Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Still Moriarty walked on without looking left or right. The crowds—mobs, really—of rough men parted for him as if the professor were some unholy Moses and the ruffians mere dark waves on the Red Sea.

Realizing that his clothes and cane and very mannerisms “stuck out” in this part of town, Henry James stopped on the dirt path that passed for a sidewalk and seriously considered turning around and getting back to a decent part of town as quickly as he could.

How? Which way? And what if someone stops me?

As these thoughts sent a chill through him, James noticed three men deliberately approach Professor Moriarty. None of them shook hands—nor offered to—but even from almost a block distant, James could tell that the four men recognized each other. Or rather, that the three large ruffians—poorly dressed from greasy homburgs to their expensive but muddy boots with oddly pointed toecaps—knew Professor Moriarty. The men were big—big-shouldered, big-armed, big-bellied—but Moriarty towered over all three of them. With his skull-like face, protuberant forehead, and bald dome covered with only a few combed-over dark strands, the professor stood out like a well-dressed cadaver looking down at would-be body snatchers.

They exchanged a few words and turned left down a street. Feeling the stares of the clusters of rudely dressed men near him, James made up his mind to stay in the chase and hurried to turn the corner.

Dead end. The street was short and empty of anyone save for Moriarty and his new friends and it ended at a massive warehouse with no windows.

James stepped back around the corner and out of sight mere seconds before one of the men looked over his shoulder at the empty cul-de-sac of mud and brick.

When James dared peek again, two of the men had shoved open a heavy wooden sliding door. The rumble of a large group—whether of men or animals, James could not tell—came through the open door, but then Moriarty followed the first two in, the third man glancing back again but not before James once more dodged out of sight, and then the massive door was rolled shut. There was a regular-sized door—man-door, as it were—about a dozen steps to the right of the sliding door, but it was solid wood and James had no idea if it opened into the same area that Moriarty had entered. It was probably locked.

James stood at the corner and . . . dithered. That was the only word for it, he realized, dithered .

What could he do?

He could get out of this dismal neighborhood—or perhaps he could, he’d not noted all the turns and changes of direction that had gotten him in this area of town—and find some trustworthy lad to carry a second message to Holmes via that cigar shop.

But certainly that wouldn’t be in time for Holmes to arrive before whatever business was detaining Professor Moriarty in the warehouse would be concluded. And Henry James didn’t believe he had the nerve to continue. Besides, Holmes had lied to him and stated flatly that Professor James Moriarty, the presumed criminal mastermind, did not exist; that he had been a figment of Sherlock Holmes’s imagination, dreamed up solely to expedite the ruse of Holmes’s falsified death and subsequent disappearance from the world.

Well, that wasn’t true. James had seen him in the 1892 photograph of mathematicians present at the Conference on Advanced Mathematics and Astronomical Physics, University of Leipzig, and now he’d seen him in person.

But what to do?

He could retreat from this neighborhood and find a policeman. But what crime had Moriarty committed? All James had seen was the professor walking down a public street—or alley now, as the case might be—and everything James knew about the man was that he was a legitimate English mathematician and physicist. The police might put him , James, in jail for inciting a false complaint.

The obvious and sane choice was for him to turn away now and walk—briskly—out of this dangerous neighborhood (James had the sense that walking north and east would at least get him out of this Foggy Bottom area) and return to the Hays’ comfortable home and forget all about Professor James Moriarty for the time being. Should he ever bump into Sherlock Holmes again, he’d share this amusing little story of actually having crossed paths with the real Moriarty in Washington City.

Yes, that was the only sane and safe thing for him to do.

James took two deep breaths and walked down the cul-de-sac toward the warehouse, silently hoping with every pace that the heavy sliding doors wouldn’t open as he approached. What if Moriarty and the three ruffians stepped out just as he reached the door? One could hardly claim to be lost when one has deliberately walked the better part of a city block down a dead-end alley.

The sliding door did not open.

James stepped to the right of it and stopped in front of the solid wood door. Setting his hand on the iron knob, he prayed that it would be locked. It should be locked. It seemed more like an office door than a door to the open, noisy space Moriarty and the thugs had stepped into. When he ascertained that it was locked, James could turn about, leave at a brisk but dignified pace, and know that he’d done everything in his power to find out what Moriarty had been up to.

The door was unlocked.

James opened it further, tensed to turn and flee if he made a noise or if he saw anyone.

It was completely dark inside. The slit of gray light showed only a narrow staircase rising steeply straight ahead. There was a thick film of dust on the steps, so the stairway must not have been regularly used.

James stepped in and let his eyes adjust to the darkness as best they could.

The narrow stairway rose with what seemed an alarming steepness between two dark, moldering walls. The upper part of the steep staircase was invisible in the darkness—it could be missing for all James could tell from here—but once his eyes had adapted, he realized that there was the faintest glow from a gas lamp on the wall at the top of these stairs.

He began tip-toeing up, trying not to make even the slightest sound, dreading the inevitable squeak and creak of the old steps, but he soon realized that at this rate, the climb to the top would take him ten minutes or more. Besides, the steps were solid. They did not squeak or creak. Perhaps the dust helped muffle his steps.

James walked normally—mostly normally, he realized, since he was still putting most of the weight on the toes of his shoes—and when the staircase was at its darkest, he put his hands flat on the walls on either side. There was no railing. He felt each step gingerly with the toe of his right foot before putting any weight on it. Then he was moving into the tepid oval of light from the gas lamp above.

Nothing. Just a narrow landing with the flickering light. No doors or windows of any sort. James looked to his left and realized that a second and equally steep flight of stairs rose high to another dim light.

All in all, there were four such long, steep flights of stairs and three dusty, poorly lit landings before he reached the top. Here there was a door to his right. The top half was glass and the glass was glazed. James looked down; his were the only footsteps in the dust here. He tried the cracked-porcelain doorknob.

The door was locked. James used all the strength he could muster, even putting his shoulder to the door, but it remained locked. He knew that he could use his walking stick to break the glass and gain entry that way, but he did not entertain that thought for more than a second. The sound of smashing glass might bring Professor Moriarty’s entire mob down on him.

He’d turned and was about to start his steep descent back into the darkness when he noticed something on the left wall, the wall opposite the door. Or rather, he heard something from there.