rage
I searched for hours.
Some might say I’m tenacious to a fault.
Ever since I was born, I had known structure. I had always had people telling me what to do. Ordering me around. My parents. Then, teachers. Then, those up above me in the army.
Last of all was the professor.
If I left, it meant I had no rules. I had no guidelines.
I didn’t like the freedom.
And I didn’t want to leave him.
I had the strong feeling that he had lived. Perhaps it was hope.
I ran up and down the shore like a lost dog, shouting out into the water. I didn’t know what I was calling for; sometimes I wasn’t shouting at him at all. Sometimes I was shouting at that damn Holmes.
Sometimes I was shouting out of frustration at myself. Couldn’t I have done something? Stayed a little closer? Gotten there a little faster?
There were other people looking there besides me so that I kept my hat pulled low. I wasn’t worried that they would hear me; I doubted that they heard each other over the roar of the waterfall. I was merely worried that someone--the doctor--might recognise me.
I didn’t need authorities swooping down on me.
I scanned the area around me.
Shouted again.
It thinned out so that there was just one lone man scrambling about the rocks, and when I noted that he had a moustache I couldn’t help myself, drawing my gun nearly before I had realised it and putting a bullet in him. He fell easily, and I loped over to his body.
Tilted it with my boot and curled my lip in disgust.
Not the man that I hoped to see, but certainly I had all the time in the world to track him down and make him pay for his part in this.
Nudged the man into the water and watched him drift lazily out until he blurred with the dark horizon. My lantern was flickering, reminding me that it needed its oil replaced so that I was irritated. It would soon go out so that I could not finish my search…and then what?
I walked for some distance.
My mind was focused on two things. One, find Sherlock Holmes and kill him. Two, find the professor.
I wouldn’t do all this trickery. Trickery got us in this mess in the first place, though I’d never say that to him. No, I’d put a bullet through the great Sherlock Holmes’s head.
Effective.
There in front of me in the mud were drag marks, and I frowned deeply as I followed them with my eyes.
I had a sneaking suspicion that they belonged to Mr. Holmes and so I carefully dragged my bootheel across a good portion of it, erasing both it and the ensuing, stumbling footsteps that began to lead away.
Certainly if he had lived…
Certainly…
“Professor!” I shouted again, growling in frustration as I turned this way and that, holding my lantern higher to illuminate the ground in front of me. “C’mon! You aren’t gonna let a little water off you, are you?!”
I made a vow to turn back at the bend and kept forward, calling out every now and again and pausing to listen. It was on my last shout that I thought I heard something and so I stopped, straining every fibre within me as though I were back listening to the stealthy tread of a tiger rather than trying to hear the shouting of a man.
Silence met me and I was filled with an overwhelming disappointment. The professor might be smart; brilliant, even, but he was no match for the cascading fountain we had stood next to only hours before.
I turned back.
“Sebastian…?”
I froze, certain that my mind was playing tricks on me and then I tilted my head in the direction that I thought I heard it from. There it was again--my name--and when I heard it uttered again with a groan I was stumbling forward, hastily moving to the water.
He was partially in it, having managed to pull himself out with some tenacity that I marvelled at, and he gazed weakily up at me, drenched to the bone.
“I’m rather cold…”
“I should imagine so,” I said, stripping out of my jacket and bundling him in it as best as I could seeing as he was lying still on the ground. “Can you move?”
“Where am I?”
I grit my teeth. It was something else entirely to see a man with such amazing brainpower left essentially feebleminded at this moment. It was unnerving. …Frightening.
“Professor, you’re in Switzerland. You know that. I know that. Remember? Switzerland? Got to go to a peace council? Reichenbach?”
He looked blankly around himself. “Have I been going for a swim?”
I sighed. It was hopeless. I couldn’t fault him; I imagine I’d be far more rattled after taking a tumble down several storeys. “Yes. You’ve been very bad. C’mon. We need to go inside, where it’s warm.”
I’d kill Holmes for this. Forcing a man of his stature down like this was unforgivable.
“C’mon, Professor. Up you get. It’s getting to be too dark, anyhow.”
I somehow managed to get both the Professor and the lantern in my arms, but I lost my gun in the process. Priorities. I could fetch a weapon from anywhere, or go back for it later.
