Imagine my cold wave of horror when—glancing up from the toes of my shoes that I’d been staring at dejectedly—I realized I’d just gotten exactly what I wanted. Warlock Holmes stood not ten yards in front of me walking in my direction and staring straight at my face with a ghastly smile plastered across his features.
I froze where I stood. What was my excuse, again? Had I ever concocted one? If he should say to me, “Hullo, Watson! What are you doing here? Saaaaaaay… you’re not disobeying my injunction about insinuating yourself into my life and business, are you?” what defense could I raise? I think I gave a little peep of alarm.
Holmes’s grin did not falter. He looked right at me and exclaimed, “MOOOOOOOOOOOOOP!”
To which I could only reply, “Erm… what was that?”
He directed his next comment not to me, but to one of the trees on the other side of the street. “NEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOF!”
He then turned sharply to the right, walked forward until the tips of his shoes touched the wall of the building that bordered the street, and noted, “MOE-MOE-MOE-MOE-NODUT!” He stood staring at the wall in apparent self-satisfaction for a few moments, then began opening and closing his mouth over and over, in the fashion of somebody who is utterly taken with the novelty of it.
“Um… Holmes? Are you quite all right?” I asked. Apparently whatever I had to say was far less fascinating than the action of his own teeth, for I was ignored. Nevertheless, I had come to my own conclusion anyway—that Holmes was definitely not all right. Yet as I drew closer, I came to a second, even stranger, conclusion.
It wasn’t Holmes. I realized his skin—which I had at first deemed to be a bit too shiny, as that of a man who suffers from fever sweats—wasn’t really skin at all. The thing that stood before me was not my friend, but a hollow man of wax. The likeness was remarkable—one is tempted to say exact. Indeed, the best visual cue that this was not Holmes was when the automaton opened his mouth, so that one could see straight into the hollow cavity of his head.
Well…
That and one or two behavioral clues, I suppose.
“NUUUUUUUUUUD!”
I leaned in to examine him more closely—as did a number of Baker Street’s other residents, it must be said—and asked, “What are you? What is happening?”
In response, he turned to me and gave me an inhuman grin. It pulled the corners of his mouth back as far as they could go, but the emotion was in no way mirrored by the glassy emptiness of his eyes. He then reached up to put one hand into my mouth, the interior of which he began to explore with much vigor and curiosity. Gasping, I reached up to slap his hand away. He slapped me back. Rather a heavy strike, as it turned out, for his wax arm was quite solid. The blow knocked me back a few steps and visibly deformed the side of one of his hands. He then lost interest in me, turned on his heel and headed back the way he had come.
With a gasp of excitement, I realized his destination. The hollow man was headed directly back towards the door of 221B. Well… towards where I knew it must be. My head and stomach swam when I tried to look at it. I therefore resolved not to. Instead, a few brisk steps took me right up behind my waxen antagonist. He seemed to take no notice as I caught up the hem of his coat. After that, I had naught to do but close my eyes and let the gentle tug of this bizarre homunculus guide me home.
Oh, how I thrilled to hear that familiar click and creak of my old street door opening! Then, the joyous moment my toe bumped that first stair. I dared not open my eyes, but I did not need to. Custom had taught me where to place my steps. Sqeeee-err-ka-reeeeek, went the third stair from the top. Finally, the clumsy fumbling of a lock gave me to know we had reached the door to my old rooms.
Here, at last, I paused. I released the hem of the wax man’s coat and cautiously cracked one eye open. I knew Holmes was likely to have a number of nasty magical surprises for unbidden intruders. As I still possessed a whit of sense, I resolved not to become one. I therefore cleared my throat and called, “Holmes? It’s me, Watson. Is everything quite all right?”
Even as I said it, the waxen man swung the door open, revealing a strange spectacle indeed. Several large brass hooks had been screwed into the ceiling of my familiar quarters. From these hung all the blankets from my old bed and a great quantity of black dressmakers’ muslin, dividing my old kitchen and sitting room into a labyrinth of mostly unseen corridors and rooms.
Leaning against the nearest of these cloth barricades stood a second homunculus. This one was much smaller. His head was wax—built to resemble a young, freckled lad—but made with far less skill than the Holmes simulacrum. His wig was all off to one side. His limbs and torso were made of painted planks, like a cut-rate ventriloquist’s dummy. I’d have thought him nothing more than a doll, except that as the door opened, he turned to look up at me with hopeful surprise and began soundlessly flapping his mouth open and shut. Apparently, he lacked the other creature’s powers of… well… I suppose I have to call it “speech”.
And there, in front of it all—framed in the open
