Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [126]
We discussed the entire affair over dinner with Mycroft and Lord Roxton, who had arrived safely back in London and was eager to hear of hunting opportunities in this New World. Mycroft undertook to pass a sanitized report back to His Excellence Pope Leo XIII. I did not envy him the task.
It seemed to me that the more Holmes and I recounted our adventures to Mycroft or Roxton, or discussed them with each other, the less real they became. It was as if by telling them as a story, they became a story.
Perhaps it is for the best. I still wake from nightmares in which I see Azathoth twisting in the flames. In some of them, I am burning too.
Holmes threw himself into more mundane cases immediately upon our return. In quick succession he solved the bizarre problem of the paradol chamber, investigated the loss of the British barque Sophy Anderson and cast light upon the grotesque affair of the monkey and the plywood violin.
Other adventures followed, and I was proud to stand with him during them.
I am ashamed to say that the memory of Bernice faded, and I married again. My wife and I had a happy few years together before a congenital weakness of the heart robbed me of her wit and her beauty. Had it not been for Holmes's friendship, I too would have perished, of a broken heart.
Following the success of my memoir entitled A Study in Scarlet, I embarked upon another account of my adventures with Holmes: The Sign of the Four.
To my surprise (and, if truth be told, to Holmes's chagrin) the public rather took to these little amusements, and so I began to write more of them. I composed A Scandal in Bohemia in shorter form as an experiment, and found that its popularity far outstripped either of the two longer works. I was a middling to fair physician, but I found that I had a talent for fiction. My medical colleague and co-author, Arthur Conan Doyle, became well known to the public. The noms-de-plume with which he protected the identities of Holmes and myself became equally famous, but Doyle never revealed our real names. After a while, we both found ourselves in the curious position where we would answer either to our real names or to our fictional ones.
Secretly, we both preferred the latter.
On a number of occasions I had attempted to set down the circumstances of our meeting with the Doctor, and their shocking outcome. On each occasion I found myself floundering, wondering what people would make of them. It was Holmes, of course, who came up with the solution.
'Write for yourself, Watson,' he said. 'Write the book, let the doctor friend of yours pretty it up for you, and then lock it away somewhere.'
I did write the book, this book, and it helped. Seeing aspects of the narrative from the point of view of Bernice Summerfield helped me to find a wider perspective. The notes she had written on strange, yellow scraps of paper with a sticky margin, have been integrated into the text almost verbatim. I do not pretend to understand much of what she says, and some of it jars with my own recollections, but I admire the way that she says it.
When I look back and ask myself what I learned, I can say that I now know the universe to be a far stranger place than I had, in my prosaic British way, imagined. Far stranger, and far richer. I also find myself intolerant of the pronouncements of clerics of any sort. They may talk of Hell, but I have seen it.
And Holmes? He refuses to talk about his brother Sherringford. He seems to have retreated inside himself He is dismissive of love, friendship and family ties.
He has also taken to wearing gloves.
There is a confession that I have to make. I have suppressed a deal of material in preparing this narrative, even though it will never see print. Our interview with Doctor Minor in the Broadmoor asylum, for instance, is too appalling to consider setting down on paper, and the circumstances surrounding the