would you stand up and walk out on me
exciting times all around. i have new sherlock holmes fic for you!
for the americans in the audience, this story is your tax dollars at work, because i wrote like half of it at my ridiculous government job. the census is the best, y'all. i sit here in my little supply room that is packed with brown cardboard boxes and gray metal cabinets full of erasers and two million blue ballpoint pens made by blind people, and several times an hour someone comes in to request something of me, and the rest of my time is my own. i have my ipod for tunes and a stress ball to throw against the wall like steve mcqueen. i read a hundred pages a day. i've started bringing my computer in with me, even though i walk to work, the diversion being well worth the backache. years and years from now, i'll still be complaining about how no job will ever be as cool as my mindless job as a supply clerk for the 2010 census.
holmes/watson, rated r, 14896 words. onwards, further.
The Other Way of the World
By Candle Beck
Something had happened.
Holmes arrived home in wet clothes one night, shaking with his hands and face as white as bone. Watson saw him only briefly, coming out of his room and down the first few steps with his friend's name bright in his mouth, for they had not seen each other in a fortnight. His voice arrested as he got a look at Holmes, thinking with a quizzical detachment that would have made the detective proud: it's not raining.
At the creak of Watson's foot on the step, Holmes flicked his gaze up and it made the breath stick in Watson's lungs because Holmes's eyes were pits, bullet wounds, hard and tar-black and devastated.
"What-" Watson began, fear settling like a cold cloth around his heart, and Holmes looked as if the sound of Watson's voice was physically damaging, so he swallowed back whatever he had meant to say next. The detective disappeared into the sitting room, and a moment later Watson heard the door to his bedroom slam shut.
Finding himself at a total loss, Watson followed him. He stopped before Holmes's door, lifted his fist to knock but then hesitation jogged through him, and he stepped back. Holmes didn't want to see him. That had been made plain.
Watson took the seat by the window, nudging at the glass to allow in some of the sweet antipluvial night air, and he lit a cigarette. He cast a long eye at the door to Holmes's room, wondering how long he would have to wait.
*
Inside, Holmes was pacing.
It was ten and a half strides, door to window. His hands were buried in his hair, still cold and slick from the river. There was a lump as big as an egg where the man had hit him with the brick. He was holding his head together.
"You should have turned him," Holmes mumbled, and he flinched, yanked at his hair. "Stop it."
The man, think about the man. He was of Italian extraction, kinky hair, black olive eyes, so think about that. Think about his scars and tattoos; he'd been to sea, obviously, his arm branded by the French Navy at least ten years before, that piratical snake etched in black, and the slabs of muscle across his shoulders, his hands horny and thick with calluses, spoke to his recent employment as a stevedore, and so it would be the docks next, the docks at sunrise with the ships plangently mourning the night, the flags run up blood-red and weightless and you should have turned him.
Holmes came to the window again and leant his forehead on the thin glass. His chest hitched on a forgotten breath. One fist softly found the wall, and he gazed down at the street, drinking in the people and dissecting the shabby miseries of their infinitesimal lives. The pursuit felt compulsive, desperate. Dark secrets piled up like rotting wood in his mind.
From the other room, he could smell the smoke of Watson's cigarette. Holmes closed his eyes and did what he could to concentrate on that alone.
*
Watson had been taken out of town by a minor lord who'd had the bad form to contract a nasty case of influenza while at his country estate, and more than enough money to bring his favourite doctor to him. It was a largely thankless chore, and it would take two full weeks of Watson's life before all was said and done, but when he returned they would be able to afford restaurants again. An altogether acceptable trade, the good doctor felt.
He had left Holmes well enough, preoccupied with the germinal stages of an intricate chemical experiment, and sent him three telegrams (the last had been rather more blunt than the previous: DO YOU YET LIVE STOP), and heard nothing from him, not a word. This was far from atypical, of course, and Watson had not been genuinely worried. Upon his return to the capital, he had purchased a newspaper from a lad outside the train station and ascertained that Holmes was not dead, dying, or incarcerated, but instead "consulting" (read: manipulating to act as his own personal brute squad) with Scotland Yard on investigations into the kidnapping of the Marquess of Northampton's son.
The world as defined by Sherlock Holmes had continued spinning in Watson's absence. There was a certain comfort in that, a surety that things were as they should have been. Watson depended on Holmes like he depended on gravity.
And this vision of the detective pallid and dripping on the carpet, the gouges where his eyes had been, it unbalanced Watson. He was destabilised, out of sorts, looking down at his feet to ensure the ground was still there. It had been thirteen hours since Holmes had vanished behind a locked door.
Mrs Hudson brought lunch and Watson stood, his bad knee sighing dimly with pain. He thanked her, a courteous bend to his spine, and wasted minutes on useless pleasantries before asking, "Has he given you much trouble, my dear lady?"
She pressed the heel of her hand to an escaping tendril of hair, smoothing it back. Her face was pinched, threads of tension at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
"We're both extremely pleased to see you home, I'm sure," Mrs Hudson said circumspectly.
Watson sighed. "Indeed," he murmured. He gave the landlady an apologetic half-smile. "Do you happen to know where the case took him last night? He came in in quite a state."
Mrs Hudson's lip curled, a look like the scrape of a rasp on her face. "You have been gone too long, Doctor, if you think that he would share such confidences with me."
"Indeed," Watson said again, feeling dull. Mrs Hudson left and Watson fiddled with his tea spoon for a moment before rising and going to Holmes's door.
"Holmes," Watson called through the wood. "Will you eat?"
There was no answer. Watson leaned close, almost brushing his ear on the door. He could hear nothing, and the text of his last telegram surfaced in his mind like ill-formed corpses afloat on the sea--do you yet live.
He turned away. His fingers brushed the cool metal of the knob, and then he let the contact break. Watson went back to his lunch, a quiet gnawing worry taking up the space in the back of his mind. He resolved that he would stay in this room until Holmes emerged, no matter how long it might take.
