THE AMERICANS HAVE A PHRASE: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU wish for—you just might get it.
Actually, now that I put it to paper, I can’t help but think it might be one of ours. Yet the saying implies such a vigorousness of undertaking, combined with such an absence of forethought that… I don’t know… doesn’t it seem rather American?
This is not to say Englishmen are immune to such folly, as I myself was to learn one Friday afternoon as I strolled down Baker Street. I had allowed my feet to carry me there upon an empty hour, once again. Ostensibly, I went because I wished to encounter Holmes or Mrs. Hudson, or some other figure from my bygone adventures, who might sweep me up into a new one. I knew this was true for, even though I had no present use for it, I’d brought my adventuring bag along. My adventuring bag was very similar to my medical bag. In fact, it was my medical bag. But when I had my pistol in there as well, to my mind it became my adventuring bag.
Imagine my cold wave of horror when—glancing up from the toes of my shoes that I’d been staring at dejectedly—I realized I’d just gotten exactly what I wanted. Warlock Holmes stood not ten yards in front of me walking in my direction and staring straight at my face with a ghastly smile plastered across his features.
I froze where I stood. What was my excuse, again? Had I ever concocted one? If he should say to me, “Hullo, Watson! What are you doing here? Saaaaaaay… you’re not disobeying my injunction about insinuating yourself into my life and business, are you?” what defense could I raise? I think I gave a little peep of alarm.
Holmes’s grin did not falter. He looked right at me and exclaimed, “MOOOOOOOOOOOOOP!”
To which I could only reply, “Erm… what was that?”
He directed his next comment not to me, but to one of the trees on the other side of the street. “NEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOF!”
He then turned sharply to the right, walked forward until the tips of his shoes touched the wall of the building that bordered the street, and noted, “MOE-MOE-MOE-MOE-NODUT!” He stood staring at the wall in apparent self-satisfaction for a few moments, then began opening and closing his mouth over and over, in the fashion of somebody who is utterly taken with the novelty of it.
“Um… Holmes? Are you quite all right?” I asked. Apparently whatever I had to say was far less fascinating than the action of his own teeth, for I was ignored. Nevertheless, I had come to my own conclusion anyway—that Holmes was definitely not all right. Yet as I drew closer, I came to a second, even stranger, conclusion.
It wasn’t Holmes. I realized his skin—which I had at first deemed to be a bit too shiny, as that of a man who suffers from fever sweats—wasn’t really skin at all. The thing that stood before me was not my friend, but a hollow man of wax. The likeness was remarkable—one is tempted to say exact. Indeed, the best visual cue that this was not Holmes was when the automaton opened his mouth, so that one could see straight into the hollow cavity of his head.
Well…
That and one or two behavioral clues, I suppose.
“NUUUUUUUUUUD!”
I leaned in to examine him more closely—as did a number of Baker Street’s other residents, it must be said—and asked, “What are you? What is happening?”
In response, he turned to me and gave me an inhuman grin. It pulled the corners of his mouth back as far as they could go, but the emotion was in no way mirrored by the glassy emptiness of his eyes. He then reached up to put one hand into my mouth, the interior of which he began to explore with much vigor and curiosity. Gasping, I reached up to slap his hand away. He slapped me back. Rather a heavy strike, as it turned out, for his wax arm was quite solid. The blow knocked me back a few steps and visibly deformed the side of one of his hands. He then lost interest in me, turned on his heel and headed back the way he had come.
With a gasp of excitement, I realized his destination. The hollow man was headed directly back towards the door of 221B. Well… towards where I knew it must be. My head and stomach swam when I tried to look at it. I therefore resolved not to. Instead, a few brisk steps took me right up behind my waxen antagonist. He seemed to take no notice as I caught up the hem of his coat. After that, I had naught to do but close my eyes and let the gentle tug of this bizarre homunculus guide me home.
Oh, how I thrilled to hear that familiar click and creak of my old street door opening! Then, the joyous moment my toe bumped that first stair. I dared not open my eyes, but I did not need to. Custom had taught me where to place my steps. Sqeeee-err-ka-reeeeek, went the third stair from the top. Finally, the clumsy fumbling of a lock gave me to know we had reached the door to my old rooms.
Here, at last, I paused. I released the hem of the wax man’s coat and cautiously cracked one eye open. I knew Holmes was likely to have a number of nasty magical surprises for unbidden intruders. As I still possessed a whit of sense, I resolved not to become one. I therefore cleared my throat and called, “Holmes? It’s me, Watson. Is everything quite all right?”
Even as I said it, the waxen man swung the door open, revealing a strange spectacle indeed. Several large brass hooks had been screwed into the ceiling of my familiar quarters. From these hung all the blankets from my old bed and a great quantity of black dressmakers’ muslin, dividing my old kitchen and sitting room into a labyrinth of mostly unseen corridors and rooms.
Leaning against the nearest of these cloth barricades stood a second homunculus. This one was much smaller. His head was wax—built to resemble a young, freckled lad—but made with far less skill than the Holmes simulacrum. His wig was all off to one side. His limbs and torso were made of painted planks, like a cut-rate ventriloquist’s dummy. I’d have thought him nothing more than a doll, except that as the door opened, he turned to look up at me with hopeful surprise and began soundlessly flapping his mouth open and shut. Apparently, he lacked the other creature’s powers of… well… I suppose I have to call it “speech”.
