Selections from The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by edited by John Joseph Adams

There was a sound behind me and I spun around, fumbling in my pocket for my revolver. It had been a shallow pop, as of someone opening their mouth in preparation to speak. I held my breath and aimed the revolver from my waist. There was nothing. The silence, the darkness felt loaded, brimming with secrets and something more terrible . . . something . . .

  "Holmes," I said. But he would not be there, he was not foolish, not so stupid to return here when he was wanted for some of the most terrible murders—

  "My friend."

  I started, tried to gauge where the voice had come from. I tightened my grip on the pistol and swung it slowly left and right, ready to shoot should anything move. I was panicked, terrified beyond belief. My stomach knotted and cramped with the idea of a knife parting its skin and delving deeper.

  "Is that you Holmes?"

  More silence for a while, so that I began to think I was hearing things. It grew darker for a moment as if something had passed in front of the moon; I even glanced up, but there was nothing in the sky and the moon was its usual wan self.

  "You feel it too!" the voice said.

  "Holmes, please show yourself."

  "Go to my rooms. Mrs Hudson hasn't heard of things yet, she will let you in and I will find my own way up there."

  He did not sound mad. He sounded different, true, but not mad.

  "Holmes, you have to know—"

  "I am aware of what you saw, Watson, and you would do well to keep your revolver drawn and aimed ahead of you. Go to my rooms, back into a corner, hold your gun. For your sanity, your peace of mind, it has to remain between us for a time."

  "I saw . . . Holmes, I saw . . . "

  "My rooms."

  And then he was gone. I did not hear him leave, caught sight of nothing moving away in the dark, but I knew that my old friend had departed. I wished for a torch to track him, but Holmes would have evaded the light. And in that thought I found my continuing belief in Holmes's abilities, his genius, his disregard for the normal levels of reasoning and measures of intelligence.

  The madness he still had, but . . . I could not help but trust him.

  From the distance, far, far away, I heard what may have been a scream. There were foxes in London, and thousands of wild dogs, and some said that wolves still roamed the forgotten byways of this sprawling city. But it had sounded like a human cry.

  He could not possibly have run that far in such short a time.

  Could he?

  Mrs Hudson greeted me and was kind enough to ignore my preoccupation as I climbed the stairs to Holmes's rooms.

  There was another scream in the night before Holmes appeared.

  I had opened the window and was standing there in the dark, looking out over London and listening to the sounds. The city was so much quieter during the night, which ironically made every sound that much louder. The barking of a dog swept across the neighbourhood, the crashing of a door echoed from walls and back again. The scream . . . this time it was human, I could have no doubt of that, and although even further away than the one I had heard earlier I could still make out its agony. It was followed seconds later by another cry, this one cut short. There was nothing else.

  Go to my rooms, back into a corner, hold your gun, Holmes had said. I remained by the window. Here was escape, at least, if I needed it. I would probably break my neck in the fall, but at least I was giving myself a chance.

  I've come to his rooms! I thought. Fly to a spider. Chicken to a fox's den. But even though his voice had been very different from usual—more strained—I could not believe that the Holmes who had spoken to me minutes before was out there now, causing those screams.

  I thought briefly of Detective Inspector Jones, and hoped that he was well.

  "I am sure that he is still alive," Holmes said from behind me. "He is too stupid to not be."

  I spun around and brought up the revolver. Holmes was standing just inside the door. He had entered the room and closed the door behind him without me hearing. He was breathing heavily, as if he had just been running, and I stepped aside to let in the moonlight, terrified that I would see the black stain of blood on his hands and sleeves.

  "How do you know I was thinking of Jones?" I asked, astounded yet again by my friend's reasoning.

  "Mrs Hudson told me that he had been here looking for me. I knew then that you would be his next port of call in his search, and that you would inevitably have been forced by your high morals to relay what you have so obviously seen. You know he is out there now, hunting me down. And the scream . . . it sounded very much like a man, did it not?"

  "Turn on the light, Holmes," I said.

  I think he shook his head in the dark. "No, it will attract attention. Not that they do not know where we are . . . they must . . . fear, fear smells so sweet . . . to bees . . . "

  "Holmes. Turn on the light or I will shoot you." And right then, standing in the room where my friend and I had spent years of our lives in pleasurable and business discourse, I was telling the truth. I was frightened enough to pull the trigger, because Holmes's intellect would bypass my archaic revolver, however mad he sounded. He would beat me. If he chose to—if he had lured me here to be his next victim—he would kill me.

  "Very well," my friend said. "But prepare yourself Watson. It has been a somewhat eventful twenty-four hours."

  The lamp flicked alight.

  I gasped. He looked like a man who should be dead.

  "Do not lower that revolver!" he shouted suddenly. "Keep it on me now, Watson. After what you think you saw me doing, lower your guard and you are likely to shoot me at the slightest sound or movement. That's right. Here. Aim it here." He thumped his chest and I pointed the gun that way, weak and shocked though I was.

