MEIRINGEN, SWITZERLAND
10 Miles from The Reichenbach Falls
—
256 Miles from Schloss Alber
From the Diary of Dr. Francisco Castillo
5th May 1891—Entry No. 1
There comes a time, in any man’s life, when he has no recourse but to wait.
The duration of these purgatorial stretches can vary greatly. Some are a matter of seconds; a beat of intoxicating inertia as an ivory ball rattles around a track.
Some last much longer; hours of helplessly awaiting your wife’s first words when you’ve returned from the roulette table with empty pockets for the fourth consecutive night.
It takes no genius to observe that my examples are not only related, but personal. In fact, it was the trajectory of these events that led me to a three-room cabin in the middle of Chaltenbrunnen—the place where I have been waiting, alone, for six long days.
When I arrived, I found it quite picturesque. Logs set upon logs, rising for a single storey. A slate roof with a considerable overhang, as if the cabin were hiding its eyes beneath a low cap. The symmetry of the structure was broken only by a stout wooden chimney rising from the lefthand side.
The interior was unexceptional. The central chamber sporting a rudimentary kitchen with a larder, a table and chairs. A moth-eaten armchair stood by the fireplace, the most luxurious fixture in the main room by way of disqualification.
I perused the two bedrooms, testing the mattresses. Both made me pine for the armchair.
It was warm enough, at least, the larder had been stocked, and the bedsheets were laundered. I was also pleased, having arrived with nought but my leather weekend bag for what I thought would be a two-day excursion, to find supplementary garments hanging in the wardrobe of the smaller bedroom.
My employer, despite being overdue, seems to have a great facility for planning.
The only thing I am displeased with is the meagre contents of the writing desk. Not a shred of paper, nor a drop of ink! It is thanks to my own dwindling supply that I am able to commit my thoughts to paper.
Crack. Snap. Movement outside. My pen raises from the page, and my ears prick like a hunting dog’s. There is no path to a cabin this remote, which made it hell to walk to but, equally, I am confident that I cannot easily be crept up on here.
I listen, forgetting to breathe. “Please,” I think, “let my callers have arrived. Let us finally get this bizarre business over with.”
But I hear nothing more. The door remains unknocked. I settle back into my diary and swallow an increasingly bitter impatience.
Prior to this excursion, I had never been to Switzerland. I’d never wanted to go. Where many of my contemporaries sought fortune and adventure beyond Valencia, I never questioned that I would live, practise my profession and eventually die within earshot of the Catedral de Santa María.
When she once asked why I hadn’t followed my learned colleagues abroad, I explained to my wife that a man can listen to a thousand melodies but, perhaps unbeknownst even to himself, truly he is searching for a single song that he will never tire of. While my friends left to seek their spiritual homes, I rejoiced in having found mine at birth.
I used to take pride in my contentment, and pity those with what I perceived as an incompleteness of spirit. My arrogance was fuelled by the praise of my neighbours. “A doctor of such keen intelligence, making a home here instead of scampering to the Americas? How stirring! How bold for a man of such infinite horizons to plant his feet among us!”
Then, in the dawning days of my twenty-ninth year, there came one glorious August evening when I found myself at a tertulia. The dances had played themselves out, flushing our cheeks and invigorating our
conversation. I’d left my wife’s side to ask a young architect about his plans for the city, when his two investors threw their arms over his shoulders to offer their own spirited opinions on the man’s work.
I found myself, like a bird riding a thermal, in the elevating presence of three intelligent, rabid conversationalists like myself. Our talk flowed from literature to opera, to the summer programme of the Teatre Principal and, eventually, to further social destinations for that night.
With that uncanny aptitude some tourists possess for unearthing venues even a resident might not stumble upon, they told me about a rather bohemian gentleman’s club deep in the city’s centre. Caught in the evening’s crook, I helped my wife and her friends into a tartana and paid the driver to ferry them home.
It was on that night that I first played roulette and tumbled, headfirst, into the hole in my heart.
I had played cards socially, games of skill and bluff, wagering as much as any man with a healthy penchant for distraction. Yet even the most enthralling contests would eventually tax my energies, until I felt no qualms about walking from the table..
Games of pure chance, as I learned that night, worked their inexorable way beneath my constitution and gripped like nothing I had imagined. I had witnessed it in other forms, seeing men bent to the bottle or the syringe, acting in ways that their good sense should not countenance.
I had judged them harshly.
But now it is clear to me, as a proponent of evolutionism, that there exists an animalian shadow within even the most collected psyche. A base urge endures, which wants and shouts and pines and, despite availing itself of not a single syllable, holds more persuasive weight than a library of rhetoric.