And there, in front of it all—framed in the open doorway—stood Holmes. He wore a wax-stained leather apron and an expression of surprise. He held a wax-smeared ink pen in one hand and several long strips of paper in the other. In his eye I detected just a little bit of horror to have been caught at… whatever this was. The expression lasted only a moment. Apparently, he decided to play it off as coolly as he could, for he favored me with a haughty sniff and said, “Ah. Watson. To what do I owe this unwarranted intrusion?”
“Well, I was out for a walk, you see, when I encountered this… um…” I indicated the waxen Holmes.
“I’ve been calling him Steve,” Holmes announced. “Hard to say why. It doesn’t seem right calling him Warlock as that’s what he’s supposed to call me, if he ever learns to talk.”
A quick flicker of vexation crossed Holmes’s features. He then pressed one of the strips of paper against a nearby wall, wrote “Learn to talk” on it, crumpled it into a ball, and commanded, “Steve: open!”
Steve turned to Holmes and obediently opened his mouth. Holmes chucked the little ball of paper in, then stood to wait with an air of expectation. Presently, Steve opined, “HEEEEEEEEURRRMOE!”
“Damn,” grumbled Holmes.
“My word! Is that how you give it commands?” I asked.
“Hmm, yes. The whole thing is a variation on the ancient Hebrew golem—an entirely new version of my own devising. Brilliant, isn’t he?”
“Well…”
“MOO—MOO—MOO—HURGOP!”
“…I don’t know about brilliant. He is quite singular. But, Holmes, why have you elected to create an animated wax version of yourself?”
Holmes adopted an air of casual calm and, staring at his fingernails as if displeased with the state of their cleanliness, mentioned, “Simply because I expect—at any moment—” here he suddenly wheeled towards me, and stared from under his hawk-like brows with rakish intensity, “to be murdered!”
He paused, as if waiting for somebody, somewhere, to say, “Dun-dun-DAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
But all he got was my exasperated little sigh and a “Well, that’s not good news, is it?”
“Not directly, I suppose. No. But it does show, Watson… it does show… well, I’ve still got it, haven’t I. Despite the fact that everybody’s leaving me and treating me like garbage, I’m still having wonderful adventures and maybe everybody ought to take a second look at old Warlock and admit he’s rather special!”
“Hmm. So. Am I to gather I am not the only person to have left your circle recently?”
“There may have been a slight altercation between Lestrade, Grogsson and myself.”
“Oh?” I asked. “May there have?”
“They may have come over to level certain unfair and unfounded accusations regarding the lack of care I have taken recently, combined with the number of crimes I have been committing and the corresponding level of danger that I be discovered, apprehended, and burned as a witch. Or worse: discovered, almost apprehended, and destroy humanity in the ensuing struggle. I was deeply offended by the subject, so I sent them away.”
And there was the expected haughtiness, of course, but something else as well. Holmes’s sentence ended with just the tiniest tinge of guilt. It was this, more than anything else, that caused me to feel a sudden, cold horror.
“Holmes… what do you mean ‘sent them away’?”
“Only that they were being rather insistent, despite the fact that I made it known I did not wish to discuss the matter. I was having quite the row with Mrs. Hudson, you see, who keeps bringing up two place settings instead of one and making me sad. I really did not have the energy to deal with Grogsson and Lestrade as well. I told them and told them, but they would not respect my wishes, so I… er…”
“Used magic?”
“Minor teleportation!”
“Holmes!”
“I didn’t mean to, Watson. I just lost control for a moment, and it was done. Look, it’s a small matter. They are safe and sound in Dublin. Or Dubai. Or the planet Dunmicron IV near the Spixtar Nebula. I don’t know. Somewhere beginning with ‘D’. Probably not that last one, though, because I remember thinking they’d be all right making their own way back. And I’m sure it was somewhere with a breathable atmosphere. Though I do seem to recall it was a particularly foul atmosphere. Oh! Do you know what…? Detroit?”
I shook my head. “Right. Well. I don’t think I care for the direction this conversation has gone in. I’ll be honest, I rather expected, ‘Oh, hello, Watson, I’ve been making wax versions of myself ’ to be the lowest point, but no—”
I was interrupted by Holmes’s smaller homunculus, pulling at the leg of my trousers.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaagh! What is he doing? What does he want?”
Holmes shrugged. “Hard to say. Billy is not as adept at expressing his needs as Steve is. He’s an earlier effort.”
“I made him myself.”
“Again, I can tell.”
“Steve’s rough physical form was done for me by the French genius Tavernier. Billy… well… that was just me on a slow morning. I use him as a pageboy. Useful to have a page about, when one is at odds with one’s landlady.”
Yet I disregarded the end of Holmes’s explanation. It’s just rather hard to concentrate, is all, with a tiny waxen boy tugging on your clothing.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I don’t understand you.” He looked up at me, his face a study in earnest hopefulness. Slowly, he drew one of his little wooden hands across his neck, then pointed it at his face.
“What was that?”
Again, his hand went across his neck, then back to his face.
“You want me to kill you?”
“Oh, Watson! Don’t be silly. Disregard the little fellow,” Holmes scoffed, interrupting Billy’s excited nods of confirmation. “The important thing, let us try and recall, is that I am about to be murdered!”
“Fair point,” I admitted. “Do you have any idea by whom?”
“Of course I do! By my new Watson.”
“Your what?” I cried. “Holmes, do not tell me you’ve manufactured a murderous doppelganger of me out of wax!”
“No. And let me just say, what a queer thing to suppose! No, no. This new Watson is not made of wax, he’s made of… Italian person. And he’s nothing like you. Which is rather the point. You see, I found myself somewhat out of sorts and making poor decisions. What I needed, I realized, was another living companion: a new Watson! But I was a bit reluctant to let myself have one, since the last time had ended so badly.”
