“We had a fight of our own,” I said. “It turned out in much the same way. I’ve gotten the mastermind all bottled up, though I’d better get back to check on him—and to summon the police. Can you keep these two … subdued—?”
“Of course,” Watson said. “The rough work is done.”
WE HIT the papers one last time—Watson and I. Holmes ducked out of the whole affair, evading the police and the reporters and avoiding the notice even of his erstwhile partner. Still, Watson and I took our moment to bask in the acclaim of Le Temps:
NEW CRIME DUO FOILS LOUVRE ROBBERY
Yesterday, two men from London foiled a plot to steal some of Paris’s greatest treasures. The first man, Dr. John Watson, is the one-time companion and chronicler of the deceased Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Watson joined forces with a Cambridge student named Thomas Carnacki. Carnacki was recently touted as an underling of crime lord James Moriarty, but in fact he is a British agent who was working undercover to clean up the remains of the Moriarty gang. Together, the two men caught a ring of thieves intent on stealing no less than the Mona Lisa.
“They had an elaborate plot,” Dr. Watson outlined, “replacing the lock on an outside door, gaining positions on the museum guard staff, and using the infirmary and a custodial closet as their base of operations.”
The thieves planned to steal the greatest treasures of the museum, including paintings by Titian, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio. Though the plan originally involved only grand larceny, it evolved to include murder.
“They found out about us,” Carnacki said in his sickbed. He is recovering from a stab wound to the chest. “They ambushed us on the museum floor in broad daylight. They tried to execute us.” When asked why the men hadn’t succeeded, Carnacki indicated, “We’re better fighters.”
Watson and Carnacki handed two of the three thieves to police, though the ringleader escaped. The amateur crime fighters described this third man as tall and lean, with white hair and a white mustache and beard. The Metropolitan Police Force is busy combing the city for the man.
Their search began at a garret apartment near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where Carnacki showed the police a map of Paris on which the gang had pinned all the major crimes of the last two months. Police describe the map as a “godsend,” and they anticipate using it to break numerous criminal networks throughout the city.
Though Watson and Carnacki saved priceless artworks and helped police mop up crime in Paris, they deny claims that they will form a new detective partnership. “I’m no Sherlock Holmes,” said Thomas Carnacki.
Watson had his own reasons for parting ways. “I have been eternally blessed to have known and worked with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and his loss is one that I will never recover from—nor will London. Instead of playing about at a business that was most serious to Holmes, I would rather confine myself to helping my patients live long, happy lives.”
OF COURSE, for the papers, it was all crooks and detectives, villains and heroes—and I must confess that our adventures had been dramatic if not melodramatic. But only after the flash powder had ceased its lightning and the public had ceased its thunder did I have a moment to realize all I had lost.
SHE LAY within the gray walls of Perè Lachaise cemetery. It was in the days when poor folk still could be buried there, before Oscar Wilde and dozens of others made it a dying ground for the elite. Anna was allowed in, though her notorious father had been denied. He had been cremated, his ashes stored among thousands of other urns in a vault for criminals.
Even though Anna had rated her own plot, it was perhaps the smallest plot in the place. The mound of dirt atop her body was barely two feet wide and six feet long—I know, for I paced it out. I wondered if they had even given her a coffin. And her headstone was small and round, a baby tooth perched temporarily between all those adult monuments. It said simply “Anna Moriarty 1872–1891.”
“Anna, I’m sorry.”
I told myself that she was in a better place. I’d even seen her there and would have joined her except that she sent me back. Anna lived now in the realm of spirit, while I was stuck in the world of flesh.
I stayed by that spot for hours. I sat on the crypts beside hers, even lay down on one sarcophagus and slept. Of course, the family of the man entombed there might have been offended, but on the other hand, that same family would mourn while standing atop my Anna.
I remembered her bonnet and her blue dress and the basket with bars of cheese shining like gold. I remembered her haunted eyes when she returned to me in the library in Bern, her blond braids hanging down beside her face as she told the story of her father’s life. The child of two geniuses—Anna had so much left to do with her life, not the least of which was to love me.
Then I heard in my mind, like the whisper of a pen signing a signature, I’m not done.
Her work wasn’t finished. After all, it was because of Anna that I lived—and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, too. It was because of her that the Undying Evil that had created Jack the Ripper and the Napoleon of Crime was trapped forever. Anna had shown me the way, and she would keep guiding me. In little ways and large, she would be with me.
I got up from the sarcophagus, brushed grave dirt off my clothes, and said, “Thank you.”
At last I could leave her grave behind. Anna was going with me.
SHERLOCK HOLMES sighed, letting the latest issue of Le Temps slump down into his lap. We sat in our small rented rooms on the Left Bank, and below our second-story window, an open-air market rumbled and rattled. It seemed to be giving Holmes a headache. I had wondered whether this location would be too noisy for him as he recovered his mind, but I couldn’t resist the bustle of it, the young philosophers and poets and artists roaming the streets at all hours, the partial views of the Seine and of Notre Dame. Besides, it was the only place I could afford, drawing the last money from my university account.
This afternoon, though, the agitation beyond the windows seemed to be getting to Holmes. He rubbed his forehead with fingers stained by newsprint. “It’s such a struggle to read French.”
I glanced toward him from my perch beside the window and laughed. “You seemed to speak it fluently when you had a demon inside you.”
Holmes shot a look of annoyance my way. “It’s just that sort of comment that will keep me from ever getting my mind back.”
“What sort of comment?”
“‘When you had a demon inside you.’ That sort of comment. It’s nettling enough to have whole sections of my memory blacked out, erased by amnesia, without your turning it into voodoo.”
I was shocked. “It was voodoo.”
“It was amnesia, pure and simple!” he pronounced. “It was a physical reaction—like dropping a perfectly tuned violin and picking it up to find that all the strings must be retempered.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t just amnesia. You remember Anna, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course. Anna Moriarty. Daughter of James Moriarty.”
“You remember our whole adventure with her, from the morning she fished you from the Reichenbach River to the morning we reached Paris, yes?”
“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 hu
man 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.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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
www.tor-forge.com
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
The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls Page 28