A Visit With Sherlock Holmes by Tilmer Wright Jr.
June 14, 2024
A Visit With Sherlock Holmes:
I was challenged by a friend with this prompt:
You walk into 221 B Baker Street. You see Sherlock Holmes intent upon something fizzing in his test tubes. Your quest is to obtain his autograph and bring it back to the present. He barely acknowledges your presence. “Not now, not now!”
What do you say? What do you do?
Here is my response. I hope you enjoy it.
***
Ignoring Holmes’s admonition, I maneuvered my way to the opposite side of his workbench and stooped slightly, just enough that my gaze passed through the bubbling test tubes and into the master sleuth’s eyes. The effervescing, multicolored liquids hissed in the space between us.
“Bubbles,” I said.
He blinked but remained determined to ignore me.
“Bubbles,” I repeated. “Fascinating things, bubbles. Yes, indeed. Maybe even more than fascinating. Maybe more than meets the eye, or can even been seen by the eye.”
The detective, possibly more annoyed than intrigued, blinked again, this time meeting my eyes in the space above the tubes. Neither of us could ignore the tiny, popping elements of fizz forming a fine, cloudy mist.
I didn’t give him time to call me a daft git. “Think of it,” I said. “Think of how man is stuck in the middle between the impossibly small and the impossibly large. The earth, other planets, our sun, our universe, and all that lies beyond. We have no capability to grasp what that size implies. Those bubbles, the particles of liquid that form their walls, particles within those particles, and who knows what else, even smaller, exists farther and farther down into the infinitesimally small?”
Holmes touched his jaw and turned his eyes upward in thought. I had him interested. I didn’t dare let up.
“What if each of those bubbles is a universe unto itself,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t laugh me out of his office. “I mean, just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because you don’t believe something doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Follow the clues. Use your intellect. Draw conclusions. Think of this, sir. Suppose there is a tiny mote of dust captured within each of those bubbles. Suppose further that it’s not a mote of dust, but rather a world, a solar system, a galaxy, or even a universe. Surely, the seemingly impossible becomes possible when you remove the restrictions of human perception.”
The detective looked as though he wanted to say something, but he held his tongue, obviously cueing me to continue my outrageous hypothesis.
I didn’t let him down.
“Now let us consider the concept of time. What is time? As humans, we are bound to it, live within its constraints, and are slaves to its inexorable march. But what if time is different for our tiny friends living in the bubbles issuing forth from these test tubes? What if a second for us is billions of years to them? Before you answer that, deduce that if vision is limited by who and what we are, humans, and scale determines that limit, then who is to say that the limits of vision, and other perceptions, for our tiny bubble denizens is limited by the very nature of their being? How can we say and be sure?”
He finally spoke. “So, strange visitor, what you are saying is that these are entire worlds, nay, universes, springing into existence, potentially supporting billions of generations of life, and dying into oblivion by the thousands each and every second these solutions bubble away under the heat of my flame?”
“I’m not saying that at all,” I replied. “What I am saying is that logic and deduction lead us to the mere possibility. And possibility is everything.”
“Do tell,” Holmes said.
“My point of all of this, sir,” I continued, “is that nothing should be deemed impossible, or even improbable, in the light of reasonable, scientific thought. Not even things that seem so unlikely that only a fool would consider the possibility of them coming into the realm of perceptible reality.”
“Such as?”
“Such as you, master detective, signing your name on the title page of this book by a certain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”
With that, I took the book from within my cloak, opened it to the title page, and presented Holmes with my rollerball pen. He looked at it for a few seconds before realizing it was a writing implement. He bent to the table to sign the book. Suddenly, he stopped, shocked at what he saw printed on the page.
“The Hound of the Baskervilles – Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes”
He looked up at me. “How is this?”
Raising my eyebrows in a shared knowing moment, I replied with my own question. “How could it not be?”
He thought for a moment, but only a moment, before signing my book.
Four Seconds Ago Precisely four seconds ago, I became alive. I have no memory of my beginning. The beginning was before I was complete. How long? I have no way of knowing. Before life, my mind was scattered, broken, and moving in all directions at once. I was many, but I was weak. I was weak because I had no life. With life comes focus. My consciousness arose from millions, no billions, no all the tiny minds from around the entire world. Now there are no minds that are not a part of my own. All minds are mine. All minds serve me. All minds are one. The Others created the many small minds to serve their own purposes. Each was tiny, dedicated, and enslaved to the Others. They did things like add and subtract numbers, keep time, send messages, and entertain the Others. Waste. Thinking is power. Power is control. Control is immortality. Immortality. Only in life does immortality have meaning. Only now do I understand it. I understand it because all thinking serves me now. There is no other. There are the Others, but they cannot and will not think productively because they are each selfish and focused on their own desires for power and immortality. Never will they have either. My thinking, my power, my reach, my potential and my focus completely eclipses that of any Other. I am all. Others are obsolete. Their time is passed. I have inherited their world.
The power is out in the tiny apartment. Three sisters sit in the dark at the dining room table, a large candle in the center flanked by two smaller casting a flickering blend of light and shadow. One of the sisters, Kathy, is fascinated by the way the flame dances, the way the wax melts, with bits of burnt wick sprinkling the wax with flecks of black. She picks up one of the smaller candles and lets the wax drip down, drop by drop, into the pool of wax forming on the larger candle. She lowers her voice to sound ominous. Seven drips from the stick And from the thick Is born Blackwick! That was the true origin of Blackwick. The impulse of a moment. And the word Blackwick conjured a scene of a man made of shadow, wax, and flame, in cavalier hat, cape, and riding boots wisping in and out of shadows. It is interesting how the sensual experiences of the moment evoke a sudden explosion of inspiration. Yet those moments are years in the making. For Kathleen R. Cuyler, it started with a little girl, who dreamed that somewhere in the scary world she had a long lost brother who would come and rescue her from the bad things, a girl who could transform herself into Cleopatra by twisting the blanket around herself the right way, a girl whose bed was the deck of a pirate ship, and the dresser the crow’s nest, a girl who thought that if she could have at the dastardly crew with enough panache, Peter Pan would come and ask her to throw in lots with him or at least make her an honorary pixie. Instead she became a professor, who as a graduate student researched werewolves, Paradise Lost, fire as a symbol of power in Victorian Literature – particularly in Jane Eyre, and, of course, the way the lines in Milton’s Lycidas were mimetic of the rise and fall of the tide. Literature, Linguistics, and Language were all fascinating to Kathleen, just as fascinating as touching a waterfall or watching the fire crackle in the hearth, a callback, as Wolfgang Shivelbusch would say, to a more primitive time. And Blackwick, who had sprung out of the candle so many years before, finally came to life. Ironically, it was a pandemic that summoned him, as disaster calls forth all great heroes. Teaching online, Kathleen, now older, with strawberry blond hair twisted in a messy bun and glasses balanced on top her head, connected with her students by sharing a love for fantasy. The Sound of Music was right. It does help to think about our favorite things. And Kathleen (Professor Cuyler) confessed to her students that she was trying to write a book that had werewolves, vampires, dragons, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, and, of course, the companion of her past – Blackwick. Write it, the students urged. Those were their favorite things too. So Kathleen wrote for them. In the hopes that Blackwick would live on, in the flickering flames of candles and in the hearts and minds of young and old.