  "Holmes . . . you look terrible!"

  "I feel worse." From Holmes that was a joke, but I could not even raise a smile. Indeed, I could barely draw a breath. Never had Holmes looked so unkempt, exhausted and bedraggled. His normally immaculate clothing was torn, muddied and wet, and his hair was sticking wildly away from his scalp. His hands were bloodied—I saw cuts there, so at least for the moment I could believe that it was his own blood—his cheek was badly scratched in several places and there was something about his eyes . . . wide and wild, they belied the calm his voice conveyed.

  "You're mad," I said, unable to prevent the words from slipping out.

  Holmes smiled, and it was far removed from that maniacal grin he had offered me as he crouched over the dying man.

  "Do not jump to conclusions, Watson. Have you not learned anything in our years together?"

  My hand holding the gun was starting to shake, but I kept it pointing at my friend across the room.

  "I have to take you in, you know that? I will have to take you to the station. I cannot . . . I cannot . . . "

  "Believe?"

  I nodded. He was already playing his games, I knew. He would talk me around, offer explanations, convince me that the victims deserved to die or that he had been attacked . . . or that there was something far, far simpler eluding me. He would talk until he won me over, and then his attack would come.

  "I cannot believe, but I must," I said, a new-found determination in my voice.

  "Because you saw it? Because you saw me killing someone you must believe that I did, in fact, kill?"

  "Of course."

  Holmes shook his head. He frowned and for an instant he seemed distant, concentrating on something far removed from Baker Street. Then he glanced back at me, looked to the shelf above the fire and sighed.

  "I will smoke my pipe, if you don't mind Watson. It will put my mind at rest. And I will explain what I know. Afterwards, if you still wish to take me in, do so. But you will thereby be condemning countless more to their deaths."

  "Smoke," I said, "and tell me." He was playing his games, playing them every second . . .

  Holmes lit a pipe and sat in his armchair, legs drawn up so that the pipe almost rested on his knees. He looked at the far wall, not at me where I
remained standing by the window. I lowered the revolver slightly, and this time Holmes did not object.

  I could see no knives, no mess on his hands other than his own smeared blood. No mess on his chin from the masticated flesh of the folks he had killed.

  But that proved nothing.

  "Have you ever looked into a mirror and really concentrated on the person you see there? Try it, Watson, it is an interesting exercise. After an hour of looking you see someone else. You see, eventually, what a stranger sees, not the composite picture of facial components with which you are so familiar, but individual parts of the face—the big nose, the close-together-eyes. You see yourself as a person. Not as you."

  "So what are you trying to say?"

  "I am saying that perception is not definite, nor is it faultless." Holmes puffed at his pipe, then drew it slowly away from his mouth. His eyes went wide and his brow furrowed. He had had some thought, and habit made me silent for a minute or two.

  He glanced back up at me then, but said nothing. He looked more troubled than ever.

  "I saw you killing a man, Holmes," I said. "You killed him and you laughed at me, and then you tore him open and stole his heart."

  "The heart, yes," he said, looking away and disregarding me again. "The heart, the brain . . . parts, all part of the one . . . constituents of the same place . . . " He muttered on until his voice had all but vanished, though his lips still moved.

  "Holmes!"

  "It has gone quiet outside. They are coming." He said it very quietly, looked up at me from sad, terrified eyes, and I felt a cool finger run down my spine. They're coming. He did not mean Jones or the police, he did not mean anyone. No man scared Holmes as much as he was then.

  "Who?" I asked. But he darted from his seat and ran at me, shoving me aside so that we stood on either side of the window.

  "Listen to me, Watson. If you are my friend, if you have faith and loyalty and if you love me, you have to believe two things in the next few seconds if we are to survive: the first is that I am not a murderer; the second is that you must not trust your eyes, not for however long this may take. Instinct and faith, that is what you can believe in, because they cannot change that. It is too inbuilt, perhaps, too ingrained, I don't know . . . "

  He was mumbling again, drifting in and out of coherence. And I knew that he could have killed me. He had come at me so quickly, my surprise was so complete, that I had plain forgotten the gun in my hand.

  And now, the denial.

  Doubt sprouted in my mind and grew rapidly as I saw the look on Holmes's face. I had seen it before, many times. It was the thrill of the chase, the excitement of discovery, the passion of experience, the knowledge that his reasoning had won out again. But underlying it all was a fear so profound that it sent me weak at the knees.

  "Holmes, what are they?"

  "You ask What, Watson, not Who. Already you're half way to believing. Quiet! Look! There, in the street!"

  I looked. Running along the road, heading straight for the front door of Holmes's building, came Sherlock Holmes himself.

  "I think they will come straight for me," Holmes whispered. "I am a threat."

