James Moriarty wasn't a man at all. He had long since been told so. Not a human, something else. Something different and dangerous, deserving of spite and suspicion. So he had taken it to heart, if indeed there ever was one to start with – Moriarty claimed there never was, that he was simply born as this, not less than man but more than man, better than others for his lack of sentiment, of petty morals – and played into the part given to him at childhood with unyielding drive and ambition. A child neglected became a child hated became a child feared and now, a force of nature revered.
James Moriarty wasn't a man at all. He had never been given the chance to become one. Instead, he turned into a black hole, pulling others in. You wouldn't know Moriarty was out there unless you knew what to look for – a black hole in the dark night. People – pawns, like lifeless debris floating aimlessly in space – gravitated towards him. Drifters, the ever-seeking travellers of night, they never knew what they were headed for until it was too late and they were already orbiting the centre, the black vacuum that was Moriarty, moving ever closer. There was no escaping Moriarty, once you crossed the event horizon into his world. And, once you had spiralled so near you could finally see him, the centre of the web, the new centre of your universe, you knew you were doomed. Moriarty, the ever hungry and not a man at all, was sure to crush you, sooner rather than later.
When I reached that point, I didn't even care any more. Where others stepped on the breaks and tried to withdraw, to back out, I stepped on the gas. He sucked the breath right out of my lungs when I kissed him.
James Moriarty wasn't a man at all. Perhaps he had never been. When I first saw him, I thought him a cruel, sick bastard (but who am I to judge?). As I got closer still, I understood that was wrong. There was nothing cruel about James Moriarty. Men are cruel, and James Moriarty wasn't a man at all.
Black holes burn out in an instant, without warning, collapsing in on themselves. There is no way for me to tell how close to annihilation I was when Moriarty perished, leaving me floating in empty space. I figure I was teetering right on the edge. Foolishly, I sometimes think he deliberately saved me from himself, but that would require sentiment, something so very human-like and so very black hole-unlike.
There was nothing left behind, no diary or answer. I still don't know whether there ever was a child named James Moriarty, tainted and turned into super-massive black hole James Moriarty, or if he was and had always been Something Else, or as he would have preferred, Something Better. No, in fact, he would have preferred if this had never been written down at all, much less with all this sap and purple prose. People fear the unknown, he would say.
Moriarty wasn't a man at all, he claimed. And yet, he knew so very much about them.