*
Holmes was no longer in Baker Street.
He had left many hours before, crawling out the small bevelled lavatory window and down the coal chute to the blackened alley. He did not wish to explain himself to his friend, and he knew Watson would not let him leave peacefully otherwise. Holmes could not see him now.
So he was at the docks. There was a furze of salt and grime on everything, scratchy splintered boards under his feet. The men hauling crates and ropes did not pay him any attention, air shooting out of them in strained grunts, hands squamate and swollen overlarge.
Holmes moved through the melee, hat pulled low over the dyspeptic look on his face. He was looking for a match to the tattoo the man had worn on his arm, a crimson-eyed ouroboros circling a dark star. A pirate's mark, and it had been familiar in the distant way that most things were familiar to Holmes; the name Corsica drifted through his mind like a faraway song.
There was a shout to his left, and Holmes's head snagged to see a man who'd torn his hand open on a sharp bit of metal, fresh blood spilling off his palm. Something constricted in Holmes's chest, a furious glaze casting across his vision.
Blood on the floor. That boy with his empty senseless face, his fluttering blue-milk eyes, the bones of his fingers broken and moving sickly under the skin as Holmes cut him free of his bonds. The blood, all over the floor.
"Stop it," Holmes whispered, clenching his hand in his pocket tightly enough to imprint crescent-moon bruises on his palm. He needed to find that tattoo. That snake choking on its own tail, that darkest of stars. He needed to keep moving.
The mugient excesses of the docks filtered into steam and roar as Holmes walked. He forced his mind open, folderol and the metallic cries of industry clamouring for space. He let the flood of sensory data overwhelm him until it was not facts anymore, not reality, but only endless sound, enough sound to make it silence.
*
A boy came with the evening edition as the sun began its long slide down the declivity of the sky, and the front page screamed murder.
The son of the Marquess of Northampton was dead. His body had been found in a cheap tavern room near Blackfriars, fourteen years old and never having known a day of privation or hardship until the last week of his life, when the imbalance had been mercilessly redressed.
Watson took meticulous notes, scribbled bewildered questions in the margins. He was operating in a state of functional shock; Holmes had been hired to return the boy safe home, and instead the headlines ran red. It felt like a paradox, a terrifying impossibility come to be.
There wasn't enough information in the newspaper story, all obscured rumour and hysterical supposition, and Watson set it aside. He rose to his feet, tugging his waistcoat straight and tucking a bit of shirt back under his belt as he went to Holmes's door and leaned his ear close once again.
Nothingness spoke eloquently through the barrier. Watson rested his forehead on the wood for a single moment, then moved back and rapped his knuckles hard.
"Holmes, I've seen the papers. Are you all right?"
Nothing. Watson held his breath to make sure.
He tried again. "I'm truly sorry, my dear man. I do not doubt that you expended every effort in aid of the boy."
The door remained impassive, as blank as a cataract. Watson's hand was spread out on the wood, his index finger tapping noiselessly. He wondered if Holmes had taken to the bottle, and then he wondered which bottle. The picture of Holmes with a seeping hole in his arm and lifeless stones for eyes flitted through Watson's mind, as real and vibrant as a fever dream.
"Holmes," Watson said, and briefly considered how much of his time he spent calling to Holmes through doors. "There's no need to discuss it if you'd rather not, but would you mind answering me, at least?"
And nothing. Slippery tendrils of fear wound around Watson's spine.
"I know your habits too well to take your silence with equanimity," Watson told the door. "Please, Holmes."
Under normal circumstances, Watson saying 'please' was a shibboleth, a golden key, the final straw for Sherlock Holmes, but there was no luck in the world today, and silence reigned.
Watson stepped back, his hands squeezing into fists. His breath was coming fast and ragged.
"I'm kicking in your door now, old boy," he called, giddy strength squirrelling through his body. "I won't be blamed for it, either."
The doctor suited action to word, the door crashing inwards with a crack like a rifle shot, a bristling splinter of wood. The room was empty, the lavatory window standing open like an accusation. Watson found Holmes's smudged fingerprints on the glass, and for some reason it felt like the worst kind of betrayal.
*
The docks gained him nothing, and Holmes made his way along the muddy river path, the great dome of St Paul's hovering like an enormous grey silk moon to his left. He hadn't eaten in two days and it was starting to show, a growing hollow feeling inside. Holmes shoved the ache aside, thinking that he would eat after he found the man with the tattoo, or pass out trying. The carrot and the stick, Holmes thought in exhaustion.
He came upon a crumbling wall of brick, a dead dog lying stiff-legged in a wet patch of refuse, and Holmes stopped, closed his eyes for a second. Breathing deep, he recognised the mephitic smell of brine and sulphur, the particular smoke from the meat-curing shop in the next street. This was the place.
Holmes had been only half-conscious at the time, dragged by his collar with his boots scraping long tracks in the muck. The man with the tattoo had hit him with a brick, hauled him through the dirty streets, and rolled him into the river. The shock of the gelid water brought his senses shrieking back to him, and so he had survived, but that fact wasn't helping him a tremendous amount right now.
For better than two hours, Holmes scoured every inch of the area, searching for the slightest sign. The hem of his coat dipped into the mud as he crouched down, geometric circles caked on the knees of his trousers when he lost his balance and tipped forward.
There was blood on the bricks, four long marks made by a human hand, by Holmes's hand. He set his fingers to the claret stains, saw how they matched his shattered nails and the scabbed broken skin at the tips. The moment reoccurred in Holmes's mind: he had surfaced from the haze of pain, the man's hands wrenched in his collar, and understood what was happening to him almost at once, clawing for the bricks and feeling his nail peel off as if it were made of wax.
Holmes shuddered, and said under his breath, "Quiet, old boy." His hand throbbed like a broken heart, and he wished Watson were here with him, only for a moment but with enough power that he was nearly overcome.
