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It is with a trembling hand and a heart heavier than any I have borne in all my years of service that I, John H. Watson, M.D., set down these lines. They are not for publication. The world believes the narrative I gave in 'The Final Problem,' and there for the three years of darkness I have let it rest. Sherlock Holmes perished at the Reichenbach Falls on the fourth of May, 1891, locked in mortal combat with Professor James Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime. So the papers reported. Why would they not? I myself wrote as much, a story for the comfort of the public and the honor of my friend. Yet the truth is stranger, more terrible, and (may God forgive me) more wonderful than any fiction I have ever committed to print. In fiction I killed him. In life I could not live without him. Thus, in my desperation, perhaps in my madness, I did that which no man of science or of faith should ever attempt.
I had accompanied Holmes to Switzerland in the spring of 1891, fleeing the long shadow of Moriarty’s organization. This much of the story is true. The Professor himself had followed us across Europe with the relentless patience of a hound. At Meiringen we took rooms at the Englisher Hof, and there, on the morning of our intended departure for Rosenlaui, came the fatal letter. An English lady, it said, lay dying of consumption in the hotel and begged the attendance of an English doctor. Holmes, with that keen glance which read my every thought, urged me to go. I went. Yet there was something in the air, perhaps the too-perfect courtesy of the landlord or the absence of any other English guests, which stirred a doubt within me. It was as though the very geometry of the place had grown subtly wrong. I had not gone half a mile before I turned back, my pulse unsteady with a presentiment I could not name.
The path to the falls was slippery with spray. I heard the roar before I saw the cataract, a white thunder leaping into the abyss. Then came the vision. There, upon the narrow ledge above the boiling cauldron, I beheld them. Holmes and Moriarty, locked together like two stags in their final struggle. The Professor’s arms were about my friend’s waist. Holmes’ sinewy hands gripped the other’s throat. For an instant they swayed upon the brink. Then, with a cry that was torn from my own throat, they toppled together into the void.
I do not fully remember what came next. Somehow, I followed. It was Holmes, and I always followed Holmes.
The path was wet and treacherous, yet a narrow goat-track descended the cliff face, half hidden by ferns and moss. No sane man would have attempted it in such conditions. I did not hesitate. My boots slipped, my fingers bled upon the rock, but desperation lent me strength. Half sliding, half falling, I reached the foot of the falls where the waters churned among black boulders that seemed, in the mist, to form impossible angles. I told myself it was my fear.
There they lay. Moriarty had struck a projecting ledge and been shattered like a vessel of glass; his skull was crushed, one arm almost severed, the upper body twisted beyond recognition. Holmes had fallen a little farther, into a shallow pool at the base. His face was unmarked save for a livid bruise across the temple, but his limbs were broken in a dozen places, the chest caved, the spine, I feared, snapped. No pulse answered my frantic fingers. His eyes, those grey, piercing eyes, were closed forever.
I knelt in the spray and wept. The one dear friend of my life, the man who had been more to me than brother or comrade, was gone.
And yet?
Even in that black hour my mind, trained in the dissecting rooms of a certain ancient university, began to work with a horrible clarity. Here is my secret. It was one not even Holmes had revealed. It is hard to believe he did not know. The man knew everything. Perhaps he kept his silence out of kindness, although that is as unlikely as ignorance. Perhaps it was merely like the solar system, one of the bits of data discarded because it did not matter. I had not told the world nor even the British Army the whole truth of my student days. London and Edinburgh were the schools I claimed. I had been to both, but only briefly. The truth was that I had taken the greater part of my degree at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, that gloomy seat of learning where Victor Frankenstein had once pursued his unholy studies. There, amid dusty folios and forbidden experiments, I had learned not only the ordinary arts of surgery but the darker lore of galvanism, of the chemical preservation of tissue, and of the slender thread that separates life from the semblance of death. Rumors of Frankenstein’s work still haunted the lecture halls. I had seen, with my own eyes, a frog’s heart made to beat again by the application of a voltaic pile. I had observed reverse dissections where limbs were regrafted from mouse to mouse. What if the same principle, pushed to its uttermost, could be applied to a human frame?
