The Fourth Circle (37 page)

OF COURSE I surrendered at once. It was the gesture of an experienced chess-player who knows when the game is over and respects his opponent too much to waste his time with superfluous additional moves. I decided not to interrupt Sir Arthur with any further suspicious and inappropriate questions, but nodded briefly and became all ears.

"In fact, we must go back another step," he began. "To Moriarty's death in the lake several weeks ago. It was not, as officially declared, an accident. Oh, no, don't worry—Holmes did not kill him, as has just occurred to you, judging by your face. It was a premeditated suicide."

I barely repressed an exclamation; only my firm decision not to interrupt stopped me, but not before my mouth had gaped open. The sight must have been rather comical since my companion smiled briefly before continuing.

"It seems that Moriarty, who—you will agree—was no less intelligent or astute than Holmes, suffered from the same ailment as his rival. The initial pleasure in carrying out perfect crimes soon faded, leaving behind a void, which could only be filled by greater intellectual challenges. Unlike Holmes, who sank into moodiness and hopelessness and waited for such challenges to come knocking at his door, Moriarty was more enterprising and went looking for them, and in the right place—the British Museum Library."

The "Ah!" that escaped from me was quite involuntary. I pulled a penitent face, which drew another brief smile from Sir Arthur.

"It was only from Holmes's confession that I managed to piece together what had in fact happened right under my nose. About half a year ago I noticed a steep increase in interest in some of our ancient volumes. Various people of both sexes began to visit the department of rare and antique books, always studying the same few titles. I did not attach any great importance to this, thinking it was part of the recent fad for esoteric subjects. How could I have known or even suspected that it was always the same person, the proven master of disguise—Moriarty.

Whatever it was that he was trying to find in the ancient tomes, he wished the search itself to be as inconspicuous as possible. Not long after, the interest suddenly waned, and this attracted my attention, but by then it was too late. The only remaining trace was the fact that several pages had been torn out the disappearance of which could not be explained, because we strictly scrutinize every user of rare and antique titles. Of course, the puzzle would have been much easier to
understand if we had known who, in fact, had been visiting us."

I nodded mutely, to show my full understanding. I remembered how many times I myself had been a victim of similar tricks of Moriarty's. On one occasion, he deceived me by disguising himself as a statue in a park, from whose hand a jet of water was flowing. Luckily, I had taken an oath of silence, so I was not tempted to reveal this embarrassing incident. To think I had so gladly quenched my thirst from that fountain following a hard chase after Moriarty....Holmes shook with laughter for a good fifteen minutes when I told him the story, and he had explained to me the nature of my "fountain."

"I tried to find out by reconstruction what was on the missing pages that was so important that somebody should act with such vandalism, but I failed, of course. It would have been an act of vanity to expect success. Who am I, after all, to measure myself against the genius—dark though it be—of a Moriarty? Only now, from Holmes's confession, I have an idea, though incomplete, about it."

The sudden sound of the wall clock in the dining room striking six o'clock interrupted Sir Arthur. We both looked for a moment at the great pendulum under the clock face. It was swinging hypnotically. I think that the unexpected sound startled him a little more than me. He was obviously one of those people who "lived" their own story as they were telling it. For him, it was as if Moriarty were somewhere near, in the room with us, disguised maybe as the wall clock, or even as me....

"Apparently, Moriarty accidentally came across this idea about the existence of another world. The other Earth, with the other, differing London and all the rest. It was, at last, the great challenge, the ultimate adventure of the spirit, something that he had yearned for and would never share with his main rival—if he did not have to. But the powers he possessed, though great, were nevertheless not great enough to carry out the plan that inevitably followed from the discovery of that parallel world: an attempt to communicate with it."

"Communicate...with...." I whispered.

"Aye. All the more so because, as Holmes claims, the stolen pages indicated that from the other side too efforts to establish such contact are constantly being made—known for some reason as 'completing the Circle,' a metaphor no doubt that somehow infiltrated into our world, or grew here parallel to it. I do not know.

In any case, the trail Moriarty began to follow, the signpost concealed in some ancient book, the founding stone on which he was to erect this entire edifice, was this: a circle."

I remembered at that moment my conversation with Holmes regarding the circle from Moriarty's letter and his excitement at the time. How angry he had
been with me when I had failed to see in the message of his arch-rival anything more than just a circularly drawn line! But how was I to know? To me it was just a plain, ordinary circle. I have always been one to take things at face value.

"However, to open such a channel," Sir Arthur continued, "it was essential to jettison certain hindrances, certain items of ballast, the first of which was one's own corporeality, materiality. You see, nothing material can penetrate the barrier between the two worlds. Holmes, in his confession, explains in detail why this is so, and mentions some discoveries that are only to be made in the future; unfortunately, my familiarity with physics is really very modest, so that I did not understand much. What I did comprehend was, that there are some tiny particles that rotate in opposite directions and have opposite electric charges—but why they cannot mingle with each other, I cannot explain."

There was in his voice an undertone of dismay, almost as if he were ashamed.

I hastened to encourage him.

"You may omit the technicalities, Sir Arthur. I do not know much about physics either."

"Thus, Moriarty had to fulfill the necessary condition. To divest himself of his own body...to die...at least, in one sense."

"How does one die 'in one sense'?" In my voice there was no surprise. My capacity to be surprised had long since faded in this conversation.

He shrugged. "Well, the body dies, but the...soul...does not. I am aware that in other circumstances this would sound like mere babble, religious mysticism, but do not forget that these are special circumstances, very special."

The warning was quite superfluous. Even had I wanted to, how could I forget?