That night, as the ball sank into twenty-four black and my money was raked away across the table, I was flooded with the aching possibility that I could win it all back, and more besides.
My wife failed to sympathise with my Darwinian argument, perhaps because she had not read On the Origin of Species, perhaps because women do not have the same tawdry wants and incompleteness, or perhaps because I had lost a month’s income in a matter of days.
Regardless, for the first time in my blessed life, I felt the taste of despair, and such despair had but one destination.
asingly thin veneer of my reputation. My beloved wife clawed at me; as if she were sinking into a lake, tied to a heavy stone. I saw her desperation grow into weary acceptance, which hurt even more than her wrath.
Eventually, I borrowed money from those with no reputation to protect and the veneer was broken, many times over.
Knock. Knock.
My eyes flick toward the cabin door. My breath is arrested in my throat.
The creaking cabin walls, the snap of a twig, the passing of some nocturnal creature through the undergrowth, all have brought me to my feet at some point in the past week, believing my patron had finally arrived.
This was no such illusion. It was a sound of distinctly human intent.
I slip my diary into the bureau, grip my cane, and haul myself onto my good leg. A trio of distinct sounds rises from the floorboards as I limp across the room. A tap, a footstep, a drag. The burning hearth seems to grow uncomfortably warm, as I begin to panic over what I am to say.
No handshakes or specific phrases were discussed, only that there was a set of rules for my opening salvo, and I would be wise to stick to them. I formulated an adequate sentence two days ago but, as I draw closer to the oaken door, chilled by the cold draught that bleeds through the cracks, I can scarcely remember a single word.
I look to my medical bag: white leather with silver adornments and a polished wooden handle. It was here when I arrived, along with a note to keep it ready beside the door for my guest’s arrival, supplied with all the latest instruments and tinctures. I focus on my duty, the duty for which I trained for all those years, and the calm of the medical practitioner takes root in my mind.
I remember my wording, reach for the doorknob with a steady hand, and turn it.
“May I heal a weary traveller of …” I say in English as the door swings open, before abruptly falling silent.
The small wooden porch is entirely empty, and the sound of retreating footsteps is barely separable from the rustle of windswept leaves among the dancing pines. Cold air brushes past me and I breathe it in through my nose, my stomach folding with the unease of a man who is without company, yet not entirely alone.
Pressing on my cane in the effort of turning myself around, I briefly look down. I stop when I see a large, brown paper envelope on the step. It stares up at me, unaddressed, without a stamp, almost smug in its ability to creep up to my door.
I take a final, perfunctory glance around my empty surroundings, before gripping my cane in two hands and painstakingly lowering myself to one knee. I snatch up the envelope, haul myself back to my feet and promptly shut myself inside.
The armchair calls to me from the fireside, my one unquestionable ally.
I stare at the envelope. It was, without doubt, deposited in the last few moments—it is still dry despite resting on damp wood outside. Some devil on my shoulder whispers to me that I should open it, but my curiosity is tempered by the urge for self-preservation.
I am here for two reasons. Firstly, because I am a consummate physician. Secondly, because my vices have rendered me desperate. I am being paid well for my discretion and if an envelope arrives at my patron’s door, I cannot think of a worse first impression than breaking its seal.
I open the writing desk and throw the envelope inside. However, before I can shut the lid, something curious happens. The envelope splits, sliding over itself. It takes a second for my mind to understand what I’m seeing. What I thought was a single letter is actually two, resting perfectly atop one another.
So much for my keen powers of observation.
The second envelope catches my eye. This one does have an address, or rather an addressee, which was mostly obscured by the other envelope. I reach down and extract it, three English words slowly revealing themselves.
To The Doctor.
The words have a
dark ring to them. The letter is addressed to me, but not by name. It is as if the sender does not know me personally, but is aware of the situation I have found myself in. I begin to feel that I am like a piece on a chessboard, entirely subordinate to the intentions of others.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Shock causes me to drop the lid of the writing desk, which almost slams shut upon my fingers. Inexplicably, after six days of waiting, I have had two visitors at my door in as many minutes.
I linger briefly at the desk. It would not take more than a few seconds to rip the envelope open and absorb its contents, but with the cabin’s curtains parted wide, an impatient caller would very likely catch me at it.
Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.
And impatient they are. I stride across the room. Tap. Step. Drag. Tap. Step. Drag.
I pull the door open and I’m presented, finally, with my intended complement of guests: one man with the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen, and another close to death.
