FIVE YEARS LATER, ON A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT upon Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes and I were once again running for our lives.
It was our second attempt to banish the phantom hound, and we were using the same method as before, that of offering ourselves as bait. I shall not rehearse the details herewith. I shall simply summarise. Where before we failed, this time we succeeded. The beast entered, unawares, the portal we had conjured in the Great Grimpen Mire, was swallowed up, and was thus returned whence it had come.
Not long afterwards, Holmes informed me that I was entitled, if I so wished, to write further stories about him. This Holmes, at the turn of the new century, was a different man from the beleaguered, haunted Holmes of 1895, when he had been at his nadir. This Holmes was sprightlier, shot through with a steely sense of purpose, altogether invigorated. He saw no harm in my resuming the lucrative practice of penning sanitised versions of our adventures together, and neither, in the event, did I. I had recovered sufficiently from my grief over Mary and could see now that neither I nor The Sign of Four was to blame for her death; the guilt lay solely and squarely with the three Sikhs.
I duly turned in a novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was serialised in The Strand in 1901 and collected as a bound volume the following year. It received great acclaim and healthy sales, and I continued thereafter producing – intermittently – a string of further such narratives, both long and short. I ceased in 1927 and my only literary output since then consists of this trilogy. These books I consider my final testament, in which I offer a rendition of the truth about Sherlock Holmes after all the fictions I have published, much as Zachariah Conroy’s journal served to set straight the lies he had told about the Miskatonic expedition.
The simple fact is that the resurrection of Professor Moriarty as R’luhlloig, far from cowing Holmes, had a galvanising effect upon him. It sharpened him, as the whetstone does the blade. A man like him needed a nemesis, it seems, even if he had not realised it, or indeed wanted it. Holmes now had a specific focus for his talents. He had an enemy with a name and an agenda. R’luhlloig had declared war not merely on the Great Old Ones but on Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes rallied to the cause and rose to the challenge.
How that war impinged upon him, and upon the earth, will be the subject of the third and final volume of these memoirs, detailing events of 1910. It began on the rugged chalky coast of Sussex, but its ramifications stretched across worlds and brought us face to face with danger in a myriad of guises, not least in the shape of creatures from the briny depths who earned the sobriquet “sea-devils” and who, I will say, were both more and less than that name might imply.