Nicholas Meyer Read Online Free Page A

referred deprecatingly to the brandy again, and departed.
    With grave misgivings, I bolted the door after him and ascended the steps to my own room, where I began disrobing, but then decided against it, and sat down in the chair next to the bedroom fire—which had long since gone out—with my hands on my knees.
    For a while I even entertained the idea that Holmes had been right, that he had stopped over for the lag end of an evening, that we had smoked a pipe or two and downed a snifter or three, and that I had imagined all that talk of a Professor Moriarty when, in fact, the conversation between us had occupied other channels entirely. Was that possible? In my present exhausted state I knew I was having as much trouble thinking clearly as a man does when he awakes from some vivid nightmare and for a season after cannot make himself realize that he is not still in hell.
    I needed proof more tangible. Stealing downstairs again, carrying a lamp, I would have seemed a curious sight had the girl left her room and espied me: a middle-aged man with his boots off and his collar undone, creeping down the stairs of his own house with a befuddled expression on his face.
    I entered the consulting room, scene of the commencement of this phantasy—if phantasy it was—and examined the shutters. They were closed and bolted, certainly. But who had closed them? Holmes, as I remembered him doing, or myself? Settled into my chair I tried to recall every detail of the
    conversation as I remembered it, pretending as best I could that I was Holmes listening to the deposition of a client in our old sitting room in Baker Street. The effect, had anyone chanced to be listening, would have been ludicrous enough. The middle-aged man without the boots was now sitting in a consulting room by the light of a single lamp and talking to himself—for I found it necessary from time to time to pose (as Holmes did) certain interrogatories concerning my own statement.
    "Can you think of anything at all that the man said or did that you distinctly recall having covered in talk before the period when you both woke up and he spoke of the brandy you had drunk together?"
    "No, I don't—stop a bit, though, I do remember something!"
    "Excellent, Watson, excellent!" came the familiar phrase at my ear, only this time my own voice was speaking the words.
    "He asked me when he first walked into the consulting room where Mary was. I told him she had gone visiting and that we were alone. Then later—after the nap we both took in our armchairs—he was on the point of leaving when he asked me to thank her for such a pleasant evening. I told him again that she was away and it startled him. He didn't remember my saying it earlier."
    "You are quite certain you did mention it earlier?"
    "Oh, yes, quite," I replied, a trifle miffed at the question.
    "Then is it not possible, since we have allowed for the mellowing effects of the brandy already, that he forgot, simply forgot you had mentioned the fact before? Did he not, in fact, allude to that explanation himself at the time?"
    "Yes, but—no, dash it all! We were neither of us in an alcoholic stupor!"
    I got to my stockinged feet in my agitation and, seizing the lamp, padded into the sitting room again in an effort to leave my second voice behind.
    Pulling back the curtains in the sitting room I saw that it must soon be getting light. I had been already fatigued when Holmes first appeared and now, it seemed, I was completely exhausted.
    Had he appeared, though?
    This was an even madder notion, and I cursed myself for having articulated it, even in the recesses of my brain. I turned from the window and the first light of dawn.
    Of course, he had.
    And for once I received proof positive of an assertion.
    The two used brandy snifters lay where Holmes and I had left them.
    I awoke the next morning, or rather that same morning, in my own bed, whither I had apparently flung myself half-dressed at some point during my profitless