Suddenly Holmes rolled over in bed towards Smith and, in a moment of feigned clarity, pleaded, “Is it you? Culverton Smith? Please! You are the only one who understands this malady! Please, you must save me!”
“Save? You? Don’t be preposterous!” said Smith, with a laugh. “Perhaps you do not fully understand how things stand between us, eh?”
In response, Holmes made a terrible gasping noise. This seemed to worry Smith, who bounded across the room for Holmes’s water pitcher. He poured a glass, then returned. He paused over Holmes, a gloating expression on his face.
“I bet you’d like this, wouldn’t you?” Smith asked, tilting the glass of water back and forth, as if considering pouring it out. “Well… you may have it. Not because I’ve any special regard for you, you understand, but merely because I do not wish you to perish before you’ve heard what I have to say. Here you are. Careful now, you fool, don’t slop it about! Do you know why I don’t care for you, Mr. Holmes?”
Between feverish gulps of water—and I had to admit this was by far the most convincing acting I’d ever seen Holmes produce—he gasped, “Yes. Yes. Your nephew.”
“Hmm. Yes. Young Victor, poor fool. It wasn’t his fault, you know. He simply stood between myself and a property reversion.”
“Really?” said Holmes, momentarily forgetting to play sick. “I thought you were jealous of his name.”
“No! No!” cried Smith, slapping the drinking glass from Holmes’s hand. Huge drops of water spattered down all around as the gigantic glass careened to the floor where—fortunately for me—it did not shatter. “Why should I be jealous, eh? Just because his first name sounds victorious and his last, manfully savage? Because my mother had the misfortune to fall in love with someone named ‘Smith’? Because she then became convinced—God knows how—that ‘Culverton’ was a perfectly acceptable first name for the young child she supposedly loved? Is that why?”
“Erm…” said Holmes, “…sure?”
“Well, it was nothing like that! Nothing! The reversion! That’s why I killed him!”
“Ah, so you did kill him,” said Holmes.
“Oh, you already knew that, I am certain. You and those detective friends of yours. It was ungenerous of you, Mr. Holmes, to connect the rare Chinese tropical disease I had identified to the untimely death of my nephew. And most ungenerous of you to point out that three bottles were missing from my collection and that at least one of these had been poured all over Victor’s sandwich. Perhaps that is why you find yourself in your current state, eh?”
The words “current state” were, I think, sufficient to remind Holmes that he was meant to be pretending at being sick. He gave a few feeble little coughs and gasped, “What do you mean, Mr. Smith? I caught this disease from my dealings with Chinese dock workers.”
“No, you didn’t!” Smith scoffed. “Really now, did you fail to realize? Think, Holmes! Think! To contract a disease so similar to the one that felled Victor? So soon after crossing me? Can you think of no other cause for your suffering?”
Holmes held one hand to his brow, as if trying to focus his thoughts against the fever. Yet after only a moment’s “reflection” he surrendered with a shrug.
“It was me, you dummy!” Smith howled. “I poisoned you! Ha, ha! Think carefully, Holmes. Try and remember. Did you not receive a little wooden box in the post this week?”
Holmes gave another helpless shrug.
“Did you not open it? Were you not impaled in the face with two dozen tiny needles?”
“Ah!” Holmes gasped. “Why, yes! I think I recall it!”
“That was me, don’t you see? I sent the box! I loaded those needles! I coated them first in the bacterial samples I knew must lead to your wasting demise! Now, at last, you see the folly inherent in crossing Culverton Smith! Now, you know why death is upon you! Bwaah-ha-ha! So, may I perform any other services before you die in freakish misery?”
“There is one thing,” said Holmes, in a clear and confident voice. All pretense of sickness was gone from him. As Culverton Smith gaped in disbelief, Holmes sat up, smiled, and said, “I’d rather like a batch of toast and soup. I’ve been starving myself for three days in order to fool you.”
“What? No, no, no!” Smith spluttered. “I fooled you! I poisoned you!”
“I’m afraid not, my good fellow,” laughed Holmes. “I was never ill. I was never poisoned.”
“But… but… you opened the box!”
“No. I never did. I fooled you.”
“No, I fooled you. With the box.”
“But I never opened it.”
“But you did.”
“No. I didn’t. Look,” said Holmes, peeling off one of his false facial lumps and flicking it at Culverton Smith. “It’s all a clever ruse, you see? Disguised as a common Irish dying man—”
“But no, I fooled you! You opened my box and got stabbed in the face.”
“No that’s what I keep trying to tell you! I fooled you! Look: there’s your box right there. Unopened. See?”
Culverton Smith swept the little box off Holmes’s alchemical desk and stared at it incredulously, turning it over and over in his hands.
“But… but… how did you get it back together?” he demanded.
“I never took it apart! I told you!”
“Impossible! The very instant you moved this flap, it should have—”
“Wait! Don’t open it!” Holmes cried.
But it was too late. There was the swish of cardboard sliding over cardboard, then the twang of a spring and the gentle “fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fftfft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft- fft-” of two dozen poisoned needles, imbedding themselves in Culverton Smith’s face.
We all froze, mouths agape. Of us, Smith himself was first to gather his wits, scrutinize the situation, and offer an observation. “WHAAAAAGHUAHUAH!”
“I told you not to open it!”
“EEEAAAAAAAAAH!”
“Well, screaming about it isn’t going to help.”
“AAAAAAAAAAUGHAAAAH!”
“But you’re going to persist anyway, I see,” said Holmes, voice heavy with exasperation. “Damn it all… after all that work to get