Couldn’t say the same about the Professor.
Some of his fire returned as I hoisted him up, and he squirmed a bit.
“I’m not a babe! Put me down!”
“It’ll be easier this way!” I said back and he fell silent. I caught a faint glimpse of fear trace across his face and I bit down hard on my lip to keep from tightening my grasp on him to a painful degree.
The professor was a pillar, you see. I’d seen portions of his organisation crumble before--all because of that man--but I’d never seen his foundation shaken. Now there were cracks along the surface, and I didn’t like it.
The professor was always the certain one. I couldn’t be the certain one! I didn’t make the decisions--he did!
In the blink of an eye, my cosy existence had been flipped on its end and I didn’t like it.
-----
“Get in the bath,” I said, gesturing to the tub that I had had the woman of the hotel draw.
The professor gave me a flat look. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he said, tone dangerous.
I didn’t fear him.
Certainly I had before. I should think it extraordinary if you met him and didn’t, no matter what you knew him as. If you knew James Moriarty as a professor, you’d be fearful of saying something wrong to him. To bring out that sneer. To have him mock you in front of all your peers and mates. To have him ride you into the ground for one careless mistake with a cold look and a smirk on his face as he did so.
If you knew James Moriarty, the criminal mastermind…well. Enough said, right?
I had feared him in the beginning. I had seen him shuck people off left and right for minor offenses, and once he decided he no longer needed you, you were thoroughly finished. I had been nervous of a false step and a slip of the finger because I knew I wasn’t at his level--hell, I’ve never been very clever.
But then I did mess up and he was furious, tapping his pen on his desk in an angry tempo as I waited for him to say the words I dreaded to hear.
“I no longer need your services.”
I waited.
He set his pen down, knitting his fingers together and glancing up at me with a sigh. “Do you know the problem, Sebastian, with relying on people?”
“No, professor,” I said nervously.
“They inevitably let you down,” he said coldly, watching me carefully. “You have disappointed me.”
I said nothing, lowering my head.
“Don’t do it again.”
I glanced up. “You…what? You’re not going to dismiss me?”
“Seems so,” he said flatly, and then he allowed a flicker of a smile to come onto his face. “Besides, I have needs of a marksman and I trust only your shot.”
I blinked, then, taking myself from the memory and back to the hotel.
Right.
I wouldn’t disappoint him here, either, and whether he liked it or not he was going into the bath.
“You’ve gotta do it, Professor, or you’ll make yourself sick.”
I nudged him toward the tub, making the mistake of applying a little too much pressure upon the man. He whirled on me like a feral beast, hands at my throat.
I was too worried to truly fight the man in his condition and yet I tried to pry his hands away from my neck. “Professor! ‘S me!” I tried to say yet inevitably failed as his fingers restricted my airway.
He searched my face quickly, bewildered, yet he must have read something in it that was familiar to him for he released me, allowing me to rub anxiously at my skin whilst looking fretfully at him.
“Forgive me. Everything seems…wrong.”
“Just get in the bath,” I said, and when he gave me a hateful look I held up my hands. “I’m not gonna drown you or anything like that.”
“I should think not,” he said grimly, and when he began to undo the buttons at his neck I turned away to give him privacy.
“You can look again,” he said, somewhat amused. When I turned back he had lowered himself in so that only his head remained above water and I knelt down beside the tub to be level with him.
He didn’t speak again for some time.
He was pale overall, with large bruises covering portions of his body, intermingling with cuts. Some were deep enough to warrant a frown from me as I cleaned them with a washcloth, and I tried to be as gentle as I could.
It was difficult, as I had no nieces or nephews, nor any children of my own. I had never had to be gentle with someone else. My actions were all aimed at destruction, and death, and causing the most physical pain that I could possibly do. How could I reverse that?
I managed it, tilting his wrist and mumbling an apology when he winced, loosening my grasp so that I barely touched him at all. “It’s gonna be all right, you know. We’ll find him,” I said, keeping up my litany that I had done to fill the silence as he stared blankly off into space.
At times he whimpered, and they sounded less painful and more fearful so that my temper was set on edge.
That bastard had reduced him down to this. The man could have had the world at his knees and now he was in a bathtub, crying out at my slightest movement, mumbling to himself gibberish that I did not understand.