“Hey!”
“But then I thought, Watson and I were very different. What if my new Watson was more like me? So that is what I set out to find. You were not magical at all. The new Watson had to be as magical as I could manage. Like me! He had to have a brooding and mysterious nature, with just a hint of alluring darkness to him. Like me! And—since it was the thought that you might die that ruined our partnership—it would probably be best if the new Watson was enough of a threat to humanity that it might be quite a boon to everybody if he did happen to be killed. Like me!”
“Holmes! What a thing to say!”
“Bah! It’s only the truth, Watson; everybody knows it. The real problem was this: wherever could I find such a man? And yet, after weeks of tireless searching, voila! Count Negretto Sylvius!”
“Well, he certainly sounds the part,” I admitted.
“And looks it,” Holmes enthused. “Oh, you should see his moustache! Super dark and mysterious! Now… I will admit, the man is not as magical as I had hoped. He is a minor practitioner only. But as a security risk, he is ideal: more than enough of a criminal so that if the predictable should come to pass, nobody will miss him much at all. He’s perfect!”
I will not lie; the notion that Holmes was attempting to replace me was as painful as ever. Yet what could I do? The burden of gentility was on me, and the only course it left me was clear. I straightened my shirt and said, “Indeed. It seems as if you’ve found the ideal match, Holmes. From the bottom of my heart, I wish you more success with your quest for a living companion than you had in your quest for an arch-nemesis.”
“Well…” said Holmes, tapping the tips of his index fingers against each other.
“Oh! Right!” I said, with a start. “I forgot—you’ve said he’s already trying to kill you. I just… lost myself for a moment there.”
“No, that’s all right, Watson. In fact, until you mentioned it, I had overlooked the silver lining this situation presents: though I have failed in my quest for a new Watson, I may well have succeeded in my previous efforts to secure an enemy. He is wholly dedicated to my destruction, Watson. And, though he possesses all the graces of the Southern manner, he is the devil incarnate when the mood is on him.”
“But whatever set him against you, Holmes?”
“Oh, that’s the best part of all! He is in possession of the fabled Margarine Stone!”
Holmes raised both hands reverently to the sky as if praying to some unseen, cyclopean altar and stared with blissful fervor into the middle distance, prompting me to clear my throat and ask, “The… erm… the what now?”
“The Margarine Stone! Don’t you know what margarine is, John?”
“Not quite butter?”
“Exactly!”
“All right, but—and hear me out here, Holmes—also not quite a stone.”
“Ha! Do you know nothing of the origins of margarine?”
I shrugged. “I know that the French emperor Napoleon III set a prize for the invention of a less perishable, less expensive alternative to butter for the French soldiers and the French poor. Nobody told him, apparently, that those are the same people. A fellow named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès came up with some abomination made from beef tallow and claimed the prize. In recent years, I hear the recipe for margarine has evolved to vegetable oils, water, salt and yellow dye, whipped into a froth and set to harden.”
“Ha!” Holmes scoffed. “That is what they wish you to believe!”
“Oh?”
“The truth is far more interesting! Fourteenth-century Carpathia! Nigh-mythical alchemist, Dragomir Hus! Nearly every detail of the man’s life is lost to the fog of history, Watson, save these two facts: his love of toast and his hatred of going out to the shops. So many trips to secure butter? For a man of his genius? Unacceptable! Instead, he labored in his laboratory—which I have just realized is a fine spot to labor in. Labor-a-tory. I get it now—for over two decades, combining vegetable oils, salt, yellow dyes and water until at last he reached the optimal derivation! A singularity of taste and convenience which crystalized—as divinity realized upon the mortal plane will often do—into a single jewel of perfect flavor: the Margarine Stone!”
“Which must have struck him as a bit of an inconvenience,” I noted. “Because—if it’s a rock—how does one spread it on toast?”
“Oh, not to worry, Watson. The stone continually oozes a flavorful discharge.”
“Eww.”
“It appears as a fist-sized diamond with a deep yellow luster—”
“Well, that makes sense, at least.”
“—an object of unquestionable beauty!”
“Constantly dripping grease? No, I think I’ll go ahead and question its beauty right now.”
But Holmes was not listening to me. He had a look of faraway wonder in his eye and I knew that as he’d told me the story of the stone it was... how should I say…? It was as much for his benefit as for mine. It was an act of devotion. Of worship. Holmes had his little fancies, to be sure, but it was rare for me to see him truly desire something.
Rare.
And disconcerting.
The greed… the pure, unhidden and unalloyed greed that showed in his eyes unnerved me. The question was: how far would he go in pursuit of his desire? I had the sinking feeling that now was a very poor time indeed for Holmes to be without a live-in governor.
“MOOOOOOOOOOOP!” said Steve.
“Quite,” I agreed.
Holmes shook his head. “Oh, can you picture it, Watson? Can you imagine what I could do if I got my hands on that stone?”
“You could have margarine?”
“An endless supply! Consider how closely my happiness relies upon toast! Why, I would never have to go to the shops again!”
“No, Holmes. What about bread? You’d still have to—”
Yet my protestations—no matter how valid—served only to anger him. He turned on me and thundered, “I strive, Watson, in the realm of Gods! Vex me not with the thoughts of worms!”
He then began to pace the narrow little confines of the room he’d blocked off with fabric, stroking his chin and muttering, “I know the man who has the stone; that is something. He knows I know; that is problematic. He has sworn to slay me; also problematic. Damn! That’s two in the ‘problematic’ category, only one in the ‘something’!”
