The Ghost in the Game (6/8)
Title: The Ghost in the Game
Author: EmmyAngua
Rating: 15
Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Darkfic
Warnings: Implied torture. Bad language.
Ships: Implied Sherlock/John, Molly/Other.
Summary: Moriarty has a secret. When Molly Hooper gets closer to it than anyone has before she knows her chances of survival are zero. But what is it? And how does it involve a missing scientist, Irene Adler, a deserted Manor House, and some mysterious hauntings at 221b Baker Street?
Part 1 II Part 2 II Part 3 II Part 4 II Part 5 II Part 6
--
Chapter 6
“This is Sherlock Holmes in 1895.”
A picture flashed on the screen. It was an image of a stranger who bore no resemblance to the Sherlock Holmes she knew. His eyes were dark and lively, burning with a passion and a… kindness that her Sherlock Holmes didn’t have.
Her Sherlock Holmes. How ironic to think of him as that.
But at the same time, something about him was familiar. Something around the nose.
“He lived in 221b Baker Street with a Dr. John Watson and a landlady called Mrs. Hudson. He worked, on and off, with a Detective Lestrade. And his odious brother was called Mycroft. Want to guess the name of his Arch Nemesis?”
He grinned.
“So the question you need to answer, Molly, is simple. How can two men live the exact same lives over a hundred years apart?”
Molly had been trying to mash the buttons on the phone without being seen. She stopped and responded in a flat voice.
“Obviously the Sherlock Holmes I… know… isn’t really that Sherlock Holmes. Someone has turned him into him.” She glared. “But I knew that already.”
“But there’s so much more you don’t know!” he said cheerfully. He clicked the next slide.
The Moriartys.
“My great, great, great, great grandfather started it all. He and Sherlock Holmes were engaged in a battle of wits that lasted their entire lifetime and became their mutual obsession. Sherlock Holmes became legendary in my family. Every child grew up hearing the stories, long after Sherlock Holmes was dead. We all wanted to be like Professor Moriarty.
“Thankfully my ancestor had a great interest in the purity of his descendants. He wanted to make us in his image. By whatever means necessary.”
Molly swallowed. “Cloning?”
“Hah! No. He chose a simpler method - fucking his sister. Oh you’re shocked, I expect the medical reporter in you is desperate to write an article about me.”
“After four generations of incest I’m surprised you’re even alive. I’m not surprised that you’re insane though.”
Moriarty’s eyes flickered dangerously and she was reminded of the sudden attack in her bedroom when she had last mocked him.
“My mother needed medical help to make sure I survived in the womb. Well. I say mother. She was also my aunt. And thankfully technology is such that, next time, it will be even easier. But we’ll get onto that later. Right now we should be talking about my great grandfather. He was a brilliant man, a doctor, and he was smart enough to realise the most important fact about medicine.”
“Which is?”
“That the Hippocratic oath is for fools.”
Molly clenched her teeth, almost unable to believe she was at the mercy of this lunatic. “That’s not true.”
“Oh yes it is. Concentration Camps did more for medical advancement than had been achieved in a hundred years. The medical profession’s greatest dilemma was deciding whether to use the information. Doing harm gets results. My great-grandfather knew this and gathered together like-minded men. Together they cloned the first humans in 1946. They made leaps that the medical world won’t discover for hundreds of years. His own, special interest was that of brain surgery. Have you figured out why yet Molls?”
Molly swallowed. “So he could re-create Sherlock Holmes?”
“Exactly!”
A new slide appeared.
The Clones
“His plan was to clone him, send the babies away until they were twenty, then bring them back. Using his technology he’d strip away the new identity and re-create the old. And voila! One hundred percent authentic Sherlock Holmes.
“But it wasn’t that easy. You see, the technology wasn’t reliable and the clones kept dying during the process. My great-grandfather died with his work unfinished. My grandfather - well I say grandfather, technically he was my father too - had more success. As you’ve seen.”
His eyes flicked up at the ceiling.
Molly closed her eyes. Five men, all tortured for their entire lives solely because they shared genes with a Victorian detective.
“Of course he was a petty man. All he cared about was exacting his revenge on his pet clones and making them suffer so he could feel powerful. No finesse at all. I’d have killed them off years ago, but sometimes I’m just a sentimental fool. And then I came along.”
He said it in a Cheshire Cat tone that implied this was better than the birth of Jesus Christ himself.
