“Indeed, that was my estimation, more or less. Seventy cases of significant interest in a period of sixteen years. Leaving aside my own earlier cases, how many cases do you suppose I found in the literature that either presented, or that I could deduce presented, similar features of interest in the prior sixteen years, and the sixteen before that?”
“Why…well, some that were truly worthy would never be uncovered, or the relevant features that made them recognizable not brought out. But even so. For the same area I would guess forty or fifty?”
“Seven, Watson. Seven in the prior sixteen years. And four in the sixteen before that.”
I was somewhat taken aback by the coldness of his features—a coldness not directed at me by any means, but still uncomfortable to behold. “The records may be incomplete—”
“Undoubtedly, Watson,” he said. “Yet not, I think, nearly incomplete enough to explain this discrepancy. Or,” he continued, the grimness clear in his tone, “the incompleteness may be an explanation in a very different way.”
Before I could reply to this extraordinary statement, I heard the sounds of the hansom outside the now-open window at the same time as Holmes. “Our guest has arrived, however, and further discussion might as well take place in her presence.”
Moments later, Miss Anne LeChance entered. Holmes showed her to a seat, then seated himself in his accustomed armchair and studied her in silence for a moment.
She shifted uncomfortably. “Mr. Holmes? Is there something amiss with my dress or, perhaps, my hair again?”
“Not at all,” he replied. “You present a perfect picture today, Miss LeChance. It is clear you took great pains to address any minor failings of your first hasty visit.”
I had noticed by this point that Miss LeChance’s current attire had narrower sleeves, and my swift impression of her figure as she entered indicated that she was now wearing the fashionable S-bend corset.
“Thank you, Mr. Holmes. Now, have you any news for me?”
“I have examined your problem, in light of some other most interesting discoveries I have made in the last week or so, and I believe I have made considerable progress towards an answer, yes. If you will indulge me by answering a few questions, I think a full resolution will be forthcoming.”
She nodded. “Mr. Holmes, you may be assured of my full co-operation.”
“Excellent!” He sprang to his feet. “I have been somewhat remiss; might I get you some tea or other refreshment? Our discussion may take some small time.”
“Tea will be sufficient, Mr. Holmes.”
“Watson? Will you have anything?”
“The same for me, Holmes.” I tried to keep my voice as natural as might be. An outsider, I was sure, would not notice a thing, but to me Holmes’s actions were clearly unusual. I had seen similar minor play-acting when he was preparing a trap for some adversary, but in this case I had not the slightest idea of his intent.
As he turned from setting the kettle on the gas, one hand flew outward, so swiftly I could scarce see it, and something streaked through the air toward Miss LeChance.
But to my astonishment, the young lady’s hand came up with the speed of thought and with a snap had caught the flying object—which proved to be a small sack of some sort. “Holmes!” I remonstrated. “What in the world—”
“My apologies, Watson. And to you, Miss LeChance. It was, I admit, a risky means of verifying a somewhat shaky chain of inference, but I preferred a swift answer over a rather extended period of circumlocution.”
“You could have injured her!” While I had every faith in my friend, I was still outraged by this risk he had taken.
“Hardly, Watson. Observe that this bag is filled with a mixture of small seeds and cotton; it might have stung, had it struck her wrongly, but would have left scarce a bruise, if that. The object was not to harm, but—”
“But to test my reaction,” Miss LeChance said, her tones bespeaking both admiration and chagrin. “Well done, Mr. Holmes.”
He gave a small bow. “Thank you. We can proceed, then, without further pretense as to the true nature of this case.”
“I trust you will be enlightening me on whatever it is that the both of you now understand?” I asked. “For I admit to being now entirely at sea.”
The look that Holmes gave me then was a queer one—hooded, with a mingling of sympathy, anger, and comfort that carried a great foreboding, and reminded me strangely of that most peculiar look that Miss LeChance had previously given me.
“Of course, Watson,” he said after a moment. “You are lacking some of the details that I have been able to uncover, and may also suffer from a differing perspective, I suppose.” The flat, grim manner in which he uttered the last words only reinforced my trepidation.
But he turned to our client. “You do not object, I hope, to my laying out my thoughts and processes for you and my friend Watson?”
“Please, Mr. Holmes, go ahead.” She threw me another glance, as unreadable as her earlier one. “If you think it wise.”
“I must,” said he. Even so, he was silent for a long moment before he finally began to speak.
• • •
“We begin,” Holmes said at length, “with the fact that you, Miss LeChance, were not the first, but the last in a sudden string of cases involving that which we, for lack of a better term, may call the paranormal—though not paranatural, since—as Watson was kind enough to point out to me—anything which exists must be, ipso facto, natural.
“Only recently had I first encountered anything of this nature; now, in the space of a week, I was confronted by seven cases ostensibly involving phenomena generally considered supernatural, with only one that I thought I could easily assign to more mundane causes.
“This confirmed one of the more outrageous hypotheses I had formed upon accepting the existence of one paranormal event; namely, that something within the world had changed to either make these phenomena occur, or make them more visible or obvious to others. No other simple hypothesis fit these facts.” He looked at both of us, saw us nod, and continued.