Though the situation made me uncomfortable, I will confess to a certain rising hopefulness. Holmes was involved in an adventure, that much was clear. A stupid one, no doubt, but an adventure nonetheless. And—despite his insistence that I never involve myself—he seemed willing to puzzle it out in my presence. He had made no move to eject me and, indeed, seemed to be airing his thought process in the hopes that I could improve upon it. Which, I was certain, would not be an insurmountable challenge.
Of course, there were other demands upon my attention. Another tug at my trouser leg caused me to look down into the wide, earnest eyes of Billy the pageboy. He’d gotten Holmes’s bread knife from beside the fireplace and was holding it helpfully out towards me, handle first.
“No,” I told him. “Stop asking.”
Then, since he didn’t, I turned to Holmes and said, “Do you think we could do something about all your wax monsters? I find them a bit distracting.”
“Hmmm? Oh, fine, fine. Steve, go sit in your chair.”
“HRUUUUUP?” asked Steve, tilting his head to one side.
“The chair! Right over there! Go sit—argh! Fine. Steve: open.”
Steve obediently opened his mouth. Holmes scribbled “Sit in your chair” on one of his scraps of paper, crumpled it, and tossed it down Steve’s throat. A sudden wave of recognition flickered across Steve’s pseudo-face and he gave an accommodating little head bobble, which I think meant, “Well why didn’t you say so, silly?” and clomped off towards the Baker Street side of the sitting room, pushing aside curtains as he went. Holmes wasted no time plucking the bread knife from Billy’s hand and shove-kicking the little fellow in after his big brother. Billy seemed to mind this very little, for as soon as Steve settled in his chair, Billy did the same in a nearby corner, staring up at the larger construct with an expression of utter awe, as if to say, “Look how realistic his hair is! I wish I had hair like that. I wish I could talk.” Yet the thing that struck me most about the whole endeavor was not the behavior of Holmes’s homunculi; it was his décor. His actions, you see, had swirled certain of his curtains about, revealing an unexpected feature.
“Holmes!” I gasped. “Your curtains! They are invisible!”
“Not entirely, Watson,” he said, smiling at my incredulity. Holmes was never above interpreting wonder as praise. “You will note that from the front side, they appear black. From the back, yes, they are practically invisible.”
“But… why? How?”
“Why? To protect my person. As he has paid me rent, 221B Baker Street is not safe from Negretto Sylvius. I have therefore devised this clever blind. Should he come here—as I fear he shall—I can stand at the door to my bedroom and see all. To him, this domicile is a confusing maze. To me, the trap to catch a shark! How? All thanks to my personal invention: the one-way curtain.”
“But then, why have you used all the blankets off my old bed, too?” I wondered.
Holmes huffed. “I said I invented the one-way curtain, Watson. I didn’t say I invented enough.”
As Holmes fired a series of frowns about the room at his insufficiently plentiful defensive curtains, I began to parse the situation. A number of useful facts had been presented, of course, but they had been presented in a typically Holmesian explosion of data, bereft of a cohesive narrative. I began to probe him for the rest.
“Let me see if I can get this straight, Holmes,” I said. “You decided to get a replacement me. Your criteria were thus: he needed to be magical and disposable, yes?”
“Exactly.”
“You then settled on Count Negretto Sylvius. I’m curious—how did you know of him?”
“Scotland Yard. It seems he’d come to their notice by being accused of rather a spate of nefarious little crimes and plots, all across Europe. But he always beats the charges—there’s never any mundane explanation for how he could be to blame for the trouble. Lestrade imagines this is because he’s been using a bit of magic. We’ve always thought I’d eventually have to deal with Negretto.”
“Instead, you contacted him and asked him to be Watson Number Two. But tell me, how did you reach out to him?”
“Simple. I sent a letter to his house.”
“Er… Holmes… he has a house?”
“Several, I think. He is a count, after all.”
“Right. Did it not occur to you, Holmes, that people who own multiple houses are not usually in the market for shared rooms?”
Holmes gave a defensive sniff. “Of course it did; I am not a child. I am a super-clever grown-up man!”
“Who seems to have made a blanket fort out of his entire living space,” I reminded him. But he gave me the sort of angry glance that let me know I was straying out of useful territory, so I demurred and asked, “How did you go about asking him to ignore his own houses?”
“Again, it was the height of simplicity. In my letter, I asked him to disregard them. They were not important, I said. The main thing was that I was a sorcerer without peer, in possession of countless magical secrets and treasures, and rather poor at guarding them. In short, I presented myself as the sort of person he might like to get to know. And—as the total fiscal investment I required of him was a single pound—I encouraged him to reflect that he had little to lose.”
“Very apt,” I admitted. “And this effected your meeting?”
“Of course it did. He came ’round and had brunch. It was lovely,” Holmes insisted. “I mean… for a bit. He showed up, gave me the pound, said he’d heard of me, and inquired as to the situation I desired. I told him he’d have to live here—at least enough to be annoyed by occasional accordion outbursts and to keep me from being bored. In exchange, if he had any magical questions he wanted answered, I assured him he’d have regular access to the best magic guy ever: me! At which point, he gave a polite little cough and everything turned rotten. Have you noticed how often that happens, Watson? Things going rotten right after a polite cough?”
I sighed and nodded.
“He seemed to think that perhaps he might be the more magical partner in such a union,” said Holmes, “and began trying to impress me with his previous accomplishments. Now—and understand I never meant to do this, Watson—but I may have giggled a bit. This only made him try harder, so in no time I was laughing and laughing. Luckily for me, his boasting included much talk of his possessions. Notably, that he’s equipped his bodyguard, Sam Merton, with a genuine Straubenzee.”