He shoved his hand into his hair, twisted hard. Agony burred through his head, the outsized lump on his skull jumping to life, and Holmes gritted his teeth, rode it out. Watson's company was the other thing he was not permitted until he had found the man with the tattoo.
At the embankment over which Holmes had been dumped, there was more of his blood, and a scrap of filthy woolen cloth. Holmes tested it with his fingers, and saw a flash of his hand hooking in the villain's coat pocket as he was tipped over the side, the vertiginous strength of gravity clutching at him. Holmes brought the ragged square close to his face, sniffing and squinting, and that was powder and beetroot, the smell of a woman's makeup.
Holmes pushed the pocket into his own pocket, and turned away from the river. He went looking for an actress or a whore.
*
Watson arrived at Scotland Yard just as night took full control of the sky. Boys on stilts came down the streets carrying torches to ignite the gaslights, strange macabre sight like creatures from another planet awkwardly invading. Whitehall was otherwise dim and hushed, the great clock of Westminster gazing like a cat's eye across the City.
Inside it was all dark-suited constables with shiny gold on their collars. Several recognised Watson and called to him, hail fellow well met, but he had no time for them. He moved directly for the sergeant's desk, and demanded to see Inspector Lestrade.
Lestrade emerged to meet Watson, a resigned expression on his face.
"I do not know where he is," Lestrade said before Watson could speak.
"What happened?" Watson asked, and his voice cracked, and he was awash with self-disgust for a moment.
Lestrade sighed, looking grizzled and old. "You've heard about Northampton's boy?"
"Yes, of course. How--was he there?"
They went into Lestrade's small office and took their seats. Lestrade steepled his fingers, mouth pinched within his trim beard. The solemn look on his face scared Watson as badly as anything that had happened so far.
"Holmes found the boy," Lestrade told him. "It took him longer than he expected, and he was--you know his manner when he becomes frustrated."
Watson nodded, dry-mouthed, filling in the gaps. Holmes had not slept more than a few hours at a stretch for days. Holmes had stopped sparing time to eat. Watson could imagine it to the last detail.
"He found the boy," Lestrade said again, and stopped. His gaze danced away from Watson's for a moment, then locked back into place. "The boy was still alive when Holmes found him, Doctor."
Shaking his head, Watson said, "I don't understand," but he knew that he should, that he could if he'd just try. His heart felt like it was shrinking.
Lestrade exhaled, aggrieved. "The villain was in the room when Holmes broke in--I told him to inform me before he intended to move, but of course he paid no heed--the man was in the room, and he fled, and Holmes. Holmes went after him."
"Yes, yes of course he did-"
"He left the boy, Watson," Lestrade said. "Cut his bonds and left him barely conscious and bleeding on the floor."
Watson's head continued to shake because surely the good inspector was mistaken. Even for a man like Holmes, there were untravelled countries, black continents that he would never attempt to cross. No matter how little sleep he'd had, how starved and obsessed he'd become, there were still things that Sherlock Holmes would not do.
Discomfited to an extreme, Lestrade pulled a hand over his beard, finished in a fast formal tone:
"Holmes was beaten by the villain and thrown in the river, but he managed to extricate himself and return to the room where the boy was being held. He gave a constable the alert, and the lads and I met him there. He was pressing the boy's chest but it was too late. The boy--Philip, I should say--he had been stabbed in the back. It was not a swift death."
Lestrade paused, and angled his chin at Watson. "Do you understand now?"
Watson nodded mechanically, numbness seeping across his skin. His mouth felt weak, untrustworthy. If he spoke he would say something unforgivable.
The manner in which Lestrade regarded him was almost shaming. Watson screwed his fist against his knee, the movement hidden by the edge of the desk. His body trembled with the urge to run.
"Whatever my own reservations about the man and his methods, no one can deny the good works he's done," Lestrade told him. "And I do not wish to blame him for the boy's death. This. This is a black time for us all."
Watson stood on watery legs. "Thank you, Inspector," he said woodenly. "I must take my leave of you now."
Lestrade nodded, saddened. "Of course. Godspeed, Watson."
And so the doctor escaped back into the great city, his mind alight with the face of his absent friend.
*
Holmes visited a number of brothels in the vicinity of Blackfriars, looking for a woman who knew of a man with a ouroboros tattoo. Each interview required a nominal fee and soon Holmes's ready money was exhausted. Holding morality to be somewhat cheap at this point, he applied the art of the pickpocket to a well-fed gentleman, and went on with his investigation.
In the fourth house of ill-repute, Holmes was at last rewarded. She was a spotty girl with a thin fox's face, watchful clever eyes not too dulled by the reek of opium that surrounded her. Her body in its narrow white shift asked obscene questions, the wings of her shoulders like knives.
For the tenth time, Holmes described the man and his self-consuming tattoo, the words stiff and rote in his mouth. A buzzing pain hovered in the back of his mind.
The whore said, "Aye, I know him," and Holmes's head snapped up, clarity rushing through him.
"What is his name?"
She gave him a long look, the dilapidated gears of her brain squealing. "Why do ye want to know?"
Holmes recognised the scrofulous malice lurking in her eyes, the vicious thrill of hopeful violence. He told her, "I intend to kill him."
A faint pleased look crossed her face, her lips twisting into a barb. "Good enough for me, love."
The man's name was Melchiori. He had been in London for one month, having been summarily run off of the Italian merchant vessel that had brought him to England's grey shores. The tattoo he had acquired in the company of a band of Corsican pirates, famed for their barbarity. He would show up at the brothel at irregular intervals, flush with money and cruel-handed, sharp-toothed, wanting honest cries and whimpers of pain where other men looked for her feigned pleasure. The whore hated him, desperately and soullessly, but her decisions in these matters were not her own.