We were in a new age of science, and medicine had taught me much about the expanding horizons of possibility. Yet the past was not forgotten. In my school days I had spent some time in the back shelves of the library where older manuscripts - crumbling manuscripts translated from Arabic – predated and perhaps inspired even him. Those manuscripts spoke of vaster applications, giving formulas for vital salts capable of reanimating not mere nerves but the spirit as well. OH, those formulae were shrouded in warnings and perils, but those I in my desperation ignored. What had been impossible disaster in earlier times was frequent practice now. Perhaps… perhaps even the galvanic arts could be elevated and life repaired.
Moriarty’s body, though ruined, offered certain 'spare pieces.' His limbs were strong and unfractured in places where Holmes’ were splintered. His brain, though damaged by the fall, might supply tissue where concussion had bruised my friend’s own. The idea was monstrous. It was also my only hope. I could not leave Holmes to the crows and the river.
Nor, I realized in my aching soul, could I return to England alone. The only way forward was marked by the forked path of my death or his life.
I spotted a sturdy Swiss peasant. Or should I better say he spotted me.
“What are you doing in the water?” he called from his herd of cows.
“Help!” was my reply.
“Can’t you get out?” He came over, holding out his long shepherd’s staff.
“My…” What should I call Moriarty? “These men, they fell from up there.” I nodded at the white curtain behind me. “I need to get them out.”
“They are alive?” he asked, his face wide with credulity.
“No, but…”
“Then push them into the stream and pick up the corpses when they push up at the mill pond. If it’s too late for them, save yourself.”
But I could not, would not, do that. So, after some squabble, I convinced the man to lend me his aid. With a rope and some bovine strength we were able to pull first Sherlock and then his foe on to the bank. From there I had both bodies conveyed to a disused hunting-lodge high in the hills above the falls. That took less persuasion and more gold. But when has gold not been persuasive? I was not a wealthy man, but Sherlock has packed for travel and the rent of such a useless building was low. (To the degree I even bothered to pay it, which after the first installment I did not.) There I established a laboratory such as no Christian man should ever keep.
I worked by the light of oil lamps and the blue flare of a Bunsen burner. Day after day, and often far into the night, I toiled over the two shattered forms laid upon the rough wooden table that served as my operating slab. The air was thick with the acrid smell of carbolic acid and the sweeter, more nauseating odor of decaying flesh. Neither was strange to me. I was a doctor, after all.
First I turned my attention to Holmes, cataloguing each injury with the precision my old professors at Ingolstadt had drilled into me. The left arm was crushed beyond repair, the bones splintered as though by a hammer. Several ribs had pierced the lung. The spine showed ominous signs of fracture in the lower dorsal region. Yet the brain, protected by the skull, appeared less damaged than I had dared hope.
Moriarty's corpse, though more horribly mangled in the upper part, provided raw material I required. His right arm was intact and powerful; the legs, though bruised, offered sound femurs and tibiae.
I began with the most urgent repairs. For three days I did nothing but cleanse and debride the wounds, bathing the tissues in solutions of my own compounding. I mixed the vital salts from my memory with mercuric chloride, then mixed both with certain herbal tinctures noted in the forbidden Ingolstadt manuscripts. As I worked I made careful notes, marking what pieces were damaged and which might be saved. Here the power of the falls had not been merciful. Many portions were matched in damage. A greater surgeon might have salvaged more, but my knife skills were those of the battlefield and not the delicate anatomist. There were hours I wept at my limitations.
More nights I fretted and prayed. What, where, how could I move beyond myself?
On the fourth night, I made my first expedition. The village churchyard lay two miles down the mountain path. Under a waning moon I went, spade in hand, like the meanest resurrection-man. I sought not a full body but specific parts. I gained a section of healthy rib cartilage from that morning’s burial, and a length of femoral artery. The ground was hard with frost, and my hands blistered before I had secured my prizes. No matter. I persevered, ignoring a heart pounding with the fear of discovery. By dawn I had what was required.
Back in the laboratory, I worked by the hissing blue flame of the Bunsen. I replaced Holmes' shattered ribs one by one, wiring them with fine silver thread and grafting cartilage where needed. The arm was a greater labor. Sherlock’s left arm was broken, but not beyond healing. The right was worse. I amputated the ruined limb at the shoulder, then prepared Moriarty's right arm. The length differed, but with fine cuts I adjusted it to match in every measure with the natural left. With catgut sutures finer than any seamstress's silk I joined artery to artery, vein to vein, and… this was the most delicate of all…the great brachial nerves. For hours I bent over the table, my eyes aching in the lamplight, applying the galvanic current in minute doses to test conductivity. Finally, to my wild joy, the fingers of the grafted arm twitched as though in life.
