AWAKENINGS
T
he last thing I remembered seeing was that devil Moriarty leering into my face as he shoved his knife into me. Then everything went black.
The first new thing I saw was the angel Moriarty—Anna Moriarty—stretching her lithe body in the pink light of morning above my hospital bed.
“Where am I?” I asked.
Anna turned, her eyes lighting with surprise and joy. “Thomas!” She came to me and sat down on the bedside. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” I replied.
Tears came, but she dashed them away. “You’re alive. You’re awake. It was more than I’d hoped for.”
“I’m fine,” I told her, though I felt anything but. My chest was leaden, and every breath was a labor. Still, I tried to laugh away my pain. “It takes more than a shiv to kill a scamp like me.”
“It was more than a shiv. It was almost a sword. A few inches nearer to your heart and—” Anna shook her head, mastering herself. “It’s just been—such a long night.”
“Where’s Holmes?”
Anna gestured out vaguely past the windows of the ward. “He caught up to my father—gave him a stab like yours—but … Father escaped … . Even with such a terrible wound,
he could still run.” She steeled herself. “It’s the demon in him … . That’s what I told Holmes … .”
A chill went through me. “I saw that demon. Those eyes …”
“We have to drive it out.” Anna turned toward me. “Father’s only hope—
our
only hope—is the exorcism machine. Holmes has gone to get it.”
The exorcism machine! What a faint hope …
“When Holmes gets back,” Anna explained, “we need you to use it to build an electric pentacle.”
I nodded emptily. Back at Cambridge, I would have leaped at the chance to build such a device, but I would have had books and research facilities. Here, in this hospital, I had only what I could remember from the books at Bern—a crude schematic sketched in my mind … . and I had to build a device that would stop a demonic madman … . “This is a desperate plan, Anna, likely to end badly.”
“What about the plenary worm?”
“Your father is no plenary worm,” I snapped. “He’s a man—a genius … with a demon inside of him.”
“So, you won’t build it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then, what are you saying?”
I drew a deep breath. “Listen, Anna. We’ve shared every danger so far—”
“Every danger,” she repeated.
“But this is … different.”
She scowled at me. “How?”
“It’s different because you don’t have to be here.”
“He’s
my
father!”
“He’s not your father, Anna. He’s a demon.”
Anna paused, glancing sidelong at the gendarme who stood silently at the door. “I know. I’ve known it for years. It’s all
the more reason I want to stay. I want to be here when the demon is gone and Father is healed. Besides, you need me.”
I nodded. “Yes. Until Holmes comes back, until we’ve set up the pentacle. But then you should go away with the gendarme and leave this to Holmes and me.”
“No,” she said quietly.
“Why won’t you listen?”
She smiled. “Because I love you.” She leaned down and kissed me.
The kiss was warm and wonderful; I returned it. But when our lips parted, fear settled on my heart, as if I would never have the chance to kiss her again.
A shout came at the door: “Aha! He’s awake!” Holmes swept into the room and held the generator aloft. “Got it, without any trouble. Now, let’s see if we can’t build this pentacle of yours.” Holmes approached the bed and set the generator beside me.
I grimly studied the contraption—the heavy crank, the six black wires and alligator clips. “Well, I first saw the pentacle on you, Holmes, when these clips were attached to your extremities—ears, hands, feet. That’s what the pentacle is, a representation of the human body. It’s an electric field that drives out the soul.”
Holmes nodded. “But we may not have the luxury of hooking your father up the same way. If a knife can’t stop him—”
“Instead of hooking the machine up to him, maybe we could … we could create a pentacle and lure him onto it. Perhaps we can … form the pentacle out of some conducting material.”
“What about scalpels, bone saws, clamps, tongs?” Anna asked. “There must be enough metal in the surgical theater to form a pentacle … .”
“I doubt we could simply sneak in and carry it off. Besides, it’s too obvious. We’d never be able to lure your father onto it. No. We need something subtler … .”
