The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters

by Michael Kurland

  I shook my head, recalling. “It was completely unexpected,” said I. “I had anticipated a few polite notes from strangers mourning your passing, since the stories of your exploits had been so warmly received in the past. But what I got instead was mostly anger and outrage—people demanding to hear further adventures of yours.”

  “Which of course you believed to be impossible, seeing as how I was dead.”

  “Exactly. The whole thing left a rather bad taste, I must say. Seemed very peculiar behaviour.”

  “But doubtless it died down quickly,” said Holmes.

  “You know full well it did not. I have told you before that the onslaught of letters, as well as personal exhortations wherever I would travel, continued unabated for years. In fact, I was virtually at the point of going back and writing up one of your lesser cases I had previously ignored as being of no general interest simply to get the demands to cease, when, much to my surprise and delight—”

  “Much to your surprise and delight, after an absence of three years less a month, I turned up in your consulting rooms, disguised, if I recall correctly, as a shabby book collector. And soon you had fresh adventures to chronicle, beginning with that case of the infamous Colonel Sebastian Moran and his victim, the Honourable Ronald Adair.”

  “Yes,” said I. “Wondrous it was.”

  “But Watson, let us consider the facts surrounding my apparent death at the falls of Reichenbach on May 4th, 1891. You, the observer on the scene, saw the evidence, and, as you wrote in ‘The Final Problem,’ many experts scoured the lip of the falls and came to precisely the same conclusion you had—that Moriarty and I had plunged to our deaths.”

  “But that conclusion turned out to be wrong.”

  Holmes beamed intently. “No, my Good Watson, it turned out to be unacceptable—unacceptable to your faithful readers. And that is where all the problems stem from. Remember Schrödinger’s cat in the sealed box? Moriarty and I at the falls present a very similar scenario: he and I went down the path into the cul-de-sac, our footprints leaving impressions in the soft earth.

  “There were only two possible outcomes at that point: either I would exit alive, or I would not. There was no way out, except to take that same path back away from the falls. Until someone came and looked to see whether I had re-emerged from the path, the outcome was unresolved. I was both alive and dead—a collection of possibilities. But when you arrived, those possibilities had to collapse into a single reality. You saw that there were no footprints returning from the falls—meaning that Moriarty and I had struggled until at last we had both plunged over the edge into the icy torrent.

  “It was your act of seeing the results that forced the possibilities to be resolved. In a very real sense, my good, dear friend, you killed me.”

  My heart was pounding in my chest. “I tell you, Holmes, nothing would have made me more happy than to have seen you alive!”

  “I do not doubt that, Watson—but you had to see one thing or the other. You could not see both. And, having seen what you saw, you reported your findings: first to the Swiss police, and then to the reporter for the Journal de Genève, and lastly in your full account in the pages of the Strand.”

  I nodded.

  “But here is the part that was not considered by Schrödinger when he devised the thought experiment of the cat in the box. Suppose you open the box and find the cat dead, and later you tell your neighbour about the dead cat—and your neighbour refuses to believe you when you say that the cat is dead. What happens if you go and look in the box a second time?”

  “Well, the cat is surely still dead.”

  “Perhaps. But what if thousands—nay, millions!—refuse to believe the account of the original observer? What if they deny the evidence? What then, Watson?”

  “I—I do not know.”

  “Through the sheer stubbornness of their will, they reshape reality, Watson! Truth is replaced with fiction! They will the cat back to life. More than that, they attempt to believe that the cat never died in the first place!”

  “And so?”

  “And so the world, which should have one concrete reality, is rendered unresolved, uncertain, adrift. As the first observer on the scene at Reichenbach, your interpretation should take precedence. But the stubbornness of the human race is legendary, Watson, and through that sheer cussedness, that refusal to believe what they have been plainly told, the world gets plunged back into being a wave front of unresolved possibilities. We exist in flux—to this day, the whole world exists in flux—because of the conflict between the observation you really made at Reichenbach, and the observation the world wishes you had made.”

  “But this is all too fantastic, Holmes!”

  “Eliminate the impossible, Watson, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Which brings me now to the question we were engaged by this avatar of Mycroft to solve: this paradox of Fermi. Where are the alien beings?”

  “And you say you have solved that?”

  “Indeed I have. Consider the method by which mankind has been searching for these aliens.”

  “By wireless, I gather—trying to overhear their chatter on the ether.”

  “Precisely! And when did I return from the dead, Watson?”

  “April of 1894.”

  “And when did that gifted Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, invent the wireless?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “In eighteen hundred and ninety-five, my good Watson. The following year! In all the time that mankind has used radio, our entire world has been an unresolved quandary! An uncollapsed wave front of possibilities!”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the aliens are there, Watson—it is not they who are missing, it is us! Our world is out of sync with the rest of the universe. Through our failure to accept the unpleasant truth, we have rendered ourselves potential rather than actual.”

  I had always thought my companion a man with a generous regard for his own stature, but surely this was too much.

  “You are suggesting, Holmes, that the current unresolved state of the world hinges on the fate of you yourself?”

