“You could have margarine?”
“An endless supply! Consider how closely my happiness relies upon toast! Why, I would never have to go to the shops again!”
“No, Holmes. What about bread? You’d still have to—”
Yet my protestations—no matter how valid—served only to anger him. He turned on me and thundered, “I strive, Watson, in the realm of Gods! Vex me not with the thoughts of worms!”
He then began to pace the narrow little confines of the room he’d blocked off with fabric, stroking his chin and muttering, “I know the man who has the stone; that is something. He knows I know; that is problematic. He has sworn to slay me; also problematic. Damn! That’s two in the ‘problematic’ category, only one in the ‘something’!”
Though the situation made me uncomfortable, I will confess to a certain rising hopefulness. Holmes was involved in an adventure, that much was clear. A stupid one, no doubt, but an adventure nonetheless. And—despite his insistence that I never involve myself—he seemed willing to puzzle it out in my presence. He had made no move to eject me and, indeed, seemed to be airing his thought process in the hopes that I could improve upon it. Which, I was certain, would not be an insurmountable challenge.
Of course, there were other demands upon my attention. Another tug at my trouser leg caused me to look down into the wide, earnest eyes of Billy the pageboy. He’d gotten Holmes’s bread knife from beside the fireplace and was holding it helpfully out towards me, handle first.
“No,” I told him. “Stop asking.”
Then, since he didn’t, I turned to Holmes and said, “Do you think we could do something about all your wax monsters? I find them a bit distracting.”
“Hmmm? Oh, fine, fine. Steve, go sit in your chair.”
“HRUUUUUP?” asked Steve, tilting his head to one side.
“The chair! Right over there! Go sit—argh! Fine. Steve: open.”
Steve obediently opened his mouth. Holmes scribbled “Sit in your chair” on one of his scraps of paper, crumpled it, and tossed it down Steve’s throat. A sudden wave of recognition flickered across Steve’s pseudo-face and he gave an accommodating little head bobble, which I think meant, “Well why didn’t you say so, silly?” and clomped off towards the Baker Street side of the sitting room, pushing aside curtains as he went. Holmes wasted no time plucking the bread knife from Billy’s hand and shove-kicking the little fellow in after his big brother. Billy seemed to mind this very little, for as soon as Steve settled in his chair, Billy did the same in a nearby corner, staring up at the larger construct with an expression of utter awe, as if to say, “Look how realistic his hair is! I wish I had hair like that. I wish I could talk.” Yet the thing that struck me most about the whole endeavor was not the behavior of Holmes’s homunculi; it was his décor. His actions, you see, had swirled certain of his curtains about, revealing an unexpected feature.
“Holmes!” I gasped. “Your curtains! They are invisible!”
“Not entirely, Watson,” he said, smiling at my incredulity. Holmes was never above interpreting wonder as praise. “You will note that from the front side, they appear black. From the back, yes, they are practically invisible.”
“But… why? How?”
“Why? To protect my person. As he has paid me rent, 221B Baker Street is not safe from Negretto Sylvius. I have therefore devised this clever blind. Should he come here—as I fear he shall—I can stand at the door to my bedroom and see all. To him, this domicile is a confusing maze. To me, the trap to catch a shark! How? All thanks to my personal invention: the one-way curtain.”
“But then, why have you used all the blankets off my old bed, too?” I wondered.
Holmes huffed. “I said I invented the one-way curtain, Watson. I didn’t say I invented enough.”
As Holmes fired a series of frowns about the room at his insufficiently plentiful defensive curtains, I began to parse the situation. A number of useful facts had been presented, of course, but they had been presented in a typically Holmesian explosion of data, bereft of a cohesive narrative. I began to probe him for the rest.
“Let me see if I can get this straight, Holmes,” I said. “You decided to get a replacement me. Your criteria were thus: he needed to be magical and disposable, yes?”
“Exactly.”
“You then settled on Count Negretto Sylvius. I’m curious—how did you know of him?”
“Scotland Yard. It seems he’d come to their notice by being accused of rather a spate of nefarious little crimes and plots, all across Europe. But he always beats the charges—there’s never any mundane explanation for how he could be to blame for the trouble. Lestrade imagines this is because he’s been using a bit of magic. We’ve always thought I’d eventually have to deal with Negretto.”
“Instead, you contacted him and asked him to be Watson Number Two. But tell me, how did you reach out to him?”
“Simple. I sent a letter to his house.”
“Er… Holmes… he has a house?”
“Several, I think. He is a count, after all.”
“Right. Did it not occur to you, Holmes, that people who own multiple houses are not usually in the market for shared rooms?”
Holmes gave a defensive sniff. “Of course it did; I am not a child. I am a super-clever grown-up man!”
“Who seems to have made a blanket fort out of his entire living space,” I reminded him. But he gave me the sort of angry glance that let me know I was straying out of useful territory, so I demurred and asked, “How did you go about asking him to ignore his own houses?”
“Again, it was the height of simplicity. In my letter, I asked him to disregard them. They were not important, I said. The main thing was that I was a sorcerer without peer, in possession of countless magical secrets and treasures, and rather poor at guarding them.