“What about a liquid?” Holmes wondered. “We could paint the pentacle on the floor. Simple saltwater would conduct electricity—”
“It would evaporate too quickly, and we’d be left with nothing.”
Anna stood and wandered to a tall white cabinet on one wall. She opened the door to find row upon row of bottles. “There’s liniments of all kinds in here. Here’s alcohol.”
“No,” I replied. “Evaporates even faster than water—and it might catch fire.”
Holmes stepped up beside her. “What else is there?”
Anna said, “Well, let’s see. They’re alphabetical—alum, bleach, camphor, Epsom salts, ipecac, hydrogen peroxide, iodine, linseed oil, petroleum jelly, quinine—”
“Aha!” Holmes snatched up two bottles. “The jelly will create a substrate, and the quinine is a base that will make the mixture conduct electricity. Any acid or base is a natural conductor.” Holmes hunted up a mortar and pestle, a shaving brush, and a few other implements and began mixing his concoction.
Anna said, “I’ll be the one who cranks the machine.”
I sighed. “Holmes, before you arrived, I was trying to convince Anna that she should leave this confrontation to you and me.”
“Nonsense,” Anna said, waving her hand to dispel the thought. “Thomas has a collapsed lung, and you—Holmes—you’re the bait.”
“Help me, Holmes,” I pleaded.
“You heard her,” he replied, grinding the quinine with mortar and pestle. “You have a collapsed lung, and I’m the bait.”
Anna smiled in triumph as she approached my bed. She looked down at the generator. “Let’s hide this under a blanket on my lap so Father won’t suspect. Then, the moment he steps onto the pentacle, I’ll start cranking.”
Holmes’s face was lit with delight as he came toward us, dabbing the shaving brush in the thick mixture of jelly and quinine. “How large should I make it—the pentacle?”
“The same size as Moriarty—six feet from point to point. Paint it as a single unbroken line. We’ll use only two of the generator’s cables—concentrating all of the charge—and”—I turned to Anna—“it’ll be up to you to keep those clips in contact with the two ends of the pentacle.”
She was already arranging the cables and clips, hiding most within the seat but running two down the leg of the chair. Holmes meanwhile worked on hands and knees, meticulously painting the five points of the star. In a matter of minutes, the arrangements were complete, and we three stared down with a certain flushed enthusiasm at our creation.
“Let’s give it a try,” I said.
Anna sat down, drawing the generator onto her lap and covering it with a blanket. She glanced down to make sure that the clips were sunk into the viscous jelly at one point of the star. Then she began to turn the crank. A spark leaped beneath her feet, and the quinine jelly began to glimmer and zap with power.
Holmes reached his hand above the outer line of the pentacle. “It tingles. There’s some sort of field above the lines.” He shot an amazed look my way. “This just might work.”
“It worked on you,” I said. “And make sure you keep your head out of that field, unless you want to lose your mind again. As much as I liked Harold Silence, I like Sherlock Holmes better.” I turned to Anna. “All right. That’s enough
of a test. Give your arm a rest. You’ll need all your strength when your father comes.”
Anna stopped cranking.
The gendarme at the door poked his head in. “Excuse me,” he said with a thick French accent. “May I go? My replacement has arrived.”
“Ah!” said Holmes, striding toward the door and winking. “I’d like to give him the customary interview.”
The gendarme nodded knowingly as his replacement stepped through the doorway. He was a tall, thin man with black hair, a large nose, and a waxed mustache. Holmes stepped to the man and looked him up and down. “How long have you been with the Metropolitan Police?”
The gendarme shook his head and said,
“Parlez-vous français?”
Holmes simply smiled. “Well enough.” He gestured to the young officer. “You may go.” To the replacement, he said, “Luckily for you, we have someone who will translate for me. Anna, could you please tell the man to come in? There are a few remarkable details I must apprise him of.”
As Anna spoke these words in French, a terrible dread poured through me.
I recognized this man.
It was Professor James Moriarty.
