Who knows what alchemy causes the mind to wander
where it does. And in this day of so much so much interaction between our
mental software and the machine code sort, who knows at what point one starts
to influence the other. I’ve been working with a program that uses “completion
matching” of late, where typing the first three letters of a first and last
name will fill in the remaining parts. And then, for some reason, I thought of
holy water.
Holy water.
Hol(y) Wat(er).
Holmes(y) Watson(er).
Holy Water = Holmes and Watson.
Holy water destroys vampires. Holmes and Watson
destroy the very idea of a vampire in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.”
If Mycroft Holmes ever wanted to use a code name for
sending his brother and his doctor friend on a mission to ferret out smugglers
based in the Carpathian mountains, he could have picked a worse name than Operation:
Holy Water. And as much as pasticheurs like to combine Sherlock Holmes and
Dracula in a tale, I fear that any true-to-Holmes account of same would have a result much like that in Sussex, turning a
superstitious legend to dust with the cold light of truth.
Holmes and Watson equal holy water? In a way, they
certainly do.
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