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

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.