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concocting the most perfect, yet utterly fantastic scenarios that would explain the outrages, even affecting the minds of the very victims and witnesses; condemning many a man and woman to imprisonment or even the gallows. At times the creature was content to actually solve genuine crimes, its ability to partially glimpse men’s thoughts made that a simple matter, but it had a perverse sense of drama, and so created strange means of homicide and assault that defied reality but fuelled the fantasy. The speckled-band — that never-before heard of swamp adder that killed the Stoner girl; the impossible serum that transformed Professor Presbury into a creeping man; the impossibly agile, dart-throwing dwarf assassin at Pondicherry Lodge; the chemically irreproducible Devil’s Foot narcotic that slew a room of people instantly; all these were some of the terrible instruments of death that the djinn had conjured into being by sheer force of will, as plot elements in its cavalcade of murder and depravity. All done just so that Holmes and myself could triumphantly appear on stage to explicate and bring down the final curtain with a solution only we could furnish.

A solution I would then write of … for the adulation of millions.

My wife knew, of course. I don’t know how long it took for her to see through the veil of Holmes’ inhumanity, but she knew he was not what he seemed, but she was careful, she never challenged him directly; I am sure such action would have been fatal. No, Mary simply asked me to make a choice, as I had made a choice on that bleak battlefield years before, shivering with pain and ague. I wanted her to stay, but I could not admit why she was really leaving, so ultimately I let her go, because I was weak, I still wanted this life of fame, this life of international acclaim, as a stalwart of justice, and crusader against the wicked.

Somehow, across the years, across the miles, my old friend Faroukhan had sensed that my moment of truth was coming, and knowing I would fail, had come to repay the old debt, the debt that began with my helping his niece, and was compounded when I left his country carrying an evil native force with me, unbeknownst to him at the time. He had come to help me fight valiantly, with honor, as I had not done, as I had only pretended to do all these years since leaving Afghanistan. How he knew of my plight I know not, but he must have consulted a shaman of some kind and obtained the arrows that would rid the world of the djinn.

I was, I am, an utter fraud, no matter the sort of influence I was under all these years, no matter how confused my mental state when in proximity to the wretched creature. I know that now. I have my service revolver at my side. I have managed to rouse the fire in this room. I have dragged the djinn’s body into the fireplace and liberally doused much of the furniture in this place with oil. I will wait until I have satisfied myself that the thing’s body is adequately consumed and then ignite the room; that will take some hours, but the time has given me an opportunity to write this narrative.

After all else, I think I loved the writing more than anything, more than the money, the acclaim. How small and how sad were my desires.

I shall finish this missive and place it outside, in an envelope addressed to my old friend, Conan Doyle; he may do with it as he pleases. Then I shall return here, touch the flames to the furniture and put my service revolver to my head and do what I should have done in Afghanistan many, many years, and many, many lives ago. Hopefully I will become like Holmes, a thing of fantasy, nothing more than a creature of the imagination.

The Things That Shall Come Upon Them

The Things That Shall Come Upon Them

by Barbara Roden

“Do you recall, Watson,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes, “how I described my profession when we first took lodgings together, and you expressed curiosity as to how your fellow lodger was related to certain comments which you had read in a magazine?”

“I certainly do!” I laughed. “As I recall, you referred to yourself