“Well,” I said, “since you bring it up, I was slightly hurt by that. But you explained your reasons to me when you returned.”
“It is a comfort to me, Watson, that your ill-feelings were assuaged. But I wonder, perchance, if it was more you than I who assuaged them.”
“Eh?”
“You had seen clear evidence of my death, and had faithfully if floridly recorded the same in the chronicle you so appropriately dubbed ‘The Final Problem.’ “
“Yes, indeed. Those were the hardest words I had ever written.”
“And what was the reaction of your readers once this account was published in the Strand?’
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, since I was dead.”
“Exactly. The whole thing left a rather bad taste, I must say. Seemed very peculiar behavior.”
“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 traveled, 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 our rooms at 221B Baker Street, 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 Honorable 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 Schrodinger’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 reemerged 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 Schrodinger 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 neighbor about the dead cat— and your neighbor 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 wavefront 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 wavefront of possibilities!”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the aliens are there, Watson—it is not they who are missing, it is us! Our world is out of synch 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 festooned 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 th
e 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 Englishwomen, and Steiler the Elder, the innkeeper, reacted, as I knew he must, with surprise. My performance was probably halfhearted; 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 alpine stock, 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 honor 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.
PART IV: HOLMES AFTER DEATH
ILLUSIONS by Janni Lee Simner
Wind blew through the crack between the window and the sill. The candles sputtered and went out. Arthur heard people hurrying along the London streets outside, their staccato footsteps at odds with the moaning wind. Inside, no one spoke. No one even moved to light the candles again.
Mr. Wentworth sat to Arthur’s right, his breath slow and deep. Arthur could just make out the medium’s shadowed form, head hunched between narrow shoulders. The man’s hand felt cold in Arthur’s own. His grip was surprisingly strong.
Miss Loder-Symonds, the acquaintance who’d suggested the séance, held Arthur’s other hand. “Joshua’s good,” she’d told him, “though admittedly a bit unconventional. When his sittings succeed, they succeed spectacularly. When they fail, they are far less impressive—the spirits give him everything or nothing.” Mr. Wentworth’s failures, she’d explained, had kept him from being in very high demand. People wanted a medium who could work regular small miracles, not irregular large ones.
Miss Loder-Symonds sat straight-backed in her chair, knees just brushing the edge of the low table, skirt just brushing the floor. Two friends of hers—a doctor and his wife whom Arthur didn’t know—completed the circle. Arthur stared across the table at them.
He thought of the small tricks that took place at most séances—ringing bells, blowing horns, objects flying across the room. He found such games tiresome, and had nearly stopped attending séances because of them. Surely true ghosts were capable of greater feats.
Miss Loder-Symonds had insisted that Mr. Wentworth’s sittings were different. Arthur hoped so; he longed for proof that spiritualism was true. He’d long ago abandoned his family’s Catholicism, but he still longed for evidence of a divine creator, of an immortal human soul.
The wind continued to moan, but no miracles of any size occurred.
Arthur’s thoughts wandered to his next novel, a medieval one that would share characters and setting with The White Company but take place many years before. He could already picture Nigel Loring as a boy—poor, young, committed to chivalry and great deeds. He felt as if he’d met the lad, a sure sign that he was ready to start writing. It felt good to work with characters he cared about again. He knew he’d been right to throw that fool Holmes into the waters of Reichenbach Falls.
“The wind,” someone—the doctor—whispered, bringing Arthur back to the present. “It’s calling you.” For a moment Arthur wondered what the man was talking about. Then he heard it. The wind’s soft moans had shaped themselves into words—long, low, unearthly sounding words.
“Arthur,” the wind moaned. He had to strain to understand it. “Arthur Conan Doyle.”
Mr. Wentworth’s grip on Arthur’s hand tightened. “Welcome, spirit. What is your name?”
“My Christian name—” the voice paused between each word, between each gust that blew “—is Richard. My family name is Doyle.”
“Uncle Dick.” Always before, the voices at séances had claimed to belong to Arthur’s father—or, for that matter, to his mother, who was alive and very well. Then again, the voices had always come directly from the medium, or from some definite location within the room. They’d never been carried on the wind, not like this.
If this were a real spirit, Arthur wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to it. Even when they were alive, he’d talked to his uncles as little as possible.
“What brings you back to this world?” Mr. Wentworth asked.
“I’ve come,” the spirit’s voice turned suddenly clear and distinct, almost human, “to send my nephew my love.”
The gentle words reminded Arthur of the Uncle Dick of his childhood, the uncle who’d showed him around London during the holidays. He preferred that version over the tight-lipped old man with whom he’d fought in later years.
But the words didn’t prove anything. The spirit had said nothing a stranger couldn’t say. Arthur wanted more definite proof.
“I send my love to his sisters and brother, as well.” Still, nothing specific. The wind tugged fitfully at the curtains. “I forgive him for leaving the Catholic Church.”
Arthur clenched his jaw. “I hardly think that needs forgiving.” He thought of other arguments, fought with Uncle Dick over his dining room table.
“Of course it does.” The voice took on an edge Arthur remembered well. “But since my death I’ve met enough spirits who, though not Catholic or even Christian, seem to have lived virtuous lives and been granted a peaceful existence beyond the grave. And if the Lord can forgive their mistaken beliefs—well, I’m hardly presumptuous enough not to do so myself.”
The condescension grated. “How can a belief that results in a virtuous life be mistaken?”
“There’s room enough for virtue within the Church.” As usual, Uncle Dick avoided answering the question directly. “There’s no need for you to go outside it.”
Arthur felt like a child being lectured. His anger rose. “Room for virt
ue? When the Church has been responsible for so much bloodshed through the years?”
“You cannot blame the church for the faults of its members.”
“Then you can’t credit it with their virtues, either!” Arthur took a deep breath, fighting to calm himself. The argument would go on forever if one of them didn’t stop it. “Uncle,” he said, as calmly as he could, “surely you have not come here only to fight about the Church.”
“No,” Uncle Dick said, sounding calmer himself. “I have come here for another purpose entirely.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’ve come to ask you to bring back Sherlock Holmes!” A sudden gust beat at the windows, making the glass rattle. That was too much. Arthur jumped to his feet, restrained only by the hands of Mr. Wentworth and Miss Loder-Symonds. “How dare you?” he yelled. He wondered why his uncle cared about Sherlock Holmes in the first place. “How dare you tell me what to do!”
“All of London mourned when you killed him,” Uncle Dick said. Arthur didn’t need reminding. Otherwise sensible men had worn black mourning bands around their hats. People had sent not only furious letters, but also tearful condolences.
“And I confess,” Uncle Dick said, “that I was rather fond of the chap myself.”
“I won’t bring him back. I’m not a child. You can’t tell me how to conduct my life.”
“When you are conducting your life wrongly, I most certainly can!”
Arthur opened his mouth to protest. He knew he was only repeating old arguments, but he couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. He hadn’t started, after all.
Repeating old arguments. The words echoed through his head.
Twenty years ago, when Arthur had first left the Church, Uncle Dick had used the same words he was using now.
How could any fake spirit duplicate the exact words of their arguments? Arthur began to laugh. How, for that matter, could anyone but Arthur’s own relatives make him feel so angry, as if he were a child all over again? The laughter turned high and wild, almost hysterical, dissolving the anger.
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