“I saw the flaws in their work. Cloning was messy and time-consuming and expensive. I’d have to wait twenty years for my very own Sherlock to mature, by which time he’d be twenty and I’d be collecting my pension. And for what? His mental ability? Geniuses are ten-a-penny. The key is to find the right one and turn him into Sherlock Holmes.
“It took a few years… I needed to find scientists and psychologists who saw things my way (not that it’s hard to get a psychologist on board when you tell them they’ll never need to worry about ethics again) And then all I had to do was find the right man.”
A photo appeared on the screen.
Dr. Hedley Sholes.
“Hedley Sholes. American. Worked for the Smithsonian. Wrote a series of award winning books on applying physics and chemistry to daily life in order to achieve financial, sexual, and social success. Married you because he used his own scientific principles to realise that a wife would drastically improve his own financial and social success. Maybe not sexual, but there’s a lot of conferences with lonely hotel rooms where he could enjoy that side of things. You loved him. He was planning to drop you the second you were no longer needed. He was perfect for what I wanted.”
Molly stared at the picture of her handsome husband. She had taken that picture on their honeymoon. He was smiling crookedly, as though he didn’t really mean it but was indulging her desire for happy pictures.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He’s really dead.”
Moriarty smiled. “I destroyed his old memories and thought processes, then I introduced new ones. First I had to create the thought processes of his original, Victorian self. Then I rebuilt a whole new, modern identity around it. One that could play in the streets of London with me.”
Another slide popped up. There were four pictures.
“John Watson. Mycroft Holmes. Gregory Lestrade. Mrs. Hudson.”
Two’s story… four men and one old woman…
“They were easier. Former soldiers with no family are plentiful and you can fall over daft old women in the street. Lestrade was a widowed traffic warden. Mycroft was an unusually competent banker. I created their new identities and destroyed their old ones. They’re just like Sherlock. They just took less work.”
“And how…how did you stop them finding out about their… Victorian selves?”
“That was easy! Unless they’d pored through Victorian newspapers they’d never had heard of the Sherlock 1.0 (as I think of him) and to be safe I removed every trace of him from every record. It was actually harder slotting them into the world for the first time. I had to put Mycroft in a high governmental position. I had to get Lestrade into the police. It took a lot of money…but I have my little consultation business for that. And now I have five players.”
“What about friends? Family? Doesn’t John Watson have a sister?”
“John Watson has an actress pretending to be a sister. She gets paid a lot of money for an odd drunken phone-call and the occasional boozy lunch with him. And Mycroft, clever as he is, has a skilled handler to stop him doing anything I don’t want him to.”
A photo flashed onto the screen. A pretty young woman.
“You don’t know her, of course, but you’re going to carry her child. My child.”
She looked from the picture to his own smirking face.
“Let me guess, your sister?”
“Oh you aren’t as stupid as you look. Correct. Currently she’s working under Mycroft Holmes. His crush on her is pathetic really.”
Moriarty stepped close and leered down at her. “So…have you put it all together yet?”
Molly stared up at him. He neck was in agony from being forced still, and her whole body ached.
“You’re going to do what you did to them to me. You’re going to turn me into someone else. Another… player.”
“Oh well done! Bang on! Only in name only though. You see, I need a player for my team. A queen piece who will share my work and be a surrogate mother for my children. And I figure, what’s the point of being Dr. Frankenstein if you can’t build the perfect wife for yourself? So… Meredith Harper who became Molly Hooper will now become Irene Adler.”
“Who?”
“She was another woman from Sherlock 1.0’s life. The woman, I’d say.”
He clicked the power-point. It was an image of a woman, a Victorian painting. She was beautiful.
“You’ll need some plastic surgery, of course,” he reached in a gave her left breast a sharp squeeze. “You’ll now actually need a bra for the first time in your life. Facial reconstruction. Hair-dye. We might even make you taller.”
“Why?” she said faintly. “Why do all that? Surely there’s another woman out there…”
“Because, my sweet, you need to die. And why snuff out your life when it’s so much more fun this way? Besides, you aren’t entirely friendless. Your father might try and track you down. If he hires the right people he might trace you to me. In which case I’ll be able to prove that Dr. Meredith Sholes is alive and well and on the run from the law after murdering her husband. Insurance, you see.”
Moriarty moved out of her line of sight. She heard him picking up metal implements behind her.
“And now…Molly…your time is up. Take a long look at Irene Adler. In a couple of hours you’ll be living her life.”
He drove a needle into her arm and, within four frantic seconds, she was unconscious.
Chapter 7
----
A/N: Nearly at the end now…would love you opinions!