“Now, this fact by itself was most suggestive, not to say disturbing. But there were other facts, equally suggestive.
“Your appearance, Miss LeChance, was itself one of these facts. While—as I said—you were one of several, you immediately stood out as an anomaly. You have since corrected your errors as best you could, but that is itself most suggestive. Your dress was very close, but not sufficient. Your accent is not one I can identify.
“Then there was the matter of my little test. Your hand, you see, was in motion even before the bag left my fingers; by that, I knew you had observed that my actions were something of a blind, and had expected some sort of swift action on my part. The actual result of the test demonstrated that you have the reactions of a trained combatant in one of the martial arts of the Far East; not baritsu or one of the purer forms of karate, but something like them. You conducted yourself well enough, yet in truth…Watson?”
I thought I followed him, and it fit with that fleeting earlier impression. “I believe what Holmes is saying is that you were clearly playing a part.” His comments and my impressions came together. “Miss LeChance, you behaved as one who has studied our ways intensely, but hasn’t lived them.”
“Nicely put, Watson. You are an actress—a superlative actress, I must add—portraying a culture quite distant and distinct from your own.” He took out his pipe, filled it, and once the familiar blue smoke began to rise, continued.
“Now, I found that I could not countenance the thought that this was an unrelated event—that someone so talented, yet so foreign, would appear at my door with a tale of such paranormal events, so shortly after I found myself first involved with such phenomena. This meant one of two things. Either you, yourself, were somehow directly involved in the creation of these events, or, at the least, you knew of them and must, of necessity, understand something of their nature and origin.”
Anne LeChance
said nothing now; her face was immobile, giving away not a clue as to her thoughts.
“So. In either case, the swiftness of your appearance also implied something else: that you already knew these events were being called to my attention. Your case is one that has features rather explicitly supernatural; one might have expected you to seek assistance from the local church or others first, not to a very distant private detective whose known cases might be unusual, but quite strictly mundane in their elements.”
I was struck by this new point. Holmes was almost certainly correct—yet, if so, how could she have known? Holmes had certainly not publicized his earlier case—that was generally left to me, and I at the time had no intention of speaking of it. But Holmes was going on: “The sudden appearance of the paranormal implied a change in the world. Your appearance was an anomaly of a different sort. Both had a commonality, however, that caused me to wonder about the nature of the change to the world, and the purpose of your appearance here. As Watson observed, you are not familiar with our fashions and habits in the way of one who has lived here; yet your few visible genuine characteristics do not fit any part of the world with which I am familiar.
“Now, it is often the case that the realm of ghosts, spirits, or other supernatural creatures is referred to as another world. It occurred to me, therefore, that there was one possible explanation for both: a literal other world, or worlds, which could somehow now interact with ours. Why such another world would include the shades of the recently dead was an interesting speculation, naturally, but I was willing to leave that aside for the moment. Are you following me so far, Miss LeChance?”
She finally smiled. “Rather well, yes. Please go on, Mr. Holmes.”
“The reason that I set that question aside was the particular commonality I mentioned: specifically, myself. I have widely flung sources, and—until I had my experience with the shade of the earl—I had heard not a single bit of intelligence that implied the existence of the paranormal. So the first event of that sort I was aware of had happened to become one of my cases. And before knowledge of that case could have traveled far, you appeared at my door. Watson and I both noted some oddities, but following our initial discussion I was able to discover a prior connection, a case which Watson referred to as the three golden books.” Now his face looked very grim indeed.
“And…?” she said after a moment.
“And I recalled the case, but it took me a few moments to arrange the details in my mind.”
I looked up. “By…you know, Holmes, it seems to me it was like that for me as well. But I recall it perfectly now.”
“Indeed, Watson. I am sure you do.” That grim tone was stronger now. “That case, combined with my prior observations about the paranormal and its sudden appearance in my life, demanded that I examine this new phenomenon across a larger field of view, and perhaps to compare these new events with a similar, larger view of the world of the more normal crimes and mysteries I am accustomed to encountering.”
Miss LeChance looked at me with another of those enigmatic glances that combined sadness and pity, then looked back to Holmes. “Mr. Holmes, perhaps we should discuss this—”
“No!” I said, rising to my feet. “Miss LeChance, I do not know why you seem so concerned for me, or what bothers my friend so, but I would know the truth.”
“As Watson says, Miss LeChance,” Holmes said. “He is my right hand. I will not keep secrets from him.”
“But—”
“I have faith in Watson; you do not know him, but I do, and I have every confidence in his ability to grasp even the most outlandish of ideas.” Holmes also rose, clasped my shoulder for a moment, and then turned to the window, gazing out upon the street.
“To continue my narrative, then, I gathered together all of the extensive literature of crime—the files I had accumulated from a dozen countries, annotations of books of criminal procedure and events, and so on—and began to analyze them with respect to the occurrence of cases that, for lack of a better term, I would have considered ‘interesting’—ones that might, when solved, have made it to Watson’s files and Mr. Doyle’s publisher.
