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By Root 839 0

before known, a web woven of all that the world of crime has to offer. His agents, ‘employees’ as you call them, robbed and murdered, drained families through blackmail, and poisoned men and women with drugs. Nothing was too squalid for your father, Patri-cia Donleavy, from smuggling and opium to torture and prostitution. And all the time—ah, the perverted, filthy genius of it!—all the time the good professor sat in his book-lined study and kept his delicate hands clean of it. Nothing touched him, not the agony or the blood or the stink of terror that spread out from his agents. Just like you, Madam, he was touched only by the profits of all that sordid puru-lence, and he bought his wife pretty dresses and played mathematical games with his little daughter in the drawing room. Until I came along. I, Sherlock Holmes, with my meddlesome ways. I carved the network into many small pieces and I turned the name Moriarty into a term of derision, so that even his daughter will not carry it openly, and finally, when there was nothing left of his life, when I had driven him into a corner from which he could not escape, I pushed him over the Reichenbach Falls and he died. Your father, Patricia Donleavy, was a festering sore eating into the face of London, and I, Sher—”

With a shriek of animal fury she broke. The gun rose and swung up to face Holmes, and I, my useless right hand lying limp on the table, picked up the heavy bottle of ink and threw it hard and straight at her hand. The room was split again by a flash and deafening report, and the gun flew spinning against the wall. She came out of the dark cor-ner in a dive for the pistol, and reached it a moment, just an instant, before I hit her in a massive, launched tackle that sent us crashing into the shelves, showering us with books and bottles and pieces of equip-ment. She was immensely strong in her madness and rage, and she had the gun in her hand, but I held her down with my entire body, and my hand hung with all its strength onto her wrist, to turn the weapon away from Holmes, slowly, so slowly against her impossible strength, and then came a confused jumble of impressions, of something slip-ping and my left hand holding a hot, empty palm just as a third and completely deafening explosion went off beside my head, and the shock of it went through me like a physical jolt. She stiffened beneath me in a curious protest, and coughed slightly, and then her right arm went limp and her left hand came down across my back. I lay stunned in her embrace for a moment until my eyes focussed on the gun, inches away from her arm, and I pushed the gun hard away from me so she could not reach it, and then thought, Oh my God, where had her second shot gone, and turned to see that Holmes was unhurt but something was wrong, something was suddenly very wrong with my right shoulder. And then finally the pain came, the immense, over-whelming, shuddering roar of pain that built and beat at me, and I flung out my hand to Holmes and cried aloud as thunder filled my ears and I slid down into a deep well of black velvet.

Postlude

Putting off the Armour

Return Home

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarioushazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love.

ndless hours, what seemed weeks, washed in a sea of dark, muttering confusion, a labyrinth of blurred images and disconnected snatches of voices, speech from the other side of an in-visible wall. The Dream without end, horror without an awakening, casting about for solid ground only to be caught up again by the pain and flung back into the roaring, hissing blackness. My brother’s rumpled hair framed by the car window. Patricia Donleavy, gaunt and sick, lying in the spreading lake of incredibly red blood. A beaker of liquid copper sulphate, smashed bilious green and dripping slowly from the workbench above me. Donleavy again, standing above my hospital bed and offering to throw me from a cliff. Holmes, so still on the laboratory’s tile floor, one lonely hand curled about his head. Cold and fever burned