“Here! By the window!”
Wearing a face designed to communicate that he did not care for any single part of this whole situation, Sam Merton began pushing curtains aside with the tip of the Straubenzee, working his way towards his employer. Merton was guided in this by the soft vocalizations of Steve, who had softened his tone greatly, for he was engaged in a new exploration. His hand probed the left side of his head as he mumbled, “Mon-mau! Maaaaaaaaaaaau.”
When Merton at last emerged into the little hollow near the window, he looked down at the damaged wax man and complained, “All right, now. What is that?”
This question was answered by Steve—in his own particular fashion. It seems Merton’s original shot had passed through the right side of Steve’s head, expanded, and lodged on the inside left. Thus, after a few moments of probing, there was a strange thunk sound inside Steve’s mouth. He then opened it, gave a little cough, and expelled a flattened leaden slug, which clattered to the floor at Sam Merton’s feet.
“Aaaaaaaaaaah!” Merton opined.
Poot! added his air gun, and the recently removed bullet was replaced with another, right in the middle of Steve’s chest. Though his expressions were a bit rudimentary and not well synchronized with regular human countenance, I must still classify the look Steve gave Merton as “ungenerous”. He slumped forwards and his heavy, waxen hands began to probe randomly about the floor.
“If you are quite finished abusing my artwork, I have a proposal for you,” came Holmes’s voice, from the depths of the curtain maze. “I am going to step into my room, take up my accordion, and play. I shall try over the Hoffman ‘Barcarolle’, I should think. I encourage you to use the interim discussing the wisdom of waging war against a superior mind as compared to the wisdom of living here and sharing access to the Margarine Stone.”
We heard the sound of a door closing, and presently, the first few notes of Offenbach’s work drifted through the room. It was an unusually diplomatic move for Holmes and I was just beginning to wonder what he was playing at, when he spoke again. “Watch this, Watson,” he said. “They think I’m in the other room playing, but I’m not. I have merely bewitched the accordion to play itself. What I’m really going to do is this: I’m going to teleport myself to where the dummy is, at the same moment teleporting him to my present location. Sylvius and Merton are very unlikely to note the change. Thus, knowing nothing of what has occurred, they will then discuss their plans in my presence, alerting me to their intentions and perhaps revealing the location of the Margarine Stone!”
Sylvius’s and Merton’s brows furrowed. “Who’s Watson?” Merton wondered.
Holmes gasped, “Oh! Was that aloud? It was supposed to be telepathy! Damn, damn, damn!”
I shook my head, then laid it down into my palm and massaged my nascent headache. Yet Holmes’s carefully laid, carelessly betrayed plan unraveled even faster than I expected. At that very moment came a delicate glass clink. Looking up, I noticed Steve had his hand in my medical case. I think I was about to shout for him to be careful not to break any medicine bottles and cut himself or stick himself with any of the syringes, but caught myself just in time. He’d not have understood, I realized. And even if he had, how would a creature with no circulatory system have been affected anyway? It was not the medicine I should have been concerned about, in any case, for as he slowly began to straighten up, I saw the gleam of metal in his hand—my pistol!
At that exact moment came a slight change in the light. Nothing out of the ordinary, I would think. Most likely a cloud passing in front of the sun outside the Baker Street window. Yet this slight change had a great effect on our guests’ frayed nerves. Observing the sudden flicker, Count Sylvius shouted, “That’s it! That’s the teleport!”
Both men spun their heads back towards Steve, only to behold the creature they now thought to be Holmes, straightening up towards them with a rather impressive gun in his hand. Sam reacted just as one might expect. He gave a cry, raised the Straubenzee, and sent a second shot through the front of Steve’s shirt, right next to the last one.
“NOOOOOOORP!” Steve protested, then raised my Webley and retaliated by blowing a neat hole right through the center of Sam Merton’s face and one through his chest. I don’t think he knew exactly what he’d accomplished, but he sure did look impressed with himself to have made such loud, important noises. He turned to Negretto Sylvius with an oh-wow-look-what-I-just-did look on his face and fired the remaining four bullets into varying aspects of the good count’s torso. Both men went down like poleaxed pigeons as Steve’s barrage gave way to the gleeful click, click, clicking of a firing hammer on empty cartridges. I felt the instant tug of duty to aid the fallen. Yet, at the same time, my experience as a doctor, an adventurer and a soldier all returned the same verdict: Are you kidding? No way. That’s done it, sunshine.
Of course, it is very difficult to conceal the sound of gunfire in a residential building in the middle of London. The response we got was exactly the normal and expected one: three thumps on the floor below us and the muffled tones of an angry old woman shouting, “Oi! Noise!”
“Sorry, Mrs. Hudson!” called Holmes and I together, as had become our habit.
A moment later, Holmes appeared from the curtain maze behind me and hissed, “What happened, Watson? You taught him how to shoot?”
“I? I taught him no such thing! Apart from your paper trick, I wouldn’t know how
