Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page B

of said multitude holding the other end. Then he whinges for a bit for the spirits to answer their call. Then he turns the slate or likewise the pad over, and writing has miraculously appeared from the spirit world.”
    “Ah!” Barnett said.
    “What has happened unbeknownst to said multitude is that the medium writes the message— I am watching over you, or Have faith! or Give the swami fifty quid, or whatsomever seems appropriate to the occasion—upside down with a bit of chalk or pencil lead held in by his fingernail and a lot of practice to get it right.”
    “The professor has practiced this art?” Cecily asked.
    “He can call the spirits from the vasty deep,” the mummer affirmed. “Sometimes they come when he calls them.”
    “So, upside down, eh?” Barnett took the notebook in his hands and considered. “The professor did hold the notebook once,” he recalled. “It fell to the floor, and he picked it up and handed it to me. That was shortly before the end of the interview.”
    “It just fell to the floor?” Cecily asked.
    “Yes, it … wait a minute! No. Moriarty knocked it to the floor with a sweep of his arm. Then he picked it up and apologized. He—” Barnett closed his eyes and pictured the event. “He held it toward me for perhaps thirty or forty seconds while he was apologizing and then handed it over. I did think it strange at the time. The professor isn’t one to spend time apologizing, but, you see, the stress of confinement, I thought … Anyway, that must have been when he did it.”
    “What does it mean?” Cecily asked. “Look in binding?”
    The mummer gave an excited hop. “It must be the binding of the thingummy, doncher see? The notebook.”
    Barnett examined his trusty reporter’s notebook as though he had never seen it before. It was about six inches wide and eight high, slightly under an inch thick, with two stiff covers of some sort of paperboard, surfaced in a glued-on beige fabric that wrapped around to serve as the spine. It had a stitched binding, like a book, as the pages were not designed to be easily torn out. He turned it over and over in his hands. “I don’t see—”
    “Here!” the mummer said suddenly. He took the notebook and opened it flat and then turned it upside down. “See the way the cloth pops away at the spine when it’s opened like this? Take a dekko and see if anything’s inside that there space.”
    Barnett tried to peer inside the space thus revealed. “It’s too dark,” he said. “Wait a moment.” He lifted the notebook, still spread open, up to the light from the window and looked through. “Something,” he said. “Some sort of tube.” He tried poking at it with his forefinger, but it wouldn’t budge.
    “Here,” the mummer offered, producing a very large pair of tweezers from his jacket pocket. “Try with these.”
    “What on earth?” Barnett asked. “Why are you carrying these monstrous things around?”
    “Very useful for opening doors,” the mummer told him, “if the key should happen to be on the other side of the lock.”
    Cecily looked closely at the oversized device. “Does the need for this come up often?” she asked.
    “You’d be surprised how many untrusting people are abroad in this world,” the mummer told her.
    Barnett inserted the tweezers into the space and gently pried at the cylinder, pulling it from its resting place. “It’s a tightly rolled-up piece of—it feels like silk,” he told them.
    “Fancy that,” said the mummer.
    “Perhaps you should unroll it,” Cecily suggested.
    Barnett complied, flattening it out on the table as he did so. The eight-by-eight square of fine silk fabric thus revealed was covered with tiny writing in Professor Moriarty’s meticulous hand.
    Barnett studied it for a minute.
    “Well,” he said, “I believe we have our instructions.”

 
    [CHAPTER FOUR]
    DURANCE VILE
    I know not whether Laws be right,
    Or whether Laws be wrong;
    All that we know who lie in