5th May 1891—Entry No. 2
As one might imagine, my expectation of the pair’s arrival renders them no less alarming.
Before me stands a menacing figure approaching six foot in height, his exposed forearms displaying a lithe frame of tightly bound muscle. He wears a grey military cap over a mane of scraggly black hair. Paired with enormously thick eyebrows and an explosive beard of grizzly black strands, it feels like his beady brown eyes are peering out at me from a deep thicket, a man hiding in the bushes of his own face.
There’s a deep frustration in his eyes, and desperation, as he stands breathing heavily in the doorway.
A large leather bag hangs from his left shoulder, a signet ring gleaming on the little finger as he grips the strap. Over his right shoulder, he props up the other man, who is in no shape to be walking on his own.
While the two are of a similar height, the injured figure seems to lack his companion’s efficient musculature. His head is covered by a black burlap sack. His clothes are damp, his thin limbs shivering, his white undershirt blossoming with blood. Every visible patch of skin is either red-raw with ice burn or smudged with inky purple bruises.
That he is upright at all is quite a marvel.
I remember myself.
“May I heal a weary traveller of … injury?” I stammer, an unexpected quiver in my voice.
The bushy-haired man observes me closely, like some barbarian sizing me up as a meal.
“Ready and eager,” he growls, his voice accented with a Scottish brogue. He clearly resents the formality of our code. “Awaiting immediate medical treatment, sir.”
Transfixed for a moment by the sight of his brutalised colleague, I regain my composure and step aside, pointing the pair towards one of the bedrooms. The man surges across the main room, the tips of his charge’s shoes dragging along the floorboards as he goes.
I slam the external door and hurry in behind them, finding the grievously injured man already on the bed when I arrive.
“Take off his clothes, carefully,” I order, happy to hear a ring of professional authority in my voice.
The grizzled man complies immediately, a little more roughly than I’d like but with due attention to haste.
The unclothed patient is a tapestry of dark bruises and fresh cuts still seeping blood. There’s a breakage in the wrist, from which the bone protrudes. I understand, even from a glance, that whether he lives or dies is as much in fate’s hands as it is in mine.
So much for avoiding games of chance.
“I need to see his head,” I remark, setting to work on the man’s open wounds while nodding to the dark sack over his face.
The grizzled man glares, unmoving.
“Bag stays on,” he replies, not a word spare.
“Well, when you covered it, did he have any head wounds? Were his pupils dilated?” I question, surprised at the firmness of my voice. “Was his breathing obstructed?”
The grizzled man stares at me scornfully,
as if my attempts to save his companion have crossed a boundary. I thread a spool of suture through a curved needle and match his aggravation.
“Are you protecting his anonymity?” I ask, sharply. “Then by all means, keep the bag on. His tombstone will be blank, and you’ll have done your job.”
After a moment of resentful calculation, the grizzled man turns and gently lifts the sack from the man’s head.
The man is pale, impressively so, with a thick head of well-groomed, grey hair that’s currently matted with his own blood. His eyelids are firmly shut, the sockets slightly sunken, or perhaps only seeming so in comparison to his slightly protruding lobe of a forehead.
There are multiple contusions and excessive bleeding across his face and head, instantly vindicating my desire to see the bag removed. I almost feel a little smug.
At that moment, the body begins to seize, the shoulders arch and the man gasps. The head will have to wait. Swallowing my momentary pride, I grab my stethoscope and place it to his chest. The right side of his body ebbs and flows perfectly, only throwing into greater focus how stilted his left side has become.
I hear an ungodly whooshing beneath the surface of his skin, indicating that I have only a few minutes to save the man’s life.
I reach into my bag, withdrawing a long needle. I raise it above the man’s abdomen, as my hand seeks a gap between the ribs.
Attempting to bring the needle down, I instead feel a firm hand grip my wrist.
“What the devil are you doing?!”
I turn, indignation eclipsing my fear, as the grizzled man keeps me from my work.
He says nothing, a troglodyte snarl on his face. I realise he sees the world in the most base, uneducated manner. A sharp object brandished above his master cannot be anything but an attack, his lack of medical training blinding him to its benefits.
“Are you to be murderously stupid?” I shout. “The man has a tension pneumothorax. He … he has air in the space beneath his lungs, they cannot expand into that space unless the air is drained!”
The man holds firm. In his eyes there is the angry ignorance that so often bludgeons reason with its blunt force. As the patient gasps below me, I make one final appeal.
“If he dies, I suppose you might kill me for my failure. Do you think I have any intention of dying today?”