She turned over all she knew of him to Holmes, and made the detective swear that when he found the villain, he would take his time.
*
From Scotland Yard, Watson set out for the Blackfriars tavern where the unfortunate boy had been found. He had no stable plan, his thoughts weltering, storming and riotous like an army whose leaders had been slaughtered. All that could occupy Watson was the vision of Holmes pressing the dead boy's chest, shivering and soaked from the river.
The tavern was shuttered and barred, a forbidding notice from the constabulary nailed to the door. Watson went around back, put his hat to a window and punched it through the prinkling glass. He climbed in, slipped on a greasy counter and fell hard onto the floor.
Now he was in a fair deal of physical pain on top of everything else, the old wounds speaking up with petulant volume like bad-tempered children who had been ignored too long. Watson's hands shook as he rummaged for a candle in the drawer, and he held fast to his cane, limped up the stairs to the rooms.
Holmes would have been able to decipher a week's history from the dust in the hallway, the scuff marks and scorches on the doors, but they were different men. Gold fingers of candlelight and shadow wicked along the walls. Watson opened every door without ceremony, until he found the room with the trail of blood on the floor.
And then he froze. His hand dug into the burnished doorknob, his body sagging in a paroxysm of horrified dismay.
There was so much blood.
There was a pool by the wall, darkened to a black lake by the passage of a day, and stretching out from it like a banner unfurled was a long streak the colour of dulled ruby. The streak was as thick as a young man, and beside it crawled the flared shape of a grasping hand. Philip had managed to drag himself almost all the way to the door.
Watson closed his eyes and reminded himself that he had seen unholy things before. The destroyed women in that cave in Afghanistan. The pile of amputated limbs that they had built outside the hospital tent at Maiwand. The small boy with half his face eaten away by acid in that factory near Southwark, his single wide blinking brown eye. After a moment, the old memories were enough to banish the terror before him now, and Watson felt his composure return.
He forced himself into the room, candle held before him as a shield. Holmes would have burst in, banking as he ever did on the element of surprise, and the villain would have sprung into action, flying for whatever secondary escape route he'd devised. Holmes had gone to Philip and cut his bonds, left him there on the floor. The scene played out behind Watson's eyes, concrete in every breath and sob, every drop of blood spilled. Watson could see it; he could feel it. This was how Sherlock Holmes lived every day of his life, bound in the straits of such a crippling awareness, and at that moment Watson would have given what was left of his leg to relieve his friend of this ravening curse.
The doctor moved to the window in a trance, and saw that the drainpipe had been ripped from its fittings, bending out from the building like the fragile trunk of a willow tree. Watson closed his eyes and saw Holmes dangling as the pipe folded down under his weight, his feet kicking for balance.
Down Holmes had gone, and so down went Watson too.
*
Holmes's search took him into the lower rungs of the East End. The fox-faced girl had given him a catalog of things that Melchiori had mentioned, common haunts and proclivities, and Holmes knitted them together into a skein of the man's everyday routine, and from there extrapolated where he would most likely scarper when his luck turned sour. It would be a favourite pub, of course, someplace secure and familiar where he could get food and drink without having to show his face outside, a small room in poor condition where he would fancy himself as well-concealed as a rat in its hole.
These deductions stood out like illuminated signposts, drawing Holmes onward. He was blind to the hustle of the street, the broken slabs of pavement rising hard under his boots. He was tired, fuzzy silver lining the edges of his vision because tired was perhaps a bit of an understatement. Heaviness dragged at him, a blanket of soft steel laid across his shoulders, but he pushed through it, kept moving. Holmes knew if he passed out in this part of town, he'd wake up dead.
Someone called his name. Holmes tripped over his feet, barely caught his balance. His head whipped around and there was a constable coming up the block behind him, one hand hailing.
Badly off his guard, Holmes straightened, forced his eyes to come into focus. He set his mouth in a standard sneer, because he did not have time for this.
"My dear Constable Nelson, surely you have erred in your navigation tonight. Whitechapel is not the safest place for your kind, or hadn't you heard?"
The constable huffed out a breath, but he was not new to Sherlock Holmes and so rightly ignored him.
"Inspector Lestrade requests your presence at the Yard, sir."
"Naturally he does. Unfortunately I am engaged at the moment, and so I must bid you farewell."
Holmes turned smartly but the constable caught his elbow and the detective went still. Only one man in the world was allowed to grab him like that.
"Remove your hand," he said, the words misshapen in his throat.
The constable complied at once, but he had Holmes's attention and that was enough for his purposes.
"Every man on the beat tonight has orders to keep an eye out for you," the constable told him. "The inspector would know what you've discovered about Philip Townshend's murderer."
"He would know, if he had the competence to do his job himself rather than forever wringing my brain. Send him my regrets, would you? Good lad."
Holmes turned to go again, and Nelson tossed a hook into his back, saying, "Your doctor is among those in search of you, Mister Holmes."
Holmes faltered, hesitated. His mind filled like a balloon with the image of Watson limping through the filthy streets, teeth gritted around Holmes's name. A twisting painful thing happened in the detective's stomach, but he squashed it down to nothing because he needed to concentrate, he needed to focus. Melchiori was somewhere ahead of him, that sick black heart that Holmes would crush between his hands, and he couldn't allow himself to become distracted.
"I wish him luck," Holmes said like it was ripped out of him. "Good night, Constable."
Nelson let him go that time, muttering an expected oath at Holmes's back. Holmes ducked around the first corner he came to, feeling hunted even though that was backwards. It was all wrong.
*
Watson stumbled upon Holmes's trail almost entirely by chance.
His concentration was fused into a beam of light, as forward-thinking as a shot arrow. Somewhere ahead of him was his damaged friend, and somehow Watson had to find him, and that was all that mattered.
Out of the slack open mouth of an alley, a pair of hands latched hold of him, dragged him into the dark. Watson staggered on his bad leg and would have fallen had he not been jerked upright by his assailant.
