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

A mind, if I were being honest, not entirely unlike my own.

‘A merry dance you led us, Moriarty,’ he said. I saw the red flames behind his eyes. ‘But all joy must sooner or later come to an end.’

‘So this is it?’ I said. ‘What will you do, kill me? You think yourselves invincible?’

‘But my dear Moriarty,’ the alien said. ‘You completely misunderstand our position. We read of your work with great interest. Your Treatise on the Binomial Theorem ! Your Dynamics of an Asteroid ! Your mind is a great and precious thing! We could use a man such as yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We are beings of the mind. Bodies are merely an inconvenience, don’t you think? Tools, to be used and discarded. Join us, Professor! And we would make you immortal.’

I stood still. Beside me, Moran stirred. He looked up with dull, defeated eyes. I pitied him then. I pitied Twist, Scrooge, Holmes and all the others. I stood alone before the alien mind.

‘What would I have to do?’ I said softly.

Watson’s grin was a wet, grotesque thing. His tongue snaked out, a red, obscene thing. It spooled out of his mouth and kept on coming, like a snake. When it touched the skin of my cheek, it stopped, and I felt him shudder. I stood still, hating him, hating them all. The tongue found my ear and entered it, and the world changed forever.

You may remember that day. The day the Marsians died. The day you returned home, through streets strewn with the corpses of those you once knew, those who had been taken. Host bodies, empty of the malign influence that had animated them during the Marsian occupation. The Regent’s Canal was choked full of these corpses, and red, dying Marsian weeds rose from the subterranean depths in which they had found shelter, questing helplessly for the sun.

There were mass funerals held that day, and in the days to come. The host bodies were carted south of the river, to Blackheath, and were burned and buried in a common grave.

Bacteria! that fool, Wells, wrote, in his chronicle of the war.

Yet there is a word, an old Latin word, which I like. It is Virus .

I remember emerging from the subterranean depths, somewhere near Simpson’s, where I often dined. The sky was streaked with red. Moran was by my side. I am not sure how we got there. Moran carried me, perhaps. I was both there and not there.

I was everywhere!

My mind had been sucked into the aliens’ consciousness matrix. For a moment, I saw through their eyes, distributed all across London and beyond, extending even to the Midlands (though why anyone, human or alien, would wish to go there I’m sure I don’t know). In their memories, I saw the red planet, its sandstorms and dust, its crawling, patient life forms, living in abject terror of the telepathic fungal leeches of which I was now, myself, a part!

Yet I saw beauty, too, a strange sort of pride of these aesthetic beings, who saw themselves as warrior-monks, separated from the great Marsian mind to launch themselves all but blindly at our planet. I saw, and was for a moment tempted.

Yet I am Moriarty, and I serve no manner of man or leech.

Within their matrix, I began to reproduce. To replicate. My consciousness spread like a sickness through their telepathic web. I was everywhere, I was everything! By the time the Jacks realised what I was doing it was already too late. I was replacing their mind with my own, rewriting their being with mine. I would not become the Marsians’ puppet – they would become mine!

You may remember that day. Perhaps you were never there, but only heard of it later. The day Jack fell. The day the bodyrippers died.

Later, there had been all kinds of stories. How bacteria killed them, or a bomb, or Sherlock Holmes. Each one as ridiculous as the other.

For myself, I came to, blinking and confused, my head pounding as from the worst imaginable hangover. I could not contain their great mind. I had destroyed it, and then withdrew, back into my own skull, diminished.

I am still the Chair of Mathematics at the university where I teach. With the death of that fool, Holmes, there is no one left to know my name, or my occupation. My web of influence spreads everywhere, from the lands of the Zulu to the great courts of the Raj. My name is whispered in awe and fear in the gutters of London.

Yet sometimes, late at night, I raise my eyes up to the sky, searching in the mesh of stars for that alien red planet. There is a longing in me now, new and unsettling. Sometimes I wish they would come back. Sometimes, I think, if they’d only ask me again, I would like to go with them.

It was in the summer of 1887 that I first realised my own importance. My name, as I presented it to Mr Sherlock Holmes, was Fred Porlock, which pleased me as an invention. In that year I interfered with the plans of the most sinister villain ever known to the vast heaving London underworld, just as the gentleman from the village of Porlock once interrupted the flowing pen of the poet Samuel Coleridge. Adopting the name of Fred also pleased me. A name of no importance in itself, it smacks of greatness, of kings, emperors and heroes: Alfred, Frederick and Siegfried.

Later I knew this villain to have been Professor Moriarty, in whose evil empire I was a humble messenger, the fleeting shadow in the fog beyond London’s gaslights, the whisper before the knife. I took my orders from the link above me in his devilish web and relayed them on to the next. That web controlled all that was vile, spinning its malevolence far beyond London, far beyond the shores of England itself, eastwards towards the great powers of Europe, and even westwards towards the mighty States of America. At its centre sat the Spider, manipulating and sucking in its prey in pursuit of its own ends, regardless of the human life it destroyed in the process.

Until the summer of ’87, I performed my tasks without concern. I saw not their beginning, I cared not about their end. I knew nothing about the Spider, but now the very thought of Moriarty brings back the fears and terrors of that time.

My story begins with blood.

The blood of a flower girl spilt in the grey dawn of Covent Garden’s market. She lay in a corner of the new glass-covered flower market. I saw her black dress and shawl with the red blood still streaming over her, as red as the rose she had handed me yesterday as she cried her wares in the Strand.

‘Know her, mister?’ asked a uniformed beadle curiously.

‘No,’ I lied.

‘Elsie Bracken, her name is, God rest her soul. Her man sells matches outside St Bride’s. Soldier once, he was. Out there in India.’

Bracken! I knew that name. I felt myself shaking as I sank to my knees at Elsie’s side, despite the crowd around me. It was then I realised she still breathed, though near to death. Her eyelids fluttered, perhaps aware of my closeness to her, and her eyes opened. Did she recognise me? I doubt it, but she struggled to make one last desperate attempt to speak. Her dying breath was trying to form a word and I leaned over her as though this poor gesture might help.

‘Hurry,’ I heard her say, but then no more.

Flowers are too rare in this world for their passing to go unnoticed. Besides, the coincidence was too great. One of my few talents is an interest in codes and ciphers, as Mr Sherlock Holmes can testify, and the last message I had been ordered to deliver to my link, Bill Butcher, had indicated its next recipient: Jesse Bracken.