“I’m experimenting,” said Holmes, quite tartly, and, thought Mr. Headley, not a little defensively.
“Right, of course. Just, er, be careful, please.”
There was a vent in the wall behind Holmes’s head. Mr. Headley wasn’t entirely certain where it led, exactly, but he still lived in fear of that mythical policeman sniffing the air and organizing a raid, once he’d recovered his senses.
Mr. Headley cleared his throat and enunciated, as clearly as he could:
“Goddag, hvor er du?”
Holmes looked at him peculiarly.
“What?”
“Lenge siden sist,” said Mr. Headley.
“Are you feeling all right?”
Mr. Headley glanced at the small Norwegian phrase book in his hand.
“Jo takk, bare bra. Og du?”
“Are you speaking . . . Norwegian?”
Watson woke.
“What’s all this?” he asked.
“Headley appears to have struck his head,” Holmes explained, “and is now under the impression that he’s Norwegian.”
“Good Lord,” said Watson. “Tell him to sit down.”
Mr. Headley closed his phrase book.
“I haven’t hit my head, and I don’t need to sit down,” he said. “I was just wondering, Mr. Holmes, if by any chance you spoke Norwegian?”
“I have never had any cause to learn the language,” said Holmes. “I did wrestle with Beowulf in my youth, though, and obviously there are certain similarities between Old English and Norwegian.”
“Have you ever heard of a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson?” asked Mr. Headley.
“I can’t say that I have,” said Holmes. He was now regarding Mr. Headley with a degree of suspicion. “Why do you ask?”
Mr. Headley decided to sit down after all. He wasn’t sure if it was good or bad news that the Caxton’s Holmes had not begun producing new memories due to the return of his literary self. Whichever it was, he could not hide the existence of the new story from Holmes. Sooner or later, he was bound to find out.
Mr. Headley reached beneath his jacket and removed the latest edition of the Strand.
“I think you should read it,” he told Holmes.
He then turned to Dr. Watson.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” said Mr. Headley, “but your wife has died.”
Watson considered the news for a moment.
“What wife?”
The three men sat in Mr. Headley’s office, the copy of the Strand lying on the table before them. The occasion called for something stronger than coffee, so Mr. Headley had broken out his bottle of brandy and poured each of them a snifter.
“If he’s me,” said Holmes, not for the first time, “and I’m him, then I should have his memories.”
“Agreed,” said Mr. Headley.
“But I don’t, so I can’t be this Holmes.”
“No.”
“Which means that there are now two Holmeses.”
“It would appear so.”
“So what happens when Conan Doyle eventually dies? Will this second Holmes also show up here?”
“And the second Doctor Watson,” added Watson, who was still perturbed to have discovered that he was once married, an arrangement about which he struggled to dredge up any but the vaguest of memories after all this time, as though he had dreamed the whole affair. “I mean, we can’t have two of us—er, four of us—trotting about. It will just be disconcerting.”
“And which of us would be the real Holmes and Watson?” added Holmes. “Obviously, we’re the originals, so it should be us, but it could be a messy business explaining that to the rival incumbents for the positions, so to speak. Worse, what if this new Holmes and Watson usurp us in the public imagination? Will we just cease to exist?”
They all looked rightly shocked at this possibility. Mr. Headley was very fond of this Holmes and Watson. He didn’t want to see them gradually fade away, to be replaced at some future date by alternative versions of themselves. But he was also concerned about what the arrival of a new Holmes and Watson might mean for the Caxton. It could potentially open the way to all kinds of calamitous conjunctions. Suppose noncanonical versions of characters began to appear on the doorstep, making claims for their own reality and sowing unrest? The result would be chaos.
And what about the library itself? Mr. Headley understood that an institution as complex and mysterious as the Caxton must also, on some level, be extraordinarily delicate. For centuries, reality and unreality had remained perfectly balanced within its walls. That equilibrium might now be threatened by Conan Doyle’s decision to resurrect Holmes.
“There’s nothing else for it,” said Holmes. “We shall have to go to Conan Doyle and tell him to stop writing these stories.”
Mr. Headley blanched.
“Oh no,” he said. “You can’t do that.”