“Locating you, Professor, has not been difficult. One had merely to follow the trail of destruction that you have left in your wake. And as for the nature of my business, let me be quite clear. It is an intervention born of concern and of fellow human feeling. I have come here today to deliver a warning.”
At these words I felt a distinct surge of anger. “Whatever do you mean by such impertinence? Whatever is this absurd warning of yours?”
“I should close the door, Professor,” said he, “and sit before me. We do not have much time and the words I have to say to you now are of the most sensitive and significant kind. Indeed, if you pay proper heed to them, they will yet save your life.”
“Do you take me for a fool, sir?” I began and felt myself ready to tumble again into a paroxysm of righteous rage.
Yet Watson interrupted – “Professor!” – and I saw in his eyes not only absolute sincerity but also (and it was this which persuaded me to stay my words and, almost meekly, obey) something very close to fear.
So it was that I found myself doing as I had been asked and sitting opposite this unwanted visitor as that old storyteller began to speak.
“Let it first be noted that I am here today not on my own behalf but as an emissary from Mr Holmes.”
“Sherlock Holmes,” I breathed, perhaps more in the manner of a villain from the popular stage than I had intended. “It was my understanding that that jackanapes – that meddler-in-chief – had retired. That he drowses now by some Sussex fireside.”
“Your understanding, at least in regards to my friend’s retirement, is correct. Nonetheless…” At this, a smile of an uncharacteristically knowing, even sly, nature crossed my visitor’s face. “It is not Mr Sherlock Holmes who has sent me to speak to you today.”
“No?”
“Rather, I am present on behalf of an equally noble man: Mr Mycroft Holmes.”
I rummaged for a moment through that portion of my mental apparatus that is devoted to trivia before retrieving the necessary fragment of data. “The elder brother, yes? He who is reputed to dwell in the upper reaches of government?”
“Quite so,” said Watson. “Though I fear he is not now nearly as close to the centre of things as once he was. We are none of us – are we – quite as at home in this new century as we were in the last? We are all of us, I think, essentially Victorian.”
“On the contrary,” I said, adopting a pleasingly lofty tone such as I had for many years deployed in the faces of students too unwavering in their convictions, “it is my greatest regret that I was not born very much later. This new age of abandon suits me so very much more nicely than did those stultifying decades in which you thrived.”
“I confess myself surprised, sir, given the unmanly excesses of your biography, that the simple accident of your birthday should prove now to be the greatest of your regrets.”
I glared. “You spoke, I believe, of a warning.”
“I did.”
“Then pray deliver it. My courtesy is not without limit.”
My guest looked at this as though he intended to issue a rejoinder. In the event, he contented himself with the following, rather lugubrious words: “Mycroft cannot be seen to act in this matter. Therefore he must do so at one remove.”
“You are his cat’s paw?”
“Surely something a trifle more benign than that. Nonetheless he wished me to convey to you the extreme danger of your predicament.”
“I am in no danger, sir. My situation is surely the reverse of that state.”
“Professor, nothing is what it seems. The lady whom you know as Lowenstein has no true claim upon the name. Rather she is an agent of the War Office. She is employed as a singular agent for those extraordinary projects which have, given the present European situation, been granted tacit authority.”
I shook my head at the absurdity of it all. “You have spent too long in the pages of your own books. Such things do not happen in real life. Why should the lady lie to me in so bald a fashion? What possible interest would that office have in me? Besides, I find your pessimism concerning our continental relations to be positively dispiriting.”
“As matters stand, sir, there would seem to be little alternative to conflict before long. And as to the matter of the War Office’s interest in you – an office, might I add, against whose methods Mycroft stands vehemently opposed – why, surely that is obvious.”
“It is not obvious to me.”
“The serum, Professor. The serum! Do you not see its potential?”
“For the lending of additional vigour, perhaps, in elder males…”
“No, sir! Do you not see its possible military application?”
I gaped at the man for this wild flight of fancy. Yet was he persistent.
“Do you not see? They are experimenting upon you! They are testing your endurance, testing the effects of this new substance upon the only man in Europe to have regularly imbibed the drug. Imagine it, Professor. Imagine the scene. Battlefields swarming with soldiers who are more than human. More feral, more savage, more lethal than their Teutonic counterparts. Legions, sir! Legions upon legions of creeping men!”
With this barrage of lurid melodrama, the doctor had at last gone too far. I rose to my feet and said, with all necessary sombreness: “this, sir, is now intolerable. You do me and Miss Lowenstein a grave disservice.”
“Professor, I speak only the truth.”
“You speak slander and, I fancy, something very near to treason. Now, you have delivered your warning. I should ask you now to leave. Under normal circumstances I would request also that you bear my felicitations to your master, Mr Mycroft Holmes, yet so unworthy has been your conduct and so vile have been your insinuations, I cannot find it in my heart to do so. Dr Watson, sir, it is high time for you to depart.”
The old doctor stood up, looked sorrowfully at me, smoothed his moustache once again in that distinctive gesture and walked, slowly and wordlessly, towards the door. Once there, he turned back.
“As a scientist, Professor, you will know well what the next and final stage of their unnatural experiment will surely be.”
“And what, sir, is that?”
“They will test a thing to its very limits. To the point of its destruction. And beyond.”
I scowled in disbelief at the continuance of such folly.
“Good day, Professor Presbury. I should recommend immediate flight yet I fear you are now deaf to reason. Instead, I shall have to content myself merely by wishing you the very best of luck.”
And then he turned once more and he was gone, back to his dreams of the past, to wish himself resident again in that vanished epoch of gaslight and hansom cab.
Although certain of his more pungent fantasies have, naturally enough, lingered in my imagination, I have pushed the great majority of them aside. For I am quite certain that there can be no truth in any of it. Indeed, I am to see Scheherazade later today and to her I shall say nothing at all of this queer visitation. She will, I am certain, secure for me alternative accommodation and she has promised to take me once again upon the town. That she will have supplies about her person is to be expected.
Only pleasure lies before me now. I cannot – I will not – believe anything else. The story of the rest of my life will be one of pleasure and delight, of excess and of deep, dark, trembling joy.
It is a tragic fact that such discoveries as the one that was made in the early hours of this morning by the banks of the Thames in the vicinity of Waterloo are commonplace. A body was found, which appeared at first sight to be that of an elderly gentleman – another victim, it was thought, of old age, want, despair and that illusory comfort which is surely suggested to the desperate by the deep cold waters of our great river. Further inspection, however, revealed a more curious element to this seemingly well-worn tale.