I gave a nod. “Your thinking seems sound, Holmes.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” he sighed. “Because Grogsson and Lestrade helped me with another stratagem and I fear it worked a little too well.”
“Oh? So you didn’t banish them to some unknown planet beginning with the letter ‘D’?”
“No. Happy news, there: Devonshire Place.”
“The street?”
“Indeed.”
“But that’s…”
“Hardly 500 yards from 221B. Got rather lucky on that. Double lucky, really, because they were able to bring me news that Moriarty’s gang has been sniffing around rather vigorously after Montevbello Goosh’s nine foci.”
“So was my butler,” I mused. “I don’t know if I told you, Holmes, but in one of my mystic dreams, I learned that Moriarty used to hold the Heart—the focus for love. Now, so far as I know, it is in the possession of Irene Adler along with the Cruciator—the symbol of pain. We also know the Coin is at the bottom of the Thames, the Crown at Hurlstone Manor and the Fasces is at 221B.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Holmes, drawing a small wood-and-lead box from the folds of his overcoat. “I have it here. As soon as I heard Moriarty was hunting foci, I had Lestrade let word slip at Newgate Prison that I had taken to keeping this always on my person. The inmate population has close ties with Moriarty’s gang, you see, and I thought it wouldn’t be long until word reached him.”
“Brilliant!” I crowed. “That ought to do it.”
“Oh, it did. Not two hours later, bullets started coming at me from every which way. An hour after that, I was at your front door. And now, here we are. What do you think we ought to do?”
“Don’t worry, Holmes, I can help.”
When we at last reached Helsinki (and—thank whatever gods may be—an actual hotel) I went out and bought the best compass I could find and a number of good maps. Holmes and I spent part of that night in the cupola of the Hotel Seurahuone; Holmes concentrated for some time and at last was able to point in the direction of the mysterious smiff. I took careful note of the bearing, then went down to our rooms and drew a line on the map. We had only one good reference, but it was enough to hazard a guess. Since Holmes had said it seemed southeast from London, Germany and Switzerland were looking probable.
We went south, by boat and by rail. Given the somewhat rough nature of my measurements, there was no point in creating a second line until we had made a significant change in latitude. We took the smiff’s bearing again from the Hotel Europejski in Warsaw. The intersection of my two lines lay somewhere very near Zurich.
We came into Switzerland as quietly as we could, dressed—to the best of our ability—as locals. I convinced Holmes not to wear an enormous false moustache, but this was a narrowly won victory and I chalk most of it up to Holmes’s inability to spot a fake-moustache store.
We stayed in a small inn in Cham which—to the best of my ability to determine it—was named “Inn”. That night we set aside the large map and the two lines that had brought us all the way across Europe in favor of a local map I’d procured earlier that day. I had thought our goal might be in the capital city, but to my surprise, Holmes still sensed it south-southwest of us. The line I drew quickly left the populous areas and shot down into the mountainous wilds.
“Oh dear,” I reflected. “We may have a problem, Holmes.”
“Why?”
“Because there are so few roads there and so much overgrown wilderness.”
Luckily for us, as we had now drawn closer to our goal, Holmes’s sense of our destination grew. While I began to compose a list of alpine exploration gear, Holmes sat in one of the hotel chairs staring at the wall in the direction of our target, occasionally shaking his head.
After a time he said, “It’s a funny place, Watson. There is a flow to it, but not a peaceful one. It is a place of constant, violent, tumultuous change.”
“So… what? I’m looking for some sort of war zone in the pastoral Swiss Alps?” I asked. Yet only a moment later, as my finger traversed the line I’d drawn on our map, I gave a cry. “Holmes! Here! Look! Right on our course: Reichenbach.”
“I don’t believe I know it.”
“There is a famous waterfall there! A place with a flow—a constant change—yet the height of the fall dictates that the water comes crashing down with great force! There is your violence! There’s your tumult!”
Holmes gave a grim nod. “Well done, Watson. I do believe you’ve got it.”
