“What are you implying?”
“That you don’t actually know anything about dirt and poisons at all.”
“But I must, if I can solve crimes based entirely on this expertise.”
“Oh, somebody knows about this stuff—or gives a good impression of it—but it’s not you. It’s like me being a criminal mastermind. Last night, I decided that I was going to try to commit a perfectly simple crime: jeweler’s shop, window, brick. I walk to jeweler’s, break window with brick, run away with jewels, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“And what happened?” asked Holmes.
“I couldn’t do it. I stood there, brick in hand, but I couldn’t throw it. Instead I went home and constructed an elaborate plan for tunneling into the jeweler’s involving six dwarfs, a bald man with a stoop, and an airship.”
“What has an airship got to do with digging a tunnel?” asked Holmes.
“Exactly!” Moriarty exclaimed. “More importantly, why do I need six dwarfs, never mind the bald man with the stoop? I can’t think of any situation in life where the necessity of acquiring six men of diminished stature might arise, or none that I care to bring up in public.”
“On close examination, it does seem to be excessively complicating what would otherwise be a fairly simple act of theft.”
“But I was completely unable just to break the window and steal the jewels,” said Moriarty. “It wasn’t possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not written that way.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not the way I was written. I’m written as a criminal mastermind who comes up with baroque, fiendish plots. It’s against my nature even to walk down the street in a straight line. Believe me, I’ve tried. I have to duck and dive so much that I get dizzy.”
Holmes sat back, stunned, almost dropping the revolver from his hand at the realization of his own true nature. Suddenly, it all made sense: his absence of anything resembling a past; his lack of a close familial bond with his brother, Mycroft; the sometimes extraordinary deductive leaps that he made, which baffled even himself.
“I’m a literary invention,” he said.
“Precisely,” said Moriarty. “Don’t get me wrong: you’re a good one—certainly better than I am—but you’re still a character.”
“So I’m not real?”
“I didn’t say that. I think you have a kind of reality, but you didn’t start out that way.”
“But what of my fate?” said Holmes. “What of free will? If all this is true, then my destiny lies in the hands of another. My actions are predetermined by an outside agency.”
“No,” said Moriarty, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation if that were the case. My guess is that you’re becoming more real with every word that the author writes, and a little of that has rubbed off on me.”
“But what are we going to do about it?” asked Holmes.
“It’s not entirely in our hands,” said Moriarty.
And with that he looked up from the page.
And that was where the manuscript ended, with a fictional character engaged in a virtual staring contest with his creator. In his letter, Conan Doyle described letting the papers fall to the floor, and in that moment Sherlock Holmes’s fate was sealed.
Holmes was a dead man.
Thus began the extraordinary sequence of events that would come to imperil the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository. Conan Doyle completed “The Last Problem,” consigning Holmes to the Reichenbach Falls and leaving only his trusty Alpinestock and silver cigarette case as a sign that he had ever been there at all. The public seethed and mourned, and Conan Doyle set out to immerse himself in the historical fictions that he believed would truly make his reputation.
Mr. Headley, meanwhile, went about the business of the Caxton which, for the most part, consisted of making pots of tea, dusting, reading, and ensuring that any of the characters who wandered off—as some of them were inclined to do—returned before nightfall. Mr. Headley had once been forced to explain to an unimpressed policeman why an elderly gent in homemade armor seemed intent upon damaging a small ornamental windmill that stood at the heart of Glossom Green, and had no intention of having to go through all that again. It was difficult enough trying to understand how Don Quixote had ended up in the Caxton to begin with, given that his parent book had been written in Spanish. Mr. Headley suspected that it was something to do with the proximity of the first English translations of Cervantes’s work in 1612 and 1620 to their original publication in Spanish in 1605 and 1615. Then again, the Caxton might simply have got confused. It did that, sometimes.