It infuriated me. I should hope that he was fleeing. I really did wish for that. I wanted to hunt him down. I wanted to trace over the land. I wanted to follow rumours. I wanted to close my net about him. I wanted to track him down some dark alley.
I wanted to make him beg me for mercy. I wanted to shoot him in every limb, point blank. Gun pressed to the skin. I wanted to hear his screams and see him looking into my eyes as I did it. I wanted to feel his shudder and jerk of pain--of sheer agony--when the bullets entered him.
I traced a washcloth thoughtly over the professor’s arm, imagining snapping Holmes’s in two with only my hands. Would take a bit of doing, but I think I could manage it given the state I was in.
“’S gonna be all right, Professor. Hm? We got over the hard part. The waterfall. Next is rebuilding. You can do it. I did it. Look at me now. Got chucked out of the army and I landed on my feet.”
“Landed in my pay is more like it,” he said weakly, but he managed a smile that had me hopeful. “Are we in Switzerland?”
“Yes, professor,” I said, smile falling from my face.
“Must be why it’s so damn cold. Help me,” he said, and I felt a small stab at his request. I’d heard him say a good many things, but ‘help me’ had never been two words uttered in conjunction.
I helped him to sit up and then we awkwardly manoeuvred so that I had him clad in his blue dressing gown, drawing him back toward the bed with only some small issues.
He flopped down as though he had traversed a mountain and I stood fidgeting over him until he blinked open a blue eye at me.
“What do you want?”
“I should probably…er…well. You need seeing to.”
“Then do it,” he said, and I retrieved some bandages that we had kept aside just in case. “Sometimes I marvel at your prudishness. You were in the army.”
I gingerly prodded at his right leg. “’S a matter of respect, that’s all.”
“You’ve seen it all, anyway,” the professor said and I flushed but said nothing, instead moving to his left leg. Down near to his ankle it was swollen and discoloured and did not seem quite properly aligned.
“Think you got a sprain here,” I said and the professor hissed in pain when I began to carefully wrap the area in bandages. “I’m bein’ gentle, but it’s still gonna hurt.”
A sprain.
Holmes would be lucky if he could walk after I took a bar to his legs. Guns were wonderful--I wouldn’t say otherwise--but still…They could fell a man, no problem, but sometimes that was the problem. Sometimes you wanted him to suffer. To writhe in pain.
A bullet was far too easy.
I knew that the professor was fond of opera, and I thought that I might sing him something as I was bandaging him to take his mind off it and what had happened to him as well.
I knew that he quite liked Die Forelle and so I tried it yet he stopped me immediately, twisting and turning in a rage.
“No! No! No! I don’t want to hear that!”
“You love it--”
“No! Be careful what you fish for?! Fish for?! A pun?! I was bested by that man?! Fish for!”
He was raving--I had no idea what he was talking about so that I stopped with a sigh. I tried a little Mozart instead and he relaxed, listening to me as I improvised when I didn’t know the words. As my fingertips brushed at his stomach he followed me with his eyes lazily.
“I’ve never heard you sing before.”
“’Cos I don’t have the voice for it,” I admitted.
“True,” he said, and I was stung by his comment.
I used a little plaster upon a gash on his stomach that worked its way up to his ribs.
“Don’t stop. Keep singing. There’s something charming in it,” he said, and when I looked at him sceptically he nodded at me. “Do it.”
I couldn’t resist an order from him, no matter how silly, and so I did so, finding a variety of cuts upon his first two fingers on his right hand. Carefully, so carefully, I bandaged them together rather than have to deal with sticking plaster here and there. I was aware of his every wince and shudder and I tried to be even gentler in my treatment of him although I figured it impossible unless I didn’t touch him at all.
I would break Holmes’s fingers. Pull them back to the snapping point and hold them there for precious seconds, having him beg me to stop before tilting them back all the more, hearing the crack and feeling the bone give way beneath me.
“I don’t remember anything of it, really. Just…just so much water. I never want to go near anything like it again. Even…even the bathtub turned me…it…”
“Shhh,” I said, surprising myself with how soothing I could be. He looked warily at me, also unnerved by my tone. I suppose it would be like a tiger cuddling up to someone like a kitty-cat. “We’ll get outta here as soon as you feel up to it.”
