“Really, Holmes,” I gasped. “I thought you’d been reading Bram Stoker!”
“Who?” said Holmes.
The Vampire and the Monster were one, unmoving mass, and a change began to take place in that pile of remains. Both corpses—if that be the correct term—as one began to quickly liquefy into a huge, repulsive mass of whitish slime, which began to dissipate. It stunk in a way that reminded me of the dead corpses on a battlefield, and I moved away from it, even as the fluid sunk into the ground and became reduced to a stain, wisps of white gas coming from it.
The remaining Shadows could be heard conferring amongst themselves, each shade of me communicating in hushed, obscured tones with its counterpart of Holmes. Almost as one they could be seen faintly in the miasma again, but stepping back into their own carriages and closing the doorways. Holmes laughed, a touch of hysteria in his chortle, but he brought himself under control.
“Just what I would have advised. Time to return home.”
I had been leaning on Holmes for support. My leg was aching, my blood was pounding in my ears, but I found I could ignore the feelings, the situation still seemed so unreal as to prevent me feeling panicked even though my heart was racing, my mind was calmer than it would normally be in this situation. I’d found my footing and Holmes, satisfied I was stable, had just let my arms and shoulder loose when the Station Master appeared before us, holding a pistol. He shouted at the Shadows in the carriages.
“Very well! I shall deal with this myself!”
Holmes spoke sharply. “They know, don’t they? This is not the natural order of things? There is a risk, a danger of sorts in bringing…us together, isn’t there? They don’t want to end up affected by that danger, do they? But you don’t care, because your obsession rules your mind, overrides even your sense of self-preservation—just as you yourself said you feared it would! In that sense, you are a madman.”
“Irrelevant,” the Station Master said, and he extended his arm and pointed the pistol at Holmes’s face.
There was a noise and the Station Master turned away from us. There was someone standing behind him, presumably whomever it was had entered from the doorway behind him. It was clear from Moriarty’s face as he turned that this visitor was a surprise to him, as much as to us.
I say this visitor was ‘someone’ but even as I do, I need to qualify the description. The new arrival to our scene was not a man, that much was clear. It was some sort of device, a construct, in the rough form of a man!
It had arms and legs and a torso and a head, but they were fashioned from a copper-coloured metal of some kind. It stood at about five and half feet in height and was very slender in shape, and it was terrifying.
I thought at once of the possibility that a man was concealed in some sort of burnished armour, but the legs were almost like thin brass pipes, they did not conceal a man, or even a child’s lower limbs. The aspect of it that transfixed me the most was the thing’s head. It was larger than an average person’s, and had odd little metal flags and cones that were moving on it, like portions of a clock, or some small rotating weather vane. And the eyes were round and green, and a faint glow radiated from them, giving the thing a ghostly aspect. If I were not a man of the modern age I am sure I would have assumed the thing were some demon of the pit, some spectre, but there was something mechanical about the thing.
It spoke, the voice emanating from the head, but from no mouth I could discern. Its voice was male, clear and fluid, quite beautiful, in fact.
“No,” it said, and raised one arm and hand. A puff of gas flew forwards and into Moriarty’s face—his eyes bulged and his skin whitened, he screamed a horrible noise—then a rattle-like sound escaped his lips.
The Station Master died, but ere his body even fell to the ground, the thing caught it by the collar of the shirt, with swiftness and economy of movement so precise it seemed like a flywheel on a motor whirring into action, and held it, so that the dead man did not hit the floor, only his legs folded under him.
The thing held the Station Master’s body like a doll, effortlessly. It turned its awful face at us, and shook the body as if gesturing with a toy.
“I can use bits of this,” it said. It ‘looked’ at Holmes.
“We’re not all like him,” it said, “but too many of us are. I certainly was. Until someone like you made me see the error of my ways, made me see the misery I caused and how profoundly…irrational that behaviour was.”
Holmes’s mouth was open; not a word came out.
