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

Moriarty walks briskly, but with no particular destination. He stops here and there, memorizing details of what he sees, searching for patterns.

Twenty-three minutes into his jaunt, he encounters a cluster of bees as bright as the sun. He counts eleven of them. They follow him for a full minute, without any apparent intention of provoking harm, and then disperse into the skies.

Thirty-seven minutes after leaving his lodging, he finds himself near a book-vendor’s stall. As if in a trance, he ambulates towards it. Five minutes into his visual perusal of the titles on display, he locates a tattered copy of the second edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales , and, without knowing why, purchases it.

Sixty-one minutes into his walk, bees return, this time hundreds of them.

Moriarty contemplates them, placidly. As before, they pose no threat. They hover for a while then fly away.

Moriarty studies his notes. He shuffles the facts like cards.

The numbers must mean something.

His former address: 83 Albermarle Street.

He lives seventeen minutes away from that residence.

The time intervals between significant events during his recent constitutional: twenty-three, thirty-seven, five, sixty-one.

The number of bees during each encounter: thirteen, eleven, two hundred and twenty-seven.

Holmes’s destiny is softer than Moriarty’s. Water will break Holmes’s fall, shattering his bones, and he will sink below the surface, evanescing from the world in quiet poetry.

Moriarty, however, will strike rock. His cranium will be split and a string of bloodied brains will be ejected forth from it as if from an air gun, and he will rebound from the rock and land twisted on solid ground, face caved in.

Moriarty doesn’t know how he knows this, but he does.

Wake up! Wake up! He sees his skull-opened corpse staring up at the heavens, at himself.

No! Not real.

Just a dream.

Wake up. Wake up.

Moriarty’s eyesight has declined with age. Multiple times he tries to read the Hawthorne tome he purchased during his recent outing. But the words on the page appear blurry, indistinct.

He sighs and puts the book down.

Twenty years have now elapsed since Moriarty exiled himself from his former life.

His investigation is nearly at an end. His being tingles with the promise of impending revelation.

He thinks about Holmes. Moriarty remembers imagining, a long time ago, that Holmes might take up some solitary profession, like beekeeper. He might retire from the business of being a London consulting detective and move to the Sussex Downs. Is that where he is, then? Is that what he’s doing?

Yes; the bees. Maybe Moriarty’s adversary had found a way to teach them to follow his commands. Perhaps he instructed the bees to find Moriarty, to relay a message to him. If so, what was it?

Moriarty grows impatient in his room, suddenly feels caged. In a fit, he takes the Hawthorne book, which has so taunted him with its nebulous print during the last few days, and flings it at the wall. It falls open. Disbelieving his eyes, Moriarty finds that he can easily read the page on which it has landed, without even having to bend down.

Enraptured, he picks it up and reads, hungrily. The page marks the opening of a story called “Wakefield”, composed by Hawthorne in 1836. The story tells of a man who walks out of his house one day, leaving his wife behind, moves into a building a few streets away, and then returns to her twenty years later, without explanation or purpose.

Moriarty recognizes himself at once in the tale’s pages. Stunned, he places the book on his bed and staggers away from it, as though it were a living entity. He, Professor Moriarty, is Wakefield . But how could Hawthorne have foreseen—

No , he thinks. Hawthorne did not predict anything. Moriarty has been enacting the story, playing it out, drawing on it from some secret recess in his memory and patterning his life after it for some inscrutable reason.

Trembling, he reads it again.

This is how it ends, then? He simply walks back to 83 Albermarle Street and reunites with Mrs Moriarty?

Something is wrong. In the story, Wakefield suffers no mental malaise, no symptoms of previous trauma. But clearly Moriarty does, for it was those symptoms that instigated his separation in the first place.

My mind is the chief suspect in this investigation , Moriarty declares. My mind has fastened on to a fiction and treated it as reality. The story of Wakefield.

Wakefield. He repeats the name. He rolls it on his tongue. Wakefield.

Fiction as reality , he thinks.

A story, told as truth.

The breakthrough is imminent now. He is shaking like a man in the throes of delirium tremens , his whole body heaving, contracting, quivering.

Delirium . Another key word, lodged into his brain. There for a reason.

Think, Moriarty! You are alone, attempting to unveil a great mystery. You are an outcast of the Universe. Like Wakefield.

His mind produces a scene: a long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward. Forever.

Forever .

The Reichenbach Falls. He’s there again. This is where it all begins, where it all ends.

The dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, hundreds of feet below.

How many feet? Eight hundred and nine. Precisely .

How does he know this?

He is skilled at mathematics. Mathematics is his playground. He remembers other numbers. Eighty-three, seventeen, twenty-three, thirty-seven, five, sixty-one, thirteen, eleven, two hundred and twenty-seven, eight hundred and nine. They are of prime significance. And then he thinks: That’s it! Primes!

All the numbers are primes. Why?

Holmes would figure this out in an instant , he thinks. But he is superior to Holmes. Superior .

Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street. Two hundred and twenty-one is a pseudo-prime number.

Primes are superior to pseudo-primes; purer, the real thing.

And more: 83 Albermarle Street is not Moriarty’s actual address. He has never lived there. He remembers now. He lived at 50 Albermarle Street! Why the change to eighty-three? Prime, yes, but there must be something more.

Eighty-three. Then he knows. A simple sliding over of the decimal place. Eight point three .

That is how long he will be in the air at Reichenbach before his collision. The math is simple. His mass, one hundred and twenty-eight pounds; the distance, eight hundred and nine feet; an air resistance of point one six pounds per foot; a gravity of nine point eight meters per second squared. Outcome: he will fall for eight point three seconds.

He is Wakefield because his mind has been asleep but knows that it must wake. In his dream life he lives at 83 Albermarle Street because he is better than Holmes, and because he will fall for eight point three seconds. In dreams, print is hard to read; thus the difficulty of seeing the writing in Hawthorne’s book.

Until now.

He has been asleep.

Wake yourself! he commands.

Reality sunders, regroups.

He is falling.

This is the truth of his existence.

This is the reality.

He has never left Reichenbach.

Falling.

His brain has apprehended that he will die in seconds, when his head smashes against the rock below. And to give himself an escape, it has created an elaborate fantasy for him to flee into. It has resorted to Wakefield. It has spun an entire universe out of it, nestled his consciousness inside a place where real time is not felt. A year in his Wakefield cosmos is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second of real time.