“A genuine what?”
“Ah! A weapon favored by many of the more feared assassins of the age! A masterpiece of murder by the Dutch genius Straubenzee! Moriarty’s foot soldiers loved them. It is an easily concealable air-powered rifle. Utterly silent!”
“Really?”
“Yes, because it’s powered by air.”
“All right, but how would that be much quieter than—”
“Because,” said Holmes, stomping his foot, “it doesn’t work like a normal gun! It propels its bullet via a powerful explosion of expanding gases!”
“Right,” I sighed. “You know, sometimes when you speak, Holmes, I wonder if you and I hear the same words.”
“And I told him that was neat, but it wasn’t really magical, was it? And he said, oh yeah, well what had I done that was all that magical, eh? So, I brought Billy to life right in front of him with a wave of my hand.”
“You what?”
“Yes,” Holmes giggled. “It was great.”
“So… let me get this straight… you just happened to have a lifeless dummy with you? During brunch?”
“Of course, Watson. You see, I had constructed him, thinking to animate him to have someone moving about the house, to make me less lonely. But when I found out about Count Sylvius, I didn’t need to. So I just left him. But then came that happy moment when I realized I had a new use for him: to make Count Negretto Sylvius wet his trousers. Which he pretty much did. But then he said it was just a simple trick, not real magic. So, while he was trying to figure out how it was a simple trick, I tore a hole in reality, reached through into the vault at the Tower of London, grabbed one of the less important Crown Jewels, and threw it in his lap. Voila!”
“Holmes!”
“What? I put it back later. Anyway, I’m glad I did it, because that’s when he got desperate enough to tell me about the Margarine Stone.”
“Which seems to have made quite the impression,” I noted.
“Yes. Because it is impressive. He could see my interest growing as he spoke. At first, I think he was glad, because he’d finally found something I could not match, but it wasn’t long before he accused me of coveting the Margarine Stone.”
“Which you did,” I pointed out.
“Oh, absolutely! And he said I wanted to kill him and steal his treasures.”
“Which you did not.”
“No! I am not that sort of fellow. He, unfortunately, is. And he said I’d never get the chance to do that to him, because that’s what he was going to do to me. And we parted. Not on the best of terms, I fear.”
“I see. And when did all of this occur?” I wondered.
“Yesterday. About eleven o’clock.”
“What? Holmes!”
“Hmmm?”
“You invented one-way curtains, fortified 221B with them, obtained and then animated a life-size duplicate of yourself…”
“Well, yes. I rather hoped he might soak up a Straubenzee round or two that was meant for me.”
“…all in less than twenty-four hours? How?”
“It was no great feat,” said Holmes, with a shrug. “I went back in time two years and journeyed to Paris.”
“Damn it, Holmes! Magic!”
“I inquired as to the domicile of the famous artist Marie Tussaud. Turns out she’s dead. I would have had to go significantly farther back than two years, I’m afraid. But no matter. I was directed to Tavernier instead. I asked one of his admirers what his next figure would be and was told Pliny the Elder. From that point there was naught to do but wait near his door for a few days. Everybody who went in I asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ When one fellow said, ‘Oh, I’m going to be Pliny the Elder,’ all I had to do was crack him on the head with a walking stick—”
“Oh, I know you don’t approve of them as weapons, Watson, but I tell you this: the strange British opinion that walking sticks are dangerous melee devices was quite borne out. It worked like a charm; he went right down. I then hailed the nearest cab, gave the cabman three gold coins, stuffed the unconscious Pliny-looking gentleman inside and told the driver to go straight to Barcelona, no matter what his passenger might say.”
“Holmes!”
“From there, all I had to do was march into Tavernier’s and say, ‘Hello. I’m that fellow everybody says looks just like Pliny the Elder.’ I then sat for him for two days getting modeled, waited for two weeks while the model was finished, waited for two more days until they loaded it into a carriage to go to the museum, snuck up on the museum driver, whacked him with a walking stick—”
“Holmes!”
“Which worked wonders. Again. Really, Watson, you ought to extend them more credit. Then I took the dummy, stepped back through time to this morning—”
“Holmes!”
“Hush, Watson! I’m almost at the end and—I don’t know if you know this—the process of recounting one’s adventures is not aided by having one’s ex-living companion shout one’s name angrily at oneself, over and over. Now… where was I?”
“Paris. This morning. With a dummy.”
“Right! So, I teleported to London—don’t say ‘Holmes!’—stripped the toga off the thing, dressed it in a few of my own clothes, used some dark secrets man was not meant to know to give it life—”
“Holmes!”
“I just asked you not to do that, if you’ll recall—and began teaching him to be my perfect double! And voila! Here we are.”
“You are saying ‘voila’ quite a bit today, I note.”
“Well, I’ve just been to France.”
“I see,” I said, struggling to regain my composure. “And the curtains? How did you do them?”
“Hmmmm… I wonder how I should address that question…” said Holmes, tapping thoughtfully at his lips. “Should I give you the 12,000-word explanation you wouldn’t understand? Or should I just say ‘magic’?”
“Holmes!”
“Stop shouting that!”
“I’m trying to! I really am! But this is beyond acceptable, Holmes! Don’t you see? You need me!”
“Oh, no!” he said, throwing up his hands. “We’re not getting into that again!”
“No, we are. Look at all this, Holmes. Look how much magic you’ve been using and how many laws you’ve been breaking. You are utterly without governance. This is what Lestrade and Grogsson were talking about!”
