Dust and Shadow

At first it seemed the Ripper affair had scarred my friend Sherlock Holmes as badly as it had the city of London itself. I would encounter him at the end of his nightlong vigils, lying upon the sofa with his violin at his feet and his hypodermic syringe fallen from long, listless fingers, neither anodyne having banished the specter of the man we had pursued for over two months. I fought as best I could for his health, but as a fellow sufferer I could do but little to dispel his horror at what had occurred, his petrifying fear that somehow, in some inhuman feat of genius, he could have done more than he did.

At length, though never for publication, I determined that in the interests of my own peace of mind I should write the matter down. I think only in my struggle to record the Reichenbach Falls business have I borne so heavy a weight as I laid pen against paper. They were evil days for me, and Holmes more than once, up and about as the cases flooded in with more force than he could practically avoid, leaned against my desk and remarked, “Come see about the Tarlington matter with me. You needn’t write this, my dear fellow. The world has already forgotten him, you know. One day we shall too.”

However, as was very seldom the case, Sherlock Holmes was mistaken. The world did not forget him. It has not forgotten him to this very day, and it is a brave lad indeed who does not experience a chilling of the blood when an elder sibling invokes the frightful phantom of Jack the Ripper.

I finished the chronicle, as much as possible in that measured biographical tone which had become my habit. I did so many years ago, when Holmes’s part in the matter was still questioned. But our role in the Ripper murders soon ceased to be a topic of any interest save to a select few. Only the cases visibly solved by my friend drew the accolades of a grateful public, for a story without an end is no story at all, and for London’s sake, as well as for our own, the solution to the Ripper affair had to remain absolutely secret.

Though I may act against my own best interests, I cannot now bring myself to burn any records of the cases Holmes and I shared. I intend to leave my papers in my solicitor’s capable hands, with this particular missive resting upon the very top of my dispatch box. No matter how vehemently I may insist upon it, however, I cannot be certain that my desire to leave this account unpublished will be obeyed. This tale throws into stark relief the most distant margins of man’s malevolent capacities, and I will not stand accused of embellishment or of sensationalism. Indeed, by the time anyone lays eyes on these pages, I pray that Jack the Ripper will have faded into a mere memory of a less equitable, more violent time.

My sole intent in setting the story down at all was to applaud those indefatigable talents and high-minded purposes which I hope will ever single out my friend of more than fifty years. And yet, I am gratified to note, even as I write—beset with tidings of new war and of new grief—posterity in her kindness has already singled out a place in history for the great Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Dr. John H. Watson, July 1939