  “Indeed! Your readers would not allow me to fall to my death, even if it meant attaining the very thing I desired most, namely the elimination of Moriarty. In this mad world, the observer has lost control of his observations! If there is one thing my life stood for—my life prior to that ridiculous resurrection of me you recounted in your chronicle of ‘The Empty House’—it was reason! Logic! A devotion to observable fact! But humanity has abjured that. This whole world is out of whack, Watson—so out of whack that we are cut off from the civilizations that exist elsewhere. You tell me you were barraged with demands for my return, but if people had really understood me, understood what my life represented, they would have known that the only real tribute to me possible would have been to accept the facts! The only real answer would have been to leave me dead!”

  * * * *

  Mycroft sent us back in time, but rather than returning us to 1899, whence he had plucked us, at Holmes’s request he put us back eight years earlier in May of 1891. Of course, there were younger versions of ourselves already living then, but Mycroft swapped us for them, bringing the young ones to the future, where they could live out the rest of their lives in simulated scenarios taken from Holmes’s and my minds. Granted, we were each eight years older than we had been when we had fled Moriarty the first time, but no one in Switzerland knew us and so the aging of our faces went unnoticed.

  I found myself for a third time living that fateful day at the Falls of Reichenbach, but this time, like the first and unlike the second, it was real.

  I saw the page boy coming, and my heart raced. I turned to Holmes, and said, “I can’t possibly leave you.”

  “Yes, you can, Watson. And you will, for you have never failed to play the game. I am sure you will play it to the end.” He paused for a moment, then said, perhaps just a wee bit sadly, “I can discover facts, Watson, but I cannot
change them.” And then, quite solemnly, he extended his hand. I clasped it firmly in both of mine. And then the boy, who was in Moriarty’s employ, was upon us.

  I allowed myself to be duped, leaving Holmes alone at the Falls, fighting with all my might to keep from looking back as I hiked onward to treat the nonexistent patient at the Englischer Hof. On my way, I passed Moriarty going in the other direction. It was all I could do to keep from drawing my pistol and putting an end to the blackguard, but I knew Holmes would consider robbing him of his own chance at Moriarty an unforgivable betrayal.

  It was an hour’s hike down to the Englischer Hof. There I played out the scene in which I inquired about the ailing Englishwoman, and Steiler the Elder, the innkeeper, reacted, as I knew he must, with surprise. My performance was probably half-hearted, having played the role once before, but soon I was on my way back. The uphill hike took over two hours, and I confess plainly to being exhausted upon my arrival, although I could barely hear my own panting over the roar of the torrent.

  Once again, I found two sets of footprints leading to the precipice, and none returning. I also found Holmes’s alpenstock, and, just as I had the first time, a note from him to me that he had left with it. The note read just as the original had, explaining that he and Moriarty were about to have their final confrontation, but that Moriarty had allowed him to leave a few last words behind. But it ended with a postscript that had not been in the original:

  My dear Watson [it said], you will honour my passing most of all if you stick fast to the powers of observation. No matter what the world wants, leave me dead.

  I returned to London, and was able to briefly counterbalance my loss of Holmes by reliving the joy and sorrow of the last few months of my wife Mary’s life, explaining my somewhat older face to her and others as the result of shock at the death of Holmes. The next year, right on schedule, Marconi did indeed invent the wireless. Exhortations for more Holmes adventures continued to pour in, but I ignored them all, although the lack of him in my life was so profound that I was sorely tempted to relent, recanting my observations made at Reichenbach. Nothing would have pleased me more than to hear again the voice of the best and wisest man I had ever known.

  In late June of 1907, I read in The Times about the detection of intelligent wireless signals coming from the direction of the star Altair. On that day, the rest of the world celebrated, but I do confess I shed a tear and drank a special toast to my good friend, the late Mr Sherlock Holmes.

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE PEARLY GATES, by Mike Resnick

  An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other’s arms. Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation.

  —The Final Problem

  It was most disconcerting. One moment I was tumbling over the falls at Reichenbach, my arms locked around Professor Moriarty, and the next moment I seemed to be standing by myself in a bleak, grey, featureless landscape.

  I was completely dry, which seemed not at all surprising, though there was no reason why it should not have been. Also, I had felt my leg shatter against the rocks as we began our plunge, and yet I felt no pain whatsoever.

  Suddenly I remembered Moriarty. I looked around for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. There was an incredibly bright light up ahead, and I found myself drawn to it. What happened next I can remember but hazily; the gist of it is that I found myself in, of all places, Heaven. (No one told me that I was in Heaven, but when one eliminates the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And Professor Moriarty’s absence was quite enough to convince me that I was not in Hell.)

  How long I remained there I do not know, for there is no means by which one can measure duration there. I only know that I felt I might as well have been in the Other Place, so bored was I with the eternal peace and perfection of my surroundings. It is an admission that would certainly offend all churchmen, but if there is one place in all the cosmos for which I am uniquely unsuited, it is Heaven.

