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

Holmes put down his cup and came across to look. As he took the picture from my fingers, I noticed that the portrait was rapidly beginning to turn black.

“It hasn’t been fixed,” I said.

“On purpose,” Holmes remarked, holding up a portrait of a man with a high-domed forehead and a thin nose. “Mister Elliott was busy in the Portrait Parlour when we arrived, do you remember? And then he complained that the sitter had made his escape down the backstairs when our names were announced by the receptionist.”

“Escape?” I said. “Why would he wish to escape?”

“Can’t you guess who he was? I have a score to settle with that man,” said Sherlock Holmes.

“Which man?” I asked, perplexed.

“You’ve never seen Professor Moriarty, have you, Watson?”

“Moriarty?”

Holmes handed me the black sheet of paper. “The professor inherited tendencies of the most diabolical kind,” he said. “Well, now we know that he has a diabolical sense of humour, too. He was probably following Mycroft. He may have known, or guessed, what my brother was up to. On the other hand, he could have been visiting the studio for some purpose known only to himself.”

“A passport!” I cried. “Having a suitable picture made before it becomes law.”

“He knows of Mycroft’s plans, then.”

“And the picture faded away before we had the chance to take his measurements.”

“I’ll catch him yet, I promise you,” said Holmes.

He walked across to the grate and dropped the blackened sheet of paper on the smouldering coals. As the heat took hold of the paper and twisted it, a negative image appeared for a moment or two. A face? It was more like a skull than the semblance of any normal human being. White pinpoints of eyes set in two black cavities, sunken cheeks and sharp high cheekbones, a thin nose, high-domed forehead, and a frightful smirk on his twisted white lips.

Then the paper turned black and exploded into flames.

“The ghost that haunts me,” Holmes said, sitting down in a slump on the sofa.

What was he going to do now, I wondered, reach for his violin, or his cocaine and syringe?

“I think I’ll have another cup of Woojeon,” he said. “Are you sure you won’t join me, Watson?”

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.”