“I feel up to it now.”
“You don’t even,” I countered, and he watched carefully as I gathered up the blankets I had folded and sat on the edge of the bed before his bath. I draped them one after the other over him until he was in a big coccoon of blankets, and I suppose it spoke to his weakness that he made no complaints of being treated in such a manner, instead leaning promptly back.
“You comfortable?” I asked, and he didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Professor?”
“Just fine,” he said, though he sounded dazed. I was irritated all the more. This was a man who could do computations and equations that stumped even the most brilliant minded in Europe and yet now here he was, mulling over the answer to whether he felt all right.
I’d make Holmes forget his own name. He’d beg me to use a hook on him when I was finished. I never much went in for knives. They were messy and could do close-up what you could accomplish far away with guns.
Still. Again. There was always the lingering point that one could draw out the agony with a bit of steel. I made the mental note to look into this on the way home.
The professor began to laugh, then, and when I looked up at him he laughed all the more.
“You all right, professor?” I asked.
He laughed.
“I like this train of thought. Continue.”
“With…the talk of leaving?” I asked, bewildered.
“No, no, no. Don’t be silly. I can see it in your face. You’re thinking of Holmes, aren’t you?”
I was surprised that he had guessed it. “Well--”
“And of torture?” he asked, excited. “I can see the violence in your eyes. It is a soothing thing.”
“No one wishes to catch him more than I do,” I said, and he yawned deeply, eyes flickering as he lie back against the pillows, swaddled in the blanket.
“I think I may disagree, but why don’t you tell me some of your plans?”
“Well, first I have plans to use a few knives. At first I thought bullets, but do you know how excruciatingly painful it must be to drive knives into the palm of one’s hands? I should like to pin him to walls in such a fashion, driving the knife down into flesh and bone…”
The professor slipped off then into sleep, breathing evening out. I sat there, conflicted by my feelings of rage that Holmes had done this to the professor while relieved that my employer was still alive at all.
I calmed my twitching hands in my lap, resolved to pour over the many threads running through my mind until I found a suitable punishment for the man even as I carefully watched the professor sleep, ready to wake him if he was caught in a nightmare.
-----
Some might say I’m tenacious to a fault.
Ever since I was born, I had known structure. I had always had people telling me what to do. Ordering me around. My parents. Then, teachers. Then, those up above me in the army.
Last of all was the professor.
If I left, it meant I had no rules. I had no guidelines.
I didn’t like the freedom.
And I didn’t want to leave him.
I had the strong feeling that he had lived. Perhaps it was hope.
I ran up and down the shore like a lost dog, shouting out into the water. I didn’t know what I was calling for; sometimes I wasn’t shouting at him at all. Sometimes I was shouting at that damn Holmes.
Sometimes I was shouting out of frustration at myself. Couldn’t I have done something? Stayed a little closer? Gotten there a little faster?
There were other people looking there besides me so that I kept my hat pulled low. I wasn’t worried that they would hear me; I doubted that they heard each other over the roar of the waterfall. I was merely worried that someone--the doctor--might recognise me.
I didn’t need authorities swooping down on me.
I scanned the area around me.
Shouted again.
It thinned out so that there was just one lone man scrambling about the rocks, and when I noted that he had a moustache I couldn’t help myself, drawing my gun nearly before I had realised it and putting a bullet in him. He fell easily, and I loped over to his body.
Tilted it with my boot and curled my lip in disgust.
Not the man that I hoped to see, but certainly I had all the time in the world to track him down and make him pay for his part in this.
Nudged the man into the water and watched him drift lazily out until he blurred with the dark horizon. My lantern was flickering, reminding me that it needed its oil replaced so that I was irritated. It would soon go out so that I could not finish my search…and then what?
I walked for some distance.
My mind was focused on two things. One, find Sherlock Holmes and kill him. Two, find the professor.
I wouldn’t do all this trickery. Trickery got us in this mess in the first place, though I’d never say that to him. No, I’d put a bullet through the great Sherlock Holmes’s head.
Effective.
There in front of me in the mud were drag marks, and I frowned deeply as I followed them with my eyes.
I had a sneaking suspicion that they belonged to Mr. Holmes and so I carefully dragged my bootheel across a good portion of it, erasing both it and the ensuing, stumbling footsteps that began to lead away.
