The Quiet Man

The Magician

I can almost make out the brass numbers on the door from here, even at a distance. It’s just a door, like any other on Baker Street: black, shiny, and set into the pale concrete of the facade. That rounded window above the door isn’t just decorative: it lets in some of the ambient glow of the streetlights so that you can avoid switching the lights on when you come in at two in the morning. It’s there to help you find that first of seventeen steps without waking your landlady.

It looks just the same as it always has. It’s like stepping back in time.

But it’s not: it’s not like that at all. On the other side of that door, things must be different. Sherlock’s things will be gone, for one. No more body parts in the microwave, no more tidy rows of socks in his drawer. No skull on the mantel, certainly. No more violin music at odd hours. Other people live here now. Mrs Hudson’s latest tenants. She probably loves them as much as she loved Sherlock and me.

No, probably not. She always had a special place in her heart for Sherlock, and me by proxy. Sherlock was special that way. She wouldn’t love any other tenant like that. The new people must be pale imitations of us. Easier to cope with, certainly. Less destructive. Cleaner. Not like us, not like we were. No one could be.

It’s different now, I know it has to be, even if I can’t tell yet from down the street. Different faces, different lives are lived here. There’s probably new furniture; something must have broken or worn out over the last three years. It wouldn’t smell the same.

She will have patched up the wall. No more spray paint and frayed wallpaper, surely. You can paper over things like that, mistakes. The results of Sherlock’s boredom; you can cover up what goes on in a flat like it never happened. Even if it leaves a mark, you can hide it, remove it, no one will ever ask, or ever know. Flats can only share so much of what went on inside them. They keep secrets.

What will I say to Mary tonight? I didn’t tell her Mrs Hudson asked me over. Even when we spoke this afternoon, I didn’t mention it. I had my jacket on, I was on my way out, and still I didn’t mention it. I’m not sure why; I just didn’t want her to have it. I don’t know: she has so much of my life. I don’t know how to give her this. I don’t want to.

Anyway, I know how it would go: she’d listen to what Mrs Hudson told me, and she’d say, why is she calling you over a dodgy boiler? Have her call a plumber, or, doesn’t she have a son or a neighbour she can have do these things for her? You’re just a former tenant, John. Former tenant.Something like that. No, that’s not fair. She wouldn’t be so mean about it. She’d say: what’s the problem? Oh, a dodgy boiler? Right, I know a guy. I’ll call him for her, how’s that. That’s more likely. Mary always knows the right person for every job, and she’s very practical about these things. She wouldn’t want me coming over here, wasting my time, avoiding working on my book. I’m on a deadline this time, they want it finished by the end of the month. But I don’t know: there was something in Mrs Hudson’s voice this morning. She wanted to see me. She wasn’t quite herself, I think. She sounded...I don’t know. Something was wrong. She didn’t say that, but I could tell.

There was something she wanted to tell me, in person.

Maybe not. Maybe I’m making that up: one strange call in the middle of the night, Sherlock’s name in the paper this morning, it’s rattled me, I guess.

I just wanted to come back. Finally.

If it were any other day before this one, I probably wouldn’t be here. I would have told Mary, and I would have let her find a more practical solution. I could have avoided this. I would have stayed away. And somehow Mrs Hudson must have known that today would be different: she stopped asking me to drop by ages ago. But today, of all days, she asked me again, and here I am. Because today Moriarty is dead, and it seems fitting to me that this is the day I come back.