by Andy Lane
The last thing I saw before I turned away was a tongue of flame licking up the flagpole on the hotel roof and setting fire to the Stars and Stripes.
Chapter 19
In which our heroes have breakfast in the ruins, and the Doctor makes a surprising offer.
There was, as is usual in Holmes's cases, no distinct finale, no crescendo and clash of cymbals to mark the end of the case. Rather, there was a long, slow diminuendo, a trailing off into silence. Even now, four years later, the case of the All-Consuming Fire still haunts us both, and yet it is that moment, as we wandered amid the ruins of San Francisco, that marks an end, of sorts.
We walked for a little while, the four of us. We were not heading for anywhere in particular. We just needed to get away from the scene of Azathoth's destruction.
The city was devastated. Cracks crossed streets and houses without any distinction. Many areas were in flames, or had been afire but were now charred and smoking. Whole streets had been blown up as makeshift fire-breaks, scattering bricks, twisted metal, items of crockery and personal items to the winds. One of those houses had been mine. In it I had wooed and won my wife. Now she was dead, and a part of me wished that I was too. I was tired. I was so tired.
We saw things as we walked that I cannot explain. At one point we turned a corner to find a group of Chinese men attacking a maddened bull with machetes. I wanted to intervene, but Bernice held me back. Later we had to hide from a group of soldiers who were firing indiscriminately at looters.
Later we found a quiet square on the edge of the city and sat there for a while, saying nothing and trying hard not to think. As we did so, a man started to sing in the sweetest, purest voice I have ever heard. His clothes were torn and covered in dust, but he did not seem to care, and neither did his listeners. Hearing him, I felt a small bud of hope flower from the ashes within me. Life went on. Life went on.
'Enrico Caruso,' the Doctor said eventually, after the man had finished his recital and had begun to argue with a companion. 'You are lucky to have heard him sing.'
'I wish I had been in a better mood to appreciate it,' Holmes said dryly.
'Forgive me, Doctor, but if you are to be believed, we are several thousand miles and nineteen years from home. Do you have any suggestions?'
The Doctor blinked owlishly.
'As usual, the time is no problem,' he said. 'It's the space that might be difficult.'
The Doctor walked off around the corner, telling us that he would be back in a moment. Indeed, he was. A miraculous contraption appeared out of the air before us, a blue cabinet of the Doctor's own construction that can travel through the aether at his direction. He told us that after walking round the corner he had made his way across America by rail and engaged passage in New York upon a ship bound for London. Once there he had located his miraculous time-travelling cabinet, which remained exactly where he had left it at the home of Professor Litefoot, and travelled back to the moment at which he had left us.
I did not know whether to believe him or not, at least, not until we travelled back to Baker Street in that same cabinet: nineteen years removed from the life of the world in as many minutes. I cannot help thinking that such power is dangerous, and yet I cannot think of safer hands to hold it than those of the Doctor. He is a strange little man, but he engenders such trust.
Bernice and I talked for some of those nineteen minutes. We were standing in a corner of the control chamber of the Doctor's mighty craft, a room whose oak-panelled walls and brass railings give no hint as to its true function. With the Doctor's permission Holmes had opened a round panel in one of the walls, and was asking pointed but, I fear, ill-informed questions as to the source of its energy. Ace was standing near Holmes. I assumed that she was watching to make sure that he did not interfere with the workings of the mechanism.
I asked Bernice if I might see her again. Perhaps, I offered, a night at the theatre might amuse her, or a meal at the Savoy. She smiled.
'I'm a good six hundred years too young for you,' she said, handing me a package wrapped up with string. 'Have this instead.'
'A gift? Really, I . . .'
'It's not a gift, it's some of my diary entries. You might find them useful when you come to write this case up.'
I started to protest, but the Doctor wandered over.
'Perhaps you would like to stay,' he said. 'There's room enough for more travellers.'
Bernice looked askance at him.
'Well, why not?' he asked defensively. 'I've been thinking that one of our problems is that there's just the three of us, cooped up in here, getting on each other's nerves. It might do us good to broaden the team a bit. Bring some fresh blood in.'
