Free First Person Peculiar by Mike Resnick

from my shadow, I’ll pay a long-overdue call on the estimable Mr. Castinerra.
    Only this time, I’ll do it right.
    Erasures are, by and large, pretty lonely people. I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally have a hobby that I can share with a friend.
    ***

When I was editing Sherlock Holmes in Orbit I decided to write a Holmes story myself. I chose to do an unreported case set in a time slot that Dr. Watson conveniently left open, and it also gives the true answer to what happened after Holmes and Moriarty went over the Falls at Reichenbach.

    The Adventure of the
Pearly Gates
    “… An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other’s arms. Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation …”
    —The Final Problem
    * * *
    It was most disconcerting. One moment I was tumbling over the falls at Reichenbach, my arms locked around Professor Moriarty, and the next moment I seemed to be standing by myself in a bleak, gray, featureless landscape.
    I was completely dry, which seemed not at all surprising, though there was no reason why it should not have been. Also, I had felt my leg shatter against the rocks as we began our plunge, and yet I felt no pain whatsoever.
    Suddenly I remembered Moriarty. I looked around for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. There was an incredibly bright light up ahead, and I found myself drawn to it. What happened next I can remember but hazily; the gist of it is that I found myself in, of all places, Heaven. (No one told me that I was in Heaven, but when one eliminates the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth … and Professor Moriarty’s absence was quite enough to convince me that I was not in Hell.)
    How long I remained there I do not know, for there is no means by which one can measure duration there. I only know that I felt I might as well have been in the Other Place, so bored was I with the eternal peace and perfection of my surroundings. It is an admission that would certainly offend all churchmen, but if there is one place in all the cosmos for which I am uniquely unsuited, it is Heaven.
    In fact, I soon began to suspect that I was indeed in Hell, for if each of us makes his own Heaven and his own Hell, then my Hell must surely be a place where all my training and all my powers are of no use whatsoever. A place where the game is never afoot, indeed where there is no game at all, cannot possibly qualify as a Paradise for a man such as myself.
    When I was bored beyond endurance back on Earth, I had discovered a method of relief, but this was denied me in my current circumstances. Still, it was a craving for cerebral stimulation, not for a seven percent solution of cocaine, that consumed me.
    And then, when I was sure that I was facing an eternity of boredom, and was regretting all the chances I had forsaken to commit such sins as might have placed me in a situation where at least I would have had the challenge of escaping, I found myself confronted by a glowing entity that soon manifested itself in the outward form of a man with pale blue eyes and a massive white beard. He wore a robe of white, and above his head floated a golden halo.
    Suddenly I, too, took on human shape, and I was amazed to discover that I had not until this very moment realized that I had no longer possessed a body.
    “Hello, Mr. Holmes,” said my visitor.
    “Welcome, Saint Peter,” I replied with my newfound voice.
    “You know who I am?” he said, surprised. “Your indoctrination period is supposed to be instantly forgotten.”
    “I remember nothing of my indoctrination period,” I assured him.
    “Then how could you possibly