Welcome 2 AfterLife

The Moriarty Interruption

Despite the pain that throbbed through her head, despite the wet and sticky blood that ran from her temple and trickled in her ear, Jessica kept her eyes shut and her breathing shallow.

“Doctor Watson, I’m so glad you’re awake,” the voice was warm, jovial even. The voice, like its owner was familiar, deceiving, but would not be deceived. 

It took an effort to open her eyes and even when she did, her vision did not clear but she could make out the shape of her interlocutor on a gantry high above her.

“A bad concussion, I’m afraid,” he said, the tap of his cane and his footsteps ringing on the metal walkway as he made his way to the steep steps leading down into the dank chamber where Jessica found herself.

Fighting the pain and nausea, Jessica attempted to sit up and found her wrists chained to the wall, the iron cuffs heavy and thick with rust. The wall behind was fetid with damp, the mortar of the bricks crumbling, but the bolts holding her chains were cemented deep into the wall.   

“And I apologise for your accommodations,” he continued, sliding down the step rails of the steps to the gantry.

“I’ve been in worse places,” Jessica said, gently shaking her head to clear her vision. Instead, it only brought the taste of bile to the back of her throat.

“Yes, of course, Africa,” he said. “The Zulu war. It must have been intolerable.”

The stranger jumped across a narrow channel cut into the floor. Jess could hear the trickle of water and assumed the vile smell emanated from there as well. She surmised her location to be somewhere deep within the bowels of London’s sewers.

“That’s where you had your little accident, isn’t it.” The man stood over her, reached out with his cane and tapped Jessica lightly on her left bicep. It clanked, with the sharp sound of the polished wood against metal. Perhaps it was his close proximity or perhaps it was the reference to her mechanical limb, but at last the face above came into focus.

“James? But you’re Nikola’s assistant,” Jessica said. Nikola Tesla, the man who provided Holmes with all his cunning devices and gizmos, who collaborated  with his strange experiments, Nikola, the wizard who had tamed electricity and mastered mechanical engineering to create her astounding  artificial arm.

“Yes, rather more than just an assistant, as you can now see,” he said. “Poor Nikola, such a great intellect, but like all great minds, unable to see what is plainly under his nose.”

“It was you that sold blueprints to Nikola’s positronic difference engine to Edison, you who leaked the design for the miasmal capacitive inductors?”

The man who loomed over her, smiled and made a short bow. “That was, indeed, I.”

“Then you are-”

“Yes, I am Moriarty.” He laughed, self-satisfied sound. It echoed loudly around the chamber.

“Nikola will come to realise and when he finds out-” 

“Poor Tesla,” Moriarty interrupted, “I am afraid, he is no longer at his best. Thanks to the mercury compounds I have been infusing into his clothing, he has lost that bright spark of genius that made him a giant amongst men.”

“Foul fiend, how could you?”

“Oh, quite easily, I assure you. And the best of it is that Nikola has set sail already for the America’s to work for the very man that  financed his downfall. Oh, do stop that.”

Moriarty rapped his cane sharply against her metal limb, hard enough that she felt the jarring vibration it caused. While Moriarty had pontificated Jessica had been surreptitiously wriggling. Trying, in vain, to loosen the buckles and straps that held her wondrous arm attached  with only the vague plan that she might somehow beat Moriarty to death with it.