The creature held up its free ‘hand’ and a small aperture opened, from which a greenish light emanated, dim at first, then it became brighter.
“A pity I had to get thrown off a cliff over a waterfall to achieve that, but that’s how these things go.”
The light brightened, fiercely, and I had to shut my eyes.
I did not faint, I did not collapse. All I did, or at least all I remember doing, was close my eyes for a few seconds to shield them from the bright light. But when I opened them again it was clear that my recollection was false, or, failing that, some sort of transference of time and distance had taken place.
I was standing, dressed in exactly the same clothes as when I had shut my eyes, but I was outdoors and it was daylight! Holmes stood next me, in the same relative spot to me as before, and he looked confused: a rare sight, I must emphasise. Where we were was more incredible. We stood in the blackened ruins of some sort of wooden structure, some place that had been demolished or destroyed by fire. It was Holmes that spoke the impossible. He leant down and for some reason ran his fingers through the blackened earth we stood on.
“We’re in the roundhouse, Watson, but it’s been burnt to the ground—and these ashes are cold!” I imitated my friend’s actions, and the pure insanity of what he was saying made sense to me! I looked around and could see, strewn here and there not far from us on the ground the gutted fragments of the walls, the blackened rails, the charred and crumpled sleepers.
“Halloa!” It was Gregson, strolling along, notebook in hand.
Holmes looked him dead in the eye. I started to speak, but my friend silenced me.
“Dreadful mess here, Holmes,” Gregson said.
Then he turned to a passing worker, a scrawny old fellow with a wisp of beard pushing a trolley of grass cuttings. “This body you found, it was in this building, burnt, was it?”
“Yessir,” the fellow said. “Sad it were, he were well liked.”
Holmes and I looked at one another. “The engineer, Twykham?” Holmes said quietly.
The old man looked puzzled. “Engineer? No, sir, it were the local Station Master from Endover. Mister Moriarty.”
Holmes and I were shaken—no—profoundly disturbed by these events.
We agreed to repair to a nearby public house, but, once we had settled there, Holmes became grim-faced, withdrawn; he was visibly pained, his hand rubbing his forehead. I wanted to talk about what we had seen, share our recollections, but he stared at me and shook his head.
“I require some…time to ponder what we have been through,” he said.
He withdrew to a corner with a drink he didn’t touch and began to smoke. I knew this mood, but for once felt just as isolated as my brilliant associate, isolated from the everyday ruminations experienced by my fellow mortals. For once, as I fancied Holmes feels often, I was in a stream of ideas so rapid, so vast, even frightening, that none could be trusted to hear them.
So, whilst Holmes smoked, I took out my journal, and wrote the account you have read above.
I do not know how to categorise it.
So Ends the Journals of John H. Watson
From the diary of Sherlock Holmes
Watson and I could not find the words to adequately communicate after the bizarre experience of The Lost Specialist. We returned to Baker Street with a black cloud hovering over us, spo
iling that ease between us, that trust that respects silence. Now, the gulf without words was ominous; would one of us find cause to call the other a madman if we spoke of what we knew we had both seen and heard, however impossible it must have been?
This distraction was to be the cause of my terrible, terrible failure. We alighted from our cab and Watson unlocked the door to 221B.
A second too slow, I noticed a strange, stray shine of metal, a loop of copper-coloured wire poking out from under the front doormat! I tried to pull Watson back from the doorway—but it was too late—Watson had stepped through! An electrical connection was formed and a terrible pulse of force rippled through the doorway, and before my horrified gaze an aperture into black and purple, swirling voids appeared! A breathing maw of roiling nothingness, in a hole in thin air!
It sucked Watson in, before he could even scream! Then it closed in a blink, as if it had never been there.
I ripped up the doormat and uncovered a metal and glass plate over a bizarre, blinking, whirring device—an engine of some dark design! The finish of the craftsmanship reminded me of many of Moriarty’s tools, such as those fabricated at his direction by the blind mechanic Von Herder, and for the first time, I wondered if this was why the professor’s lead engineer had reputedly torn out his own eyes years ago, perhaps when the first work on this evil device had begun.