  In fact, I soon began to suspect that I was indeed in Hell, for if each of us makes his own Heaven and his own Hell, then my Hell must surely be a place where all my training and all my powers are of no use whatsoever. A place where the game is never afoot, indeed where there is no game at all, cannot possibly qualify as a Paradise for a man such as myself.

  When I was bored beyond endurance back on Earth, I had discovered a method of relief, but this was denied me in my current circumstances. Still, it was a craving for cerebral stimulation, not for a seven-percent solution of cocaine, that consumed me.

  And then, when I was sure that I was facing an eternity of boredom, and was regretting all the chances I had forsaken to commit such sins as might have placed me in a situation where at least I would have had the challenge of escaping, I found myself confronted by a glowing entity that soon manifested itself in the outward form of a man with pale blue eyes and a massive white beard. He wore a robe of white, and above his head floated a golden halo.

  Suddenly I, too, took on human shape, and I was amazed to discover that I had not until this very moment realized that I had no longer possessed a body.

  “Hello, Mr Holmes,” said my visitor.

  “Welcome, Saint Peter,” I replied with my newfound voice.

  “You know who I am?” he said, surprised. “Your indoctrination period is supposed to be instantly forgotten.”

  “I remember nothing of my indoctrination period,” I assured him.

  “Then how could you possibly know who I am?”

  “Observation, analysis and deduction,” I explained. “You have obviously sought me out, for you addressed me by my name, and since I have evidently been a discorporate being, one of many billions, I assume you have the ability to distinguish between us all. That implies a certain authority. You have taken the body you used when you were alive, and I perceive that the slight indentations on the fingers of your right hand were made by a crude fishing line. You possess a halo while I do not, which therefore implies that you are a saint. Now, who among the many saints was a fisherman and would have some authority in Heaven?”

  Saint Peter smiled. “You are quite amazing, Mr Holmes.”

  “I am quite bored, Saint Peter.”

  “I know,” he said, “and for this I am sorry. You are unique among all the souls in Heaven in your discontent.”

  “That is no longer true,” I said, “for do I not perceive a certain lack of content upon your own features?”

  “That is correct, Mr Holmes,” he agreed. “We have a problem here—a problem of my own making—and I have elected to solicit your aid in solving it. It seems the very least I can do to make your stay here more tolerable to you.” He paused awkwardly. “Also, it may well be that you are the one soul in my domain who is capable of solving it.”

  “Cannot God instantly solve any problem that arises?” I asked.

  “He can, and eventually He will. But since I have created this problem, I requested that I be allowed to solve it—or attempt to solve it—first.”

  “How much time has He given you?”

  “Time has no meaning here, Mr Holmes. If He determines that I will fail, He will correct the problem Himself.” He paused again. “I hope you will be able to assist me to redeem myself in His eyes.”

  “I shall certainly do my best,” I assured him. “Please state the nature of the problem.”

  “It is most humiliating, Mr Holmes,” he began. “For time beyond memory I have been the Keeper of the Pearly Gates. No one can enter Heaven without my approval, and until recently I had never made a mistake.”

  “And now you have?”

  He nodded his head wearily. “Now I have. An enormous mistake.”

 
“Can’t you simply seek out the soul, as you have sought me out, and cast it out?”

  “I wish it were that simple, Mr Holmes,” he replied. “A Caligula, a Tamerlaine, an Attila I could find with no difficulty. But this soul, though it is blackened beyond belief, has thus far managed to elude me.”

  “I see,” I said. “I am surprised that five such hideous murders do not make it instantly discernible.”

  “Then you know?” he exclaimed.

  “That you seek Jack the Ripper?” I replied. “Elementary. All of the others you mentioned were identified with their crimes, but the Ripper’s identity was never discovered. Further, since the man was mentally unbalanced, it seems possible to me, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of Heaven, that if he feels no guilt, his soul displays no guilt.”

  “You are everything I had hoped you would be, Mr Holmes,” said Saint Peter.

  “Not quite everything,” I said. “For I do not understand your concern. If the Ripper’s soul displays no taint, why bother seeking him out? After all, the man was obviously insane and not responsible for his actions. On Earth, yes, I would not hesitate to lock him away where he could do no further damage—but here in Heaven, what possible harm can he do?”

  “Things are not as simple as you believe them to be, Mr Holmes,” replied Saint Peter. “Here we exist on a spiritual plane, but the same is not true of Purgatory or Hell. Recently, an unseen soul has been attempting to open the Pearly Gates from this side.” He frowned. “They were made to withstand efforts from without, but not within. Another attempt or two, and the soul may actually succeed. Once possessed of ectoplasmic attributes, there is no limit to the damage he could do in Purgatory.”

  “Then why not simply let him out?”

  “If I leave the gates open for him, we could be overwhelmed by even more unfit souls attempting to enter.”

  “I see,” I said. “What leads you to believe that it is the Ripper?”

  “Just as there is no duration in Heaven, neither is there location. The Pearly Gates, though quite small themselves, exist in all locations.”