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Shaking hands - their skin long since wrinkled, having carried the burdens of age so long that youth has become a distant memory - hold on to a thick bundle of notepaper, the linen-white sheets covered with immaculate lines of handwriting. The cover sheet bears the date October 14th, 1889... 30 years ago to this day, my name the only other written text besides it. Before I had even turned over the cover to reveal the first page and read the salutation - my eyesight is no longer what it used to be - I knew whose letter it was I was looking at.

Now these eyes are clouded by tears as long-buried emotions overcome me: The grief and sadness I had thought to have left behind after years of misery that followed when I lost you... the anger for those who I deem responsible for your death, the anger for myself for not being there to save you - or to die trying. I must sit down for my legs suddenly no longer have the strength to support me, finding the way to my favourite armchair purely beased on memory. Retrieving the handkerchief tucked away in my pocket I manage to wipe the tears from my eyes, ever so carefully removing the cover page to start reading.

"Dear John..."

The first of many lines of bold but precise letters, your handwriting's execution the vessel for the thoughts of your cunning intellect - not a single letter deviating above or below the flow of words, not a single punctuation mark too much or too little. Words I used to put to paper in your stead, meticulously recording in writing all the adventures we have seen through together over the years - your reasoning and logic bringing light into the darkness that adheres to the most heinous and ruthless sides of human nature. You unraveled the crimes nobody else could - sometimes not even wanted to - solve, bringing those who deemed themselves save behind the veils of lies and deceit they had constructed to conceal their involvement in the unspeakable felonies they had wrought.

Through it all, I have always been dear Watson to you - the habit of addressing each other by our last names no matter how close friends we had become being a second nature to me. I have never truly questioned your reasoning to do so - but at times when even your composure wore thin, your resolve was tested to the point where you were no longer able to guard your emotions from the rest of the world as you were wont to do? It was then when it became evident that you were a deeply empathic person. It was then when your otherwise distant and matter-of-factly manner - oftentimes even drifting into arrogance - would reveal itself not to be your true nature, but rather a protective mechanism.

Your fellow human beings (though you never put it that way) have always been more of a mystery to you than the plots and schemes of your criminal antagonists. You did have feelings - as rich and deep as those of every other man - only were you wary to show them, if not afraid to do so. Thus it was even more remarkable if you did - even then not in the form of a dramatic emotional release, but rather by subtle means: Like calling me by my first name. Even after all those years I can still imagine vividly how you sit there at your desk, pen in hand spelling out your thoughts on the very paper I now hold in my hands under the ghostly light of a gas lamp. Our roles reversed, you trying to sort out the deep turmoil you find yourself in - the reason for this letter and the factual report it contains.

Under the light of electric bulbs - bright as daylight, lacking the ghostly but homelike allure of their gas-fueled predecessors - I finally gather enough volition to overcome the waves of grief, nostalgia, and regret these old memories have stirred up and read past the salutation.

"Dear John,

it is on a solitary autumn evening that I find our usual roles reversed. Before I will get to the heart of two matters that have led me to question the very foundations my entire life - professional and personal - has rested upon until this very day.

Before I shall move on to describe the nature of said matters, I must clarify one thing I most certainly have failed to state clearly so far, and knowing myself will continue failing to do so: I have always considered you my best friend and trusted companion in all of our endeavours, for your continued friendship and unwavering loyalty have lent me strength and solace whenever I required it. As such, it pains me tremendously that there are - and possibly will be - cases for which I have to forego your companionship. Though these cases have been very few and far in-between to this present day, the account of the events I will relay to you now in writing concern precisely one of them.

My friend, rest assured that the reasons I chose not to let you in on the circumstances surrounding this series of crimes are in no way connected to your conduct or your demeanour. On the contrary - I was specifically asked not to involve anyone else regarding this matter: Not by the London police or our esteemed officials from Scotland Yard, but by a private party who very clearly expressed the desire to remain anonymous. To that end I asked you to part ways with me for a time - due to events you will doubtlessly remember due to their extraordinariness."

"You may - you will - wonder why I have chosen to take my leave at a time when London was besieged by the deeds of an inhumane murderer the likes of whom the city had never seen before."

And I clearly do: You bade me to take some leave, invoking the necessity to see to private matters of a very personal nature at the time. I never saw the need to enquire the reasons behind your request, not even after the two weeks you had anticipated for your absence had turned into a month and a half. The year 1889 - after the Great War has left the world forever changed, there are not many who remember the brutal series of murders that haunted London at the time. And fewer who want to remember the harbinger of death whose true identity has never been uncovered - the unspeakably cruel murders stopped as abruptly as they began, never to resume again...