I believe the machine is a multi-versal transporter; a cut-down-in-size version of the locomotive we escaped. The perverse, but calculating, Moriarty’s fail-safe: If he did not vanquish myself and Watson in the roundhouse he planned to dispatch us with this trans-dimensional booby-trap!
I pulled the wiring of the device open and saw a shimmering, perfect diamond powering the mechanism, and also saw it sparking and heating—smoke beginning to belch out of it. There was no time; I was not prepared to lose the only friend I have, the only friend a man could ever need, and so, I studied the arrangement of the device, and with no time to do anything but hope, and noting a congruence with more commonplace electrical and magnetic generators, I ripped two wires out, and exposed two bare ends, and connected the wires.
There was a boom and flash and I—well, to a passer-by, I imagine—it appeared as if I vanished.
Then I was back, standing on the doorstep to Baker Street, the front door now closed, as if naught awry had happened. I pulled my own keys out of my pocket and began to open the door, and just as I did so I felt my glance drawn to the brass doctor’s plate on the outside of the building that reads ‘JOHN H. WATSON, M.D.’; a plate Watson had insisted upon with his recent decision to make our address both his lodgings and consulting rooms since Mrs Hudson’s other tenant had vacated.
The plate moved! It literally rippled, and I’m sure I frowned in puzzlement—and then, finally, it ceased wavering in form and cast, to reveal, to my gradually awakening understanding, the new name of the doctor that practises from these premises, living as my room-mate, friend, and biographer…Watson had been flung into the bridge between realities as it passed through this exact spot, at this juncture in the worlds of infinite possibilities, this spot where Sherlock Holmes dwells, and so, therefore a doorway opens to his residence; but beyond that fact, just WHO might I reside with, in worlds of infinite eventuality?
My mind became clouded, buzzing with visions of the ghosts of what might be, but this was no reverie; I could feel the thoughts solidifying; facts I knew to be were changing, my knowledge of my past, my future distorting. I tried to hang on, with all the concentration I have mastered my entire life, to keep hold of who I truly was and what I sought, of the friend I must rescue.
Though it seemed childish, I spoke aloud, in desperation: “Once I step through this door, the new reality beyond it will become mine. But if I can survive the experience of what lies beyond I can keep searching until I find the way to bring you back, Watson. For somewhere in my possible futures there is a way for me to pick the door that will lead me to home, and thence the scientific method to restore you. I just have to find it, though it takes me a lifetime, no, an endless array of lifetimes, old friend. I hope I will know when I have come to the right world, and surely will know when I am in the wrong one.”
The End…
…of Only One Reality…
The Forlorn Death of Sally at the Crossroads
Dennis O’Neil
All this happened a while after that business with the Clantons in Tombstone. Wyatt’s brother Virgil had gotten himself shot up and Wyatt asked me to help get Virgil and his family to California, where they’d likely be safe. I told Wyatt I would, but I didn’t have much heart for it. Truth is, I was weary of politics and killing, and my cough was getting worse. I didn’t like the color of what I was spitting up, either, and I was broke—being Wyatt Earp’s friend brought me a certain amount of recognition, but it didn’t put a thing in my pocket. So I told Wyatt that I’d meet him in Tucson in a few weeks and lit out for a town I’d heard about called Feeley, where a rail head they’d just built was bringing in cowboys and steel pushers with salaries to lose. I figured I’d help with the losing part while I got myself together, then head for Tucson.
I got off the stage round noon in a one-horse town called Keppel’s Crossing intending to stretch my legs. I asked the driver when he’d be pushing on to Feeley and he said he wouldn’t, not before the next morning at the earliest.
“Why might that be?” I asked him.
