyes, shifts it into reverse, the vehicle must come to a halt at the precise time it was first completed. It cannot proceed any further backwards, because the parts that make it work will no longer be together but in the places they originally came from, the drawer of a junk room, the highest shelf of an electrician’s garage, the cellar of an ironmonger’s. They will be scattered.

“Thus to employ a time machine to travel a great distance backwards in time, for example, several centuries, we must construct the device and then wait for a length of time exactly equivalent to those centuries. Our maximum range into the past is only the moment when the machine was successfully completed. That is why this humble object on the table before you is, to all intents and purposes, a working time machine, for it is equally useless to us, equally incapable of taking us into the past.”

With the air of a lecturer who has rushed through a lesson in order to go to lunch early, Moriarty spread his arms.

They were offended, humiliated.

“So much for the past!” huffed one guest. “What about the future? A time machine could be used to facilitate illegal deeds in coming weeks. To anticipate stock market fluctuations and—”

“The future? Gentlemen, the future is overdue.”

There was a dull reverberation at the solid door that was the only entrance and exit from the chamber. It was an explosion but oddly muted, as if the entire force of the blast had gone into the body of the door and remained there. But the door swung open anyway.

The intruder lurched forward, regained balance.

His silk costume was so dark and so perfectly clean that it was plainly visible in the muddier gloom beyond the reach of the lamp above the table. The eyes behind the mask scanned the chamber, fixed on Moriarty, and the entire mask creased itself, powered by a hidden frown. “Here is the future,” said Moriarty theatrically. “A little late.”

The Bone of Contention took a determined step.

And the dog was on him.

The chain that held it to the bronze ring was long.

The lunge was horribly graceful.

Like a storm cloud pregnant with a violent downpour flinging itself at the mass of a granite mountain, the hound rushed through the air towards the disguised hero. The impact was like the smack of a hand on a fully satisfied grotesque belly but enormously magnified.

They went down together.

They rolled, snarled, grappled. Cloth tore, bone snapped.

Moriarty observed, carefully aloof.

Other spectators were more excitable, aghast.

“Your dog is losing!”

“Yes, he is, but I never bothered to name him, so let us not grow too sentimental at his impending demise.”

The Bone of Contention was a hero and heroes have powers and skills and the holy blessing of contrivance. Bloodied and numbed, garb in disarray, rents of silk hanging down like thirsty mutant tongues, he staggered away from the canine corpse, slipping once in the gore smeared on the soles of his boots, accelerating towards the table.

Moriarty calmly watched and waited for the right moment. Then he lifted his cane and aimed it at the avenger.

A click as he pressed a button in the handle and a tranquilliser dart embedded itself in the chest of the hero, like a darning needle that misses its tangent, a rose thorn turned inwards into its own stem. The Bone collapsed, a ripped sack of flesh and adulterated blood.

“Help me lift him. Clear a space there! Now fetch the dog too. I am serious. It will take at least three or four of you.”

Moriarty lay out the unconscious Bone almost tenderly on the surface of the table and applied scissors to the lopsided mask, cutting it off, setting at liberty a young troubled expression, the visage of a vigilante with more enthusiasm than strength, more strength than sense, more sense than luck. A few more snips and the face was fully free.

“Hurry with the hound! Every second counts.”

His medical bag was open beside him, the array of instruments within the voluminous leather depths twinkling and gleaming like icicles in a cave. He selected the ones he required with due care, almost lovingly. Meanwhile, a quartet of the bespectacled professors struggled with the cooling burden near the damaged door, grumbling loudly as they attempted to drag it across the varnished floor. Relying on its own dripping ichor to grease the way, they were uncoordinated and inefficient.

“You are pulling the head while I pull the tail! Push the head or there will be no progress whatsoever tonight—”

“Pah! There is progress every second of every minute of every hour somewhere in the world. A chemical reaction here, a hypothesis there, the discovery of a distant star or new particle.”

Arguing and wheezing, they finally manhandled the beast to the side of Moriarty, but they were quite unable to elevate it on to the table next to the prone Bone. “No matter, gentlemen. What you have achieved will suffice. I bid you sit and recuperate your energies.”

They rested, heads in hands, until the satisfied murmuring of Moriarty proved too much of a temptation; and then they looked. Men who had sawn off the heads of birds for transplantation on to the necks of toads flinched in distaste, recoiled and even grimaced.

“You are blinding him. This it barbaric indeed!”

“No, my friends, I am performing an operation of extreme delicacy, a procedure that is far more of an art than a routine at the present moment and may remain so indefinitely. The eyes of the dog for the eyes of the man. An unprecedented exchange!”

“The purpose of this surgery?”

“It is, I hope, the method by which I will make time travel possible. It is likely that all will be made clear soon.”

Two bodies with craters in their faces now troubled the chamber. The violator of human geometry wiped his hands quickly on a towel and returned to work. The eyes of the living man were cast negligently on to the table like peeled eggs, allowed to roll randomly.