Certainly if he had lived…
Certainly…
“Professor!” I shouted again, growling in frustration as I turned this way and that, holding my lantern higher to illuminate the ground in front of me. “C’mon! You aren’t gonna let a little water off you, are you?!”
I made a vow to turn back at the bend and kept forward, calling out every now and again and pausing to listen. It was on my last shout that I thought I heard something and so I stopped, straining every fibre within me as though I were back listening to the stealthy tread of a tiger rather than trying to hear the shouting of a man.
Silence met me and I was filled with an overwhelming disappointment. The professor might be smart; brilliant, even, but he was no match for the cascading fountain we had stood next to only hours before.
I turned back.
“Sebastian…?”
I froze, certain that my mind was playing tricks on me and then I tilted my head in the direction that I thought I heard it from. There it was again--my name--and when I heard it uttered again with a groan I was stumbling forward, hastily moving to the water.
He was partially in it, having managed to pull himself out with some tenacity that I marvelled at, and he gazed weakily up at me, drenched to the bone.
“I’m rather cold…”
“I should imagine so,” I said, stripping out of my jacket and bundling him in it as best as I could seeing as he was lying still on the ground. “Can you move?”
“Where am I?”
I grit my teeth. It was something else entirely to see a man with such amazing brainpower left essentially feebleminded at this moment. It was unnerving. …Frightening.
“Professor, you’re in Switzerland. You know that. I know that. Remember? Switzerland? Got to go to a peace council? Reichenbach?”
He looked blankly around himself. “Have I been going for a swim?”
I sighed. It was hopeless. I couldn’t fault him; I imagine I’d be far more rattled after taking a tumble down several storeys. “Yes. You’ve been very bad. C’mon. We need to go inside, where it’s warm.”
I’d kill Holmes for this. Forcing a man of his stature down like this was unforgivable.
“C’mon, Professor. Up you get. It’s getting to be too dark, anyhow.”
I somehow managed to get both the Professor and the lantern in my arms, but I lost my gun in the process. Priorities. I could fetch a weapon from anywhere, or go back for it later.
Couldn’t say the same about the Professor.
Some of his fire returned as I hoisted him up, and he squirmed a bit.
“I’m not a babe! Put me down!”
“It’ll be easier this way!” I said back and he fell silent. I caught a faint glimpse of fear trace across his face and I bit down hard on my lip to keep from tightening my grasp on him to a painful degree.
The professor was a pillar, you see. I’d seen portions of his organisation crumble before--all because of that man--but I’d never seen his foundation shaken. Now there were cracks along the surface, and I didn’t like it.
The professor was always the certain one. I couldn’t be the certain one! I didn’t make the decisions--he did!
In the blink of an eye, my cosy existence had been flipped on its end and I didn’t like it.
-----
“Get in the bath,” I said, gesturing to the tub that I had had the woman of the hotel draw.
The professor gave me a flat look. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he said, tone dangerous.
I didn’t fear him.
Certainly I had before. I should think it extraordinary if you met him and didn’t, no matter what you knew him as. If you knew James Moriarty as a professor, you’d be fearful of saying something wrong to him. To bring out that sneer. To have him mock you in front of all your peers and mates. To have him ride you into the ground for one careless mistake with a cold look and a smirk on his face as he did so.
If you knew James Moriarty, the criminal mastermind…well. Enough said, right?
I had feared him in the beginning. I had seen him shuck people off left and right for minor offenses, and once he decided he no longer needed you, you were thoroughly finished. I had been nervous of a false step and a slip of the finger because I knew I wasn’t at his level--hell, I’ve never been very clever.
But then I did mess up and he was furious, tapping his pen on his desk in an angry tempo as I waited for him to say the words I dreaded to hear.
“I no longer need your services.”
I waited.
He set his pen down, knitting his fingers together and glancing up at me with a sigh. “Do you know the problem, Sebastian, with relying on people?”
“No, professor,” I said nervously.
“They inevitably let you down,” he said coldly, watching me carefully. “You have disappointed me.”
I said nothing, lowering my head.
“Don’t do it again.”
I glanced up. “You…what? You’re not going to dismiss me?”
