“Turn on the light, Holmes,” I said.
I think he shook his head in the dark. “No, it will attract attention. Not that they do not know where we are . . . they must . . . fear, fear smells so sweet . . . to bees . . .”
“Holmes. Turn on the light or I will shoot you.” And right then, standing in the room where my friend and I had spent years of our lives in pleasurable and business discourse, I was telling the truth. I was frightened enough to pull the trigger, because Holmes’s intellect would bypass my archaic revolver, however mad he sounded. He would beat me. If he chose to—if he had lured me here to be his next victim—he would kill me.
“Very well,” my friend said. “But prepare yourself, Watson. It is been a somewhat eventful twenty-four hours.”
The lamp flicked alight.
I gasped. He looked like a man who should be dead.
“Do not lower that revolver!” he shouted suddenly. “Keep it on me now, Watson. After what you think you saw me doing, lower your guard and you are likely to shoot me at the slightest sound or movement. That’s right. Here. Aim it here.” He thumped his chest and I pointed the gun that way, weak and shocked though I was.
“Holmes . . . you look terrible!”
“I feel worse.” From Holmes that was a joke, but I could not even raise a smile. Indeed, I could barely draw a breath. Never had Holmes looked so unkempt, exhausted, and bedraggled. His normally immaculate clothing was torn, muddied and wet, and his hair was sticking wildly away from his scalp. His hands were bloodied—I saw cuts there, so at least for the moment I could believe that it was his own blood—his cheek was badly scratched in several places and there was something about his eyes . . . wide and wild, they belied the calm his voice conveyed.
“You’re mad,” I said, unable to prevent the words from slipping out.
Holmes smiled, and it was far removed from that maniacal grin he had offered me as he crouched over the dying man.
“Do not jump to conclusions, Watson. Have you not learned anything in our years together?”
My hand holding the gun was starting to shake, but I kept it pointing at my friend across the room.
“I have to take you in, you know that? I will have to take you to the station. I cannot . . . I cannot . . .”
“Believe?”
I nodded. He was already playing his games, I knew. He would talk me around, offer explanations, convince me that the victims deserved to die or that he had been attacked . . . or that there was something far, far simpler eluding me. He would talk until he won me over, and then his attack would come.
“I cannot believe, but I must,” I said, a newfound determination in my voice.
“Because you saw it? Because you saw me killing someone you must believe that I did, in fact, kill?”
“Of course.”
Holmes shook his head. He frowned, and for an instant he seemed distant, concentrating on something far removed from Baker Street. Then he glanced back at me, looked to the shelf above the fire, and sighed.
“I will smoke my pipe, if you don’t mind, Watson. It will put my mind at rest. And I will explain what I know. Afterward, if you still wish to take me in, do so. But you will thereby be condemning countless more to their deaths.”
“Smoke,” I said, “and tell me.” He was playing his games, playing them every second . . .
Holmes lit a pipe and sat in his armchair, legs drawn up so that the pipe almost rested on his knees. He looked at the far wall, not at me, where I remained standing by the window. I lowered the revolver slightly, and this time Holmes did not object.
I could see no knives, no mess on his hands other than his own smeared blood. No mess on his chin from the masticated flesh of the folks he had killed.
But that proved nothing.
“Have you ever looked into a mirror and really concentrated on the person you see there? Try it, Watson, it is an interesting exercise. After an hour of looking, you see someone else. You see, eventually, what a stranger sees, not the composite picture of facial components with which you are so familiar, but individual parts of the face—the big nose, the close-together eyes. You see yourself as a person. Not as you.”
“So what are you trying to say?”
“I am saying that perception is not definite, nor is it faultless.” Holmes puffed at his pipe, then drew it slowly away from his mouth. His eyes went wide and his brow furrowed. He had had some thought, and habit made me silent for a minute or two.
He glanced back up at me then, but said nothing. He looked more troubled than ever.
“I saw you killing a man, Holmes,” I said. “You killed him and you laughed at me, and then you tore him open and stole his heart.”
“The heart, yes,” he said, looking away and disregarding me again. “The heart, the brain . . . parts, all part of the one . . . constituents of the same place . . .” He muttered on until his voice had all but vanished, though his lips still moved.
“Holmes!”
“It has gone quiet outside. They are coming.” He said it very quietly, looked up at me from sad, terrified eyes, and I felt a cool finger run down my spine. They’re coming. He did not mean Jones or the police, he did not mean anyone. No man scared Holmes as much as he was then.
“Who?” I asked. But he darted from his seat and ran at me, shoving me aside so that we stood on either side of the window.
“Listen to me, Watson. If you are my friend, if you have faith and loyalty and if you love me, you have to believe two things in the next few seconds if we are to survive. The first is that I am not a murderer; the second is that you must not trust your eyes, not for however long this may take. Instinct and faith, that is what you can believe in, because they cannot change that. It is too inbuilt, perhaps, too ingrained, I don’t know . . .”
He was mumbling again, drifting in and out of coherence. And I knew that he could have killed me. He had come at me so quickly, my surprise was so complete, that I had plain forgotten the gun in my hand.
And now, the denial.
Doubt sprouted in my mind and grew rapidly as I saw the look on Holmes’s face. I had seen it before, many times. It was the thrill of the chase, the excitement of discovery, the passion of experience, the knowledge that his reasoning had won out again. But underlying it all was a fear so profound that it sent me weak at the knees.
“Holmes, what are they?”
“You ask what, Watson, not who. Already you’re halfway to believing. Quiet! Look! There, in the street!”
I looked. Running along the road, heading straight for the front door of Holmes’s building, came Sherlock Holmes himself.
“I think they will come straight for me,” Holmes whispered. “I am a threat.”
“Holmes . . .” I could say little. The recent shocks had numbed me, and seemed now to be pulling me apart, hauling reality down a long, dark tunnel. I felt distanced from my surroundings, even though, at that moment, I knew that I needed to be as alert and conscious of events as possible.
“Don’t trust your eyes!” he hissed at me.
That man, he had been running like Holmes, the same loping stride, the same flick of the hair with each impact of foot upon pavement. The same look of determination on his face.
“Faith, Watson,” Holmes said. “Faith in God, if you must, but you must have faith in me, us, our friendship and history together. For there, I feel, will lie the answer.”
There came the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.