"Yer in the wrong part of town, toff," said the man, grinning with black teeth, smashed porcine eyes buried in his dirty face. "Ye must pay the toll." He held a ragged length of blade in his hand, moving to press it under the doctor's chin, but Watson would have none of that.
In a clean motion, he yanked himself back and to the side, let his arm come sweeping up, cracking his cane into the man's face and abruptly shattering his nose. The makeshift blade scraped along Watson's throat but it was shallow, insignificant, and then the weapon clattered to the ground. The man choked on half a shout, both hands to his face, and Watson walloped him again, the hard knob finding the man's temple and sending him to the ground in a boneless collapse.
Watson exhaled. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to the short seeping wound in his neck, checked the man's pulse without much interest either way. The felon lived still, and so Watson came out of the alley to locate a constable who could haul the man away.
The constable he found was named Nelson.
Much later, Watson would wonder at the coincidence, the disparate snaking lives brought together so briefly and with such great impact. Watson had never been a devout man, and Holmes would surely call it superstitious folly, but when it was very late at night he would be certain that there had been an eye on the two of them at that moment, an Eye. Someone had been keeping watch.
*
Holmes assembled a rough tradesman disguise from the random detritus cached in his coat, pulled his hat low over his eyes and affected a limp, slouching into the tavern. No one paid him any attention as he took a seat in the corner where he could see down the hallway of rooms for let. He struck a match alight with his thumbnail and nursed his pipe, feeling scoured and covered in skin thinner than smoke.
A period of minutes went past. Holmes observed the movements of the barkeep, the single harried waitress, the sparse yabbering crowd. There was a card game going on to one side, and the man with the Breton accent was cheating. The two sullen-looking youths playing darts were engaged in a guilt-ridden homosexual relationship that could end in nothing but violence. The old man with his face in his hands had lost his mind to syphilis.
This was certainly the place, Holmes decided. The fox-faced girl had named it as Melchiori's favourite, the only address he might call home, but more than that was the feel, the villain's ghost snarling just beyond where Holmes could see.
He touched his fingers lightly to the lump on the side of his head. Last night's fight was in kaleidoscopic splinters in his mind, single blows remembered out of sequence, fractured cries echoing and redoubling in his mind. Somehow Melchiori had knocked Holmes to his knees, and then the brick, that blunt thud of stone on skull, and then blackness.
It infuriated Holmes beyond the telling of it. He couldn't abide losing.
A boy came in wearing a butcher's apron that hung on him like a musselman's long tunic and bearing a covered plate of food that leaked steam. Holmes tracked the plate to the bar where it was surrendered for a few coins, and then the waitress took it down the hallway to the rooms.
She rapped on the third door down, and Holmes watched the changed light spill over her as the door was inched open, an arm emerging to accept the plate. From where Holmes sat, he could see the dark ink spoiling the arm, the hard black circle of snake.
Holmes let out a slow careful breath. He set his pipe down on the table and noticed absently that his hands were shaking. His head felt dizzy and light, his body made of nothing more than breath. The pieces of his plan slotted into place, and he got to his feet.
The first thing he needed was a diversion.
*
Constable Nelson took Watson back to the spot where he had encountered Sherlock Holmes, and pointed out the direction in which he had gone, and Watson barely took the time to thank him before rushing onward.
Adrenaline took him over like a possession, a demon sinking into his blood. He was close; he could feel it. Holmes had walked this street, peered into these same battered shops. His afterimage flickered before Watson, an underdeveloped photograph.
Watson was not thinking about what would happen when he found his friend. He required data, evidence. He needed to see how badly Holmes was injured, how long it had been since he had slept, how much blood he had on his hands, and then he would be able to determine his next move. Holmes was always telling him, never act in advance of the facts.
The dense pain in his leg had receded like a battling tide, waiting for him just off-shore. His shoulder felt pounded like raw meat, supporting too much weight on the trembling strut of his cane, but he wasn't concerned with anything physical just now.
Then ahead of him, a hansom cab burst into flames.
Watson stopped dead, blinking in detached disbelief. It seemed that nothing would stay reasonable tonight, the fell caprices of the world overwhelming and devoid of all sense.
A nebula of shouts filled the air from all directions. Humanoid black shadows tumbled out of the sagging buildings, shoe leather scraping on the stones. Watson's instincts clicked on finally, and he ran for the fire, a jolting staggering wreck on his bad leg but what could he do about it?
"Hallo!" he shouted into the loose gathering that had formed around the flaming cab. "Does anyone need a doctor?"
There was a general rumble to the negative. An older man, his mouth hidden in a flocculent beard, sidled close to tell him, "Wasn't anybody inside. That's her driver there," with a nod to a red-faced man who was currently bellowing curses at the sky.
Watson shook his head, dreadfully confused. "How did this happen?"
"It was that dark fellow," a ratty-looking woman answered from his other side, arms crossed like stone gates over his chest. "I seen him mischieving about just before the flames took. Looked a right scoundrel, he did."
Watson's skin tightened. He whirled around, shouldering out of the crowd with his eyes scanning feverishly. Every face took extra scrutiny because who knew what mask Holmes might have affixed.
He should have known, of course. Holmes had told him a thousand times: there were no real coincidences in the world.
He reeled to a stop near an emptied tavern, and bent over his knees, wilfully trying to stop his heart from thumping so hard. His vision shivered into focus and he saw before him on the grimy step a crushed box of matches. It did not register with Watson for a long moment, because it was something he saw every day of his life, because it was Holmes's brand.
The doctor jerked his spine straight, his white eyes staring furiously through the tavern's open door, the abandoned tension of the knocked-over chairs. He screamed once, mindless, "Holmes!" and then he was running again.