  "Holmes . . . " I could say little. The recent shocks had numbed me, and seemed now to be pulling me apart, hauling reality down a long, dark tunnel. I felt distanced from my surroundings even though, at that moment, I knew that I needed to be as alert and conscious of events as possible.

  "Don't trust your eyes!" he hissed at me.

  That man, he had been running like Holmes, the same loping stride, the same flick of the hair with each impact of foot upon pavement. The same look of determination on his face.

  "Faith, Watson," Holmes said. "Faith in God if you must, but you must have faith in me, us, our friendship and history together. For there, I feel, will lie the answer."

  There came the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  "I will get them, it, the thing on the floor," Holmes said, "and you shoot it in the head. Empty your revolver, one shot may not be enough. Do not baulk, my friend. This thing here, tonight, is far bigger than just the two of us. It is London we're fighting for. Maybe more."

  I could not speak. I wished Jones were there with us, someone else to make decisions and take blame. Faith, I told myself, faith in Holmes.

  I had seen him kill a man.

  Don't trust your eyes.

  He was bloodied and dirtied from the chase, hiding from the crimes he had committed.

  I am not a murderer.

  And then the door burst open and Sherlock Holmes stood in the doorway lit by the lamp—tall, imposing, his clothes tattered and muddied, his face scratched, hands cut and bloodied—and I had no more time.

  The room suddenly smelled of sweet honey, and turning my head slightly to look at the Holmes standing with me at the window, I caught sight of something from the corner of my eye. The Holmes in the doorway seemed to have some things buzzing about his head.

  I looked straight at him and they were no more. Then he gave me the same smile I had seen as he murdered that man.

  "Watson!" Holmes said, reaching across the window to grasp my arms. "Faith!"

  And then the new visitor smashed the lamp with a kick, and leapt at us.

  I backed away. The room was dark now, lit only by pale moonlight and the paler starlight filtering through London's constant atmosphere. I heard a grunt, a growl, the smashing of furniture and something cracking as the two Holmes tumbled into the centre of the room. I quickly became confused as to which was which.

  "Away!" I heard one of them shout. "Get away! Get away!" He sounded utterly terrified. "Oh God, oh sanity, why us!"

  I aimed my revolver but the shapes rolled and twisted, hands at each other's necks, eyes bulging as first one and then the other Holmes presented his face for me to shoot. I stepped forward nonetheless, still smelling that peculiar honey stench, and something stung my ankle, a tickling shape struggling inside my trousers. I slapped at it and felt the offender crushed against my leg.

  Bees.

  "Watson!" Holmes shouted. I pulled down the curtains to let in as much moonlight as I could. One Holmes had the other pinned to the floor, hands about his neck. "Watson, shoot it!" the uppermost Holmes commanded. His face was twisted with fear, the scratches on his cheek opened again and leaking blood. The Holmes on the floor thrashed and gurgled, choking, and as I looked down he caught my eye. Something there commanded me to watch, held my attention even as the Holmes on top exhorted me to shoot, shoot, shoot it in the face!

  The vanquished Holmes calmed suddenly and brought up a hand holding a handkerchief. He wiped at the scratches on his face. They disappeared. The blood smudged a little, but with a second wipe it too had gone. The scratches were false, the blood fake.

  The Holmes on top stared for a couple of seconds, and then looked back at me. A bee crawled out of his ear and up over his forehead. And then the scratches on his own cheek faded and disappeared before my eyes.

  He shimmered. I saw something beneath the flesh-toned veneer, something crawling and writhing and separate, yet combined in a whole to present an image of solidness . . .

  Bees left this whole and buzzed around the impostor's head. Holmes was still struggling on the floor, trying to prise away hands that were surely not hands.

  The image pulsed and flickered in my vision, and I remembered Holmes's words: you cannot trust your eyes . . . instinct and faith, that is what you can believe in . . .

  I stepped forward, pressed the revolver against the uppermost Holmes's head and pulled the trigger. Something splashed out across the floor and walls, but it was not blood.

  Blood does not try to crawl away, take flight, buzz at the light.

  My pulling the trigger—that act bridging doubt and faith—changed everything.

  The thing that had been trying to kill Holmes shimmered in the moonlight. It was as if I was seeing two images being quickly flickered back and forth, so fast that my eyes almost merged them into one, surr
eal picture. Holmes . . . the thing . . . Holmes . . . the thing. And the thing, whatever it is, was monstrous.

  "Again!" Holmes shouted. "Again, and again!"

  I knelt so that my aim did not stray towards my friend and fired again at that horrible shape. Each impact twisted it, slowing down the alternating of images as if the bullets were blasting free truth itself. What I did not know then, but would realise later, was that the bullets were defining the truth. Each squeeze of the trigger dealt that thing another blow, not only physically but also in the nature of my beliefs. I knew it to be a false Holmes now, and that made it weak.

  The sixth bullet hit only air.