“It doesn’t matter!” Holmes thundered. “This issue has been settled! You are in terrific—”
But he did not finish, for at that moment came a distinct poot! sound from the street outside, followed by the delicate kish of breaking glass and the solid smack of a hollow-head bullet ramming into the side of Steve’s head. He gave a forlorn “UUUUUUBUU!” and slumped forward in his chair. Billy jumped up and pointed both hands at his fallen brother, as if to say, “Are you kidding? He gets to get shot, too?” I think if there had been any moisture in his little wooden body, tears of jealousy would have been streaming down his face.
I tell you, it is funny how far instinct outweighs reason. I consider myself a fairly intelligent man; nevertheless, I was halfway to Steve, yanking open my adventuring bag as I elbowed aside invisible curtains, when Holmes caught my sleeve.
“Watson! What are you doing?”
“I have to help the—oh…”
“Yes. ‘Oh’ exactly,” said Holmes. “Spare no thought for him, Watson. He feels no pain and has no self-awareness. Let us instead turn our minds to more important matters. Namely…” Holmes balled up his fists and cried, “…one of my plans just worked! Yes! YES!”
I rolled my eyes. “All right, Holmes. Let us not give in to self-congratulation.”
“No. Let’s. Because this is great! This is rare! Oh, I’m so glad you got to see it, Watson! Tell everyone you know! It’s just like I hoped! Maybe I should get a dummy to soak up a bullet or two for me, I thought. And it was no small amount of trouble, let me tell you. Time travel! Teleportation! Three weeks of waiting about outside some Frenchie’s flat! But now, look! Who’s lying about with a hole in the side of his head? Bang! Steve! Not me!”
Yet Holmes’s cavalcade of compliments for himself was cut short by a loud crash. Someone, it seemed, had just elected to kick open the Baker Street door.
“He’s here!” cried Holmes in a petrified kind of whisper-gasp. “Quick, Watson! Quick!”
He grabbed me by the sleeve and dragged me over to the Baker Street wall to a small triangular partition formed by two curtains that hung between the two front windows, just in front of Steve’s chair. There was hardly enough room for me in there and my adventuring bag made a notable lump in one of the curtains. With a cluck of disapproval, Holmes stripped it from my grasp and threw it into the corner by Steve. It slid to a halt against the wall, after knocking Billy off his crude, envious little feet.
“Here! Stay right here, Watson! Make not the slightest sound, or it may mean your life!” Holmes urged, then battered his way through the curtains towards the hallway that led to his room and mine. Or… no. To his room and Count Negretto Sylvius’s, I realized with a sudden wave of sadness.
From the stairs outside came a gruff voice. “Careful. I don’t trust it. He went down weird.”
This was followed by a lightly accented Italian voice that said, “Bah! What do you know, Sam? Stay here. Guard the door. And look out for that landlady he’s got. Shoot her if you need to.”
“Hey!” I heard Holmes mutter. “That’s a bit offsides.” From outside came the sound of cautious steps, creeping up our stairs. When the third step from the top creaked, I heard the Italian voice give a little hiss of self-recrimination. Presently, the door to our chambers swung slowly open and a head peeped through. My view was partly occluded. Holmes’s curtains—though magnificent—were by no means perfect. From the front, they resembled black muslin. From the back, a thin, transparent gauze. From the diagonal I needed to see the entryway, it seemed as if several banks of thin, dark fog hung in front of me. The only thing I could tell for sure was that—yes—Count Negretto Sylvius had exactly the kind of sweeping black moustache his name implied. He jerked back in surprise when he beheld the strange labyrinth of curtains that had appeared since his last visit. Yet, he knew where his target lay. Slowly, silently, he began sneaking through the curtains towards me, seeking his fallen foe. He wore a garish suit and carried an over-ornamented walking stick with a gold-colored ball atop. Clearly not actual gold, for the color had worn off where his grip had rubbed it. As he pushed aside the final curtain, he gave a gasp of pleasure and surprise.
There lay Steve, collapsed across the near arm of his chair making soft, furtive “Oob. Ooob. Bobo” noises. Approaching what he must deem to be his injured enemy, Sylvius gave his lips an eager, nervous lick and slowly raised the orb of his walking stick over his head. Apparently even Italians who spend enough time here suffer from our deadly-stick delusion. What he hoped to accomplish by thwacking somebody who had just survived a gunshot through the side of the head, I could only guess. Yet as he stepped within stick-smacking range, he was interrupted.
Holmes’s clear, strident tone broke across the room, saying, “Don’t break it, Count! Don’t break it!”
The advice was instantly disregarded. Sylvius gave a little “Eep!” of surprise and brought the stick down with all his might. The orb thunked down into the side of Steve’s head, deforming the wax around the bullet hole a little bit more.
“OHHHHHH!” said Steve, who had either learned something of human speech, or had simply gotten lucky and stumbled across a noise that was somewhat apropos of the situation. I know Holmes had said he had no self-awareness, but his expression made it clear that he did not appreciate Negretto Sylvius’s recent efforts.
“Holmes? Is that you?” Sylvius spluttered. “Where are you? What are you playing at?”
“Where?” answered Holmes, in a laughing tone. “Why, I’m watching you. What am I playing at? Is it not clear? I have made a trap to catch a shark. Or, if matters go well for both of us, a room-mate.”
He then pulled some hidden lever, which loosened a string that ran along the ceiling from the hallway to the front window, which in turn dropped a folder of papers that had been suspended from the ceiling just above Sylvius. The count gave a cry of surprise and caught the falling packet. “What is this?” he cried.