*
The accelerant had been a bottle of cheap whiskey nicked from behind the bar. Holmes had hunched and skulked around the cab like a horse thief, using the last seven matches in the box to set it alight at strategic points. He sank back into the shadows, watching the flames catch around the liquor-soaked wooden frame, the fire roaring suddenly huge, a blast of heat rolling through the street.
People began pouring out of the tavern, clangourous voices echoing between the rows. Holmes pressed his back to the wall, his face bent back into the darkness of the alley, and waited until he saw the hulking barkeep stamp out with the rest before slipping through the door.
Holmes kicked a chair over and snapped off one of its legs for a cudgel, feeling basely satisfied by the splintered heft of it in his hand. He stalked into the hallway, his mind flooded with red savagery. He was going to beat a man to death. He felt primeval, as brutally powerful as an old god. Action hummed through his body.
Just before he lifted his knee to kick in the door, he heard Watson's voice, screaming his name. It stopped him.
It stopped everything.
*
Holmes was there, halfway down the hallway with a makeshift club in his hand. Holmes was there, turned to blink dumbly at Watson, his eyes still black and deadened, his face still glowing pale with despair.
Watson had to put a hand to the wall to brace himself, his legs suddenly made of air. He said Holmes's name again but there was nothing behind it, and it fell soundless in the space between them.
They stood there for a moment, rocks in a pounding river, and then Watson urged his body to motion, and moved to his friend's side. He carefully laid his hand on Holmes's arm.
"Have you found him?" Watson asked, hushed and unsteady.
Holmes nodded his head trancelike, his foggy gaze stuck on Watson's face. The blunt force of shock in Holmes's expression made Watson feel like the detective had thought him dead, looking at him now as if Watson had risen from the grave.
"He is within," Holmes said, a faint angle of his head indicating the door.
As subtly as he could, Watson tugged Holmes away, walking softly backwards down the hallway. "We must inform the police."
Holmes stopped, boot heels scraping, and jerked his arm out of Watson's hold. His throat ducked several times as he swallowed, and Watson noted the track of dried blood on the side of his neck running from under Holmes's hair to disappear in his shirt collar.
"Leave the police," Holmes said. "Leave him to me."
Watson shook his head, glancing down at Holmes's hand gripped whitely around the club. Fear had lodged itself behind Watson's ribs like an evil second heart that pumped ichor and acid.
"It's the rope for him anyway," Watson told his friend. "He'll be just as dead if you apprehend him legally."
A black look flashed through Holmes's eyes, and Watson tensed as if for a physical blow, the muscles of his back petrifying into stone. Holmes was more than half mad, this lunatic quest burning all through him.
"Death is only the last of the punishments he deserves," Holmes said, his voice a sharp hissing thing. "The boy he killed was not given the blessing of a quick demise, nor one so civil as the end of a rope. He was left bleeding on the floor, and I will see his murderer suffer the same."
Holmes turned back to the door and Watson grabbed his shoulders, pulled him back. Holmes lost his balance and would have lost his feet if not for Watson steadying him, and worry plucked at the doctor, seeing how weak and shaky Holmes was, how very near to falling down.
"Unhand me," Holmes said, a strained note in his voice. He wasn't looking at Watson, his face turned down and away.
"I cannot let you do this," Watson told him.
"You have no say in the matter."
"I do, by God." Watson tightened his grip on his friend. "Your body and mind are yours to use or ruin as you see fit, but your soul is my responsibility."
The grandeur of the statement stilled them. A small spastic gasp ran through Holmes, and his gaze flew to Watson's for the briefest glance. Holmes's eyes were depthless, an enervated plea echoing on his face. He looked more boy than man, but that was only for a moment.
"Come away," Watson said in a tone softer than cotton. "You are very tired, my friend."
Holmes's body sagged, and he leaned into Watson, closing his eyes. "Yes."
"Then come away."
Watson stepped backwards, drawing his detective with him. Watson's heart was beating in unwieldy thumps, an admixture of terror and bizarre elation spiralling through him. He wanted to take Holmes to Baker Street, and press him into bed. He wanted to barricade the door and hammer the windows shut, empty the immediate world of everyone but the two of them. He wanted to solder a thin chain to stretch between them so that he would never lose track of Holmes again.
*
Holmes let Watson lead him away from Melchiori's room, a mantle of obeisance resting uneasily on him. His brain felt disjointed, lying sideways inside his skull like an upset bookshelf, his thoughts piled broken-spined on the floor. He had a very bad headache; he'd had this headache all day long, but it was impossible to suppress now that Watson was here and it was quiet.
Watson was here. The adrenaline was pouring out of Holmes, sucking strength from his arms and legs, and the feeling that was left in its place was hollowing and fearful. Holmes kept his eyes locked on the good doctor, the single clear point in a world of haze. He wanted to grab hold of his friend, the full strength of his arms around him, cling to him like they were shipwreck survivors set adrift in freezing waters on a small broken piece of deck.
There were several bobbies already gathered outside the tavern, overseeing the operation to extinguish the burning cab, and Watson went up to the highest ranked, waving his hand to scatter the smoke and ashy black flakes that filled the air. Holmes slumped on the wall, thinking for a second that he might pass out. The chair leg slipped free from his hand, clattered on the paving stones.
Melchiori did not come easy. Holmes roused to the sound of his struggles, his spat-out Italian curses, and together with Watson and a trio of constables they subdued the villain, stripped him of weapons and locked his wrists in a pair of darbies. Melchiori lay on his stomach, his snarling mouth against the dirty floor.
Holmes tipped his head to the side, studying him like a particularly intriguing insect. "Doctor," he said in a rasp. "Don't look."
Watson said, "Wait," but Holmes would not. He kicked Melchiori hard in the back of the head, driving his face into the floor and sending a crimson burst of blood out his nose. The villain went limp, insensible, his shattered nose pressed flat. A small pool of red spread out around him, and Holmes let out a long stuttering breath.
