Nicholas Meyer (3 page)

He ceased pacing as abruptly as he had begun, looked at me, and softened his expression in response to mine.

"My dear fellow, I owe you an explanation. I have no doubt you find this all very bizarre."

I confessed as much and suggested he come with me to the fire and share a brandy, if that were possible. He considered the proposal with an air of concentration that would have been comical had I not known him to be a man who is never upset by trifles. At last he agreed, stipulating only that he must sit on the floor with his back to the mantel.

In the sitting room, having restoked the fire and settled us with our drinks—I in my armchair and Holmes upon the floor next to the blaze—I waited for him to satisfy my curiosity.

"Have you ever heard of Professor Moriarty?" he asked, plunging headlong into the business after a sip or two of his drink.

I had, in fact, heard the name, but did not say so. Moriarty was the appellation I had sometimes known him to mutter when he was deep in the throes of a cocaine injection. When the drug's effects had left him, he never alluded to the man, and, though I thought of asking him about the name and what significance it held for him, there was something in Holmes's manner that usually precluded such an enquiry. As it was, he knew how heartily I disapproved of his loathesome habit, and this was a difficulty I did not wish to exacerbate by referring to his behaviour while under its influence.

"Never."

"Aye, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!" He spoke with energy though without shifting his position. "The man pervades London—the Western world, even!—and no one has ever heard of him."

He then astounded me by launching into an all-but-endless monologue on "the professor." I listened with growing wonder and apprehension as Holmes described for me his evil genius, his nemesis, as he called him. Forgetting the danger from the air guns (though he would have made a difficult target in my drawing room at that hour and in that light), he got to his feet and, resuming his restless pacing, detailed for me a career steeped in every kind of depravity and horror.

He told me that Moriarty had been born into a good family and had had an excellent education, being endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he had written a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem), which had enjoyed a lengthy European vogue. On the strength of it he had won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities. But the man possessed hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind, crossbred with his incredible mental prowess. It was not long before dark rumours gathered round him in the university town and eventually he was

compelled to resign his chair and come down to London, where he set up as an army mathematical coach.

"That was merely a subterfuge." Holmes leaned into my face, resting his hands on the back of my chair.

Even in the dim light I could perceive the pupils of his eyes dilating with unsteady intensity. The next instant he had resumed his infernal pacing.

"For years past, Watson, I have continually been conscious of some power
behind
the malefactor, some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law and throws its shield over the wrong-doer. Again and again in cases of the most varying sorts—forgeries, robberies, murders—I have felt the presence of this force, and I have deduced its action in many of those undiscovered crimes in which I have not been personally consulted. For years I have endeavoured to break through the veil which shrouded it, and at last the time came when I seized my thread and followed it, until it led me, after a thousand cunning windings to ex-professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity."

"But, Holmes—"

"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson!" As my friend spun round from his position before the fireplace, the flames behind him and the shrill, unnatural quality of his voice lent his attitude a terrible aspect. I could see bis nerves stretched to then-highest limits. "He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city and in the annals of contemporary crime. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker—he sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. His agents may be caught, they may be apprehended and their crimes forestalled—but he—
he
is never touched, never so much as suspected." (All this tallies more or less with Watson's account of Holmes's opinion regarding Moriarty as set down in "The Final Problem.")

And so he rambled on, sometimes incoherently, sometimes declaiming as if from the stage of the Old Vic. He listed crimes initiated by the professor, he spoke of his system of safeguards designed to protect him from all suspicion or harm. He talked glowingly of how he, Holmes, had managed to penetrate that perimeter of the professor's defence and how the professor's minions, having discovered his success, were even now upon his track—with the air guns.

I listened to this erratic recital with mounting alarm, though I did my best to conceal it. I had never known Holmes to be untruthful and I could see at a glance that this was not one of his occasional practical jokes. He spoke in deadly earnest, almost babbling with fear. No human that I had ever heard of could match the catalogue of atrocities Holmes attributed to the professor. Irresistibly, I was reminded of Quixote's arch-foe, the Enchanter.

The tirade did not so much conclude as run down. From shrill statements Holmes gradually subsided into inarticulate mutterings and from thence to whispers. Accompanying this modulation in speech, his body, which had been striding energetically to and fro, now leaned up against a wall, then flung itself absent-mindedly into a chair and, before I realized what had happened, Holmes was asleep.

I sat in silence by the flames of the dying fire and studied my friend. Never had I known him to be in such deep trouble, but I was uncertain just what sort of trouble it was. From the way he spoke he almost seemed under the influence of some powerful narcotic.

Then an awful thought struck me. I recalled for the second time that night the only other occasions when I had known Holmes to talk of Moriarty. It was when he was deep in the spell of his cocaine.

Stealing quietly over to the chair where he lay slumped and obviously spent, I pulled back his lids and examined his pupils once again. I then took his pulse. It was weak and unsteady. I wondered if I might risk removing his jacket and examining his arms for recent puncture marks; but it was best not to risk waking him.

I resumed my chair and thought. In the past I had known Holmes to go on cocaine "binges," sometimes of a month's duration or more, during which time he would inject himself thrice daily with a seven-percent solution. Many readers have erroneously supposed that Holmes made use of our friendship so that I as a doctor might procure his supply of this terrible narcotic. Recently, I have even heard it postulated that my willingness to supply Holmes with his drug was the
only
reason he tolerated my companionship. Without pausing to comment on the patent absurdity of the suggestion, I will only note that Holmes had no such need. No statutes in the previous century prevented a man from purchasing cocaine or opium in whatever quantity he pleased. It was by no means illegal, and therefore my own reluctance or willingness to supply him with cocaine is quite beside the point. At any rate, there is ample record elsewhere of my own attempts to curb his vicious and self-destructive habit.