“Seems so,” he said flatly, and then he allowed a flicker of a smile to come onto his face. “Besides, I have needs of a marksman and I trust only your shot.”
I blinked, then, taking myself from the memory and back to the hotel.
Right.
I wouldn’t disappoint him here, either, and whether he liked it or not he was going into the bath.
“You’ve gotta do it, Professor, or you’ll make yourself sick.”
I nudged him toward the tub, making the mistake of applying a little too much pressure upon the man. He whirled on me like a feral beast, hands at my throat.
I was too worried to truly fight the man in his condition and yet I tried to pry his hands away from my neck. “Professor! ‘S me!” I tried to say yet inevitably failed as his fingers restricted my airway.
He searched my face quickly, bewildered, yet he must have read something in it that was familiar to him for he released me, allowing me to rub anxiously at my skin whilst looking fretfully at him.
“Forgive me. Everything seems…wrong.”
“Just get in the bath,” I said, and when he gave me a hateful look I held up my hands. “I’m not gonna drown you or anything like that.”
“I should think not,” he said grimly, and when he began to undo the buttons at his neck I turned away to give him privacy.
“You can look again,” he said, somewhat amused. When I turned back he had lowered himself in so that only his head remained above water and I knelt down beside the tub to be level with him.
He didn’t speak again for some time.
He was pale overall, with large bruises covering portions of his body, intermingling with cuts. Some were deep enough to warrant a frown from me as I cleaned them with a washcloth, and I tried to be as gentle as I could.
It was difficult, as I had no nieces or nephews, nor any children of my own. I had never had to be gentle with someone else. My actions were all aimed at destruction, and death, and causing the most physical pain that I could possibly do. How could I reverse that?
I managed it, tilting his wrist and mumbling an apology when he winced, loosening my grasp so that I barely touched him at all. “It’s gonna be all right, you know. We’ll find him,” I said, keeping up my litany that I had done to fill the silence as he stared blankly off into space.
At times he whimpered, and they sounded less painful and more fearful so that my temper was set on edge.
That bastard had reduced him down to this. The man could have had the world at his knees and now he was in a bathtub, crying out at my slightest movement, mumbling to himself gibberish that I did not understand.
It infuriated me. I should hope that he was fleeing. I really did wish for that. I wanted to hunt him down. I wanted to trace over the land. I wanted to follow rumours. I wanted to close my net about him. I wanted to track him down some dark alley.
I wanted to make him beg me for mercy. I wanted to shoot him in every limb, point blank. Gun pressed to the skin. I wanted to hear his screams and see him looking into my eyes as I did it. I wanted to feel his shudder and jerk of pain--of sheer agony--when the bullets entered him.
I traced a washcloth thoughtly over the professor’s arm, imagining snapping Holmes’s in two with only my hands. Would take a bit of doing, but I think I could manage it given the state I was in.
“’S gonna be all right, Professor. Hm? We got over the hard part. The waterfall. Next is rebuilding. You can do it. I did it. Look at me now. Got chucked out of the army and I landed on my feet.”
“Landed in my pay is more like it,” he said weakly, but he managed a smile that had me hopeful. “Are we in Switzerland?”
“Yes, professor,” I said, smile falling from my face.
“Must be why it’s so damn cold. Help me,” he said, and I felt a small stab at his request. I’d heard him say a good many things, but ‘help me’ had never been two words uttered in conjunction.
I helped him to sit up and then we awkwardly manoeuvred so that I had him clad in his blue dressing gown, drawing him back toward the bed with only some small issues.
He flopped down as though he had traversed a mountain and I stood fidgeting over him until he blinked open a blue eye at me.
“What do you want?”
“I should probably…er…well. You need seeing to.”
“Then do it,” he said, and I retrieved some bandages that we had kept aside just in case. “Sometimes I marvel at your prudishness. You were in the army.”
I gingerly prodded at his right leg. “’S a matter of respect, that’s all.”
“You’ve seen it all, anyway,” the professor said and I flushed but said nothing, instead moving to his left leg. Down near to his ankle it was swollen and discoloured and did not seem quite properly aligned.
“Think you got a sprain here,” I said and the professor hissed in pain when I began to carefully wrap the area in bandages. “I’m bein’ gentle, but it’s still gonna hurt.”
A sprain.
