The Finality Problem

by G. S. Denning

  “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, Ho
lmes! 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—”

  “Holmes!”

  “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?”