For certain periods, indeed, I had been successful—or, not I so much as my powers of persuasion in conjunction with the arrival of a new and absorbing case. Work was what Holmes craved, problems of the most challenging and perplexing nature were his element. Engaged upon a quest of this sort he had no need to resort to artificial stimulants of any kind. I seldom knew him to take more than wine with his dinner, and this, with the exception of huge amounts of shag (A cheap, strong tobacco favoured by Holmes. Shag refers to the cut of the blend as well.), was his only indulgence when involved with a case.

But challenging cases were rare. Was not Holmes always lamenting the dearth of ingenuity among the criminal classes? "There are no great crimes anymore, Watson," had been his constant and bitter litany when we shared rooms together in Baker Street.

Was it possible that between the absence of intriguing misdeeds, and my own departure from Baker Street, Holmes had fallen prey once more—and this time beyond redemption—to the evils of cocaine?

Unless the fantastic tale he had just related to me turned out to be the truth, I could conceive of no other explanation that would cover the facts. It had always been a maxim of Holmes's that whenever the possible had been eliminated, the remainder—however improbable—was the truth.

With this thought I rose, knocked the ashes from my pipe against the grate, and, resolving to await developments, threw an afghan over the inert form of my companion and turned down the lamp.

I cannot be sure how much time elapsed in the darkness—an hour or two it must have been—for I was drowsing, myself, when Holmes stirred and woke me. For a moment I did not remember where I was or what had happened. Then, in a flash, I was recalled to myself and slowly turned up the gas.

Holmes was in the act of rising as well. For a moment he looked around with a blank air and I saw that he too had forgot where he was. Had he also forgot how he came to be there?

"A pipe and a snifter, eh, Watson?" he yawned contentedly in my direction. "Nothing like them on a wet spring night. Did you, too, surrender yourself into the arms of Morpheus as a result?"

I answered that it seemed I had, and then ventured to enquire after Professor Moriarty.

Holmes regarded me with a blank expression. "Who?"

I tried to explain that we had been talking of this gentleman before the effects of the brandy and the blaze in my hearth had made themselves felt.

"Nonsense," he replied testily. "We were discussing Winwood Reade and 'The Martyrdom of Man' and I was throwing in something or other of Jean-Paul. That's the last thing
I
remember," he added, looking at me significantly from under his brows. "If you remember otherwise I can only infer that your brandy is more potent than even its distillers claim."

I apologized and conceded that the memory was in fact my imagination, and, with a few more words, Holmes took his leave. He overrode my objections that it was hard on three in the morning.

"The night air will do me good, old man. And you know there is no one so experienced in getting about London at odd hours as myself. Thank Mrs. Watson for a pleasant evening, there's a good fellow."

I reminded him that my wife was in the country, whereat he looked at me sharply for a moment, then nodded, referred deprecatingly to the brandy again, and departed.

With grave misgivings, I bolted the door after him and ascended the steps to my own room, where I began disrobing, but then decided against it, and sat down in the chair next to the bedroom fire—which had long since gone out—with my hands on my knees.

For a while I even entertained the idea that Holmes had been right, that he had stopped over for the lag end of an evening, that we had smoked a pipe or two and downed a snifter or three, and that I had imagined all that talk of a Professor Moriarty when, in fact, the conversation between us had occupied other channels entirely. Was that possible? In my present exhausted state I knew I was having as much trouble thinking clearly as a man does when he awakes from some vivid nightmare and for a season after cannot make himself realize that he is not still in hell.

I needed proof more tangible. Stealing downstairs again, carrying a lamp, I would have seemed a curious sight had the girl left her room and espied me: a middle-aged man with his boots off and his collar undone, creeping down the stairs of his own house with a befuddled expression on his face.

I entered the consulting room, scene of the commencement of this phantasy—if phantasy it was—and examined the shutters. They were closed and bolted, certainly. But who had closed them? Holmes, as I remembered him doing, or myself? Settled into my chair I tried to recall every detail of the

conversation as I remembered it, pretending as best I could that I was Holmes listening to the deposition of a client in our old sitting room in Baker Street. The effect, had anyone chanced to be listening, would have been ludicrous enough. The middle-aged man without the boots was now sitting in a consulting room by the light of a single lamp and talking to himself—for I found it necessary from time to time to pose (as Holmes did) certain interrogatories concerning my own statement.

"Can you think of anything at all that the man said or did that you distinctly recall having covered in talk before the period when you both woke up and he spoke of the brandy you had drunk together?"

"No, I don't—stop a bit, though, I
do
remember something!"

"Excellent, Watson, excellent!" came the familiar phrase at my ear, only this time my own voice was speaking the words.

"He asked me when he first walked into the consulting room where Mary was. I told him she had gone visiting and that we were alone. Then later—after the nap we both took in our armchairs—he was on the point of leaving when he asked me to thank her for such a pleasant evening. I told him again that she was away and it startled him. He didn't remember my saying it earlier."

"You are quite certain you did mention it earlier?"

"Oh, yes, quite," I replied, a trifle miffed at the question.

"Then is it not possible, since we have allowed for the mellowing effects of the brandy already, that
he
forgot, simply forgot you had mentioned the fact before? Did he not, in fact, allude to that explanation himself at the time?"

"Yes, but—no, dash it all! We were neither of us in an alcoholic stupor!"

I got to my stockinged feet in my agitation and, seizing the lamp, padded into the sitting room again in an effort to leave my second voice behind.

Pulling back the curtains in the sitting room I saw that it must soon be getting light. I had been already fatigued when Holmes first appeared and now, it seemed, I was completely exhausted.