Holmes would be lucky if he could walk after I took a bar to his legs. Guns were wonderful--I wouldn’t say otherwise--but still…They could fell a man, no problem, but sometimes that was the problem. Sometimes you wanted him to suffer. To writhe in pain.
A bullet was far too easy.
I knew that the professor was fond of opera, and I thought that I might sing him something as I was bandaging him to take his mind off it and what had happened to him as well.
I knew that he quite liked Die Forelle and so I tried it yet he stopped me immediately, twisting and turning in a rage.
“No! No! No! I don’t want to hear that!”
“You love it--”
“No! Be careful what you fish for?! Fish for?! A pun?! I was bested by that man?! Fish for!”
He was raving--I had no idea what he was talking about so that I stopped with a sigh. I tried a little Mozart instead and he relaxed, listening to me as I improvised when I didn’t know the words. As my fingertips brushed at his stomach he followed me with his eyes lazily.
“I’ve never heard you sing before.”
“’Cos I don’t have the voice for it,” I admitted.
“True,” he said, and I was stung by his comment.
I used a little plaster upon a gash on his stomach that worked its way up to his ribs.
“Don’t stop. Keep singing. There’s something charming in it,” he said, and when I looked at him sceptically he nodded at me. “Do it.”
I couldn’t resist an order from him, no matter how silly, and so I did so, finding a variety of cuts upon his first two fingers on his right hand. Carefully, so carefully, I bandaged them together rather than have to deal with sticking plaster here and there. I was aware of his every wince and shudder and I tried to be even gentler in my treatment of him although I figured it impossible unless I didn’t touch him at all.
I would break Holmes’s fingers. Pull them back to the snapping point and hold them there for precious seconds, having him beg me to stop before tilting them back all the more, hearing the crack and feeling the bone give way beneath me.
“I don’t remember anything of it, really. Just…just so much water. I never want to go near anything like it again. Even…even the bathtub turned me…it…”
“Shhh,” I said, surprising myself with how soothing I could be. He looked warily at me, also unnerved by my tone. I suppose it would be like a tiger cuddling up to someone like a kitty-cat. “We’ll get outta here as soon as you feel up to it.”
“I feel up to it now.”
“You don’t even,” I countered, and he watched carefully as I gathered up the blankets I had folded and sat on the edge of the bed before his bath. I draped them one after the other over him until he was in a big coccoon of blankets, and I suppose it spoke to his weakness that he made no complaints of being treated in such a manner, instead leaning promptly back.
“You comfortable?” I asked, and he didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Professor?”
“Just fine,” he said, though he sounded dazed. I was irritated all the more. This was a man who could do computations and equations that stumped even the most brilliant minded in Europe and yet now here he was, mulling over the answer to whether he felt all right.
I’d make Holmes forget his own name. He’d beg me to use a hook on him when I was finished. I never much went in for knives. They were messy and could do close-up what you could accomplish far away with guns.
Still. Again. There was always the lingering point that one could draw out the agony with a bit of steel. I made the mental note to look into this on the way home.
The professor began to laugh, then, and when I looked up at him he laughed all the more.
“You all right, professor?” I asked.
He laughed.
“I like this train of thought. Continue.”
“With…the talk of leaving?” I asked, bewildered.
“No, no, no. Don’t be silly. I can see it in your face. You’re thinking of Holmes, aren’t you?”
I was surprised that he had guessed it. “Well--”
“And of torture?” he asked, excited. “I can see the violence in your eyes. It is a soothing thing.”
“No one wishes to catch him more than I do,” I said, and he yawned deeply, eyes flickering as he lie back against the pillows, swaddled in the blanket.
“I think I may disagree, but why don’t you tell me some of your plans?”
“Well, first I have plans to use a few knives. At first I thought bullets, but do you know how excruciatingly painful it must be to drive knives into the palm of one’s hands? I should like to pin him to walls in such a fashion, driving the knife down into flesh and bone…”
The professor slipped off then into sleep, breathing evening out. I sat there, conflicted by my feelings of rage that Holmes had done this to the professor while relieved that my employer was still alive at all.
I calmed my twitching hands in my lap, resolved to pour over the many threads running through my mind until I found a suitable punishment for the man even as I carefully watched the professor sleep, ready to wake him if he was caught in a nightmare.
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