The Fourth Circle (28 page)

He began sifting through the books, which had been brought to us from various shelves by his assistants; each time he picked up a tome he cast a meaningful glance at me over his glasses.
"Introduction to Advanced Mathematics. History of
Chinese Cooking. The Cosmogonies of Early Civilizations. Floral Ornaments in Islamic
Architecture. A Compendium of Secret Societies.
And what do you say to this:
God and
Musicl
Nobody has asked for this book for...let me check...yes, a full century! Mr.

Holmes will certainly get dust in his lungs reading this."

"I am afraid that I cannot tell you anything more specific," I replied, hoping to bring the conversation to an end by preventing Sir Arthur from questioning me further. "Not because of any secrecy that Mr. Holmes's research involves but simply because I am almost entirely ignorant concerning it. My role in all of this is quite marginal. That of the errand-boy, one might say."

"You are too modest, Doctor Watson," said Sir Arthur, blinking at me over his glasses. It was clear he did not believe me. "It is well known that you are Mr.

Holmes's right hand." He stopped for a moment, as if contemplating something, and then added, "In any case, I am honored to have made your acquaintance. I hope I will have the pleasure of being at your service in the future, too; pray convey my greatest respects to Mr. Holmes."

Though his curiosity was undoubtedly piqued, he observed the unwritten rule of gentlemanly conduct: do not bang your head against a brick wall. He respected my indication that I was not particularly willing to reveal details of Holmes's schemes. But what, in fact, could I have told him: that behind all this lay a slightly unhinged message from one malicious dead man, written on very valuable, indestructible Italian paper, all of which greatly excited my friend? That would really have complicated matters.

I began to recount my conversation with Sir Arthur to Holmes, but he dismissed this with a wave of his hand, plainly uninterested, and threw himself on the books—quite literally. He jumped onto the couch amidst them and started to browse through the old tomes. He was not leafing through them in a normal manner: he was acting, so it seemed to me, like a man who had misplaced something valuable in one of the books and was now trying impatiently, almost in panic, to find it. His movements were so hurried that here and there a page became detached from the weakened bindings.

I knew Holmes's passion well, that mighty inner drive that would force him to attack with all his energies a case that he judged to be a worthy challenge, but I
had never yet seen such violence. In his eyes was a stare that would on any other face offer a sure sign of madness. With Holmes it could have been, admittedly, the result of a night without sleep, but now for the first time, I feared that it might be something of a much graver nature.

Since he was paying no attention to me nor had any wish for conversation, I started to look around the drawing room, unsure of what to do. My gaze inevitably fell on the massive table, strewn with books from Holmes's extensive private library. Besides the books, most of which lay open, there were many sheets of paper, covered with drawings and short comments. Holmes had, it was clear, worked through the night; it was no wonder he looked the way he did. I picked up one of the drawings and looked at it more closely.

There were circles of various sizes, which overlapped in places, creating more complicated geometrical forms: a series of concentric rings, a drawing of a flower with six petals, a two-dimensional representation of a ball, a series of belts drawn so that they formed the shape of a cylinder. There were also some very intricate forms such as I had never seen before. They looked as though they could have been some kind of outlandish, twisted architecture from the Orient, full of rounded surfaces and soft intersections based on the circle.

Several annotations accompanied every drawing. At first I only glanced at these, but when I looked more closely, I observed that they contained very few letters of the alphabet. There were many mathematical symbols, quite unreadable to me with my meager knowledge, peppered with Greek letters and some inde-cipherable abbreviations. I had had no idea until now that Holmes was so well versed in the Queen of All Sciences.

But the biggest surprises were yet to come. On the second sheet of paper that I took from the table, there was only one large circle, similar in size to that in Moriarty's letter. It was divided into twelve equal segments, and in each segment there was one calligraphically ornamented sign, more a figure than a letter. At once I thought of the signs of the Zodiac and decided to return the paper back to the pile, when something lying buried at the back of my mind announced its presence like a tinkling bell,

I kept the paper in my hand to stimulate my memory—which in the next moment flashed with the lightning of recollection. For this I probably owed thanks to the fact that this business was taking place in the morning, when I am at my freshest. A man of my years cannot expect to maintain equal clarity of mind at all times of day and certainly not in the evening when exhaustion from the day's efforts gets the better of him.

These were not astrological signs but arcane magical inscriptions, the symbols
of the Cabal, the marks of Devil-worshippers. I knew that Holmes had for a time been interested in the ceremonies of these perverted and mostly gruesome cults, from their invocations of evil spirits to their Black Sabbath celebrations. He had even attended some of them, not allowing me to escort him at such times. I had had the impression, though, that he still rejected, even despised, all that tomfoolery and mumbo-jumbo, but judging by these symbols, my impression had perhaps been mistaken.

I took another sheet of paper, now quite ready for any surprise. On it was written a vertical column of numbers composed of four figures each. Each number ended in zero, so that it seemed in fact that they each had three figures followed by a miniature circle. These circlets were what united them into a chain, a whole. This misled me for a while, so that it was only a few moments later that I realized that the numbers were years ranging from A.D. 1120 to our own, current year, which was also a "round" year, divisible by ten.

Next to each of the years was a written explanation, abbreviated more often than not, so that I established only a few dates with certainty. The first year in the column was the one in which the Crusaders founded the famous Order of the Knights of the Temple in Jerusalem—The Templars. Next to the year 1430 were the words "Est. Ord. Rosicrucians," the year 1570 saw the founding of the obscure Brotherhood of the Rose, while in 1720 the first lodges of the Freemasons came into being. (I wonder why it had got Holmes's hackles up so when I had innocently mentioned them in our conversation yesterday?) My extremely modest knowledge of secret societies, brotherhoods, orders, and the like prevented me from determining the significance of the remaining

"round" years on the list (some thirty in all). Guessing quite freely, I assumed that the marking "Par" next to 1420 may have referred to my colleague Paracelsus, the grand master of alchemy, but I was not sure, not being able to remember in which century he had lived. (The freshness of the morning was apparently slipping swiftly away....)

