Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(35)

Holmes surveyed the photographs of faeries, the wax gloves of a spirit, and the pages of automatic writing. “Then look joyous. You murdered me, and yet here I am: proof of what you’re looking for.”

“Proof?”

“Of life after death.”

“I’m still asleep. I never woke from my nightmare. Those fools who send me letters asking for your autograph might think you’re real, but—”

“Then how can I be standing here, talking to you? Why are you responding to me?”

“I didn’t murder you.”

“Perhaps you prefer a more delicate word such as ‘killed.’”

“You never died. When you and Moriarty grappled on the ledge, it was only he who plummeted into the Reichenbach Falls.”

“But you didn’t believe that at the time,” Holmes corrected him. “When you wrote ‘The Final Problem,’ you truly intended to get rid of me. You even bragged to your mother that you’d seen the last of me, even though your mother begged you not to do it.”

“You’d become a burden,” Conan Doyle protested. “Readers wouldn’t let me write about anyone else.”

“Ha. You earned a fortune from writing stories about me, and that’s a burden? Tell that to my Baker Street Irregulars when those little beggars are desperate for their next meal. Then eight years later, when you needed more money, you suddenly decided I wasn’t a burden after all. So you wrote another novel about me, but even then I remained dead, because you had my hound adventure occur years before you killed me. Then a magazine offered you even more money to write a story that showed I hadn’t actually died at the Reichenbach Falls, so you invented that nonsense about Moriarty falling alone while I escaped to Tibet. Tibet? Is that the best you could think of? Obviously you lacked conviction. You can’t fool readers, though. They sensed that something was amiss, that it wasn’t really I in those later stories, only someone to whom you gave my name. Certainly I’m not an aged beekeeper. As you can see, I’m still in my thirties. Ghosts don’t age.”

“Take off that blasted deerstalker hat.”

“Readers prefer it.”

“I didn’t include it in any of my stories about you.”

“But Sidney Paget had the inspiration to put it in one of his illustrations of me. Now readers imagine it when they read about me. It’s as real as if you’d written it. But if it troubles you . . .”

Holmes removed the deerstalker hat. Now that his forehead was fully exposed, it seemed even more intelligent, his receding hairline emphasizing the height of his brow.

He set the hat on a counter next to a photograph of wispy light in a dark room.

“Ectoplasm?” Holmes asked, referring to a placard in front of the photograph.

“The strongest evidence so far.”

“There are various types of evidence. I see that you walked in Hyde Park today, that you’re unusually troubled, and that you have limited domestic help,” Holmes said.

“Yes, yes. I’m not impressed by your parlor tricks. Remember, I invented them. There are spots of mud on my shoes and my trouser cuffs. The mud has a reddish color that’s typical of sections of Hyde Park. The mud would have been removed if I had sufficient domestic help, but at the moment, I have only the assistance of a single housekeeper: Mrs. Hudson.”

“Mrs. Hudson is my housekeeper,” Holmes reminded him.

“A slip of the tongue. Mrs. Murray. My housekeeper is named Mrs. Murray.”

“Of course. Soon you’ll have as addled a memory as you gave to dear old Watson. He can’t keep dates or names consistent from one story to the next. He can’t even keep straight how many wives he had. Two? Five? I confess that even with my superior powers of deduction, I’m unable to determine the exact number, although it’s probably two because you yourself had two. And with regard to my ‘parlor tricks,’ as you call them, you didn’t invent them. You learned them from Dr. Bell at the University of Edinburgh medical school. By the way, you didn’t ask me how I knew that you were unusually troubled.”

“Obviously because I’m here in the middle of the night.”

“I’d have known you were troubled even if we were speaking on Victoria Street at noon. You have a mark on your lower lip, where you’ve been chewing it.”

Conan Doyle raised a hand to his lip, suddenly aware of how tender it felt. “Please leave me alone. Go away and solve a mystery.”

“Solving a mystery is precisely what I’m doing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You, my dear fellow,” Holmes said. “You’re the mystery. This business about ghosts and faeries. People worry that you’re delusional.”

Conan Doyle stepped forward, clenching his fists. “Never say that to me.”

“My apologies. Kindly relax your hands. Although you were once a pugilist, that was many years ago, and if you couldn’t walk the short distance to this shop without feeling out of breath, I doubt that an altercation between us would have a successful conclusion for you, especially because I’m an expert in boxing, baritsu, and singlestick fighting. To change the subject, do you recall that Watson climbed the steps at 221B Baker Street many times before I asked him how many steps there were? He couldn’t answer the question. Together, he and I climbed the steps while we counted to seventeen. I told Watson, ‘You see, but you do not observe.’ That’s an interesting comment, given that your specialty as a physician involves diseases of the eyes.”