"Jack the Ripper, as the press chose to label the murderer who picked his victims from amidst the underbelly of the Empire's fiery heart, its steely soul - his deeds spreading panic and paranoia throughout all of society: From those who suffered most under his reign of terror since he picked his victims from their midst to the rich and powerful who feared the wrath of the populace in their inability to bring the murderer to justice."

I remember the upheaval the city went through during this series of abominable crimes: Citizens demanding the killer be apprehended, increasingly vehement and agitated as the London police and Scotland Yard failed to do so - wild conspiracy theories circulating, rumors and panic spreading like wildfire throughout the city. The tipping point to open riots, if not proverbial witch hunts was not far when the series of murders simply stopped.

The last sentence requires me to read it a second time - I was not wrong: The murderer? My dearest and oldest friend... you have died more than twenty years ago, yet you are still surrounded by unsolved mysteries and lost secrets.

"The Police and Scotland Yard - prudent as they may have been in dealing with ordinary criminals - have at times found themselves unable to cope with specific types of culprits. We have (and am sure that we will have) had our fair share of encounters with such individuals. It is most often an upsetting experience to see how hatred, greed, envy - any combination of vices human beings bear within - paired with a cunning mind and a lack of compasson result in the worst characteristics of our kind to instrumentalizing our best qualities. Committing and justifying cruel acts comes astonishingly easy with such a mindset; there is no doubt that the lowest lows of man are as much indicators for the true nature of our race as our highest highs."

Aptly summarized; I can attest to the veracity of this statement, having stood by your side often enough so that I have no cause to doubt this. But why do you feel compelled to clarify it then?

"There is a time in our lives when our beliefs and convictions - the very rock upon which our destiny rests - are put to an ultimate test: The time when all we have relied on, all we have taken for granted is reductio ad absurdum. Facing this test leaves each of us behind changed in a different way; some despair, others are left behind maddened; but no matter how, the experience leaves you behind permanently and fundamentally changed. For me this time came during my own investigations on Jack the Ripper. While the modus operandi of his crimes was deeply appaling by itself... my test were not my dealings with this murderer: It was an encounter with someone else who was on the hunt for the same perpetrator - someone whose very existence defies every rationale that defines my understanding of reality."

"John- you have always been my closest friend and trusted companion, a confidant whose patience and discretion I have valued more than anyone else's. In that capacity having had to withhold certain endeavours I had to undertake alone from you pains me greatly - the were various reasons for me to leave you out of them, but please realize that I have never done so lightly or on a whim. You deserve to know why - and you of all people in this world are the only one who will, if anything, at least give me the benefit of a doubt when it comes to believing what I will impart on you on the remaining pages of this journal. I wish with all my heart that I could have told you this in person, but if you are reading this letter it means that I am already dead and buried for thirty years. The instructions I left for this journal - and others of similar nature - are that you and you alone are to be the one to receive them and peruse them.

"Thirty years are a long time - I hope that in this time, or between my death and the day you receive this, you have found the measure of peace you have earned: That you have found the love of your life, that you have founded a family, and that you are the proud and caring father of the daughters and sons you have always wished for. If my intuition is an indication for the inscrutable mystery that is love, Ms. Mary Marston might be the special someone who will feel about you as you felt about her."

How in heaven's name did you deduce that, old friend? I was never aware of the extent of your powers of observation equally applied to relationships, let alone relationships whose beginnings had not been evident in this distant past.

"All the peril I have put you through, the risks and menaces we faced together, the cruelty and ruthlessness of those we brought to justice, the pain and suffering of their victims... John, forgive me for what I have kept you from: Living your life to your heart's desire; for all the eloquence a keen intellect may have granted me I have missed - will have missed - chance after chance to put into words how much our friendship meant to me. Should all other opportunities to tell you this in person have passed... let this letter be the means by which I do so."

"John: If you have not found the opportunity to sit down, I will ask you to do so now. The story - for I lack a better word to quantify the proceedings I am about to relate to you - I have to tell is literally not entirely of this world. Yet I will ask you to remain impartial while you read my account of the lost case you might have adequately dubbed 'The Hunter of Mad Kings' had you been the chronicler to put this account in writing."

"I will remain - as I always have - as your faithful and loyal friend."

"Farewell and Godspeed, John."

With once more unsteady hands I turn over the last page of your letter, the immeasurable feelings of loss and and grief I had thought to have resolved after your death returning with unabated vehemence. In a matter of a few sentences - words I had never expected to hear from you given your logical, stoic personality - you take me back to the times in my life I have oftentimes desired to be gone while I lived them but would have missed for nothing in this world in retrospective.

Bracing for the story that I am about to relive through your written account I pour myself a generous glass of brandy - my family would berate me if they knew I indulged like that - but even without knowing what I will learn in the hours ahead: I sense that what you have to tell, even long after you have left this world, will not be for the faint of heart...