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"Indeed! Your readers would not allow me to fall to my death, even if it meant attaining the very thing I desired most, namely the elimination of Moriarty. In this mad world, the observer has lost control of his observations! If there is one thing my life stood for-my life prior to that ridiculous resurrection of me you recounted in your chronicle of 'The Empty House'-it was reason! Logic! A devotion to observable fact! But humanity has abjured that. This whole world is out of whack, Watson-so out of whack that we are cut off from the civilizations that exist elsewhere. You tell me you were barraged with demands for my return, but if people had really understood me, understood what my life represented, they would have known that the only real tribute to me possible would have been to accept the facts! The only real answer would have been to leave me dead!"
Mycroft sent us back in time, but rather than returning us to 1899, whence he had plucked us, at Holmes's request he put us back eight years earlier in May of 1891. Of course, there were younger versions of ourselves already living then, but Mycroft swapped us for them, bringing the young ones to the future, where they could live out the rest of their lives in simulated scenarios taken from Holmes's and my minds. Granted, we were each eight years older than we had been when we had fled Moriarty the first time, but no one in Switzerland knew us and so the aging of our faces went u
I found myself for a third time living that fateful day at the Falls of Reichenbach, but this time, like the first and unlike the second, it was real.
I saw the page boy coming, and my heart raced. I turned to Holmes, and said, "I can't possibly leave you."
"Yes, you can, Watson. And you will, for you have never failed to play the game. I am sure you will play it to the end." He paused for a moment, then said, perhaps just a wee bit sadly, "I can discover facts, Watson, but I ca
It was an hour's hike down to the Englischer Hof. There I played out the scene in which I inquired about the ailing Englishwoman, and Steiler the Elder, the i
Once again, I found two sets of footprints leading to the precipice, and none returning. I also found Holmes's alpenstock, and, just as I had the first time, a note from him to me that he had left with it. The note read just as the original had, explaining that he and Moriarty were about to have their final confrontation, but that Moriarty had allowed him to leave a few last words behind. But it ended with a postscript that had not been in the original:
My dear Watson [it said], you will honour my passing most of all if you stick fast to the powers of observation. No matter what the world wants, leave me dead.
I returned to London, and was able to briefly counterbalance my loss of Holmes by reliving the joy and sorrow of the last few months of my wife Mary's life, explaining my somewhat older face to her and others as the result of shock at the death of Holmes. The next year, right on schedule, Marconi did indeed invent the wireless. Exhortations for more Holmes adventures continued to pour in, but I ignored them all, although the lack of him in my life was so profound that I was sorely tempted to relent, recanting my observations made at Reichenbach. Nothing would have pleased me more than to hear again the voice of the best and wisest man I had ever known.
In late June of 1907, I read in The Times about the detection of intelligent wireless signals coming from the direction of the star Altair. On that day, the rest of the world celebrated, but I do confess I shed a tear and drank a special toast to my good friend, the late Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the following:
Jeremy Lassen and Jason Williams at Night Shade Books, for letting me edit all these anthologies and for doing such a kick-ass job publishing them. Also, to Ross Lockhart at Night Shade for all that he does behind-the-scenes, and to Marty Halpern for catching all my tyops.
David Palumbo, for the Holmesarific cover.
Gordon Van Gelder, the Dr. Joseph Bell to my Sherlock Holmes (i.e., the model upon which my career is based). Of course, unlike Holmes, I am not a fictional character, or so the voices tell me.
My agent Je
David Barr Kirtley for serving as my Watson during the assembly of this volume. All the clever things in the header notes are his work. Anything lame you came across is mine.
Rebecca McNulty, for her various and valuable interning assistance-reading, sca
My mom, for the usual reasons.
All of the other kindly folks who assisted me in some way during the editorial process: Charles Ardai, Jack Byrne, Frances Collin, Andy Cox, Ellen Datlow, Jake Elwell, Je
The NYC Geek Posse-consisting of Robert Bland, Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, Jordan Hamessley, Andrea Kail, and Matt London (plus Dave Kirtley, who I mentioned above, and the NYCGP Auxiliary)-for giving me an excuse to come out of my editorial cave once in a while.
The readers and reviewers who loved my other anthologies, making it possible for me to do more.
And last, but certainly not least: a big thanks to all of the authors who appear in this anthology.