* * *
The journey to the falls was difficult. Do you know how it’s hard to drive over pointy things? Well the Swiss Alps, it turns out, are rather pointy. Also, our destination was remote. The small village of Meiringen lay not far away, but we hardly trusted it. We approached it from some distance and surveilled it through binoculars, from the cover of the nearby woods. I’m glad we did. It had a small hotel called Das Englischer Hof, which looked cozy, charming, and deeply suspicious. Even Holmes thought so.
“Watson…” he said, lowering the binoculars. “Is that a hotel specifically for English people who happen to be marching through this remote Swiss town?”
“On the face of it, it would appear so,” I said.
“And yet, I don’t see one for the French, the Germans, the Samoans, the Palestinians or anyone else.”
“They do seem curiously absent.”
Holmes stepped further back into the woods and spent a few minutes walking in a circle firing doubtful glances alternately at his shoes and Meiringen. After a time, he said, “Did…? Did Moriarty build a whole hotel for just you and I, in order to guard the smiff?”
I shrugged. “You know him better than I do, Holmes.”
He nodded, screwed up his features and mused, “How about we don’t go there?”
“Yes. How about we don’t.”
Instead, we had to work our way around the entire village, through the woods. By the time we reached the path that led to Reichenbach Falls, twilight was upon us. Night brought with it a piercing cold and I was glad for my traveling gear. The path up the side of the mountain was only three feet wide, with a sheer cliff face on one side and a fall into a deep, watery crevasse on the other. It would have been madness to attempt it in darkness.
Yet—worryingly—the night was not dark. Which is one of those defining characteristics of night, usually. The moon shone down with silver splendor and curtains of luminescent air began to appear, delicately drifting, shimmering in green, purple and blue. The Northern lights, I would have said, if we were anywhere… you know… north. In Norway, they’d have fooled me. In Switzerland, I stared up at them with open distrust. After a while, I grumbled, “Well, at least you were right about one thing, Holmes: this place looks deeply magical.”
At my words, my friend gave an uncomfortable cringe. “But it doesn’t feel like it, Watson. There should be magic everywhere in this world. And near a smiff—egads—this whole place should be dripping with it. But I don’t feel… any. This place feels dead, Watson, as if all the magic that comes near it is burned off, somehow.”
“Burned off to make those lights, do you think?”
“Possibly. I cannot feel any of the arcane potential that usually attends me. All I can feel is that Moriarty-seeming dread in the pit of my heart—the same as it’s been all this time, but so much closer now.”
“Where?”
“Just ahead.”
We crept around the final bend to the end of the path. It came so close to the falls that a brave man might reach out and put his hand into the flow of the grand Reichenbach as it plunged over 300 feet into the black chasm beside us. Indeed, that’s exactly what the path was for—a scenic hike with a nice opportunity at the end to show your best girl that you were really quite fearless. But there was something else there, too: a strange ball of pale, twisted wood wet with the spray of the falls. It looked like naked roots, except there was no tree. Roots only, stretching out from each other in all directions. It was ea
sily over a yard in diameter.
“What the deuce is that?” I wondered.
Holmes crept close and laid his hand to it. Despite its size, it tipped easily back and forth with only his casual effort.
“Wood,” he muttered. “It’s very light. Strong, too. Balsa, I think. A perfect sphere of balsa.”
I wrinkled up my brow. “Except, spheres are round,” I pointed out.
“No, he’s quite right,” said a feminine voice from just around the curve of the path behind us. “Before I began concentrating on it—using little bits of magic and my own experience to shape it night by night—it was indeed a sphere.”
The cadence of the voice was vaguely familiar to me, but the voice itself was shockingly so. More than merely familiar, it was actually familial, and let me say, I hadn’t expected to hear it on a mountain path in Switzerland.
“Mary?” I gasped.
“In a way,” said my wife, stepping into view around the bend. She wore a fur coat with a little hat of the same and a warm muff for her hands. It was quite exquisite—of a vaguely Russian style, I thought. Some sort of white-and-blue card protruded from beneath one of the folded-back lapels, but at this distance I could not tell its exact nature. This small defect could not spoil the rest of the ensemble; I would have said Mary looked better than ever, if it were not for a particularly predatory gleam in her eye. For all our domestic discord, Mary had never looked at me like that before.
