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

And, as if watching the scene in the jerking staccato motion of a promenade mutoscope machine, she saw herself rise suddenly like a meteor and send the rocketeer flying to the floor with a resounding blow. Saw, to her amazement, the earnest boy who had partnered that awful Shoreditch detective jump out of the shadows like a fairground apparition and grab the brass handles that operated the room’s fire-break shields, an iron- and asbestoscurtain thundering down from the roof and isolating them from the moustachioed soldiers and the recumbent rocketeer.

And he had thought that she would fall to the floor in relief, but instead she looked desperately all about her like a mad thing, her whole body shaking with fury like a cat who had pounced on the acid-yellow family canary but has had its prey rescued at the last moment by some interfering human and now howls its displeasure.

And, then, suddenly, her demeanour completely changed and she became wild-eyed and almost delirious, jumping the upturned armchairs like an Olympic hurdler and making a grab for a supine figure that even now was trying to slide like some dark thing and seek the shelter of the shadows and safety.

“Oh no, not so easily, my man,” he heard her shout. Saw something like a glint of blue-hued metal flash in her hand as she palmed the cosh so carefully concealed up her sleeve and struck the figure, quickly grabbing it by the scruff of its thin neck and dragging it over to the open window.

“Rosie, no!” he shouted, recognising the Professor, as she dumped him unceremoniously on the open window frame, the bitter mountain wind ruffling the man’s elegant frock coat and making him look like a bedraggled crow as he teetered between life and death on the narrow precipice that was the windowsill.

And, even as he rushed to try and intercede, he heard a low rumble and realised that Moriarty, like one of his automaton soldiers, had no fear and smiled unrepentantly at the girl as she towered over him, blood from the gash in his forehead trickling lazily down his sallow cheek.

“So, so, young miss.” He almost smiled. “Who of yours have I so wronged that you slay me with such vehemence. What sainted mother have I corrupted, what virtuous sister defiled?”

And Rosie shook her head slowly, as her neat little hand stretched out and began to apply pressure, pushing his scarecrow’s body slowly out over the abyss with a steely deliberation that knew her prey would eventually find its fulcrum point and topple headlong into the glacier far below.

“Neither, sir,” she says now with a steady voice though her whole body shakes with emotion. “I slay you for my father, Sherlock Holmes. “ This is for Reichenbach, Moriarty! ”

And, to this day, Jacques is still sure that he heard the Professor laugh hysterically as he tumbled flailing into the dark gorge of that freezing night …

I was stillborn, after a fashion.

Unable to speak, unable to move other than this blinking of the eyes. I was told my paralysis was due to a cerebrovascular disease passed on to me by my mother. I come from poor genetic stock, you see. My mother was descended from a bloodline that barely deserved the name: it was diluted red juice, she always said. It was rusty tap water. Her grandparents had died in their forties; her parents had done the same. Her husband came from a family who seemed to suffer heart attacks for fun; he died when I was but a child.

My mind, at least, flourished while the flesh surrounding it withered. I did well at school, having been forced, from a very early age (thanks to my ever patient and guilt-ridden mother), into developing a means to communicate. This I managed via an alphabet-based system connected to the frequency of blinks I managed with either eye, a practice that consumed many hours of painstaking trial and error.

Though my sight is keen, I often suffer from a number of optic ally related problems: double vision, flashes, headaches and so forth. I cannot cough, spit or swallow with any degree of success. I do not eat solid food. I’m unable to control my emotions and find myself oscillating between bouts of laughter-induced hysteria and racking sobs. I am blessed to be in the bosom of a family that loves me dearly, and they have sacrificed a great deal to make me comfortable, to ensure a future, of sorts, for me. A great deal of money has been spent to adapt a room at my mother’s hotel (she and her brothers, Pascal and Tobias, have run the Schilthorn since the 1870s) so that it is comfortable for me. A special, raised bed – very heavy, so I am told – needed to be built on site. Ramps had to be added to the hotel infrastructure so that my wheelchair – itself of a bespoke design – could be more easily pushed around the grounds. My gratitude knows no bounds. But for my mother’s love and devotion to me, and the support and protection afforded to me by my uncles, I might well have been abandoned, destined to live a miserable life in the cold, cruel poorhouses in Bern or Lausanne.

Nevertheless, I wished I had died in childbirth. I did not want to live. As soon as I was able, I begged my mother to help me go to sleep for ever, to end my suffering. But she refused; she was horrified. It was a sign from God, she told me. If I had been meant to die, it would have happened in the womb. She begged me to put such thoughts out of my head – she was convinced that the mind, if focused on one particular subject for long enough, could achieve its ambition – scared rigid that I would be delivered straight to hell should I be granted my heart’s desire.

My mother’s paraenesis went unheard, I’m ashamed to say. Lying in bed or sitting immobile in my fortress chair were causing my muscles to atrophy. I once heard the doctor telling my mother that the heart might not escape the same fate. Though it was beating, and strong because of that, it was having to work extra hard to serve my failing body. The doctor suspected my heart might eventually be affected by the malaise of the flesh and either stop working so effectively, or stop working altogether.

I lay awake at night imagining my heart in my chest, perhaps deciding if it was time to give up. But such thoughts did not panic me. I knew death would be a release. I knew it was every parent’s concern that they might outlive their offspring, but I couldn’t imagine what life would be like once my mother was gone. I could only envisage misery, and the interminable, wretched pursuit of her to the grave.

Some nights, when my misery seemed to know no lower limit, and I felt stretched and on the brink of dissolution, like a drip of molten wax, I thought of my heart – imagined it in the prison of my ribcage – beating more and more slowly, until it trembled and stopped. I willed it to happen. I wanted it more than anything else. I would wake the next morning, feeling cheated by God, and convinced He wanted me to live so that He could be entertained by my travails.

It was after this episode that I began to really turn my focus inwards. I began to study my feelings and I realised that although I was an intelligent young man – given the limitations of my affliction – I was retarded in terms of experiencing the full gamut of emotions. I have already mentioned that I shifted between extremes, albeit without any discernible external stimuli to trigger it. My emotions were chaos. In short, I did not understand them. I could not interpret them. Like me, my feelings were inert, broken, paralysed. I had learned to “talk”, but there was no colour to my words. How could you develop a personality, how could you convey wit or spirit or character if you had never lived? My reaction to every situation was the same: dumb passivity. I could not engage unless I was engaged. I could initiate no kind of contact.