Yet not all was success. Decay threatened constantly. I turned the cellar’s old wine vessels into vats of preserving fluid, a solution of alcohol, arsenic salts, and the mysterious 'vital salts' described by Frankenstein's own tutor. Both bodies were immersed when not under the knife. The odor permeated my clothes, my hair, my very dreams. I call them dreams, and not nightmares, for while fearsome those visions of twisted stars brought me more guidance in my work.
A week later I required more material. This time I visited a slaughterhouse in the valley. From the carcasses of swine I took sheets of skin for grafting over the abrasions on Holmes' torso and thighs. This was easier, as no one questioned a man wanting to make sausages. Pig skin, I reasoned, would serve as a temporary covering until human epidermis could knit. The experiments with smaller parts continued. I kept a severed hand from Moriarty's left in a separate basin, stimulating it nightly with the voltaic pile. It would clench and unclench, a sight both fascinating and repulsive. From it, eventually, I took one finger to complete my friends left hand.
Work consumed the summer and autumn. Enough of the body had been repaired that with constant galvanism I could return the circulation of blood. It was blood of my own donation, but blessedly acceptable. Thus I confirmed by belief that only human blood served for men. So begin the natural healing of the flesh. While not yet life, this was the first shade and promise of life.
By October I had turned to the head. A delicate trephination relieved pressure upon Holmes' brain, and where concussion had damaged tissue I excised miniscule portions and replaced them with corresponding fragments from Moriarty carefully chosen from areas of the frontal lobe that I prayed governed intellect rather than vice.
Twice more I visited the graveyard. Once for a young man's heart, for Holmes' own had been bruised in the fall and beat only feebly when tested. The transplantation was crude; I could not match the great vessels perfectly. Yet when I applied the current the organ stirred in its new position, driving blood through the repaired frame. Another journey yielded a length of spinal cord from a mountaineer killed in a rockfall; this I spliced into the gaps in Holmes’ own with threads of silk and silver wire, testing each junction with the battery until the legs gave a convulsive kick that nearly overturned the table.
Each operation was followed by days of anxious watching. Would infection set in? Would the grafted tissue take? I mixed my own antibiotics from molds and fungi gathered in the forest, applying poultices that would have shocked the Royal College of Surgeons. (From my own professors it would merely have brought a slight disapproval.)
Through all these months the horror of my actions never left me. I, who had taken the Hippocratic Oath, was now a desecrator of graves, a grave-robber, and worse. I was the creature I had been so early warned against, a modern Prometheus stealing not fire but the mad spark that animates the cosmos itself. Yet every time doubt assailed me I looked upon the pale, still face of Sherlock Holmes and knew I could not stop. Without him life was ashes.
When notes and memory failed I experimented first upon smaller subjects. There were frogs caught in the mountain streams, whose hearts I stopped and restarted with the battery. There was a stray dog whose broken leg I mended in like fashion, watching new bone merge and strengthen old. Success in these trials emboldened me, yet each failure plunged me into despair. Once, after a particularly trying day when the grafted arm showed signs of mortification, I sat by the fire and questioned my sanity. Was this not the very madness that had destroyed Victor Frankenstein?
Better, I decided, to be mad than lonely. I kept on my work.
By the time the first snows fell upon the peaks, the body lay nearly whole upon the slab. It was a composite man, pieced together from my friend and his greatest enemy. The flesh was Holmes', but threaded through with the sinews of Moriarty. I had done all that surgery and chemistry could accomplish. Unnatural nature had done more, with the mechanically animate flesh healing around the stich work and, once I carefully removed my threads, mending over the scars. His chest was whole again, lifting in the shallow forced movements. His limbs were straight and responsive, with the electrical force moving the muscles enough to keep them functional. His hair curled, long and dark, on the stone pillow of the dissection table.
I had ordered from Berlin an acidic stack of formidable power. From this the complex web directed the power into the waiting flesh. Wires ran to the temples, to the spine, to the heart itself. Now remained only the final, terrible experiment. Now it was time to call back the departed spirit with the power of natural galvanic force.