He turned back to the doctor and constables, his head on fire with renewed pain, his shaking hands buried in coat pockets. The policemen were leery, hands curled protectively around their cudgels as they regarded Holmes like an unpredictable madman, which was not wholly unreasonable. Watson had his fists clenched, his mouth set in a rigid shape. His eyes were so blue that they made Holmes dizzy. His vision sparkled, began to disintegrate.
"It was necessary," Holmes explained woozily. He let his eyes flutter closed, a piceous wave crashing down on him from above. He was about to lose consciousness and so he said, "Watson," to ensure that he would not wake up alone.
*
nextly
for the americans in the audience, this story is your tax dollars at work, because i wrote like half of it at my ridiculous government job. the census is the best, y'all. i sit here in my little supply room that is packed with brown cardboard boxes and gray metal cabinets full of erasers and two million blue ballpoint pens made by blind people, and several times an hour someone comes in to request something of me, and the rest of my time is my own. i have my ipod for tunes and a stress ball to throw against the wall like steve mcqueen. i read a hundred pages a day. i've started bringing my computer in with me, even though i walk to work, the diversion being well worth the backache. years and years from now, i'll still be complaining about how no job will ever be as cool as my mindless job as a supply clerk for the 2010 census.
holmes/watson, rated r, 14896 words. onwards, further.
The Other Way of the World
By Candle Beck
Something had happened.
Holmes arrived home in wet clothes one night, shaking with his hands and face as white as bone. Watson saw him only briefly, coming out of his room and down the first few steps with his friend's name bright in his mouth, for they had not seen each other in a fortnight. His voice arrested as he got a look at Holmes, thinking with a quizzical detachment that would have made the detective proud: it's not raining.
At the creak of Watson's foot on the step, Holmes flicked his gaze up and it made the breath stick in Watson's lungs because Holmes's eyes were pits, bullet wounds, hard and tar-black and devastated.
"What-" Watson began, fear settling like a cold cloth around his heart, and Holmes looked as if the sound of Watson's voice was physically damaging, so he swallowed back whatever he had meant to say next. The detective disappeared into the sitting room, and a moment later Watson heard the door to his bedroom slam shut.
Finding himself at a total loss, Watson followed him. He stopped before Holmes's door, lifted his fist to knock but then hesitation jogged through him, and he stepped back. Holmes didn't want to see him. That had been made plain.
Watson took the seat by the window, nudging at the glass to allow in some of the sweet antipluvial night air, and he lit a cigarette. He cast a long eye at the door to Holmes's room, wondering how long he would have to wait.
*
Inside, Holmes was pacing.
It was ten and a half strides, door to window. His hands were buried in his hair, still cold and slick from the river. There was a lump as big as an egg where the man had hit him with the brick. He was holding his head together.
"You should have turned him," Holmes mumbled, and he flinched, yanked at his hair. "Stop it."
The man, think about the man. He was of Italian extraction, kinky hair, black olive eyes, so think about that. Think about his scars and tattoos; he'd been to sea, obviously, his arm branded by the French Navy at least ten years before, that piratical snake etched in black, and the slabs of muscle across his shoulders, his hands horny and thick with calluses, spoke to his recent employment as a stevedore, and so it would be the docks next, the docks at sunrise with the ships plangently mourning the night, the flags run up blood-red and weightless and you should have turned him.
Holmes came to the window again and leant his forehead on the thin glass. His chest hitched on a forgotten breath. One fist softly found the wall, and he gazed down at the street, drinking in the people and dissecting the shabby miseries of their infinitesimal lives. The pursuit felt compulsive, desperate. Dark secrets piled up like rotting wood in his mind.
From the other room, he could smell the smoke of Watson's cigarette. Holmes closed his eyes and did what he could to concentrate on that alone.
*
Watson had been taken out of town by a minor lord who'd had the bad form to contract a nasty case of influenza while at his country estate, and more than enough money to bring his favourite doctor to him. It was a largely thankless chore, and it would take two full weeks of Watson's life before all was said and done, but when he returned they would be able to afford restaurants again. An altogether acceptable trade, the good doctor felt.
He had left Holmes well enough, preoccupied with the germinal stages of an intricate chemical experiment, and sent him three telegrams (the last had been rather more blunt than the previous: DO YOU YET LIVE STOP), and heard nothing from him, not a word. This was far from atypical, of course, and Watson had not been genuinely worried. Upon his return to the capital, he had purchased a newspaper from a lad outside the train station and ascertained that Holmes was not dead, dying, or incarcerated, but instead "consulting" (read: manipulating to act as his own personal brute squad) with Scotland Yard on investigations into the kidnapping of the Marquess of Northampton's son.
The world as defined by Sherlock Holmes had continued spinning in Watson's absence. There was a certain comfort in that, a surety that things were as they should have been. Watson depended on Holmes like he depended on gravity.
And this vision of the detective pallid and dripping on the carpet, the gouges where his eyes had been, it unbalanced Watson. He was destabilised, out of sorts, looking down at his feet to ensure the ground was still there. It had been thirteen hours since Holmes had vanished behind a locked door.
Mrs Hudson brought lunch and Watson stood, his bad knee sighing dimly with pain. He thanked her, a courteous bend to his spine, and wasted minutes on useless pleasantries before asking, "Has he given you much trouble, my dear lady?"
She pressed the heel of her hand to an escaping tendril of hair, smoothing it back. Her face was pinched, threads of tension at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
"We're both extremely pleased to see you home, I'm sure," Mrs Hudson said circumspectly.
Watson sighed. "Indeed," he murmured. He gave the landlady an apologetic half-smile. "Do you happen to know where the case took him last night? He came in in quite a state."
Mrs Hudson's lip curled, a look like the scrape of a rasp on her face. "You have been gone too long, Doctor, if you think that he would share such confidences with me."
"Indeed," Watson said again, feeling dull. Mrs Hudson left and Watson fiddled with his tea spoon for a moment before rising and going to Holmes's door.