Author: EmmyAngua
Rating: 15
Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Darkfic
Warnings: Implied torture. Bad language.
Ships: Implied Sherlock/John, Molly/Other.
Summary: Moriarty has a secret. When Molly Hooper gets closer to it than anyone has before she knows her chances of survival are zero. But what is it? And how does it involve a missing scientist, Irene Adler, a deserted Manor House, and some mysterious hauntings at 221b Baker Street?
Part 1 II Part 2 II Part 3 II Part 4 II Part 5 II Part 6
--
Chapter 6
“This is Sherlock Holmes in 1895.”
A picture flashed on the screen. It was an image of a stranger who bore no resemblance to the Sherlock Holmes she knew. His eyes were dark and lively, burning with a passion and a… kindness that her Sherlock Holmes didn’t have.
Her Sherlock Holmes. How ironic to think of him as that.
But at the same time, something about him was familiar. Something around the nose.
“He lived in 221b Baker Street with a Dr. John Watson and a landlady called Mrs. Hudson. He worked, on and off, with a Detective Lestrade. And his odious brother was called Mycroft. Want to guess the name of his Arch Nemesis?”
He grinned.
“So the question you need to answer, Molly, is simple. How can two men live the exact same lives over a hundred years apart?”
Molly had been trying to mash the buttons on the phone without being seen. She stopped and responded in a flat voice.
“Obviously the Sherlock Holmes I… know… isn’t really that Sherlock Holmes. Someone has turned him into him.” She glared. “But I knew that already.”
“But there’s so much more you don’t know!” he said cheerfully. He clicked the next slide.
The Moriartys.
“My great, great, great, great grandfather started it all. He and Sherlock Holmes were engaged in a battle of wits that lasted their entire lifetime and became their mutual obsession. Sherlock Holmes became legendary in my family. Every child grew up hearing the stories, long after Sherlock Holmes was dead. We all wanted to be like Professor Moriarty.
“Thankfully my ancestor had a great interest in the purity of his descendants. He wanted to make us in his image. By whatever means necessary.”
Molly swallowed. “Cloning?”
“Hah! No. He chose a simpler method - fucking his sister. Oh you’re shocked, I expect the medical reporter in you is desperate to write an article about me.”
“After four generations of incest I’m surprised you’re even alive. I’m not surprised that you’re insane though.”
Moriarty’s eyes flickered dangerously and she was reminded of the sudden attack in her bedroom when she had last mocked him.
“My mother needed medical help to make sure I survived in the womb. Well. I say mother. She was also my aunt. And thankfully technology is such that, next time, it will be even easier. But we’ll get onto that later. Right now we should be talking about my great grandfather. He was a brilliant man, a doctor, and he was smart enough to realise the most important fact about medicine.”
“Which is?”
“That the Hippocratic oath is for fools.”
Molly clenched her teeth, almost unable to believe she was at the mercy of this lunatic. “That’s not true.”
“Oh yes it is. Concentration Camps did more for medical advancement than had been achieved in a hundred years. The medical profession’s greatest dilemma was deciding whether to use the information. Doing harm gets results. My great-grandfather knew this and gathered together like-minded men. Together they cloned the first humans in 1946. They made leaps that the medical world won’t discover for hundreds of years. His own, special interest was that of brain surgery. Have you figured out why yet Molls?”
Molly swallowed. “So he could re-create Sherlock Holmes?”
“Exactly!”
A new slide appeared.
The Clones
“His plan was to clone him, send the babies away until they were twenty, then bring them back. Using his technology he’d strip away the new identity and re-create the old. And voila! One hundred percent authentic Sherlock Holmes.
“But it wasn’t that easy. You see, the technology wasn’t reliable and the clones kept dying during the process. My great-grandfather died with his work unfinished. My grandfather - well I say grandfather, technically he was my father too - had more success. As you’ve seen.”
His eyes flicked up at the ceiling.
Molly closed her eyes. Five men, all tortured for their entire lives solely because they shared genes with a Victorian detective.
“Of course he was a petty man. All he cared about was exacting his revenge on his pet clones and making them suffer so he could feel powerful. No finesse at all. I’d have killed them off years ago, but sometimes I’m just a sentimental fool. And then I came along.”
He said it in a Cheshire Cat tone that implied this was better than the birth of Jesus Christ himself.
