I woke once more inside what I immediately recognized as a military tent. Holmes had opened a bottle of smelling salts under my nose.

"We are somewhere in Surrey," he whispered. "A clearing in the woods near a small town. I should think it is Dorking, I have seen a spire which may well be St. Martin's. There is but one tent, and I have counted four of these pirates, including two ladies, one of whom is a child. But do not be fooled. They are armed to an extent I have never seen."

The ragged group who stood around us parted, as one entered who was obviously their commanding officer. He was thin, with very short dark hair, presented in a stark parting. He stood like a soldier, but any scientist would have declared that his face was that of a criminal. He carried the rifle I had last seen in Holmes' study, the very one, I was certain. Though the weapons his fellows had with them made it look simple.

"Lee Oswald," he said, his voice high and reedy, "you, Mr. Holmes and you, Dr. Watson, I'm your best friend. I'm here to set you free."

I gathered that he did not mean he was going to release us.

Holmes stood to face him. "You imagine you have us at a disadvantage, sir, but perhaps I know rather more about you than you imagine. You have spent some time in Russia. You are happily married to a woman of foreign descent, and were apprenticed to a carpenter."

Oswald laughed. "Close, but not quite right. I guess you've heard something in my accent, which is kind of a mongrel's bark. Got a lot of disappointment in it, while you sound like you own the world. Where you're wrong is, you've seen something about my hands. I just like playing with the skin with my knife a little, just toughening it up. Just the way I am. Doesn't mean anything. Not a lot about me does anymore."

On a handful of occasions I have seen my friend confounded. Rarely have I seen him so lost as he was in that moment.

"Perhaps you would be good enough to inform us of your purpose?"

"Like I said, we're here to free you. Like me and the other guys have been freed. That's Vlad over there, the Count, some days he likes us to call him Dracula."

"Dracula is a fictional character, he is not real," said Holmes.

"And these are Calamity Jane and Alice."

So I recognised three of this group. Calamity Jane was the female scout, the hero of Goose Creek Camp, just a few years ago. Here she looked most strange, with blonde ringlets and a cavalry hat. She carried a vast cannon that would have looked obscene in any hands, let alone those of a lady. And little Alice... was this the Alice from the fiction of Lewis Carroll? The mean face and heavy armament of the small child spoke of a vast distance from the quaintness of that work.

"Interesting," said Holmes. "I believe you are not heavily armed delusionals. So what are you?"

"Where's his deer stalker?" Oswald had rudely turned to interrogate the others. "We've got his violin, his pipe, his magnifying glass..." I noted that he counted these objects onto a table from a bag. "Didn't he have it with him when you sprang the trap?"

"He was as you see him now," said Dracula, in an extraordinary accent.

Holmes stared at them. "Are you referring to a hat? I do own one, but of what relevance -?"

"We have a list of what makes you yourself, Mr. Holmes. We're going to need the hat. We've successfully targeted Professor Moriarty, and you should see him now, the big changes now he's been freed..."

"What?" I blurted. "You confirm, I take it, that he lives?"

"Yeah. And what's happened to him, it's so obvious. I didn't realise until I'd caught him with the device. The top hat and the opera cape, that's what did it. It took a struggle to get him into them, but it really paid off."

"Are you seriously suggesting, sir," said Holmes, "that the content of one's character is determined by the hat on one's head? The deer stalker is worn only by someone in the countryside who wishes to go out in the rain."

"You know that expression, 'never let the facts get in the way of a good story'? Well you just did that, mister. Not your fault. It's the times you live in. The times everybody lived in until I came along. I guess maybe that's why they chose me. To be the guy that does the freeing. The inventors of this little doohickey, I mean. It zaps you, kind of exposes you to all the random stuff out there, frees you, like I said. What comes out the other side... it ain't what you'd call random, you can see a method in the madness, but us guys who got zapped... it's stuff we'd never have thought of for ourselves." He went over to a table and picked up a strange-looking weapon, a bulky silver barrel with sights and a trigger mechanism.

"I got experimented on in jail, right after they faked my death. The Decontextualisation Corps, they called themselves. They looked the part: white coats and pipes, or Germans with fuzzy hair. They didn't tell me much, just that I was going off into some other world. Or rather worlds. That I was going to be cut out of history and made into something bigger, something that would run and run. Now I've always got this rifle with me, yeah, this one here that I used to make you interested, to make you come after us. It always comes back to me. And I'm always kind of skinny, but you should see how the rest changes! Some days I wake up a Commie, some days I'm from outer space, hey, some days I'm even innocent!"