“I also drew on my myriad sources to determine how many other reports of paranormal activity had been made outside of my own current circle of acquaintance.” He looked to me. “Watson, given what we discussed earlier, what do you infer was the result of that research?”
An eerie feeling had begun to descend upon me, as though I stood half outside of myself. I could see and hear and act, yet the tension in my mind and body had risen to a level that I could not yet fathom. “Well, Holmes,” I said, my voice sounding unnaturally calm in my own ears, “if the results were similar, then you must have found few—if any—examples of paranormal happenings beyond those we already have encountered.”
He nodded.
“But…” I waved my hands vaguely. “What does it all mean, Holmes? I begin to feel as though I am walking in a nightmare, yet I know I am awake.”
“You may be closer than you realize, Watson,” he said, and his shoulders were rigid, yet vibrating faintly with some tremendous inner tension. “One of the most essential principles of my science of detection is that at its base, human nature is the same, regardless of its time or place. This has served me well throughout my career. If that were true, it would imply that across the world, there should be roughly the same frequency of crime of all sorts, including those with elements of interest to me.
“Yet I have now very strong evidence that such is not the case; the vast, vast majority of such crimes and mysteries have been presented to me, and appear to be little-seen outside of London and its environs. Similarly, the change in the world that has allowed the paranormal to appear has been almost unseen except by those who have brought their sightings to me.”
Miss LeChance bit her lip, but nodded slowly.
He turned to me. “And what, Watson, can we deduce from this?”
I found myself, for the first time, not wanting to answer. My mouth was suddenly as dry as it had ever been in Afghanistan, wondering if a bullet were about to find me, and I felt my hands shaking. At the same time, however, I could not shy away from my friend now, for his expression was not merely grim but concerned, focused on me alone.
I took a breath and tried to order my thoughts. “You will, I trust, pardon me if I take a moment? You have presented so many extraordinary elements here that I am a trifle overwhelmed.”
“Of course, Watson. Take your time, please.”
So. Seventy cases in sixteen years, versus seven elsewhere. Virtually all paranormal cases presented to Holmes. His remarks about Miss LeChance. The world suddenly changing…
A pattern was becoming clear, and it was so strange and terrible that I scarcely dared speak. “First…Miss LeChance, you believe, is not from this world.”
“Correct.”
“She may be, herself, from the same world as our spirits…” I saw a tiny shake of his head, “…or another, but the combination of her oddities simply does not fit with any known country on Earth.” Another thought struck me. “Yet she had some means of getting considerable information on our customs and even of us, in particular…” I looked to Holmes. “Here is a fanciful thought, Holmes, from one of the tales of Mr. Wells; what if she were from the future, using some form of time machine?”
Rarely have I seen Holmes look so astounded. “Watson! My friend, you never cease to surprise me. That is a most interesting conjecture. In some ways it fits very well. But there are other features.”
I closed my eyes, feeling that foreboding rising, my heart accelerating its beat to the point that I thought the vibration of my chest must surely be visible. “Yes. She does not fit here, yet Burke’s shows that she is from here, as did your inquiries. Leaving Miss LeChance aside…Holmes, here is one of the most disturbing conclusions from your discoveries about your cases and the paranormal events: you are, yourself, the focus of the world.”
I had hoped with no little despe
ration that Holmes would laugh, or respond with one of his acidic retorts that showed how very far I had gone afield; instead he sighed and nodded, his eyes shadowed with his concern, a concern still directed at me.
“So,” I said, maintaining with what effort I cannot even estimate a calm and reserved demeanor, striving to emulate my friend’s dry and measured delivery, “we have a world that appears to focus to the exclusion of most of the rest of the globe on one man; a case which this man, normally preternatural of memory, could not immediately call to mind despite its most unique and peculiar aspects—the affair of the three golden books; the fact that memory of this case was also dim for me for a moment, before becoming singularly clear.”
I paused as the significance of another, always ignored, point struck me. “The fact that when I cast my mind back over my life, the only details that instantly come to mind have to do with Holmes and my involvement in his cases; the sudden appearance of the paranormal in a world which has never exhibited it; and a visitor who simply does not fit, yet is inarguably, at the same time, a part of the world; and the agreement and admission that this visitor does in fact come from another world.”
I took another breath, feeling so light-headed that I thought I might faint. But I would not permit it, no matter how outrageous the conclusions. “I can think of only one circumstance in which a world might focus almost to exclusion on one person, yet pretend to be a complete and independent world, and where that world could suddenly have truths appear and disappear, and it is one with which I am intimately familiar. The world, in short, of storytelling, with the changes being those an editor might impose, or an author perform during rewriting a story.”
I looked directly at our visitor. “And you…you do not fit, because your story is not ours. Yet you know ours, seem to have a genuine respect and even, I might say, affection for Holmes that implies you have known of him for a long time. Perhaps my guess of someone from the future is not, after all, as far afield as I might have thought.”
Thirteen Authors With New Takes on Sherlock Holmes Page 9
