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"And so: Adler, the woman herself, working on this old man in the garden of an up-market London house. Plainly, patently impossible and unreal. And being the logically minded person I am, and believing that proof defines truth rather than simply belief, I totally denied the truth of what I was seeing. I knew it could not be because Adler was a woman unfamiliar with, and incapable of, murder. And indeed she has not been in the country for quite some years now. My total disregard for what I was seeing meant that I was not viewing the truth, that something abnormal was occurring. And strange as it seemed at the time-but how clear it is now!-the woman had been heavily on my mind as I had been strolling down that street."
"Well to hear you actually admit that, Holmes, means that it is a great part of this mystery."
"Indeed," Holmes said to me, somewhat shortly. "My readiness to believe that something, shall we say, out of this world was occurring enabled me to see it. I saw the truth behind the murderer, the scene of devastation. I saw… I saw… " He trailed off, staring from the window at the ghostly night. Both Jones and I remained silent, seeing the pain Holmes was going through as he tried to continue.
"Terrible," he said at last. "Terrible."
"And what I saw," I said, trying to take up from where Holmes had left off, "was an impersonator, creating Holmes in his own image-"
"No," Holmes said. "No, it created me in your image, Watson. What you saw was your version of me. This thing delved into your mind and cloaked itself in the strongest identity it found in there: namely, me. As it is with the other murders, Mr Jones, whose witnesses no doubt saw brothers and wives and sons slaughtering complete strangers with neither rhyme, nor reason."
"But the murderer," Jones said. "Who was it? Where is he? I need a corpse, Holmes. Watson tells me that he shot the murderer, and I need a corpse."
"Don't you have enough already?" Holmes asked quietly. I saw the stare he aimed at Jones. I had never been the subject of that look, never in our friendship, but I had seen it used more than a few times. Its intent was borne of a simmering anger. Its effect, withering.
Jones faltered. He went to say something else, stammered and then backed away towards the door. "Will you come to the Yard tomorrow?" he asked. "I need help. And… "
"I will come," Holmes said. "For now, I imagine you have quite some work to do across London this evening. Five murders, you say? I guess at least that many yet to be discovered. And there must be something of a panic in the populace that needs calming."
Jones left. I turned to Holmes. And what I saw shocked me almost as much as any event from the previous twenty-four hours.
My friend was crying.
"We can never know everything," Holmes said, "but I fear that everything knows us."
We were sitting on either side of the fire. Holmes was puffing on his fourth pipe since Jones had left. The tear tracks were still unashamedly glittering on his cheeks, and my own eyes were wet in sympathy.
"What did it want?" I asked. "What motive?"
"Motive? Something so unearthly, so alien to our way of thinking and understanding? Perhaps no motive is required. But I would suggest that examination was its prime concern. It was slaughtering and slicing and examining the victims just as casually as I have, these last few days, been poisoning and dissecting mice. The removed organs displayed that in their careful dismantling."
"But why? What reason can a thing like that have to know our make up, our build?"
Holmes stared into the fire and the flames lit up his eyes. I was glad. I could still remember the utter vacancy of the eyes I had seen on his likeness as it hunkered over the bloody body.
"Invasion," he muttered, and then he said it again. Or perhaps it was merely a sigh.
"Isn't it a major fault of our condition that, the more we wish to forget something, the less likely it is that we can," I said. Holmes smiled and nodded, and I felt a childish sense of pride from saying something of which he seemed to approve.
"Outside," said Holmes, "beyond what we know or strive to know, there is a whole different place. Somewhere which, perhaps, our minds could never know. Like fitting a square block into a round hole, we were not built to understand."
"Even you?"
"Even me, my friend." He tapped his pipe out and refilled it. He looked ill. I had never seen Holmes so pale, so melancholy after a case, as if something vast had eluded him. And I think I realised what it was even then: understanding. Holmes had an idea of what had happened and it seemed to fit neatly around the event, but he did not understand. And that, more than anything, must have done much to depress him.
"You recall our time in Cornwall, our nightmare experience with the burning of the Devil's Foot powder?"
I nodded. "How could I forget."
"Not hallucinations," he said quietly. "I believe we were offered a drug-induced glimpse beyond. Not hallucinations, Watson. Not hallucinations at all."
We sat silently for a few minutes. As dawn started to dull the sharp edges of the darkness outside, Holmes suddenly stood and sent me away.
"I need to think on things," he said urgently. "There's much to consider. And I have to be more prepared for the next time. Have to be."
I left the building tired, cold and feeling smaller and more insignificant than I had ever thought possible. I walked the streets for a long time that morning. I smelled fear on the air, and one time I heard a bee buzzing from flower to flower on some honeysuckle. At that I decided to return home.
My revolver, still fully loaded, was warm where my hand grasped it in my coat pocket.
I walked along Baker Street every day for the next two weeks. Holmes was always in his rooms, I could sense that, but he never came out, nor made any attempt to contact me. Once or twice I saw his light burning and his shadow drifting to and fro inside, slightly stooped, as if something weighed heavy on his shoulders.
The only time I saw my brilliant friend in that time, I wished I had not. He was standing at the window staring out into the twilight, and although I stopped and waved he did not notice me.
He seemed to be looking intently across the rooftops as if searching for some elusive truth. And standing there watching him I felt sure that his eyes, glittering dark and so, so sad, must have been seeing nothing of this world.
The Case of the Bloodless Sock by A
A
Everyone knows Professor Moriarty as the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, but most people would probably be surprised to learn that Moriarty appeared in person in only one of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories, "The Final Problem." The author was ready to bring his Sherlock Holmes tales to a suitably dramatic conclusion, and Professor Moriarty-the Napoleon of crime, who pulls the strings of a vast criminal conspiracy-was invented to be a suitably imposing adversary, a match for the great detective, whose downfall would allow Sherlock Holmes to go out in a blaze of glory. (The character Moriarty was partially based on Adam Worth, a cultured master criminal who once stole a valuable Thomas Gainsborough painting only to discover that he liked the painting too much to sell it, which angered the men who had helped him steal it. Interestingly, Worth also-unlike Moriarty-ordered his men not to use violence in the course of their robberies.) Of course, the audience wanted more Holmes, and more Moriarty too, and so Moriarty has subsequently enjoyed a long and notorious career in books, film, and TV. Moriarty returns again in this next tale, with a characteristically diabolical scheme.