Tuesday, January 10, 2017

If there was a backstory - (part vi - The Reichenbach Fall)

~continued from last post.

The stage is set. The curtain rises. Sherlock Holmes is facing his arch nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Twists and turns, ally-ways and by-ways /all/ of them reach to the Reichenbach Falls. The flight, the fight…and finally, the Fall. Watson is there, side-lined, left out of act, watching; horror-stricken to see his master, companion, friend, lover who is left to fall over into the dark, watery death. Watson, the Heart, whose past wounds were healed to perfection by his perfect partner was left once more, crippled and broken. Of course! That man has a goddamn wife, doesn’t he?!! The fellow who fell off the waterfall was just his best mate, stuff like that happens people, get on with your lives…! The show’s over folks, thanks for coming! Now skedaddle off to wherever you’ve come from. Doyle Doyle Doyle…. How you have changed.

The pen was set down and the last novel was published. ‘Sherlock Holmes is dead!’ said the newspapers… ‘No more detective stories’; ‘no more adventures for Holmes and Watson’; ‘the curtain is down in Baker Street’….. Maybe I should put on my cape and take the next train to Sussex, for retirement. Maybe Watson /did/ think to leave London once and for all; for what’s the use of staying in a place where you could /never/ escape your memories? His laughter, his gentle manners… how can he run away from the soft heart Sherlock only ever showed to his John, his Boswell, his biographer? Watson could die while drowning in grief. He could only scream at the injustice that has befallen him. How can the creator be so much like the devil? How can anyone ever just /think/ of letting his Holmes die like that?!??

Can you not see the hurt John felt when Doyle did what he did? Can you not see how miserable things become when ego gets in the way? Oh I think you /can/ see. Not just see; I think you are slowly starting to wish that this story didn’t take such a horrendous turn. But then you saw how such things can happen. In our last discussion we saw how fear of being slandered and ridiculed by others can make us stop in our tracks and give up from following our dreams. Our narrator is exactly like us, he too came to this murky pond of despondence, and was lost in narcissistic thoughts about allowing pride and ego clinch the victory. For once in our story, evil had overrun good. The table has turned. 

‘Good’ was let down, thrown over a waterfall. The light was out, darkness has fallen. Pages were torn, and documents burned. Lovers were separated; and hearts that were once tenderly sewn together, stitch by stitch, were ripped, torn apart. For over a decade, things that should never have been forgotten, were lost.

But as always, when things become overrun by darkness, there comes the East wind. Strong and destructive, it wreaks havoc in a land plagued by wrong-doing and evil. So it was for our rather ‘lost’ narrator. He has followed the wrong arrows and had ended up in a deep well that was dug up due to his own choices. So it was up to the East wind to whirl him back up into light and push him towards the right direction. He was /asking/ for a good ass-kicking and such a reaction was coming his way. It was coming his way extremely strong and powerful. It was coming to get him and shake him right down to his bones. The people were rising. One by one, they began to stand around the two people who seemed to /belong/ to each other in a very strange way. They were separated by their ‘creator’ and it was /not/ right. In every way possible, it was /wrong/. Doyle, you’d better bring Holmes back to his Watson…

~will be continued.

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