'This isn't Mission bloody Impossible,' Ace muttered.
'A tempting offer,' Holmes replied, shutting the panel decisively. 'I greatly wish to see more of these worlds you talk about, and the shining marvels that technology will bring us in the future. And yet...'
He glanced over at me, a question in his eyes. I nodded. I knew what he was thinking: the same arguments had occurred to me as well.
'. . .And yet I fear that we would be out of our depths. The adventure we have just shared with you has brought us both to the edge of our sanity.
The human brain cannot take too much information at once: it must be given time to sort, to index, to catalogue. We need our London around us once more, like a comfortable overcoat.'
'Perhaps...' I ventured.
'Yes, Watson?'
'Perhaps in a few years. When we have distanced ourselves from the events of the past few days.'
He smiled.
'A wise prescription. We would be happy to travel with you, Doctor, but not just yet. Not, at least, until I see that scoundrel Moriarty dangling at the end of a noose.'
We soon arrived in our sitting room at 221b Baker Street, frightening the life out of Mrs Hudson, who was tidying the room and had just popped out for a fresh duster. By the time she returned, Holmes and I were sitting in our usual seats and the Doctor and his companions had gone. I was still blushing after Bernice had kissed my cheek.
We discussed the entire affair over dinner with Mycroft and Lord Roxton, who had arrived safely back in London and was eager to hear of hunting opportunities in this New World. Mycroft undertook to pass a sanitized report back to His Excellence Pope Leo XIII. I did not envy him the task.
It seemed to me that the more Holmes and I recounted our adventures to Mycroft or Roxton, or discussed them with each other, the less real they became. It was as if by telling them as a story, they became a story.
Perhaps it is for the best. I still wake from nightmares in which I see Azathoth twisting in the flames. In some of them, I am burning too.
Holmes threw himself into more mundane cases immediately upon our return. In quick succession he solved the bizarre problem of the paradol chamber, investigated the loss of the British barque Sophy Anderson and cast light upon the grotesque affair of the monkey and the plywood violin.
Other adventures followed, and I was proud to stand with him during them.
I am ashamed to say that the memory of Bernice faded, and I married again. My wife and I had a happy few years together before a congenital weakness of the heart robbed me of her wit and her beauty. Had it not been for Holmes's friendship, I too would have perished, of a broken heart.
Following the success of my memoir entitled A Study in Scarlet, I embarked upon another account of my adventures with Holmes: The Sign of the Four.
To my surprise (and, if truth be told, to Holmes's chagrin) the public rather took to these little amusements, and so I began to write more of them. I composed A Scandal in Bohemia in shorter form as an experiment, and found that its popularity far outstripped either of the two longer works. I was a middling to fair physician, but I found that I had a talent for fiction. My medical colleague and co-author, Arthur Conan Doyle, became well known to the public. The noms-de-plume with which he protected the identities of Holmes and myself
became equally famous, but Doyle never revealed our real names. After a while, we both found ourselves in the curious position where we would answer either to our real names or to our fictional ones.
Secretly, we both preferred the latter.
On a number of occasions I had attempted to set down the circumstances of our meeting with the Doctor, and their shocking outcome. On each occasion I found myself floundering, wondering what people would make of them. It was Holmes, of course, who came up with the solution.
'Write for yourself, Watson,' he said. 'Write the book, let the doctor friend of yours pretty it up for you, and then lock it away somewhere.'
I did write the book, this book, and it helped. Seeing aspects of the narrative from the point of view of Bernice Summerfield helped me to find a wider perspective. The notes she had written on strange, yellow scraps of paper with a sticky margin, have been integrated into the text almost verbatim. I do not pretend to understand much of what she says, and some of it jars with my own recollections, but I admire the way that she says it.
When I look back and ask myself what I learned, I can say that I now know the universe to be a far stranger place than I had, in my prosaic British way, imagined. Far stranger, and far richer. I also find myself intolerant of the pronouncements of clerics of any sort. They may talk of Hell, but I have seen it.
