My wife was not fond of going into the attic of our townhouse. It was no surprise. She was, after all, a woman who prided herself on the tidiness of our home.
“A place for everything and everything in its place,” she would say. It’s a principle that I myself have lived by my entire life, one of the many reasons that we were so well suited.
It is also why I found that the habits of my fellow lodger so rankled with me during my years at Baker Street. It wasn’t to say that the man was slovenly. Indeed, when it came to his appearance, Holmes was fastidious to the point of obsession. However, any man who would amuse himself by shooting bullets into the wall of our drawing room was obviously someone whose ideas about tidiness were at the raffish end of the spectrum.
I still wonder why I agreed to store Holmes’s archive when he finally moved out of 221B. Thankfully, my wife had been out on the day that wagon after wagon had trundled down Cheyne Walk, each fully laden. That evening, after everything had been crammed into its new home, she had paid a brief visit to the attic, but had quickly descended again, her face as pale as snow, vowing never to venture up into such “chaos” again.
Now, as I opened the attic door, I sympathised. The merest glance at the jumbled mess of crates and boxes was enough to send the sanest mind into panic. There had been no plan, no organisation. My friend had simply deposited his life’s work into the empty space and shut the door behind him.
“I thank you, Watson,” he had said that day fifteen years ago, as he opened the bottle of champagne that he had purchased to toast the end of an era. “I shall have little use for the archive in my new life, but I cannot bear the thought of it being discarded.”
I had suggested that he could donate both his library and the vast index to Scotland Yard. Needless to say, the proposal was met with considerable disdain.
And so, in the subsequent years, his collection of books, clippings and periodicals had mouldered, gathering dust. Now, as the musky stench of paper welcomed us, Holmes all but danced up the stairs, the sight of his once precious volumes a positive elixir.
“Excellent, Watson. Simply excellent.”
I tried to hush him, not wanting to upset my wife any more than I already had. Holmes seemed conveniently oblivious to my pleas.
“It is good to be among my things again, Watson, even after all this time. A man could lose himself up here.”
“Or break his neck,” I suggested, stepping over a pile of books only to narrowly avoid turning my ankle on a discarded phrenology bust.
“Watch that,” Holmes said, already rummaging through a tea chest. “It was a gift from dear Hollander.”
“If it means so much to you, then maybe you would like to keep it, or at least return the wretched thing to Bernard at the first opportunity.”
Holmes made no reply, but instead abandoned the chest to continue rummaging through other boxes. “Watson, I sincerely hope you have not been moving things around up here?”
“Perish the thought. Besides, I would have no idea where to start.”
“But they should be here, next to the obituary albums.”
“I promise you, I haven’t touched a thing. What are you looking for?”
Ignoring me, he went to work, pulling the tops off boxes and nine times out of ten not replacing them, having failed to find whatever he was looking for inside. All the time he muttered about my suspected interference in his filing “system”. I half decided to leave him with his books and boxes, but, while bed was calling me, my curiosity had been piqued by this sudden activity. What was he hoping to uncover?
“Aha,” he finally exclaimed, straddling a mahogany trunk to pluck a hefty-looking tome from a straining bookcase.
“What is it?”
“Butterworth’s Almanac of Medical Curiosities,” came the reply, as Holmes sat on the trunk and opened the book on his lap. “Have you not read it?”
“I can’t say I have. When was it published?”
“Oh, 1867 or thereabouts.”
“And you think it will help identify the bone?”
“Do you think I would go through all of this if it could not?”
“Stranger things have happened, Holmes.”
Perching on the edge of an overturned crate, I waited patiently for him to flick through the yellowed pages, pausing to peer at faded illustrations.
“No… no… no… no… no…” he said, dismissing one page after another.
“No luck then?”
Holmes’s face darkened, until he turned the last page and a sheet of paper fluttered down from where it had nestled between the endpaper and the back cover.
“There it is!” he exclaimed, throwing the almanac aside without a second thought.
“Careful, Holmes.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that old thing. Dreadful book, barely worth the pulp it’s printed on. No, this is what I was looking for.”
He snatched up the scrap of paper, poring over its text.
“Yes, this is more like it.”
“And do you intend to share exactly what it is?”
“It’s yours,” he replied. “Or at least it was, until I liberated it from one of your medical journals.”
“You did what?” I exclaimed, outraged.
“Come now, Watson. The crime took place some twenty years ago. Far too long to bear a grudge.”
“I’ve only just found out about it!”
“Are you going to sit there and split hairs all night, or shall I tell you what it says?”
“Perhaps I should have asked you to pack yourself off to the Goring when I had the chance. Go on then. Astound me.”
Holmes held the paper up so I could see a small illustration on the other side. Trying hard to ignore the jagged line where it had been ripped from one of my precious journals, I focused on the picture.
“Do you recognise anything?” Holmes asked.
“A scapula, but it has—”
“The same growth as our misplaced clavicle.”
“Not so much misplaced as misappropriated.”
“Whether it is in our possession or not, we now know what caused its mutation.”
He passed the paper over.
“Myositis ossificans progressiva,” I read.
“Quite literally ‘muscle turns progressively to bone’. If you read on you will discover that it is one of the rarest diseases in the world, afflicting just one in every two million, thank heavens.”
Read on I did, the horror of the condition becoming clear. According to the author, sufferers from the malady would in effect grow a second skeleton over the course of their life, extra bone sprouting from limbs, fusing them in place. Over time their joints would seize up, transforming them into living statues. The passage was short but chilling. I looked up at Holmes, barely able to imagine the torment the condition would bring.
“So the bone—” I began.
“Came from a victim of that dreadful condition,” concluded Holmes, “although how it ended up in that operating theatre I have no idea. But perhaps tomorrow, after a good night’s rest, we can throw ourselves on the mercy of your Harley Street colleagues. Surely someone in London must know more about the disease?”