The man’s face ripples, as if the act of ordering his thoughts somehow requires muscle. With great reluctance and a quiver of his fingers, the grip on my wrist loosens, and I plunge the needle into the ailing patient.
A long gasp is drawn from the man, unstilted and clean. The pressure subsides, and my assistant shrinks back into an onlooker’s stance, too proud to concede but perhaps willing now to accept my expertise.
rist, right leg, abdomen, and the entirety of his head. Eventually, there is little I can do but hand him over to God’s own grace.
Observing his deathly pale skin, my eyes fall on a needle-tipped tube in my medicine bag.
“He has lost a great deal of blood. He may require a transfusion. It’s not without tremendous risk but if we’re lucky it will strengthen him. An infection in this state would spread like a fire through a haybarn.”
My assistant, loyal attack dog that he seems to be, has slowly grown used to my presence, increasingly respecting my concern for his master.
“Risky?” he grunts, requesting elaboration.
“Yes. Only to be done if necessary.”
He considers the words, before nodding.
“Only if necessary,” he confirms darkly, his agreement mixed with grim warning.
Night has fallen by the time I end my examination, and I retire to the cabin’s main room. The grizzled man follows closely behind me, which I find thoroughly frustrating. Though medical concerns have taken the fore over the last few hours, one part of my mind remained fixated on the envelope in the writing desk. An envelope that is seemingly, impossibly, addressed to me.
I wish to read its contents with an almost jittery impatience, yet I know not how my accomplice might react, and he seems determined to keep an eye on me wherever I go.
“Will you turn in soon?” I query, checking my watch before slipping it back into my pocket.
The man grunts, nodding towards the armchair I am currently occupying.
“I see.” I deflate as the realisation dawns upon me. “Of course, there are only two beds. You can’t tell me you plan to sleep in an armchair, at least not after the day you’ve had! Take the bed, I’ll sleep in here.”
The man looks at me and for a panicked moment I believe he can read my intentions, until I realise it is merely a base glare of vigilance and suspicion. He will be sleeping in the chair tonight, the main room serving as a nexus point between my room and the patient’s chambers. If anyone makes any movement, in either direction, he will be aware of them.
“All right, well, don’t say I didn’t offer,” I smile, calculating, with increasing frustration, how I might transfer the letter to my room.
7th May 1891—Entry No. 1
This is my first update in this diary for two days, and things are graver here than I first imagined.
First, there is the patient’s health.
He remains comatose. His wound opened last night, and it was fortunate for him that I couldn’t sleep. I passed through the kitchen, intending to check on my patient whilst also seeking to observe the grizzled man’s sleeping habits.
Half a creak from the floorboard had the stern figure stirring in the armchair. I concluded, with a heavy heart, that the damnably intriguing letter would have to remain in the writing desk until he was no longer beside it—ideally, out of the room entirely.
With his default air of suspicion, he hauled himself up and shadowed me into the patient’s room.
Both of us were alarmed by the bleeding. I got to work, and I had it stemmed good and proper when I came up with an idea so simple, I can only blame my fatigue for the fact that I didn’t think it before.
“Put pressure on this,” I ordered, watching with some satisfaction as the grizzled man followed my orders. “He’ll need a transfusion. Can’t be helped. I’ll get my bag.”
It was thanks to luck more than judgement that I had stowed my medical bag in my own bedchamber. The man had glanced between me and his master, thinking through his options. He could, of course, have ordered me to hold the pressure myself while he fetched my bag. Yet, despite my obvious dedication to my patient’s health, he clearly saw danger in leaving me alone with his patron.
“Quick.”
“Of course,” I smiled, affably.
My movements were deft, as stealthy as a hobbling man could hope to achieve. I pulled myself over to the writing desk, grabbed the letter addressed to myself, stumbled hastily into my room and began to pry the letter open.
To the esteemed medical practitioner,
I am making three assumptions …
“Quickly! Return!” a harsh voice barked from the patient’s room. I must credit him with one thing. If his job is to keep an eye on me, he hasn’t given me a second’s breathing room. I frustratedly stowed the letter beneath my mattress and returned to my patient.
I stemmed the bleeding and renewed work on my sutures. From my bag, I retrieved a syringe and drew a hefty dose of a milky white liquid into it.
No sooner did the needle approach the patient’s skin than the assistant stopped me, his hand once again gripping my wrist.
“No drugs,” he ordered in a growl like rolling thunder.
“This is morphine,” I argued. “He is on the verge of going into shock.”
In a perplexing response to my statement, the man paused, withdrawing a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. I saw the briefest flash of typewritten words as he lifted the paper close to his eyes, using a bizarre pair of handheld spectacles to read it.