On a night of storm, when the thunder rolled among the peaks like the voice of judgment, I closed the circuit.
For a long minute nothing stirred. Then a convulsive shudder ran through the frame. The chest heaved. The eyelids fluttered. A low moan, half pain, half recognition, escaped the lips.
“John.” It was less a word then a cry, but it was enough.
I fell to my knees beside the table, tears streaming down my face. “My dear fellow,” I whispered, “you are returned to me.” All I had done, all I had dared and suffered? Those were forgotten. He breathed. Sherlock Holmes breathed.
The third year was the hardest.
The revived Holmes could walk only with support. At first he leaned heavily upon my shoulder as we paced the rough boards of the hunting-lodge, his steps uncertain and dragging. The left leg, which had received a section of Moriarty’s sound femur, seemed disproportionately strong, and there were occasions when his gait assumed a curious, loping quality quite unlike my friend’s former precise and economical stride. The grafted right arm likewise possessed a power that astonished me. Once, when he stumbled against the table, his fingers closed upon the back of a wooden chair with such sudden force that the timber splintered audibly. He regarded the broken wood for a moment with a faint, satisfied smile that chilled me.
Speech returned slowly and in fragments. Sherlock muttered in his sleep. Sometimes he spoke in languages I knew he knew, and other times in strained syllables I doubted were any human language at all. In daylight he stumbled over both, the struggle to communicate frustrating both of use. Still he kept on.
For many weeks his utterances were brief and labored, yet when managed they carried the old incisive quality. Only occasionally I felt the syllables were overlaid with a colder, more metallic precision. “Watson,” he would remark as we stood by the window, “the barometer has fallen three-tenths of an inch in the last hour. A storm approaches from the north-west.” These observations were faultless, yet they lacked the old boyish pleasure in trivial detail. There was instead a quiet satisfaction, as though each new fact were another pawn secured upon some invisible chessboard.
I set myself the task of reawakening his faculties with all the patience in my soul. The violin was our first battleground. I placed the beloved Stradivarius into his hands and guided the bow across the strings. At first the notes were harsh and discordant; the grafted fingers moved with an awkward stiffness. Then, upon a bleak November afternoon, the old mastery flooded back. He played “The Devil’s Trill Sonata” with such fire and delicacy that the tears rose unbidden to my eyes.
When the piece ended he did not lay the instrument aside. His hand drifted of its own accord into a dark, intricate melody I had never heard. It was not the creations of Sigerson the Norwegian, by which name Holmes had sometimes passed. The work was mathematical in its construction, full of strange dissonances and unexpected resolutions. It was the music of a mind that perceived hidden patterns in chaos. When I asked its name he replied, “It has none, Watson. It is merely the logical extension of certain principles of harmony.”
The tone was Holmes’, but I worried that the thought carried the tinge of another intellect.
Memory returned in vivid but uneven patches. He recalled our old adventures with astonishing clarity. We discussed the case of the speckled band, the singular affair of the Red-Headed League, and even the peculiar adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. Yet when the name of Moriarty arose in conversation, a curious light would enter his eyes. “A most formidable opponent,” he murmured once. “His organization was a thing of beauty in its way. To create a perfect web spanning half the Continent? Such efficiency is rare.”
I could not suppress a shudder at the note of admiration in his voice.
One evening I discovered him at the chemical bench I had fitted up for his recreation. Before him stood a small flask containing a colorless, odorless liquid. “A most elegant paralytic,” he explained calmly. “Death follows in six seconds with no detectable residue. Moriarty would have appreciated the perfection of the formula.” Seeing my horrified expression he added smoothly, “I speak for purposes of scientific inquiry only, my dear Watson.”
Yet I remained uneasy. There were nights when I awoke to find him standing motionless by the window, gazing out at the snow-covered peaks with an expression of cold calculation. Once I heard him whisper into the darkness, “The network could be rebuilt... only stronger this time.” When I confronted him at breakfast he denied any recollection of the words. Then, after a blink, he slowly added “If it was, might it not serve to reduce rather than encourage crime? After all, a system known is a process more easily thwarted.”
To this I had no answer. He was right, of course, but… Was this new aspect of efficiently different from his past love of the chase? Or had he simply stepped up to comprehend and fight the greater danger?