“Why, that is you,” Holmes replied coolly. “Have a look through. I think you’ll find it comprehensive, if not complete. There lay the real facts as to the death of old Mrs. Harold, who left you the Blymer estate. And the complete life history of Miss Minnie Warrender!”
“Who is that?” Sylvius demanded, his voice shaking with fear.
“Oh? You don’t know her?” said Holmes. “Sorry. Lestrade must have got the files mixed up. But what about the robbery of the Train de Luxe to the Riviera on February 13? Or that check forged on the Crédit Lyonnais?”
With horror, Sylvius leafed through the pages and gasped as he saw a picture of one of his most illegal and secret acts. But then an instant later, his brows drew together in confusion and he said, “Wait! This is no photograph. Somebody drew this!”
“Did I get anything wrong?” Holmes asked.
“Well… no. But I still don’t think it would mean anything in court.”
“Shall we find out? Or would you prefer to become my living-companion?”
“Living-companion? Ha!” Sylvius shouted. “You say that is your goal, but your true intentions are clear! You covet the Margarine Stone!”
“Well… yes… a bit,” Holmes admitted.
“You will never find it!” Sylvius howled. “I have placed it in a secret vault, far from here, beyond the wit of any thief!”
No. That was a lie. Unless my powers of observation and deduction had failed in the most spectacular manner, I knew exactly where the stone was. I had observed how his left hand would hover protectively over his jacket pocket from time to time. More to the point, I had noticed a rather prominent lump in said pocket. Even more to the point, I had also not failed to note the gigantic and rapidly expanding grease stain all over one side of Sylvius’s jacket and down one leg of his trousers.
“You should have a care!” Sylvius said, with a threatening laugh. “I have not come unarmed! Not defenseless! Not alone!”
The laugh with which Holmes answered him was far more sinister. “Oh, I know all about Mr. Merton out there. Behold: my shark has brought a gudgeon to defend him! Perhaps we should invite your friend up to share in our discussion, eh? Billy! Attend my bidding!”
The tiny wooden boy pushed aside my adventuring bag and leapt to his feet. Sylvius gave a cry of surprise.
“Go invite Mr. Merton up to join us, won’t you?” said Holmes. “He’s the large, stupid-looking, heavily armed fellow at the base of the stairs.”
Clatter, clatter, clop went Billy’s little wooden feet, as he sped across to the door. Say what you will about his lack of size, speech and enjoyment of his existence, but at least he could follow orders better than his compatriot. We heard him rattle down the stairs, then a gruff voice shouted, “Aaaaaaaaaigh! What the ’ell?” This was followed by a loud poot! and the sound of splintering wood. This was followed by a terrible hiss, as of a gas chamber recharging, and a dull metallic ping. The process repeated two more times and for a moment I thought little Billy had received the only boon I’d ever known him to crave. Yet presently, the door creaked open and the tiny homunculus appeared in the presence of a large, crush-nosed gentleman who looked more than a bit rattled. Billy had three new holes though his torso and a hangdog look that basically said, “Oh, I don’t know why I even try…”
“What’s goin’ on?” Merton wanted to know. Beneath one arm he cradled a device that was… well… clearly not an umbrella. It had been designed to look like one. Or, a bit like one. It was a tasteful pink number of unusual size and weight. Instead of a spike tip, it featured a large, perforated pipe, which must have acted both as muzzle and a suppressor for the noise of the shot. The back end had not only the traditional hook handle, but a trigger, cocking mechanism, and a large brass air tank. I did have to admit the Straubenzee Special was somewhat quieter than a traditional firearm and its deadliness was beyond question. That said, its subtlety left something to be desired. “Where are y’, boss?”
“Here! By the window!”
Wearing a face designed to communicate that he did not care for any single part of this whole situation, Sam Merton began pushing curtains aside with the tip of the Straubenzee, working his way towards his employer. Merton was guided in this by the soft vocalizations of Steve, who had softened his tone greatly, for he was engaged in a new exploration. His hand probed the left side of his head as he mumbled, “Mon-mau! Maaaaaaaaaaaau.”
When Merton at last emerged into the little hollow near the window, he looked down at the damaged wax man and complained, “All right, now. What is that?”
This question was answered by Steve—in his own particular fashion. It seems Merton’s original shot had passed through the right side of Steve’s head, expanded, and lodged on the inside left. Thus, after a few moments of probing, there was a strange thunk sound inside Steve’s mouth. He then opened it, gave a little cough, and expelled a flattened leaden slug, which clattered to the floor at Sam Merton’s feet.
“Aaaaaaaaaaah!” Merton opined.
Poot! added his air gun, and the recently removed bullet was replaced with another, right in the middle of Steve’s chest. Though his expressions were a bit rudimentary and not well synchronized with regular human countenance, I must still classify the look Steve gave Merton as “ungenerous”. He slumped forwards and his heavy, waxen hands began to probe randomly about the floor.
“If you are quite finished abusing my artwork, I have a proposal for you,” came Holmes’s voice, from the depths of the curtain maze. “I am going to step into my room, take up my accordion, and play. I shall try over the Hoffman ‘Barcarolle’, I should think. I encourage you to use the interim discussing the wisdom of waging war against a superior mind as compared to the wisdom of living here and sharing access to the Margarine Stone.”