“Hello, darling,” she added.
“What are you doing here?” I spluttered.
“I am here to end things,” she said, then turned her gaze on my companion. “Warlock Holmes, our threads are long and winding, and too often intertwined. But that all stops tonight. Long have I grappled with my own finality problem. In so doing, I believe I’ve found the answer to yours.”
I think my mind was working a bit slow. I didn’t want to let myself believe it. Yet, the one thing that kept intruding on my stupor was this: I finally understood why I had been able to stay so long away from the soul to which my own had been bound. Not because my soul had been removed or rewritten.
Because hers had.
“Moriarty?” I croaked.
Holmes gave a gasp of surprise—apparently he hadn’t worked it out either. But then, what would you expect? Just at the end of his own gasp, he interrupted it with another gasp, this one gleeful. He threw both hands to the air and cried, “Everybody! Wait! Wait, wait, wait…”
He paused.
“Maryarty.”
The eyes of Holmes’s ancient nemesis—and my current spouse—narrowed with hate. Beneath my breath, I muttered, “Jesus Christ, Holmes.”
“What? Come on, you guys! It’s perfect! Maryarty! It was right there!”
I swear the night air got a few degrees colder. Holmes filled it up with rolls of laughter as Moriarty glared. “Really, James,” said Holmes, wiping tears away from both eyes, “with all your famous powers of logic and foresight, I’m surprised you didn’t figure out I’d call you that.”
Moriarty rolled his eyes, gave a sigh of strained patience, reached up for his lapel, and flicked it forward. Beneath lay one of those abominable little cards Americans wear when they must meet each other in number. Squinting in the strange, shifting light, I could just make out the writing.
“Hello,” it said, “my Name is Maryarty.”
“Oh,” muttered Holmes, a bit sheepishly. “Never mind, then.”
“I have planned long for this evening, Holmes,” Moriarty said, “and you must realize that it is very likely all you have to say to me tonight has already crossed my mind.”
Holmes gave a haughty sniff. “Then possibly all your answers have already crossed mine.”
“Hmmm… No. I shouldn’t think so,” said Moriarty and I, together. Holmes gave us a look.
Moriarty smiled. “I have anticipated almost anything you might try to best me. I even know one or two ways you might succeed. But I came anyway, Warlock, because of the two most important things I know about tonight: I know you won’t. And I know why.”
That was enough to jolt my brain into action. Moriarty, so far as I could tell, was a man who was capable of anything. His intellect was vast. He believed his cause to be absolute and just. There was no act he would shy from to see his plans come to fruition. And there was a reason for what he was doing. That’s what terrified me most: I knew he had a reason. Why would he confront Holmes and I like this? If he knew our destination, why show up alone and outnumbered? He hadn’t had to do that, had he? The man had a virtual army at his disposal. He had tricks I’d never heard of. Why was he standing here, so exposed to danger? He did have a reason. I knew that.
Now, if only I knew what it was…
I began racking my mind, even as Holmes scoffed, “Oh, really now, Jimmy! Are you sure you haven’t got a bit too big for your britches? On your best day, you’re never a match for me. And look: I’ve got Watson here, too.”
“Oh dear,” Moriarty mused. “I hope he isn’t armed.”
He reached Mary’s delicate arm into the deep fur pocket of her coat. It re-emerged, holding my trusty old service revolver. My shoulders sagged.
“Considerate of you to leave it for me,” he noted. “Oh, and do you know something amusing: we actually lost track of you when you jumped off your ship. We had no idea the two of you were in Norway.”
“Oh…” I muttered. “Until…”
“Yes. Thank you for your kind letter. But now, I feel we must address the matter of the day. Holmes, I have reason to believe that one of the nine foci of Montevbello Goosh is currently on your person. Give it to me.”
“Not likely,” Holmes snorted.