THE END Of ALL THINGS
I
felt deep dread, lying there as Moriarty stood at the door, no doubt fingering a knife in his pocket. Anna must have been frightened, too, for she gave a little gasp, and her hand tensed on the hidden crank of the exorcism machine.
Sherlock Holmes, however, showed no sign of fear. His gaze was steady and knowing, and the words that poured out of him seemed to be spoken to a friend, not to a demon. “Officer, you have a daunting task before you.” As Holmes spoke, Anna translated his words into French. “The young man you see lying in that bed was stabbed not by some thug in an alley, but by a genius.” Holmes was baiting Moriarty with that word, knowing he would be flattered to the core.
“Genius?”
Moriarty replied, inflecting the word in the French way. For good measure, he added,
“Sacré Coeur!”
“
Coeur
, yes,” Holmes said, “heart. Courage. That’s what we need, for the would-be killer is cunning, fearless—a mastermind!” He turned his back on Moriarty and headed toward me. “Come, let me show you the man’s handiwork.”
Moriarty followed, his hand quivering in his coat pocket and his feverish eyes locked on Holmes’s back.
“Come right up to the bedside,” Holmes said as he stepped into the pentacle.
Anna watched fiercely, ready for the moment when Holmes would exit the pentacle and her father enter it.
“Let me move aside so that you can see the wound.” Holmes stepped from the pentacle.
Moriarty stopped short of it and stared balefully at the quinine jelly that sketched across the floor. “Clever,” he said, no longer making any pretense of speaking French. His voice was dreadful and calculating as he went on: “A very clever trap, indeed. But the trap must always be more clever than the quarry.”
Holmes spun to see the angry, bulging eyes of his great foe, Professor James Moriarty. The man stood there with an ancient-looking gun raised in his hand. He ripped the false nose and mustache from his face and pulled the wig from his head. “Last time we met, your knife work proved to be a little better than mine, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. And so I acquired a gun. Do you know what kind of gun this is, Detective?”
Holmes stood just beyond the pentacle, his hands at his sides and his eyes fixed on his mortal enemy. “A blunderbuss, I would guess.”
“Yes. A very old weapon with a very large iron ball inside it. It’s a pirate’s gun, a sort of handheld cannon. It’s useless at long range, but at short range, as we have here, it kills with a certainty. The one-inch lead ball in this gun will destroy whatever it contacts. Whether head or torso, arm or leg or hand—whatever it hits will be gone, and the rest of the body will bleed out in minutes.”
Holmes nodded. “An imprecise and indiscriminant weapon … . How far you have fallen, Professor. Once you could take over the whole of London with a single equation. Now, you can’t kill one man with anything less than a blunderbuss?”
“I can kill you any way I want,” Moriarty growled, “but there is something satisfying in the thought of splitting you in half.”
Holmes shook his head and tsked. “When your wife handed you the keys to world domination, they were such subtle things—numbers on a page. But look what your ham-fisted efforts have turned them into! A half-pound lump of lead.”
Moriarty stepped past the pentacle, careful to keep his toes from its rim, and approached Holmes. The blunderbuss quivered in his hand. “Do not mention my wife.”
“Why not?” Holmes challenged, standing his ground. “Susanna was a genius. A true genius.”
Moriarty paused as if mesmerized. The vision of his beautiful Susanna seemed to fill his eyes.
Holmes continued. “You think you saved her from a life of prostitution. You think you educated her about logic and philosophy, that you lifted her out of the gutter and made her into something worth loving. But it is all reversed. She was a creature worth loving before you met her. Susanna was a miracle, and she saved you. She elevated you, transfigured you from a little mathematical nebbish into a professor.”
I cringed, waiting for Moriarty to explode, but instead, he drank in the words as if they were truth long denied. He held the blunderbuss leveled, but his finger was slack on the trigger, and his eyes were slack on Holmes.
“She saved you,” Holmes repeated.
“Yes.”
