“Good lord, Holmes! This leg weighs as much as I do! I don’t suppose you might have cut him up into smaller pieces.”
“Well, I didn’t see you helping!”
“Yes, and speaking of helping: human Garridebs, what say you come over and lend a hand, eh?”
None of them moved an inch. They all stood about in the back of the room in stunned silence. And do you know what? Disappointment. Which, in an odd way, I could understand. One of the strange burdens of humanity is lack of purpose. If most of us have one, it is difficult to know what it may be. Oh, all the world’s religions will say they have the answer, but only if one is willing to suspend his disbelief and try to place his faith there. These three men did not have to. They—alone among humans—had possessed a purpose.
All right, not an enviable one. Getting chewed up by a demon is not a fate most people aspire to, but it is a purpose nonetheless and it must have come as quite the shock to see Holmes carve up their destiny before their very eyes.
Grunting and straining, I dragged one of Garrideb’s legs to the portal and shoved it through. Holmes kept tossing brick after brick of gold, as fast as he could. Leaning down and straightening back up to throw with rhythmic regularity, like some sort of overly charitable member of a bucket brigade. Though a few hundred thousand pounds worth of gold had spilled out, he’d gotten the bag empty. I helped him drag it over and push it through, horrified by the otherworldly blood that coated my hands.
“His body! Did you get the body?” Holmes asked.
“Are you joking? The thing must weigh two tons!”
Holmes gave a little nod to concede the point, then gestured towards the demon’s corpse and made a little grunting noise. The body rose and flew through the portal like a disgusting meat-missile. The instant it went through, the portal changed. The light of the twin suns grew dim and the air beyond seemed to coalesce into jelly. This was aptly demonstrated by the next brick of gold, which flew though the portal, wedged itself in to the air beyond, and began to slowly sink.
“How very outré,” I noted.
“Hurry!” Holmes urged.
The next few bricks splatted into thickening air. The one after that barely went in at all. Holmes had to lean on it and kick it to get it to sink in. The final brick clinked off solid stone and fell heavily to the floor. I looked down at it distrustfully.
“Erm… so am I to gather that’s… not great?”
“Not especially,” said Holmes, staring down at it with a pained expression. “I mean, it does seem to be ordinary gold—which at least occurs on this plane of existence. So that’s good. I’m just trying to decide which would be more damaging: to allow it to stay here, or to tear a hole through reality to put it back.”
“Ooh. I know I don’t have your level of expertise in such matters,” I told him, “but I have always included myself in the please-don’t-tear-holes-in-reality camp, as it were.”
Holmes sighed. “And it’s not as if we don’t have a use for it.”
He grasped Melfrizoth by the handle, pulled it out of the floor, walked to the fallen brick, and used the tip of his soul-blade to cut the gold into three sections—as easily as if he were dividing up a soft cheese. This accomplished, he muttered, “Ves, Melfrizoth,” and the blade vanished. The fire in his eyes cooled. His horns retracted. His legs shifted back to normal human form. And finally, his right hand gave up and admitted that really, when one paused to reflect on things, that’s exactly what it was—a right hand.
Holmes stooped, gathered up the pieces of gold, and walked over towards the human Garridebs. “All right, you three,” he said. “I know it’s been a bit of an odd day. I know you feel strongly drawn to this place and… er… what was supposed to have happened here. But that’s all done, now. It’s not going to happen. So just take this, all right, and go do whatever you want to do with your lives.”
He gave each of them a gleaming bar of demon gold. At first, none of them seemed to understand what Holmes was doing. Of them, Mr. Chow was first to recover his senses. He stared dumbly at his bar of gold a few moments, then at the other Garridebs. Finally, he gave a little sidewise glance at Mr. Grub and muttered, “His is bigger.”
“Well maybe by a tiny bit,” Holmes huffed. “Look, I had a demon-killing blade, all right? Not a wealth-reapportionment device! Besides, this is Mr. Grub’s house, isn’t it? This is the wreckage of his precious collection we’re all stomping around in, so let’s try to have a little charity, shall we?”
This, at last, shook Garrideb Grub from his stupor. The antique antiquarian jerked back suddenly, as if he’d just recognized what he was looking at, gave a terrible cry of dismay, threw down his block of gold and flung himself to his knees to assess the damage to his beloved collection.
Let’s just say: it was vast.
Poor fellow. I went and laid a hand on his shoulder, saying, “There, there, Mr. Grub. It could have been worse, you know. True, some of your artifacts have been injured, but now you have the funds you need to fill some of those gaps that had frustrated you so. And with the demonic threat lifted, I’d say the whole thing’s gone rather well.”
This seemed to infuriate Holmes. “Rather well? Oooooh, you bloody bastard!”
“What? Me?” I protested.
“Yes, you! Look at you, Watson! You’ve been shot! Again!”
“Well… slightly…”
“Unacceptable! Do you know the trouble I’ve gone through to keep you safe? And yet you continue to insinuate yourself into every adventure you can find! Sometimes