Moriarty raised the Webley up beside his face, waggled it back and forth and clarified, “Give it to me, or I will shoot Watson.”
Holmes’s eyes narrowed with anger. He thrust one hand towards my revolver and cried, “M’gnan Verveviroth!”
And I resolved to go pistol shopping. Because, clearly, my current one was about to melt. Or fly apart. Or turn into a duck, or something.
But it didn’t. Nothing happened. A look of confusion spread across Holmes’s face. Moriarty’s eyes twinkled.
“You do not seem to trust my powers of foresight or the depth of my knowledge, Holmes,” he said. “You should extend me more credit. For example, all those demons that whisper in your mind—I know what they are saying to you, right now.”
Holmes’s look of confusion deepened, then gave way to one of concentration. Suddenly he gasped, his face a perfect mask of wonder. “Nothing!”
“Nothing,” Moriarty agreed.
“Watson! Nothing!” Holmes crowed. “It’s just me in here! Oh, for the first time in two hundred and forty years, I can hear myself think!”
“I’m not convinced that is a good thing, Holmes.”
“Oh, but it is, I assure you! It’s wonderful! So funny, how you don’t notice silence. It’s been so long since I heard it, I forgot!”
I know I have told the reader before of the constant tumult of demonic voices in my friend’s head, but just let me take a moment to say how deeply I do not envy the man who can stand next to a 360-foot waterfall and be amazed by the silence.
Holmes began to probe his face and the side of his head with his fingers. “Wow… it’s weird!”
Moriarty—very charitably—allowed Holmes a moment to marvel at it, then said, “I’m pleased you are enjoying it. Of course, it also means that the army of demonic friends who have been keeping you safe from me for so very long can be of no service to you.”
“I… I can’t do magic?”
“In this very special place, nobody can,” said Moriarty.
“Because of the smiff?” Holmes wondered.
“The… I’m sorry, the what?”
“It’s a word Holmes invented,” I explained. “It means a weakening of earth’s anti-magic barriers.”
“Ah,” Moriarty said. “Yes. A porte. A thinning of the veil. You will find
nothing of the kind here, I’m afraid. All you’ll find is earth’s pre-eminent dead spot and a rather clever lure.” Moriarty indicated the monstrously deformed ball of balsa.
My brow wrinkled. “If you used magic to make that,” I wondered, “why does it work here? Wouldn’t its magic be drained by a place like this?”
A flicker of reluctance crossed his features, but he did answer me. Ha! Too many years the teacher, Moriarty. Too many times frustrated that students and underlings failed to ask the right questions.
“It is drained. Any magical item that spends more than a day or two here would be. Whatever latent magic that sphere might have possessed can no longer be detected. Only its emotion can.”
I harrumphed. “Sounds like magic to me.”
“And thus we see: you are no mage,” Moriarty scoffed.
Holmes shook his head and said, very quietly, “He’s lying. There is a smiff here, Watson; I can feel it.”
“If that were true,” I hissed, “wouldn’t this place be just swimming in magic?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “Oh! Unless… unless somehow magic were pouring out, instead of pouring in!”
The look of profound annoyance on Moriarty’s face gave me to know Holmes had guessed it right.
“Anti-smiff! Brilliant! Where is it?” I whispered.
Holmes closed his eyes and moved his head experimentally, back and forth. After only a moment, his eyes popped back open. He pointed down into the frothing cauldron at the base of the falls and said, “Down there.”
“Ah… so, nowhere we could access it, then?”
“Not with any degree of safety or convenience, I would think.”
“If we could get to it, could we—”
But Moriarty cut me off. He pulled back the hammer of my Webley, pointed it at my chest and said, “Holmes! The focus, if you please.”
“What? Oh! Hey! No, don’t hurt Watson! Here! Here, take it!”
Holmes dug about frantically inside his greatcoat, spilling a few of his remaining bills out onto the muddy path. In only a moment, his hands found the little wooden box that contained the Fasces. He pulled it forth and held it out towards Moriarty, even as I shouted, “Holmes, don’t! He’ll shoot me anyway!”
The Finality Problem Page 28