His knowledge of the criminal world had deepened in disturbing fashion. He could discourse at length upon the financing of secret societies, the routes of opium and stolen jewels across Europe, and the psychology of the master criminal with an intimacy that went far beyond anything he had known in his former life. Some of this knowledge came from his old index and case-books, which I had sent for. Much, however, seemed instinctive. It was as though the fragments of brain tissue I had grafted had carried with them something of the Professor’s own evil genius.
Still, the true Sherlock Holmes was not wholly extinguished. There were moments, Blessed moments. There were sudden flashes of kindness, a gleam of the old dry humor, a look of genuine affection when his eyes met mine, all of which reassured me my friend truly lived within that repaired frame. In those precious instants my heart would swell with hope. It was my reassurance when the darker current flowed beneath the surface, threatening to twist the man I loved more than life itself.
Deduction came back, yet altered. Our daily exercises in observation yielded equally mixed results. I would arrange small objects about the room and ask him to describe all that he saw. He excelled as of old, noting the clay upon a boot-heel, the precise shade of an ink-stain, the wear upon a coat-sleeve. The sole difference was that his process had taken on a darker coloring. Where once he might have concluded that a man was a clerk lately returned from the seaside, he would now declare with cold certainty, “This individual is a forger who has lately completed a large commission and now fears detection.” When I pressed him for his reasoning he would smile thinly and reply, “The mathematical probability of such a distribution of ink upon the cuff of an honest man is negligible.” But he did not speak to the authorities.
Some nights I found him, chalk in hand, marking equations on the wall. I have never known enough math to follow more than laboratory calculation, but these were strange even for Holmes. There were letter I had never seen, not Greek or Latin or even calculatic notation, and geometries complex enough to make my eyes hurt. I passed it off. Sherlock had always been the more educated man. If he wanted new challenges to exercise his healing brain? Surely this must be a good thing.
It was on a night in our final month in the lodge that the worries began in earnest.
We had ventured down to a village for supplies when a local bully, a man known to terrorize the district, waylaid us. He had before left me alone, preferring not to risk robbery of a foreigner who might have powerful friends, or at least distant contacts to complain to the state police. This time? He was drunk, and foolish with it, and perhaps that or perhaps some failure to extract coin from the locals had made him desperate.
“You! Cripple!” He made a clumsy swipe at Sherlock’s cane. “Where are you going?”
“About my own business,” I replied calmly.
‘Then you’ve got coin.” He staggered closer. “Turn it over!”
Holmes studied him for perhaps ten seconds. Then, with a movement so swift I scarcely saw it, he struck. Not with a fist, but with a small phial drawn from his coat. The man gasped, clawed at his throat, and fell dead upon the path.
It was the poison he had devised before, swift and untraceable.
“Holmes!” I cried.
Holmes looked down at the corpse without emotion. “A vermin removed,” he said. “The world is better for it, Watson.”
I stared, horror rising in my throat. This was not the Holmes who had always left justice to the law. This was the mind of Moriarty, calculating the removal of an obstacle with the same icy logic he had once turned upon the paid targets.
That night in the lodge I confronted him. “Holmes,” I said, my voice shaking, “that man was a brute, but he was a living soul. Have you become the very thing we fought?”
He turned those grey eyes upon me, those deep wise eyes I had brought back from death, and smiled faintly. “You speak of Hermeneutics, which is unworthy of either of us. If there are monsters behind the veil? What wisdom would come from lifting that veil?”
“So you would delete it?”
“Like any other fact found useless,” Holmes nodded. “We are men of science. The body is a machine, my dear Watson. I have the brain of a detective. The rest is academic.”
He was right, of course. We doctors were taught that the brain was the seat of reason, the body mere ‘transport’, and the soul a fantasy or a faith but nothing of medicine. Still? I could not easily sleep. Night after night I paced the wooden floor, wrestling with the eternal problem of the physical versus the mental. How much of a man is flesh and how much is that indefinable spark we call the soul? I had used Moriarty’s arm, his liver, even tiny fragments of his brain tissue. Had I thereby imported something of the Professor’s black genius? Or had the horrors warned against followed the alchemy of the manuscripts? Or was the change merely the trauma of death and resurrection?
The first or the last, what difference would it make? I knew only that without this altered Holmes my own life would be unendurable. I had buried my friend once. I could not do it again. If an occasional villainous life must be sacrificed to keep him at my side? Well, had I not done as much far earlier in our partnership?