“I saw the flaws in their work. Cloning was messy and time-consuming and expensive. I’d have to wait twenty years for my very own Sherlock to mature, by which time he’d be twenty and I’d be collecting my pension. And for what? His mental ability? Geniuses are ten-a-penny. The key is to find the right one and turn him into Sherlock Holmes.
“It took a few years… I needed to find scientists and psychologists who saw things my way (not that it’s hard to get a psychologist on board when you tell them they’ll never need to worry about ethics again) And then all I had to do was find the right man.”
A photo appeared on the screen.
Dr. Hedley Sholes.
“Hedley Sholes. American. Worked for the Smithsonian. Wrote a series of award winning books on applying physics and chemistry to daily life in order to achieve financial, sexual, and social success. Married you because he used his own scientific principles to realise that a wife would drastically improve his own financial and social success. Maybe not sexual, but there’s a lot of conferences with lonely hotel rooms where he could enjoy that side of things. You loved him. He was planning to drop you the second you were no longer needed. He was perfect for what I wanted.”
Molly stared at the picture of her handsome husband. She had taken that picture on their honeymoon. He was smiling crookedly, as though he didn’t really mean it but was indulging her desire for happy pictures.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He’s really dead.”
Moriarty smiled. “I destroyed his old memories and thought processes, then I introduced new ones. First I had to create the thought processes of his original, Victorian self. Then I rebuilt a whole new, modern identity around it. One that could play in the streets of London with me.”
Another slide popped up. There were four pictures.
“John Watson. Mycroft Holmes. Gregory Lestrade. Mrs. Hudson.”
Two’s story… four men and one old woman…
“They were easier. Former soldiers with no family are plentiful and you can fall over daft old women in the street. Lestrade was a widowed traffic warden. Mycroft was an unusually competent banker. I created their new identities and destroyed their old ones. They’re just like Sherlock. They just took less work.”
“And how…how did you stop them finding out about their… Victorian selves?”
“That was easy! Unless they’d pored through Victorian newspapers they’d never had heard of the Sherlock 1.0 (as I think of him) and to be safe I removed every trace of him from every record. It was actually harder slotting them into the world for the first time. I had to put Mycroft in a high governmental position. I had to get Lestrade into the police. It took a lot of money…but I have my little consultation business for that. And now I have five players.”
“What about friends? Family? Doesn’t John Watson have a sister?”
“John Watson has an actress pretending to be a sister. She gets paid a lot of money for an odd drunken phone-call and the occasional boozy lunch with him. And Mycroft, clever as he is, has a skilled handler to stop him doing anything I don’t want him to.”
A photo flashed onto the screen. A pretty young woman.
“You don’t know her, of course, but you’re going to carry her child. My child.”
She looked from the picture to his own smirking face.
“Let me guess, your sister?”
“Oh you aren’t as stupid as you look. Correct. Currently she’s working under Mycroft Holmes. His crush on her is pathetic really.”
Moriarty stepped close and leered down at her. “So…have you put it all together yet?”
Molly stared up at him. He neck was in agony from being forced still, and her whole body ached.
“You’re going to do what you did to them to me. You’re going to turn me into someone else. Another… player.”
“Oh well done! Bang on! Only in name only though. You see, I need a player for my team. A queen piece who will share my work and be a surrogate mother for my children. And I figure, what’s the point of being Dr. Frankenstein if you can’t build the perfect wife for yourself? So… Meredith Harper who became Molly Hooper will now become Irene Adler.”
“Who?”
“She was another woman from Sherlock 1.0’s life. The woman, I’d say.”
He clicked the power-point. It was an image of a woman, a Victorian painting. She was beautiful.
“You’ll need some plastic surgery, of course,” he reached in a gave her left breast a sharp squeeze. “You’ll now actually need a bra for the first time in your life. Facial reconstruction. Hair-dye. We might even make you taller.”
“Why?” she said faintly. “Why do all that? Surely there’s another woman out there…”
“Because, my sweet, you need to die. And why snuff out your life when it’s so much more fun this way? Besides, you aren’t entirely friendless. Your father might try and track you down. If he hires the right people he might trace you to me. In which case I’ll be able to prove that Dr. Meredith Sholes is alive and well and on the run from the law after murdering her husband. Insurance, you see.”
Moriarty moved out of her line of sight. She heard him picking up metal implements behind her.
“And now…Molly…your time is up. Take a long look at Irene Adler. In a couple of hours you’ll be living her life.”
He drove a needle into her arm and, within four frantic seconds, she was unconscious.
Chapter 7
----
A/N: Nearly at the end now…would love you opinions!