For an amusing moment, he almost looked studious.
“Milky white.” He checked the syringe. “Twenty milligrams. No more.”
My brow furrowed. There were exactly twenty milligrams in the syringe, he could see as much, yet clearly an outside force had told him exactly what to look for.
“And who, might I ask, is governing my administrations so closely?”
The grizzled man nodded towards the patient himself, and I found myself reaching several conclusions at once. Whoever was currently in the bed before me must possess a great capacity for
planning, keen intelligence, and intense paranoia.
There were many tinctures in the medical bag that they had provided me with. Some of these, in high doses, could also serve as potent poisons. Not only had this man suspected that he would be incapacitated but he had planned his own recovery, and taken measures to shield himself from any doctor who might attempt to sabotage it.
Even more disconcerting than his extraordinary efforts to avoid this fate was the overriding question: Why would a man fear his own physician turning against him?
I injected the morphine, then placed a transfusion tube in the same vein and attached the other end to my own arm. As I watched my lifeblood drain into this man, I wondered quite who it was that I was saving.
As I grew steadily fainter, the man’s pallor infinitesimally recovered. I kept one thought quite firmly in mind: I would be reading that letter at my earliest opportunity.
I did not get the chance until some time later, and I am writing this in the immediate aftermath of having read it. I now know what my patient so feared, and, with great dread, have begun to understand my place within this bizarre affair.
I have included the letter, and it is transcribed below.
To the esteemed medical practitioner,
I am making three assumptions, which I will explain to you fully.
Assumption 1: The patient you are expecting is not known to you, and you have not been in their employ for long.
It is unlikely your employer would select a long-term collaborator, as they might be known to me and thus already compromised. Furthermore, if you were a loyal henchman of this man, you would turn this letter in without reading any further.
Therefore, if you are currently reading this sentence, I can suppose I am correct.
Assumption 2: Financial
leverage is being used in order to engage your services.
I don’t believe your employer has threatened you or your loved ones, since that would make you unpredictable if he found himself under your knife. No, he has attempted to buy the goodwill of a desperate man: a debtor or an addict.
Since opium or drink can cause one’s hands to shake, and this would reduce your efficacy in his eyes, we can assume that bad investments, or perhaps gambling, brought you to his attention.
Assumption 3: This letter has arrived, God willing, before he reaches your location.
Unfortunately, this is my least firm supposition. With utmost haste, I have sent identical correspondence to every shelter in proximity to the Reichenbach Falls. If you are alone, you must run immediately, without a thought for whatever it is he promised you.
If he is already in your presence—accompanied, I assume, by at least one of his few remaining loyalists—it will be quite difficult for you to leave this place alive.
Please read the words below closely.
The man you have been employed to treat is named ——————— and he is a villain of the highest order. A man of considerable intellect, who has focused the full extent of his mind upon criminality, evil and atrocity.
But his cruelty has not gone unnoticed.
In the final year of my life, I have sought to bring this man and his organisation from the shadows.
As you read these words, officers of Scotland Yard, and several authorities across the Continent, are acting upon my intelligence, deconstructing his dark empire in its entirety.
He is on the run, with no hope of returning to the life he once had, which places you in grave danger.
If he has survived my final attempt to bring him to justice, then he is likely to be seeking a new identity for himself; a transformation that he will need to be complete and irrefutable. Unfortunately, your work to heal him inevitably means that you are a witness to his old life, and therefore a threat to his new
one.
It is my greatest wish that this man should face the full force of the law. However, if you are reading this letter, then it is probable that I am no longer alive to realise that wish myself.
What happens next, is entirely up to you.
If you choose to run, report this man’s location to the authorities as soon as possible. Tell them his name, and that they must mobilise their whole force.
If you choose to kill him before he can kill you, I wish you only the greatest of luck.
Yours faithfully,
———————
P.S. The second envelope is a further contingency, and it is for him alone. Please be so kind as to not open it.
My hands were shaking as I placed the pages down upon my bedside.
I have heard of the letter’s writer. A detective known, in the relevant circles, across the continent. A singular professional whose feats almost defy comprehension. Though I have not followed his work closely, I know enough to reach one unsettling conclusion:
Anything that appears troubling to him is of grave concern to me. And if it is true, that he is writing to me from beyond the grave? I can barely stand to think about it.
I lie in bed, my eyes wide open as birdsong flitters in through the window and dawn light passes through the trees outside. This man is correct in many of his assumptions but he, of course, could not know that my leg was shattered by debt collectors two years ago. ...
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