"C. of S. G." next to 1690 could have been Count of Saint Germaine, I surmised, feeling proud of my insight, although, in truth, I knew almost nothing about him except that he was some sort of adventurer and eccentric around whom a host of legends had been woven, including one that he had lived for centuries, so that even this conclusion remained unsure.

When my gaze drifted to the bottom of the vertical column, I felt a constriction in my throat. Next to our current year there were the initials "S. H." encircled in thick red ink; then, in brackets, the letter "M," followed by something that was crossed out, so that it was now utterly illegible, and a question mark.
Filled with a dark foreboding, I turned to Holmes, intending to ask for an explanation, but he preempted me. It appeared that he had just then become aware that I was holding one of the papers from the table. As if scalded by boiling water, he sprang up from the couch on which he had been tirelessly leafing through the books just brought to him and swooped on me.

He roughly snatched the paper from my hand. "Don't touch that!"

The haggard appearance of his face made him look even more terrible than he normally did when anger took him like this, so that I flinched and shrank back, raising my hands a little to show that I had no wish to touch anything more on the table. I think that was the first time I had ever been genuinely afraid of Holmes.

He must have realized that he had frightened me, for a moment later he approached, put his hand on my shoulder, and spoke in a voice that was very mild, almost pleading. "Forgive me, Watson. I am terribly tired. I am not fully in control of myself. I need help. That letter...."

He seized his head and seemed to sway a little. I took him by the hand and helped him to the couch. I collected the books, which were still scattered over it, and the fallen-out pages too, and while I was stacking them on top of the carved chest of drawers, he stretched out on the couch without taking off his dressing gown or slippers. He stared dully at the ceiling with the look of a desperate man, his chest rising and falling quickly.

I had to help him. Mere advice to rest and relax would not be sufficient in this state. He had already gone beyond that boundary of exhaustion when he would be able to simply fall asleep. He needed to be induced to sleep, and I knew full well how I could do that most effectively, although everything in me cried out against a new injection of morphine.

Holmes was already on the edge of addiction. Nobody except me, of course, knew about this problem of his; if it ever became public knowledge (God forbid), I, as an accomplice who facilitated his vice, would lose my license to practice and would be struck from the registry of the Royal Medical Society, while his reputation as the most famous English amateur detective would be in shreds. I could be accused of vanity, but I think the possibility of the latter consequence weighed more heavily on me. After all, a small portion of Holmes's glory belonged to me.

Hadn't Sir Arthur suggested that he saw me as Holmes's right hand?

Medical reasoning finally prevailed, and I injected him with a mild dose of the narcotic. On this occasion I did not have to wrestle with my conscience; this was a matter of helping a patient to overcome a state of severe exhaustion and not of satisfying the deadly demand of an addict.

The morphine acted with celerity. As soon as I removed the needle from his
vein, the spasm of desperation passed from his face and was replaced by an expression first of relaxation, then of bliss. I knew those phases well, and every time I observed them, I had the impression that I myself was also beginning to feel better. A few moments later, he closed his eyes.

There was nothing further for me to do. Holmes would sleep for several hours now, perhaps until evening. I took the slippers off his feet and covered him with a blanket, which I had taken from the largest drawer of the chest. In the meantime, he had turned on his side and drawn his knees up to his chin, assuming the fetal position. He looked somehow fragile, childlike, not at all like a grown person. I would not have been surprised had he put his thumb in his mouth.

Before leaving, I looked around the drawing room, guided by some dark sense of foreboding; though it appeared that all had been taken care of, an inner voice was telling me that nothing had been settled, that everything was in disorder, just like this room in which I was leaving Holmes. In what condition would I find him when next I saw him? And would morphine then be sufficient to soothe him?

I shook my head to rid myself of these disturbing and gloomy thoughts and opened the door to leave the drawing room. I was startled to encounter Mrs.

Simpson; in fact I almost ran into her. She had obviously been standing there for some time, eavesdropping. Probably she had been attracted by Holmes's brief shout; most likely she had been disturbed earlier by his noisy night's work.

She murmured something to the effect that she wished to inquire when to serve breakfast to Mr. Holmes. I told her that Mr. Holmes was asleep and that he would not wake up until late afternoon, when he would be fairly hungry, so that she should prepare a large meal for then. Her curiosity unsatiated, the old woman tried to continue the conversation, hoping to draw from me something more about this unusual disturbance of the daily routine, but I suggested that I had urgent obligations to attend to, said goodbye, and left hurriedly.

WE HAVE A slight overcrowding problem.

With two new arrivals, there are seven of us in the temple, and this is beginning to make accommodation somewhat difficult. Five people at most can live here in any comfort. Acting the host for once, Sri unhesitatingly took his ham-mock out to sleep under the roof of the porch, ostensibly to make as much room as possible for the guests, but I know well he was putting himself first. With the hot season now upon us, it's actually more pleasant out of doors at night than inside, where the stale, muggy air is inclined to linger. And in fact, Buddha soon chose to join him.

It's no wonder. Both of them are people of this climate, they know how to deal with it, and they know they can rely on my efficient protection from insects, whereas the rest of the company has been gathered from entirely other parts of the world with very different climates, so they spend most of their time huffing and puffing, unable to adjust.