“I know I’m talking now to the man James Moriarty, the professor, the mathematical genius, the misunderstood child,” Holmes said carefully, “not to the preternatural creature that has taken him over.”
Moriarty only nodded vacantly, his once-rapacious eyes gone dark.
“I know I’m talking now to the man who lost his wife, the love of his life, to a killer and who mourned her until he
found her spirit again in his daughter Anna, and who loved her and would do nothing to harm her.”
Moriarty nodded again blankly, his eyes shifting to Anna. Even so, his gun remained trained on Holmes.
Anna rose from the chair, set the generator beside me, and approached her father. She stepped in front of the blunderbuss, putting her body between the gun and Holmes.
“It’s me, Father. It’s me. Your Anna. Put down the gun. We’ll get this demon out of you.”
Moriarty snarled, lifting the blunderbuss to point at his daughter’s face.
“You won’t shoot me,” she said to him, though her voice trembled. “The part of you that’s really you, the part of you that’s alive and true, won’t shoot me. Father, you’re stronger than the demon. It can’t kill Sherlock Holmes if you won’t kill me.”
“Move aside, Anna,” Moriarty said, his hand shaking.
“You have only one shot, and I’m not going to step aside.”
“The ball will go through you both.”
Holmes said quietly. “He’s right, Anna. You’ll only be sacrificing yourself without saving me. Step aside now.”
Anna shook her head and smiled. “He won’t do it. He won’t harm me.”
Dread tied my stomach in knots. “Step aside, Anna,” I said. “He’s not your father.”
Moriarty’s eyes shifted from his daughter to me. He looked disgusted. “You thought she could love you—you vagrant!”
“I do love him!” Anna shouted, shoving her father toward the pentacle. Moriarty staggered, foot coming down on the quinine gel. He slipped and tried to catch himself. His free hand snagged Anna’s shoulder and dragged her down on top of him.
The blunderbuss discharged. The lead ball hit the ceiling
and smashed through lathe and plaster. Anna fell atop her father within the pentacle. He struck his head on the floor and lay there stunned as Anna rolled away to one side.
The moment she was beyond the pentacle, she groaned, “Now, Thomas! Crank the crank!”
But I did not. I could not. I could only gape at the wide red hole blown in her side.
Anna clutched the wound and cried out again, “Now, Thomas!”
I cranked the exorcism machine. The cylinder hummed, and sparks crackled down the wires into the quinine gel. All around Professor Moriarty, the pentacle lit up, and as I cranked faster, fields of energy projected up to the ceiling.
Within those walls of light, the professor convulsed. He shuddered and staggered to his feet and tried to shove his way out of the pentacle, but the mystic fields were too powerful. He hissed and recoiled. Sheets of energy folded down around him and clove to his skin. Moriarty thrashed as electricity swarmed across him. He twitched and spun and whirled and staggered. An inhuman roar erupted from his mouth. He fell to the ground and trembled in a seizure.
Then his eyes turned crimson. I feared for a moment that the man was cooking within his skin, but this crimson color poured out of his eyes and nose and mouth and ears, poured out or was leached out by the energy that surrounded him. The liquid then boiled away into a red cloud in the air.
It was a soul—a demonic soul—and it seeped through the electric field. Rising beyond the pentacle, the demon roiled above us.
“Look out!” I panted, out of breath from cranking. “Look out, Holmes!”
The cloud descended on the great detective and whirled in a cyclone around him. Holmes crouched and swatted at
the spirit. It was no good. Whenever his hand struck the crimson vapor, evil sank into his skin. Slap by slap, stroke by stroke, the demon was possessing him. The cloud condensed around Holmes and permeated his every pore.
In mere moments, the last of the wicked spirit had poured out of James Moriarty and into Sherlock Holmes.
I couldn’t crank any longer; my lungs were bursting with each breath. I released the handle. A final few sparks zapped out through the quinine gel, but then the pentacle went dark. The electric fields that mantled Moriarty’s body fizzled away. Smoke rose from his crumpled, panting form.
