The Things in My Apartment: Week Seven
Friday, March 26, 2010 at 1:15PM Sherlock Holmes
The famous detective has lost none of his powers of deduction.
But he would very much like to die as soon as possible.
Yesterday afternoon, I was endeavoring to chronicle yet another thing that had been discovered in my apartment and Holmes was trying to chase away his demons by beating himself mercilessly at chess. He had not spoken for several hours, which was no surprise – speech has become a torture to my guest. Every time he dares make use of his withered larynx, his voice will creek in such a pathetic way, that I cannot help but imagine some ancient document of forgotten wisdom crinkling in on itself and breaking to pieces.
“I suspect…” began the detective, pausing for breath to fill his crumbling lungs, “that my left ear will soon fall off.”
“Good heavens, Holmes!” I exclaimed. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Because,” snapped the great detective, “it feels like it.”
A quarter of an hour later, Holmes’s ear was on my rug.
How has it come to pass that I, an underachieving, twenty-first century American, am providing shelter for the undead husk of crime fiction’s finest hero?
This marvelous turn of events owes nothing to my own meager exertions. I discovered Holmes, quite by accident, in my neglected cellar. He had spent the past fifty years in hot pursuit of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, the leading figure in a case that not even his faithful partner Watson had ever dared commit to paper. Watson would only refer to it as the case for which "the world is not yet ready." The world may well not have been, but Holmes certainly was. All the evidence gathered by his unsparing mind indicated that the rat now resided in my very cellar, and London’s immortal sleuth was determined to find the beast - so that it might eat him.
“They can’t write me out of that!” he declared.
Holmes, though he had not yet begun his remarkable process of physical decay, was determined that he should meet a definitive end and not be forced into any more convoluted stories.
I had merely aspired to get some laundry done, but instead found myself embroiled in the final chapter of what Sherlock Holmes hoped would be his final case.
“You’ve not heard any scratching down here?” he demanded of me. “Any squeaking?”
I was forced to confess that, save for quick trips to the washer and dryer, I spent no time in my cellar due to the awful and unidentified stench that had blighted it since before I moved in.
My cellar, I was surprised to learn, contains a series of hidden passageways which lead to a number subterranean labyrinths constructed by a variety of secret societies in order to conceal a plethora of ancient conspiracies.
“Not uncommon among old cellars,” Holmes assured me.
I followed Holmes as he located hidden entrance after hidden entrance, evaded deadly booby trap after deadly booby trap, and logically eliminated possibility after possibility, in search of his nemesis.
“I do apologize,” he said at one point. “You must find all this dreadfully tedious. I certainly do.”
Our hunt ended with the solutions to two mysteries: the whereabouts of Holmes’s quarry and the source of my cellar’s enduring stench.
The Giant Rat of Sumatra had long ago found itself a convenient corner in which to curl up and die.
“You lucky, lucky bastard!” Holmes cried at what remained of the legendary rodent. “Lucky, useless bastard! What am I supposed to do now? Moriarty’s kicked it, no one thinks a hundred foot drop off a waterfall is terribly convincing and they’ve just made another damned movie!”
Foiled once again in his quest for finitude, the greatest mind in cheap fiction has taken up residence in my apartment, where, through sheer force of will, he has begun to rot.
“If they won’t let me give up the ghost just yet, my body can at least get a running start.”
Though Holmes’s volatile temper and decaying form have provided more than a few uncomfortable moments, my roommates and I have developed a fondness for the undead icon. Sadly for Holmes, I do not think he will get his wish anytime soon. For all the damage he has managed to do his body, he cannot dismantle his famous mind. Even if he could, he could not take away the idea of it.
In the meantime, whenever we can’t remember where we put something, it never stays a mystery for long.
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Reader Comments (1)
Ugh! I'm in love... with the immortal undead.