He told me that storms had washed out the trail between Keppel’s Crossing and Feeley and nothing had passed between the towns for two-three days. He told me I was stuck and I couldn’t argue, so I set out to make the best of it. There was no room at the local boarding house—seems I wasn’t the only stranger who had gotten stuck. I finally found a stable with an empty stall that I could rent for the night. I wasn’t happy about sleeping on straw with animals for companions, but I guessed it was better than spending the night outdoors.
Then I strolled out onto the unpaved main street and began seeking whatever fortune might be found in a place like this.
It was a quiet day, quiet and ugly. Fat, mean clouds were low in the sky, an ornery wind whipping the street. My best prospect seemed to be a salon called Yellow Rosie’s and that’s where I went. But I didn’t get there right away. I got stopped twice, first by an old man, little fellow wearing ragged duds a couple of sizes too small and smelling like a charnel house.
“Mister,” he asked, “have you seen my Sally?”
“Who might this Sally be?” I asked back at him.
Maybe he didn’t hear me. “She run off again an’ I don’t know where she’s gone,” he said in a quivery voice.
I touched the brim of my hat and said, “I wish you good luck with finding her.” I continued toward the saloon. A few raindrops fell around me and I started to run.
A big man with a belly the size of a bay window, driving a creaking buckboard with a canvas-covered load on the bed, halted his team alongside me. He called for me to stop and there was no reason not to. Wheezing and huffing, he climbed down; pulled a Spencer rifle from where it had been laying on the seat, pointed it at me, and gave me a hard look. Up close, I could see a star pinned to his vest.
“You’d be the sheriff,” I said.
“Das’nt forget it. And you’d be?”
“I was born John Henry Holliday.”
“The Holliday that was mixed up in the shootout down to Deadwood?”
“I wish I could say no, but that’d be a lie.”
“You packin’, Holliday?”
I hesitated, not wanting to surrender my meagre arsenal but not wanting to cross the local law, either, seeing as how I was new in town and didn’t know how the game was played thereabouts. I reached under my belt and hauled out my derringer, a lady’s gun I’d taken off a sharpie in Waco a while back.
The sheriff tucked the rifle under an arm and relieved me of the derringer.
“I’ll keep that in mind next time I hunt butterflies.”
He shoved the rifle into my belly and said, “You got a smart mouth. I come a long way and I’m dead tired and I’d sooner shoot you as look at you. Maybe you tell me where you was night ’fore last. Wouldn’ta been Feeley, would it?”
“Why?”
“ ‘Cause somebody busted into the bank and made off with a loada gold coins.”
“Robbery’s not in my line. But so you can be peaceful about it, on Tuesday night I was enjoying a game of cards with some lawmen in Tombstone. It’s a story that’d easy to verify with an exchange of telegrams.”
“Maybe I will.”
“When do I get my property back?”
“Stop by my office on your way outta town if I ain’t arrested you by then.”
He mounted the buckboard and went to wherever he was headed and I dashed toward the saloon. Before I got there, the rain started.
That’s how I come to be playing cards in a saloon called Yellow Rosie’s late one Thursday afternoon. Yellow Rosie’s was busy: couple of cowpokes at the bar, some farmhands, some laboring men, and a bunch in pricey clothes who, judging by their talk and accents, weren’t from around these parts. The storm had made Keppel’s Crossing pretty near a bustling metropolis. I got into conversation with two gents who’d made a bonanza selling ranch land to the railroad and mistakenly reckoned they knew how to play poker. We agreed on a few rules and the next thing I knew my new friends were sharing a table and a deck of cards with me and this other fellow, rail-thin, dressed in a grey suit he hadn’t bought within a thousand miles of where we were sitting judging by the cut of it. He had the keenest gaze I’d ever seen, his eyes bright and as steady as nailheads. He watched for about an hour and then, as the barkeep was lighting the kerosene lamps, he asked if he could play a hand or two. From the sound of him, he came from England, but I figured that he had some American money and it’d be as spendable as what I was taking off the ranchers. I used my foot to push a chair away from the table and the Britisher sat down.
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