“He’s all right,” I said breathlessly to Anna. “He’s alive.”
She lay beside her father and wept. “But look at Holmes.”
Across the room, Holmes, who had been crouching away from the demon attack, now slowly rose to stand upright. His eyes were wide and red, though in a moment, the crimson color drained away into his pupils. Then he smiled a smile like a set of knives. “How clever you are, Thomas Carnacki—dabbling in the black arts, playing with the ancient pentacle of life.” Even his voice had changed, deep and malevolent. “You built your exorcism machine well enough, but all you’ve done is drive me from one body to the next. I like this one better.” The demon in Holmes’s body stalked across the room toward Moriarty. “The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls has moved on.”
He reached down suddenly to Moriarty’s belt, drew a knife, and plunged it into the professor’s heart.
“No!” Anna shrieked. “No!”
Her cry was answered by another shout. Dr. Maison stood at the door and gawked at the bloody spectacle and cried,
“Gardes! Gardes! Au meurtre!”
The demon pulled the bright-red dagger from Moriarty’s chest and smiled at me with Holmes’s teeth. “I wish I had
time to use this on you, but you would try to hold me down until the guards came. Ah, well,
ainsi va la guerre!
Thank you, Thomas, for setting me free. Everyone in Europe is hunting Moriarty, but everyone will be thrilled to see
me
again—to see Sherlock Holmes!” With that, the demon turned and dashed away. He disappeared through the far door.
“Father?” Anna said. She dragged herself to his side. “Father?” She grabbed his blood-soaked shirt and shook him. “Daddy!”
The professor’s eyelids fluttered, and he rolled his head to one side. “Oh, Anna … it’s you.”
“Yes,” she gasped. “It’s me. And it’s you, too.”
“Where are we, Anna?”
“A hospital.”
“Oh, good. I don’t feel very well.”
Anna gave a weak laugh, though her eyes were burgeoning with tears.
The professor’s hand fumbled along the floor and finally found Anna’s and squeezed it. “I’m glad you’re safe. I hope you didn’t—didn’t see what happened.”
Anna’s breath caught. “Father, I was here. It was—”
“Jack the Ripper …” Moriarty said.
“Yes, Father. Jack the Ripper.”
“He was hiding in our apartment. I knew he would be. That’s why I left you with Mrs. Mulroney.” He shook his head in chagrin. “I was sure I could defeat him. Typical arrogance.”
“But you did defeat him, Father,” Anna replied, letting the tears stream now. “You killed him. Jack the Ripper is dead and gone.”
“Good. Good. Your mother’s avenged, then,” Moriarty said. He took a long breath. “Anna, I’m afraid he’s killed me, too. I don’t think I’ll make it.”
“Oh, Father.”
“And I want you to know, before I go … I love you.”
She nodded. “I know, Father. I know.”
Professor James Moriarty gave his daughter’s hand one final squeeze, and then his grip went slack, and he was gone.
I slid down out of the bed and onto the floor. “Anna.” My chest wound burned furiously, and my lungs were ripped to rags, but I had to reach her. “Anna.”
“Oh, Thomas.” She took my hand, and her bloodstained fingers were icy. “This is it, then.”
“No! Dr. Maison saved me. He’ll save you, too.”
“No, Thomas. I’m dying. Dr. Maison can’t stop it. Neither can you … .”
“You can’t die. I love you.”
“I know. And I love you. But love … can’t stop death … . This wound of mine … oh, Thomas!”
She trembled, and before I could kiss her one last time, her soul had fled away. It was as quick as that. One moment, she lay there beside me. Next moment, it was only a body.
“Anna!” I kissed her all the same. “Anna!” I caressed her cheek, wrung her hand. “Anna!” I clung to her as the door to the ward barked open and two guards and Dr. Maison rushed into the room.
“Where’s the killer?” Dr. Maison shouted.
“There.” I waved my arm toward the far door. “Out there somewhere.”