I had seen death in many forms upon the battlefield. I told myself the victims were themselves criminals. I told myself many things.
At last, in the early days of 1894, we judged it safe to return. By then the world had mourned him for three years. I had written my account of the “death” at the falls, and none suspected the truth. Holmes had regained his old vigor, though he moved with a slight stiffness in the grafted arm and a faint scar ran across the temple like a lightning-flash. His eyes were as keen as ever. His wit was as sharp. He was returned.
Now it was time to return in truth.
Holmes adopted the disguise of an elderly Italian priest for the journey across the Continent. I travelled as myself, the grieving companion now consoled by news of a “remarkable survival.”
In London the old rooms at Baker Street had been kept exactly as we left them by the faithful Mrs. Hudson. The rent had been covered by Mycroft Holmes. He had never said more than that, leaving all to only one short letter, but I had trusted to his perceptions. They were, after all, the echo of the younger Holmes.
“Welcome back, gentlemen.” She stood at the open door, ushering us back not just to old rooms but to our old life. “I’ll have tea up in a moment.”
“Thank you Mrs. Hudson,” I said as I shed my overcoat. “It has been a very long journey.”
“And a very long time”, she answered. “Still, you’ll find all as you left it.”
So it was.
God bless me her tea was bliss, and my seat by the fire all the heaven I could desire.
When Holmes stepped through the door, shedding the clerical garb, it was as though the clock had been put back. He flung himself into the armchair, took up the Stradivarius, and played a wild Hungarian rhapsody while I sat with my medical journal open upon my knee and my heart too full for speech.
We were back. More than that, we were home.
Yet the change was there. In the first case that came to us after the return. We were called on to work out the plot behind the murder of young Ronald Adair. It is a matter which the world knows as 'The Adventure of the Empty House'. Holmes solved it with his old brilliance. The change came when the culprit, a desperate member of the remnants of Moriarty’s gang, attempted to escape through the back window. Holmes was quick after him. I heard a brief scuffle, a strangled cry, and then silence. The man was found later with his neck broken, apparently by a fall. The coroner called it accident. I knew better.
Holmes merely shrugged when I taxed him with it. “The man was a danger to society, Watson. I removed the danger. You of all people should understand the necessity of decisive action.”
“But should he not have gone to trial?”
“Had he been willing to confess. Or had he known any greater secrets to confess too.” Holmes considered the point. “This man had neither. He was no plotter, but a mere ‘heavy’ hired for his easy violence. Left to the streets he would kill again. In gaol he would do likewise. It was his nature and his trade.” My friend turned back to the sofa. “Removing his life saved that of many more innocent people. The trade was rational. You understand?”
I did understand. God help me, I covered for him. I altered my notes. I lied to Lestrade. I lied even to Mycroft. God knows if he believed me, or just pretended to do so. Perhaps he too could not allow it to make a difference. Perhaps he had what he wanted and did not care.
When, months later, another villain, this time an opium-den keeper who had murdered three of his own girls, died suddenly of a seizure while Holmes was interviewing him, I said nothing. The old Holmes would have handed him to the police. The new Holmes weighed the man’s life in the balance of utility and found it wanting.
When I descended to the cellar to unchain the surviving among the captured young women their dreadful state reconciled the crime. He was dead. They would heal. A doctor must treat the patient before him. These girls were the ones before me. If to get me here, if to save this half-dozen lives, one other must die? That is mere triage, and every physician and every soldier is trained in that bitter art.
I have since asked myself a thousand times whether I have done right. The body I repaired with the flesh of a criminal. The mind that returned bears, I fear, some imprint of that criminal’s ruthless intellect. Yet the man who sits opposite me now, violin in hand, is still Sherlock Holmes. He still deduces the impossible from the trivial. He still calls me “my dear Watson.” And I? I who once stood at the brink of the Reichenbach abyss and chose life over law, friendship over morality. I cannot bring myself to regret it.
The world sees the detective restored. I alone see the shadow that walks beside him. I alone know the patchwork soul stitched together with my own hands. If, now and then, that shadow falls across some wretch who deserves no better, I close my eyes and remember the roar of the falls and the cold weight of my friend’s body in my arms.
He is here. He is mine. That, for John H. Watson, must suffice.