And Holmes? He refuses to talk about his brother Sherringford. He seems to have retreated inside himself He is dismissive of love, friendship and family ties.
He has also taken to wearing gloves.
There is a confession that I have to make. I have suppressed a deal of material in preparing this narrative, even though it will never see print. Our interview with Doctor Minor in the Broadmoor asylum, for instance, is too appalling to consider setting down on paper, and the circumstances surrounding the mysterious deaths of Patrick Grice-Patterson and Cardinal Tosca on the island of Uffa, germane though they are, would only serve to confuse an already fragmentary account.
And now we sit here, Holmes and I, warming ourselves before the fire. I write these words in my ledger and Holmes busies himself with the newspaper. It is four years to the day since we said goodbye to the strangest man we have ever met.
I sip my brandy. Rain splatters across the window. There is a storm in the offing.
Holmes looks up and smiles at me. I smile back, and wonder whether we will ever see the Doctor and his companions again.
More rain, like gravel thrown against the glass.
And thunder, echoing far away.
Epilogue
March 1843 - Jabalhabad, India
As Bernice read the last few words, she shivered.
'Any good?' Ace asked casually.
'Not bad. Want to read it?'
'Nah. I'll wait till the film comes out.'
Bernice laughed.
'I don't know how much of this is Watson and how much is Conan Doyle, but whoever it was is all right,' she said. 'It's a bit verbose at times, but the plot moves fast. A lot of the facts have been changed, mind you. I don't remember half of these things happening. And it's odd reading about Holmes and Watson, rather than-'
'What about the characterization?' Ace interrupted.
'He's got you down perfectly, but I think he misses the essential me.'
Ace grinned.
'What about the Professor?' she asked.
Bernice glanced at the Doctor, who was resting his chin on the handle of his umbrella and gazing sombrely across the lawn towards the old man and Siger Holmes, father-to-be of Sherringford, Mycroft and Sherlock.
'A good question,' she said quietly.
The Doctor's gaze shifted from his former self to his latest companion. The corners of his mouth twitched slightly in what passed for a smile.
'A question,' Bernice said.
'Fire away,' he replied, his voice muffled by the umbrella handle.
'I wouldn't say that too loudly when Ace is around.'
This time his mouth curved into a definite grin. Ace snorted, but her eyes were laughing.
'This book...' Bernice continued.
'What about it?'
'Well, a lot of the material about Victorian London is bizarre. Odd.
Grotesque, in fact.'
'That's the way it was.'
'But surely there wasn't really an air-driven underground railway running out of Euston?'
'There was indeed.'
'And strychnine as an additive to beer, and sugar being refined with bull's blood?'
'Without a doubt.'
'And the Fenians building a submarine to attack the Royal Navy with?'
'Indubitably.'
'The more I delve into history, the weirder it gets.'
'My sentiments exactly.,'
'Something I don't get,' Ace said, frowning. The setting sun cast a rose-tinted glow across her face, and she squinted. The Doctor smiled at her.
'Go on,' he said.
'Well, the big worm-thing, Azathoth, was turning its worshippers into the lobster things - the rakshassi.'
'Indeed it was.'
'Why?,
'Ah. A good question. I suspect that Azathoth was still in the larval stage of its race when it developed its powers, and had become trapped there, a mutant imago, if you like. Perhaps, had it been normal, its adult form would have resembled the rakshassi.'
'So it made everyone love it and then made them look like mum and dad,'
she said scornfully.
'It's only a theory' the Doctor replied, affronted.
'It's well weird, that's what it is.'
The Doctor gazed across at where the girl sat painting the landscape.
'Families are,' he murmured.
Across the lawn, the old man pulled a gleaming Hunter watch from the fob pocket of his waistcoat and consulted it. Unconsciously, the Doctor mirrored the action. Bernice gazed from one to the other, stunned more by the fact that it was the same watch than the same person.
'It's five past time to leave,' he said.
They rose. The Doctor gestured to his two companions to go first, sighed deeply, then raised his hat to the old man and walked away.
He didn't look back.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