We heard the sound of a door closing, and presently, the first few notes of Offenbach’s work drifted through the room. It was an unusually diplomatic move for Holmes and I was just beginning to wonder what he was playing at, when he spoke again. “Watch this, Watson,” he said. “They think I’m in the other room playing, but I’m not. I have merely bewitched the accordion to play itself. What I’m really going to do is this: I’m going to teleport myself to where the dummy is, at the same moment teleporting him to my present location. Sylvius and Merton are very unlikely to note the change. Thus, knowing nothing of what has occurred, they will then discuss their plans in my presence, alerting me to their intentions and perhaps revealing the location of the Margarine Stone!”
Sylvius’s and Merton’s brows furrowed. “Who’s Watson?” Merton wondered.
Holmes gasped, “Oh! Was that aloud? It was supposed to be telepathy! Damn, damn, damn!”
I shook my head, then laid it down into my palm and massaged my nascent headache. Yet Holmes’s carefully laid, carelessly betrayed plan unraveled even faster than I expected. At that very moment came a delicate glass clink. Looking up, I noticed Steve had his hand in my medical case. I think I was about to shout for him to be careful not to break any medicine bottles and cut himself or stick himself with any of the syringes, but caught myself just in time. He’d not have understood, I realized. And even if he had, how would a creature with no circulatory system have been affected anyway? It was not the medicine I should have been concerned about, in any case, for as he slowly began to straighten up, I saw the gleam of metal in his hand—my pistol!
At that exact moment came a slight change in the light. Nothing out of the ordinary, I would think. Most likely a cloud passing in front of the sun outside the Baker Street window. Yet this slight change had a great effect on our guests’ frayed nerves. Observing the sudden flicker, Count Sylvius shouted, “That’s it! That’s the teleport!”
Both men spun their heads back towards Steve, only to behold the creature they now thought to be Holmes, straightening up towards them with a rather impressive gun in his hand. Sam reacted just as one might expect. He gave a cry, raised the Straubenzee, and sent a second shot through the front of Steve’s shirt, right next to the last one.
“NOOOOOOORP!” Steve protested, then raised my Webley and retaliated by blowing a neat hole right through the center of Sam Merton’s face and one through his chest. I don’t think he knew exactly what he’d accomplished, but he sure did look impressed with himself to have made such loud, important noises. He turned to Negretto Sylvius with an oh-wow-look-what-I-just-did look on his face and fired the remaining four bullets into varying aspects of the good count’s torso. Both men went down like poleaxed pigeons as Steve’s barrage gave way to the gleeful click, click, clicking of a firing hammer on empty cartridges. I felt the instant tug of duty to aid the fallen. Yet, at the same time, my experience as a doctor, an adventurer and a soldier all returned the same verdict: Are you kidding? No way. That’s done it, sunshine.
Of course, it is very difficult to conceal the sound of gunfire in a residential building in the middle of London. The response we got was exactly the normal and expected one: three thumps on the floor below us and the muffled tones of an angry old woman shouting, “Oi! Noise!”
“Sorry, Mrs. Hudson!” called Holmes and I together, as had become our habit.
A moment later, Holmes appeared from the curtain maze behind me and hissed, “What happened, Watson? You taught him how to shoot?”
“I? I taught him no such thing! Apart from your paper trick, I wouldn’t know how to begin. Anyway, if anybody taught him anything about blasting people to death, that honor would go to Sam Merton.”
“Oh! You may be right, Watson. Perhaps Steve learns best by example.”
Steve seemed pleased to see his creator. “MOE-NOE-BOE!” he said, as he turned both his joyous, blood-spattered face and the barrel of my Webley directly at Holmes. Click, click, click, went the firing hammer.
“Oh well, at least nobody taught him to reload,” Holmes reflected. “See if you can’t get that gun away from him, eh?”
The waxen murder-man was reluctant to give up his favorite new toy, but after a few minutes of prying and cajoling, I got it back from him. I turned to find Holmes looking down at the two corpses with a dejected look on his face. “Do you know the worst thing?” he asked with a sad shake of his head. “This is exactly what Grogsson and Lestrade were talking about. Ah well… can’t be helped… Care to help me hide a couple of bodies, Watson?”
“Absolutely not! This is your mess, Holmes! Your affair from start to finish, and I am deeply mortified that my pistol and I got mixed up in it!”
“Well I can’t be to blame for all of it, can I?” said Holmes, huffily.
“In my experience, Holmes, yes; you usually can.”
“Very well. Please yourself,” he snapped. “It won’t be the first set of accidental murder victims I’ve cleaned out of this apartment. Nor will they be much missed, I should think. The real tragedy—the gravest loss to mankind—is that with them died the secret of the final hiding place of the M—”
“It’s in his left jacket pocket.”
“What? Are you certain?” Holmes cried. He then rifled Sylvius’s pockets for the barest moment before raising aloft a gleaming yellow diamond, dripping with oily goo.
“Oh, happy day!” Holmes exclaimed.
“Really?”
“Find some bread, Watson! We must try the stone!”
“No, Holmes, enjoy it with my regards,” I told him, looking about for something to wrap my pistol in so I wouldn’t get blood all over my doctor’s bag. “As for my part, I’m going to do my best to be well clear of this rather singular murder scene before any of Scotland Yard’s newer inspectors happens by and gets the mystery of his life.”
I don’t think Warlock Holmes heard me. Or at least, he did not mark me. He was already in the corner, fussing over his toast racks with wide, eager eyes. I took a few moments to make sure I was presentable, then gave him a nod and walked out onto the stairs. As I stepped back into the familiar light of a Baker Street afternoon, I happened to overhear the final denouement of ‘The Adventure of the Margarine Stone’.
“Eugh!” came Holmes’s horrified voice. “You call that butter?”