“Erm… no. I do confess it: I’ve been doing my utmost to ignore you, Holmes. But for good reason! These men needed my help.”
“Actually, my help, I think you’ll find,” Holmes countered. “Unless it was you who just chopped up that demon. You are not a monster-slayer, John. You’re barely a monster-appetizer! By the Twelve Gods, you almost just got knocked down by a man with a pistol! Do you realize how preposterous that is? You cannot keep placing yourself in danger! This will stop! Right now!”
I threw my hands to my hips and huffed, “No, it will not! I will not ever turn away from a person who needs my help.”
“Oh, yes you will!” Holmes declared, then bent his hands into grasping claws, shot them towards the sky and howled, “Rhett Khan! Rhett Khan, mighty one, hear my call!”
I gave a cry of horror! Well did I remember the last time Holmes invoked that name. Rhett Khan was a powerful demon with the ability to rewrite reality, but not one a fellow should resort to lightly.
“Wait! Holmes, Wait! What are you doing? You asked me to remind you! Remember? Rhett Khaning a thing always causes more problems than it solves!”
He ignored me.
“A person has occurred which displeases me!” Holmes intoned. “Undo him, Rhett Khan, and replace him with a better one!”
There was a terrible rushing sensation—as if reality itself were sweeping me away. I tried to push back against it, but what could I do? How does one resist the flow of… everything? How does one defend oneself against absolute fact? Especially when the fact is: one simply does not exist.
THE ADVENTURE OF THAT STOCKBROKER JERK
FROM THE JOURNALS OF HALL PYCROFT 12 JULY, 1884
HIP! PIP! TOP! DERPY-DERPY! MY NAME IS HALL PYCROFT, and I have the most extraordinary adventures! Oh yes I do! Why, it is a joyful thing to be me! I sometimes think the only dark spot in this bright, wonderful world is that I’m the only fellow who gets to try it.
On the other hand: what a lucky fellow I am! Hip! Pip! Top!
Now, I know I have not written in you for some time, my dear journal. Please forgive me. The last entry, if I recall, involved that extraordinary occurrence when I showed up to my old job at Coxon & Woodhouse’s and everybody said they had no idea who I was. So strange! I repeatedly asked everyone to stop their nonsense and show me to my desk but everybody kept saying I had none and matters escalated until I was ejected from the premises and asked never to return.
A rather extreme method of sacking someone, I thought. And more than a little cruel. Especially since, so far as I could recall, I hadn’t done anything wrong. Ah, I remember how low I felt—hanging my head in shame as I walked all the way home to tell my wife, Mary, that I had lost my job and was no longer a stockbroker.
And she asked if I meant “doctor”.
And I said, “no” and “what an extraordinary thing to say” and “I have always been a stockbroker, Mary, you know that!”
What I should have said was, “Hip! Pip! Top! Derpy-derpy!” How I regret, dear journal, that in the depths of my disappointment, I forgot the advice—my mother’s sage advice—that has carried me so far in this tempestuous world. She took me aside one day, when I was only a little lad, and she told me, “Hall, my son, the world is strange. Wonderful! But strange. There will be days you encounter a thing that you simply cannot understand. For example: why anybody would name their son after a long room whose only purpose is to contain doors to other, more interesting rooms. Now the temptation, my precious boy, when you discover something that doesn’t seem possible, is to stop and examine it. But why? You’ll only throw yourself deeper into confusion. Try this instead: just cry out something wonderful. Something loud and happy and confident! It needn’t make any sense. After all, the thing that made you say it didn’t make sense either. So just say, ‘Hip! Pip! Top! Derpy-derpy!’ and you’ll feel better in no time!”
Ah, what a wise woman Mother was! How often I can be stunned into complacency and inaction by the simple (and let me say, extraneous) fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. On such occasions, a good, loud “Hip! Pip! Top! Derpy-derpy!” is all that is needed to remind myself that it doesn’t matter if something seems wrong. I am Hall Pycroft, by God! You can’t stop me! I’ll just carry on regardless, even if nothing makes sense.
Yet I must confess, in those terrible months following my sacking, I forgot my mother’s advice far too often. I was adrift. Though it took me less than half a cup of tea to decide to pull myself back up by the bootstraps, I found it was an easy thing to resolve but a difficult thing to effect. It’s very hard to find new employment when one’s chief reference continues to insist that one does not exist. It seems Coxon & Woodhouse’s took the rather ungenerous course of warning each prospective employer who contacted them that I was a dangerous madman whom they had only met on one occasion. I was perhaps to be feared, perhaps to be pitied, but under no circumstances to be hired, they said—which dimmed my employment prospects significantly.
So, I started leaving their name off my résumé. My luck improved immediately and I even managed to secure a few interviews. Unfortunately, the gentlemen who conducted these interviews had all sorts of questions about… well… I don’t even know what. Stocks, I suppose, and why they must be broken. Or how to break them. And they seemed very confused that I could not make better answers to
