Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

But his recognition of these theoretical responses creates no actual preoccupation or burden within him. Feeling, on the contrary, leavened by his situation, he settles into his new bed with unaccustomed ease, and slips into a profound, blissful slumber.

The following morning Moriarty feels no temptation to turn his thoughts inward. He spends the day diverting himself with abstruse mathematical thoughts, and, when he retires that night, again finds sleep to be deep and unproblematic.

The following day takes a similar course, as does the next, and the next.

Friday arrives. Moriarty thinks of his wife, of the pain she will feel when he does not arrive for supper, the measures she will take to try to locate him. He is moved by her plight, but he cannot change his present heading.

On Saturday morning, Moriarty awakens to find himself unshackled. Friday represented a test, and he has passed. Now he can at last allow himself to understand what he is doing here.

Comprehension dawns throughout the day, but unlike the real aurora, delivers cold rather than heat in its wake. For Moriarty’s purpose is now clear: he is to investigate the symptoms of the physical distress that he suffered on the night of his departure, to analyse them, banish them and then resume his life. Though his attack was physical, the underlying cause must surely be mental. If it were not, he could not have overcome the vertigo that had penetrated his chest, or dried himself from the illusory wetness that clung to him, by mere thought. And yet he had.

So he will stay in these lodgings, he resolves on Saturday evening, as long as he must in order to vanquish the disease.

The symptoms return, on and off.

That sound of rushing water, like a whisper inside Professor Morarity’s mind; the viscerally unsettling queasiness of a man infinitely far from terra firma.

Every day Professor Moriarty beholds his home, though he makes sure that his perambulations are timed so as to miss Mrs Moriarty. Despite the precaution, once or twice he glimpses her either leaving or entering their domicile at 83 Albermarle Street, and he feels a stab of remorse at the sight of her forlorn countenance.

Days and weeks and months go by, and Moriarty, increment by increment, makes progress in the deconstruction of his maladie imaginaire .

An unsentimental examination of his symptoms – the severe vertigo, the sound of rushing water – has made it clear that he must focus his mental energies on the one memory he has until now most assiduously avoided. The memory of his accident at Reichenbach.

Accident . The word itself, he realizes now, is denial. What Moriarty really means is struggle, fight, violence, fall ; the clash of an irresistible force with an immovable object.

What he really means is crime .

Attempted murder .

Near-death experience.

There. He can think these things now, without guilt or shame.

But then, why should he have censored himself in the first place? Moriarty wonders.

There is nothing wrong, after all, with murder. Everyone dies, and if some passengers on the inevitable train of doom are conveyed by Professor Moriarty’s adroit hands to a compartment nearer the train’s front, then, surely, that is no great tragedy. If examined closely, he is convinced that his life’s actions have also regressed other passengers towards rear compartments. It would be as ill-advised to feel guilty over the former as it would to celebrate the latter. Life itself is but a splendid calculus, in which minute adjustments of one’s position and velocity, expertly wielded, recompense the wise, while rendering the timorous their instruments.

Nevertheless, something haunts Professor Moriarty – and it haunts him severely – about his attempted murder of his great accuser, his implacable adversary, Sherlock Holmes.

Years pass. Moriarty continues to live mere streets from his former abode. He is never spotted, identified, or called upon. By now Moriarty’s death has been reckoned with by his wife. His estate has been settled, his name dismissed from memory. His wife has adopted a mantle of autumnal widowhood without the expectation of ever lifting it from her bosom.

In short, a vast gap has opened up between Professor Moriarty and the world to which he once belonged.

And now something unexpected and terrifying arises within that chasm.

It happens on a Tuesday evening, shortly after supper. Moriarty takes all his meals in his room, and he has just fastidiously wiped his lips. He is preparing to settle into that mild postprandial stupor that often results from overindulgence, when he hears the familiar susurration of rushing water. But this time the sound is right behind him.

Startled, he turns.

In his room, the walls recede, the floorboards disappear and a tremendous abyss opens before him.

For an instant, Moriarty is standing on nothing.

And then he falls.

He tumbles head first into the abyss.

Rocks race before him and gray mist sprays his skin. The sound of rushing water that lured him into this precipitous dive moments ago intensifies a hundredfold: enormous, cascading waterfalls crash inches behind him.

Dear God! There is no mistaking this place, or what occurred here. It is happening all over again. He has just struggled with Holmes on the fall’s brink; Holmes has attempted and failed to defend himself with baritsu; they have fallen together.

The world spins, and Moriarty clutches at the empty air, hoping to discover a foothold, an outgrowth of rock, anything.

Then he closes his eyes and thinks. This must be a dream, an hallucination! There is no physical dimension to his experience. It is a projection of his mind. And it is on those terms that he must combat it.

This thought has a peculiar effect. He is still falling, but more slowly than before.

He focuses his mind again. His velocity of descent decreases once again.

But is it really him that is slowing down – or the world?

The roar of the waterfall is muted, deepened, transformed. Its spray still cools his skin, but its particulate nature feels finer, less overwhelming.

Time , Professor Moriarty thinks. I am slowing down my perception of time.

With a few more moments of practice, he finds that he can bring himself almost to a halt. The more intensely he concentrates on the problem, the more time slows down, and the more time he has to keep perfecting his craft.

Finally, practically frozen in mid-fall, darkness descends upon him, and he thinks no more.

Moriarty wakes in pain. His room feels hot beyond reason, and so he opens the window.

Moments later, thirteen bumblebees swarm in, buzzing loudly.

He remains calm. The bees approach him, encircle him, then depart.

Raising a hand to his forehead, Moriarty determines that he is feverish.

Any life is made up of a single moment , Moriarty reflects. His is indubitably his fall at Reichenbach.

It comes to filter his every experience of the quotidian world, until barely a day goes by – an hour – that he is not transported back to that place, recreated by his mind with utter and bewitching fidelity.

Nineteen years have passed since Moriarty left his wife. He is not much changed in outward appearance. The frontal development of his head, if anything, has increased, and his eyes are perhaps more sunken than before. But he is recognizably the same man.

Today he wakes with an uncanny clarity of mind. His disease will soon be behind him, he intuits. The definitive remedy to his mental problem is at hand. Somewhere outside, a message is waiting for him, and he must simply locate and decipher it.

He sets about the task with diligence and alacrity. The sun shines with unaccustomed vigor, and the sky is unblemished by even the faintest cloud gossamer.