The dead dog’s eyes, in contrast, were treated with devotion, gently inserted into the gaping sockets of the patient and meticulously positioned. Moriarty even swallowed dryly during the task, not flustered but pushed to the limit of his abilities. Yet he was pleased.

“I am confident of success, gentlemen! Let us see!”

They winced at his last word.

He dipped into his bag for a flask of fluid, dampened a cloth with its contents, pressed the cloth hard over the mouth and nose of the Bone; and the shoreline susurrations of his lungs ceased.

The body jerked, kicked out, the heel of a boot catching Moriarty on his left hip quite by accident, without force.

“The antidote to the tranquilliser,” he confirmed.

The Bone sat up, bending at the waist like an open book that wants to shut itself, to hide its words from reviewers.

Moriarty adroitly stood aside, moved far back.

The Bone contracted unusual muscles, propelled himself off the table on to his feet, tottered but did not tumble.

Then he blinked and reached out, gropingly, in awe.

“What is happening? You must tell us!”

Moriarty laughed out of the shadows. “The eyes of a dog are different from those of a man. A dog can only see in black and white. What does this mean? That dogs live permanently in a monochrome world, the same world depicted in old movies and newsreels!”

“We fail to comprehend—”

“The same world, gentlemen, shown nightly on cinema screens before the advent of colour films.”

“The significance of this is beyond our—”

“Have you never wondered what a dog is doing when it interacts with things that are seemingly not there? You tell yourself it is mapping the world with its olfactory sense, sniffing traces of the intangible, and surely that is partly the case. But it is not the whole story.”

Moriarty modulated his voice, projecting it in such a way that it was an echo without a source, confusing the Bone, who listened furiously but was unable to locate it. He added, “A dog can see into the past, into the old times, into the black-and-white world, into the era when motion pictures had just begun. That is real time travel!”

“You arranged all this for what purpose?”

“You are mostly elderly men. The modified hero before you can see into the days of your youth. Back then, you lacked the wisdom, experience, resources and tenacity you have now. You are all survivors, more durable than you like to pretend. Even I could not be certain of defeating you all on my own. You have learned many things over the long decades and those lessons have become conditioned reflexes.

“But remember, my friends, that when you were callow youths you had not yet honed your survival skills. You had weaknesses, your defences were relatively frail, you were not yet survivors because you had not lived enough years or endured sufficient experiences to claim that distinction. So your younger selves are easier to thwart than the tough shrivelled editions you have become. The Bone sees you as you once were.

“And thus he can perceive your weak spots, the glaring chinks in your armour, and take advantage of them. He can destroy you with little trouble by concentrating on those weaknesses, targeting them, for now he exists in two worlds simultaneously, the present and the past. Gentlemen, I must say farewell. I will be leaving your city tonight.”

The Bone had crouched, as if compressing the helix of his soul, and now he suddenly uncoiled and hurled himself about the chamber; and the bodies of broken experts and geniuses bounced off the walls, were flung like rolled-up rugs into corners, while one man watched the carnage with perfect equanimity, not even twirling his cane.

And the unexpected defences of the victims were of no avail to them, but they interested Moriarty. Hidden pistols and concealed knives, phials of acid and hollow teeth containing poison gas. Each defence was a product of the nature of the man they were supposed to protect, a question of his taste, and the Bone could foresee what they would be, whereas Moriarty could not. It was educational and edifying for him.

Not quite ten minutes passed. The screams ceased.

The Bone had finished. He was tired but not exhausted. He turned to confront the master, scanning his bulging and borrowed eyes up and down the entire length of the nonchalant figure. Then his body relaxed, the strips of his torn costume hanging more limply than ever.

“I perceive that in your youth you were no less formidable than you are now. Discretion is still the better part of valour and so I have no intention of engaging with you. I have done enough.”

“As I expected,” said Moriarty.

“Just tell me why? Why did you betray those who wanted to work with you? Who wished to aid your crimes?”

Moriarty was affable but also philosophical. He smiled thinly, rubbed his chin and said, “In a place where there are so many heroes, more than all the jails can hold, the villains will necessarily be superior to those that are encountered elsewhere. In cities where the criminals are in the majority, the outnumbered heroes evolve into mighty beings. Here the opposite is true. I did not want competition I could not deal with. Villains here were improving all the time and would continue to improve until my own privileged position and status were under genuine threat.”

The Bone bowed and clicked his heels and hastened out of the room with the panache of an incontinent ghost.

Moriarty packed away his surgical instruments, tucked his cane under his arm, strolled unhurriedly out of the building.

The night was full of people.

The cinemas were emptying. Posters for the latest colour films, some of them torn, rippled their garish spectra at him. But he walked past. Not far was the train station, a place where the platform, rails, guards, locomotives, soot and unbearable partings were still in black and white, anachronistic, a not yet erased segment of a panoramic past.

He secured a carriage to himself. The train crossed a bridge almost at the top of the city and he was able to peer down.

All was well in Chaud-Mellé.