“Of course!”
“You had amnesia that whole time. You couldn’t remember who you were—Harold Silence and all that. But you
were making new memories. That’s what amnesia was like. This blackout, though—from the moment when Anna was shot to the moment when you were standing in the Louvre infirmary—that was not amnesia. That was demon possession.”
“Bosh,” said Holmes, shaking his head violently. “Stuff and nonsense.”
“
I
remember what happened, even if you don’t. I
saw
the demon inside of you. I tracked you down, and you ambushed me, held me hostage. The exorcism machine saved us both!”
“Ah,” Holmes said, lifting a finger to stop me. “There it is, yes? There’s the crux of this whole dilemma: that damned machine. It’s a generator. That’s all. It creates electricity, and electricity has bizarre but perfectly scientific effects on the human mind. The mind is electrical, Thomas. Lightning can derange a man, make him violent and vicious like a beast, but it’s a physical effect: the scrambling of brain signals. It’s not a metaphysical phenomenon.”
I laughed bleakly, realizing that I was destined to have this argument
ad infinitum
with my friend. “You were no brute, Holmes. You were demon-possessed. Your eyes glowed red.”
“Red is the color of the retina, and the glow may have been due to electrical overstimulation of the optic nerve.”
“What about the skeleton? We fought a walking skeleton!”
“What I remember, and correct me if I am wrong,” Holmes said, “was a mad confusion in which we thought a skeleton was attacking us and we shouted things to each other and I hurled jars from a cabinet and we ended up dancing on top of bones. Lunacy! We had both just been electrocuted, Thomas. That episode was not about a walking skeleton but about two men whose electrified brains had been reduced to monkey meat.”
“Monkey meat?”
“Yes, monkey meat!”
“No. Voodoo!”
“Monkey meat!”
We stared at each other in utter frustration and both blurted simultaneously: “You’re hopeless.”
Holmes snapped the paper up in front of his face, and I cast my gaze out the window and across the marketplace. We lapsed into silence. The street noise below gradually rose to fill our ears: laughter from young lovers, quarrels among old scholars, the cry of a middle-aged baker, the music of a hurdy-gurdy man. Life. I simply sat and let those sounds sink into me and wash away the rancor I felt in my heart. A few deep breaths, and I realized just how wonderful the world was.
At length, I ventured a new conversation. “So, when are you going to let Watson know you’re alive?”
“When I
am
alive,” Holmes growled back behind his newspaper. “When I have my mind again. There aren’t even any crimes here worth investigating.”
I nodded and stood, crossing to my tattered greatcoat, which hung on a peg by the door. “Of course not. The great crimes aren’t in the papers until after they are solved. The great crimes are out there, Holmes.”
He lowered the paper and stared toward the windows, where the sky was giving way to evening blue, and lamps one by one sent up their gaslight glow.
I pressed: “You won’t get your mind back sitting up here alone. You don’t tune a violin by playing it by itself. You have to play it with other instruments. In concert. Come on, Holmes. There’s a city full of crime out there, and there’s a genius detective in here. You need to get out into the streets if you ever want to get your mind back.”
“A new mystery,” he said quietly, though his voice was
feverish with hope. “That’s the thing. Some great crime that requires the most rigorous deduction.” He looked at me and nodded. A small smile played at the corners of his mouth. He stood and strode to the door, taking down his own cloak.
“Now, you’ll have to be patient,” I admonished. “We may not stumble on the crime of the century in the first few minutes.”
“Yes. Yes,” Holmes replied. “We’ll find it, though. And in the meantime, there are a few smaller things I need to acquire to get back into fighting form.”
“And what would those be?”
“A pipe and tobacco,” Holmes said, “and a violin.”
I smiled. “I think I have enough money for the pipe and tobacco. As for the violin, I don’t think I can afford even a cheap one. And this is a small flat. Neither of us could stand the sound of a cheap one.”
Holmes nodded. “Then that will be my first goal—to solve a mystery that pays well enough for a good violin.”
The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls
is John R. King’s twentieth published novel. He wrote much of it in the woods behind the Saint Charles Cemetery while sitting on a rock and smoking a cigar—actually, hundreds of cigars. He also wrote portions of this novel while sitting in the hallway of the Lakeview Neurological Rehabilitation Center while his son practiced for his role in
Peter Pan.
Aren’t laptops wonderful?
By day, King is the editor in chief at Write Source, a division of Houghton Mifflin that produces writing instructional materials. By night, he stars in productions of such shows as
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), No Way to Treat a Lady
, and
Arsenic and Old Lace.
King’s other hardcover titles include his critically acclaimed Arthurian trilogy:
Mad Merlin, Lancelot du Lethe, and Le Morte d’Avalon.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE SHADOW OF REICHENBACH FALLS
Copyright © 2008 by J. R. King
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Forge
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781466801257
First eBook Edition : September 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, J. Robert (John Robert)
The shadow of Reichenbach Falls /John R. King.—1st hardcover ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1801-5 ISBN-10: 0-7653-1801-6
1. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Moriarty, Professor (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Private investigators—England—Fiction. 4. Switzerland—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.I4783S53 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008005424
First Edition: August 2008