We went south, by boat and by rail. Given the somewhat rough nature of my measurements, there was no point in creating a second line until we had made a significant change in latitude. We took the smiff’s bearing again from the Hotel Europejski in Warsaw. The intersection of my two lines lay somewhere very near Zurich.
We came into Switzerland as quietly as we could, dressed—to the best of our ability—as locals. I convinced Holmes not to wear an enormous false moustache, but this was a narrowly won victory and I chalk most of it up to Holmes’s inability to spot a fake-moustache store.
We stayed in a small inn in Cham which—to the best of my ability to determine it—was named “Inn”. That night we set aside the large map and the two lines that had brought us all the way across Europe in favor of a local map I’d procured earlier that day. I had thought our goal might be in the capital city, but to my surprise, Holmes still sensed it south-southwest of us. The line I drew quickly left the populous areas and shot down into the mountainous wilds.
“Oh dear,” I reflected. “We may have a problem, Holmes.”
“Why?”
“Because there are so few roads there and so much overgrown wilderness.”
Luckily for us, as we had now drawn closer to our goal, Holmes’s sense of our destination grew. While I began to compose a list of alpine exploration gear, Holmes sat in one of the hotel chairs staring at the wall in the direction of our target, occasionally shaking his head.
After a time he said, “It’s a funny place, Watson. There is a flow to it, but not a peaceful one. It is a place of constant, violent, tumultuous change.”
“So… what? I’m looking for some sort of war zone in the pastoral Swiss Alps?” I asked. Yet only a moment later, as my finger traversed the line I’d drawn on our map, I gave a cry. “Holmes! Here! Look! Right on our course: Reichenbach.”
“I don’t believe I know it.”
“There is a famous waterfall there! A place with a flow—a constant change—yet the height of the fall dictates that the water comes crashing down with great force! There is your violence! There’s your tumult!”
Holmes gave a grim nod. “Well done, Watson. I do believe you’ve got it.”
* * *
The journey to the falls was difficult. Do you know how it’s hard to drive over pointy things? Well the Swiss Alps, it turns out, are rather pointy. Also, our destination was remote. The small village of Meiringen lay not far away, but we hardly trusted it. We approached it from some distance and surveilled it through binoculars, from the cover of the nearby woods. I’m glad we did. It had a small hotel called Das Englischer Hof, which looked cozy, charming, and deeply suspicious. Even Holmes thought so.
“Watson…” he said, lowering the binoculars. “Is that a hotel specifically for English people who happen to be marching through this remote Swiss town?”
“On the face of it, it would appear so,” I said.
“And yet, I don’t see one for the French, the Germans, the Samoans, the Palestinians or anyone else.”
“They do seem curiously absent.”
Holmes stepped further back into the woods and spent a few minutes walking in a circle firing doubtful glances alternately at his shoes and Meiringen. After a time, he said, “Did…? Did Moriarty build a whole hotel for just you and I, in order to guard the smiff?”
I shrugged. “You know him better than I do, Holmes.”
He nodded, screwed up his features and mused, “How about we don’t go there?”
“Yes. How about we don’t.”
Instead, we had to work our way around the entire village, through the woods. By the time we reached the path that led to Reichenbach Falls, twilight was upon us. Night brought with it a piercing cold and I was glad for my traveling gear. The path up the side of the mountain was only three feet wide, with a sheer cliff face on one side and a fall into a deep, watery crevasse on the other. It would have been madness to attempt it in darkness.
Yet—worryingly—the night was not dark. Which is one of those defining characteristics of night, usually. The moon shone down with silver splendor and curtains of luminescent air began to appear, delicately drifting, shimmering in green, purple and blue. The Northern lights, I would have said, if we were anywhere… you know… north. In Norway, they’d have fooled me. In Switzerland, I stared up at them with open distrust. After a while, I grumbled, “Well, at least you were right about one thing, Holmes: this place looks deeply magical.”
At my words, my friend gave an uncomfortable cringe. “But it doesn’t feel like it, Watson. There should be magic everywhere in this world. And near a smiff—egads—this whole place should be dripping with it. But I don’t feel… any. This place feels dead, Watson, as if all the magic that comes near it is burned off, somehow.”
“Burned off to make those lights, do you think?”
“Possibly. I cannot feel any of the arcane potential that usually attends me. All I can feel is that Moriarty-seeming dread in the pit of my heart—the same as it’s been all this time, but so much closer now.”
“Where?”
“Just ahead.”
We crept around the final bend to the end of the path. It came so close to the falls that a brave man might