"Holmes was most impressed by Moriarty's achievement, although in fact Moriarty succeeded not so much through his own ingenuity, as through his experiences in the Orient, where he learned some extremely bizarre techniques from Tibetan monks: astral projection, levitation...."

Holmes's intuition had been correct, then. One enigma in Moriarty's life had finally been explained: he had reached the Dalai Lama and had not fallen into the trap of becoming a radish or a ladybird. But how had he got them to reveal to him their most precious secrets? Then I thought of Holmes's ominous warning that the man should never be underestimated, not even when dead, let alone alive.

"So, Moriarty 'died' in the lake," Sir Arthur went on. "Accidental drowning after his boat overturned was the official report, and you did indeed identify the body, but the body only. His spirit was, in the meantime, preoccupied with the greatest of all challenges—an attempt to establish contact with the Others. However, the first attempt failed. Moriarty alone was just not enough to achieve this.

He was, thus, faced with a terrible dilemma: to abandon the entire project at the moment when he was so near to accomplishing it, or to ask for assistance."

The sound of the kitchen door opening interrupted him. A moment later Mrs.

Simpson came into the dining room, carrying a laden tray. The smell of fresh scrambled eggs and onions roasted in oil filled the room.

"You will soon feel much better, Sir Arthur," said she. "Nothing like a good bite to eat for overwrought nerves. Dr. Watson will tell you. We've often spoken about it, and just today I mentioned to him a cousin of mine in Kent who...."

I looked at her crossly, and she stopped talking. The old woman coughed a little in embarrassment, placed the plate on the table in front of Sir Arthur and added, "I made this for you too, Dr. Watson, in case you're hungry. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to tidy up the kitchen."

She left hurriedly. In her movements I recognized a mixture of emotions: she was glad to leave the dining room because then she would not have to listen to things unpleasant to her, but she was also angry because I had not allowed her to expound her views on medicinal matters.

Sir Arthur waited until the kitchen door was closed, then continued. "Moriarty's predicament was truly horrible: he simply could not abandon everything, but on the other hand, only one man existed who was in every respect able to help him complete the project: his sworn enemy, his eternal opponent, Holmes."

He paused and glanced at the food. He must have decided to suppress for the moment his animal appetites and give priority to the story, which he too was obviously enjoying and which was nearing a climax, for he gently pushed the tray toward the middle of the table. It occurred to me that it was fortunate that Mrs.

Simpson had gone out.

"In the end, he decided, with the deepest reluctance, on the latter. He now had to win Holmes over to the idea. This was facilitated by one action which had initially been motivated by sheer malevolence. Moriarty meant for Holmes to follow in his steps and reach the same goal, but only as runner-up and not as an equal. Without that, Moriarty's sense of triumph and gloating would not be complete."

Knowing Moriarty's nature well, I could easily believe that. I have long been puzzled by the conspicuous incongruence between Moriarty's extraordinary intelligence and his equally extraordinary baseness of character. Only after one of Holmes's casual remarks did I realize that in fact there was no contradiction at all.

"It is just a common prejudice," Holmes had said, "that great intelligence must be accompanied by great goodness. All prominent criminals in history were very
intelligent. The opposite case is much rarer."

"This is why he arranged," continued Sir Arthur, "that after his 'death' Holmes should get a letter on Murratori's paper, with a circle drawn on it; he believed that this would be sufficient encouragement to Holmes to embark on the same course, but to hedge his bet, he also arranged that crucial pages, which he had torn out of the ancient books, arrive soon thereafter, under separate cover."

"Holmes did not mention that other letter to me," I said. Even as I said this, I was aware that by these words I was finally confirming the veracity of Sir Arthur's story. There was, now, no return. There had been no return in fact for some time. The game of hide-and-seek was over.

"Holmes did not have an opportunity. The second letter was delivered to him in your absence, after you had injected him with morphine and left him apparently resting. The postman gave the letter to Holmes personally, as instructed, while Mrs. Hud—Mrs. Simpson was making tea for him."

"Apparently?"

"Apparently, yes, because the morphine played a key role. Instead of helping him to sleep, as you had intended, it woke him up. It drove away the exhaustion and cleared his mind, enlightening it. Under that influence, but also with the help of the missing pages, everything began to fall into place. Voids were filled, blunders eliminated, falsities dispelled. Borne on an artificial tide of enthusiasm and delight, Holmes rushed up an ascending line towards the light, which was beginning to appear before him, toward the closing of the Circle."

"But it did not go all that smoothly. There was a clash, a struggle. I heard Moriarty's savage yell, a madman's roar, in fact. And the destruction in the drawing room...."

"Oh, yes. The union could not be accomplished painlessly, without strife, but that was just a marginal episode."

"Union? You do not mean...."

"Integration, yes. It could not have been done in any other way. Holmes alone would not have succeeded, nor would Moriarty alone. Only by a uniting of the forces of those two sworn enemies could the ultimate step be taken—the lifting of the barrier between the two worlds. Moriarty had tried alone and failed. This is why he took the union much harder. He felt like a loser, a man who had to share with somebody the spoils that he had almost grabbed for himself. Hence the rage that you could hear through the door of the drawing room. For Holmes, however, this joining was an exotic adventure, an exceptional new experience. It is not every day that your mind gets—quite literally—merged with the mind of someone who was your chief enemy during the course of your life."
"But that means," I said, taken by a new, sudden, terrible thought, "that Holmes is also dead...at least in the sense that Moriarty is!"

"I should rather say that he made a transit into...a new form...of existence, though in every practical, earthly sense you are, I think, right. Yes, technically he is dead, although of course his body, or corpse, is missing."

"What happened to his body?" I said in a trembling voice. The concept of a

"new form of existence" was certainly comforting, but nevertheless I felt as if I were standing in a morgue.