"Holmes," Watson called through the wood. "Will you eat?"
There was no answer. Watson leaned close, almost brushing his ear on the door. He could hear nothing, and the text of his last telegram surfaced in his mind like ill-formed corpses afloat on the sea--do you yet live.
He turned away. His fingers brushed the cool metal of the knob, and then he let the contact break. Watson went back to his lunch, a quiet gnawing worry taking up the space in the back of his mind. He resolved that he would stay in this room until Holmes emerged, no matter how long it might take.
*
Holmes was no longer in Baker Street.
He had left many hours before, crawling out the small bevelled lavatory window and down the coal chute to the blackened alley. He did not wish to explain himself to his friend, and he knew Watson would not let him leave peacefully otherwise. Holmes could not see him now.
So he was at the docks. There was a furze of salt and grime on everything, scratchy splintered boards under his feet. The men hauling crates and ropes did not pay him any attention, air shooting out of them in strained grunts, hands squamate and swollen overlarge.
Holmes moved through the melee, hat pulled low over the dyspeptic look on his face. He was looking for a match to the tattoo the man had worn on his arm, a crimson-eyed ouroboros circling a dark star. A pirate's mark, and it had been familiar in the distant way that most things were familiar to Holmes; the name Corsica drifted through his mind like a faraway song.
There was a shout to his left, and Holmes's head snagged to see a man who'd torn his hand open on a sharp bit of metal, fresh blood spilling off his palm. Something constricted in Holmes's chest, a furious glaze casting across his vision.
Blood on the floor. That boy with his empty senseless face, his fluttering blue-milk eyes, the bones of his fingers broken and moving sickly under the skin as Holmes cut him free of his bonds. The blood, all over the floor.
"Stop it," Holmes whispered, clenching his hand in his pocket tightly enough to imprint crescent-moon bruises on his palm. He needed to find that tattoo. That snake choking on its own tail, that darkest of stars. He needed to keep moving.
The mugient excesses of the docks filtered into steam and roar as Holmes walked. He forced his mind open, folderol and the metallic cries of industry clamouring for space. He let the flood of sensory data overwhelm him until it was not facts anymore, not reality, but only endless sound, enough sound to make it silence.
*
A boy came with the evening edition as the sun began its long slide down the declivity of the sky, and the front page screamed murder.
The son of the Marquess of Northampton was dead. His body had been found in a cheap tavern room near Blackfriars, fourteen years old and never having known a day of privation or hardship until the last week of his life, when the imbalance had been mercilessly redressed.
Watson took meticulous notes, scribbled bewildered questions in the margins. He was operating in a state of functional shock; Holmes had been hired to return the boy safe home, and instead the headlines ran red. It felt like a paradox, a terrifying impossibility come to be.
There wasn't enough information in the newspaper story, all obscured rumour and hysterical supposition, and Watson set it aside. He rose to his feet, tugging his waistcoat straight and tucking a bit of shirt back under his belt as he went to Holmes's door and leaned his ear close once again.
Nothingness spoke eloquently through the barrier. Watson rested his forehead on the wood for a single moment, then moved back and rapped his knuckles hard.
"Holmes, I've seen the papers. Are you all right?"
Nothing. Watson held his breath to make sure.
He tried again. "I'm truly sorry, my dear man. I do not doubt that you expended every effort in aid of the boy."
The door remained impassive, as blank as a cataract. Watson's hand was spread out on the wood, his index finger tapping noiselessly. He wondered if Holmes had taken to the bottle, and then he wondered which bottle. The picture of Holmes with a seeping hole in his arm and lifeless stones for eyes flitted through Watson's mind, as real and vibrant as a fever dream.
"Holmes," Watson said, and briefly considered how much of his time he spent calling to Holmes through doors. "There's no need to discuss it if you'd rather not, but would you mind answering me, at least?"
And nothing. Slippery tendrils of fear wound around Watson's spine.
"I know your habits too well to take your silence with equanimity," Watson told the door. "Please, Holmes."
Under normal circumstances, Watson saying 'please' was a shibboleth, a golden key, the final straw for Sherlock Holmes, but there was no luck in the world today, and silence reigned.
Watson stepped back, his hands squeezing into fists. His breath was coming fast and ragged.
"I'm kicking in your door now, old boy," he called, giddy strength squirrelling through his body. "I won't be blamed for it, either."
The doctor suited action to word, the door crashing inwards with a crack like a rifle shot, a bristling splinter of wood. The room was empty, the lavatory window standing open like an accusation. Watson found Holmes's smudged fingerprints on the glass, and for some reason it felt like the worst kind of betrayal.
*
The docks gained him nothing, and Holmes made his way along the muddy river path, the great dome of St Paul's hovering like an enormous grey silk moon to his left. He hadn't eaten in two days and it was starting to show, a growing hollow feeling inside. Holmes shoved the ache aside, thinking that he would eat after he found the man with the tattoo, or pass out trying. The carrot and the stick, Holmes thought in exhaustion.
He came upon a crumbling wall of brick, a dead dog lying stiff-legged in a wet patch of refuse, and Holmes stopped, closed his eyes for a second. Breathing deep, he recognised the mephitic smell of brine and sulphur, the particular smoke from the meat-curing shop in the next street. This was the place.
Holmes had been only half-conscious at the time, dragged by his collar with his boots scraping long tracks in the muck. The man with the tattoo had hit him with a brick, hauled him through the dirty streets, and rolled him into the river. The shock of the gelid water brought his senses shrieking back to him, and so he had survived, but that fact wasn't helping him a tremendous amount right now.
For better than two hours, Holmes scoured every inch of the area, searching for the slightest sign. The hem of his coat dipped into the mud as he crouched down, geometric circles caked on the knees of his trousers when he lost his balance and tipped forward.
There was blood on the bricks, four long marks made by a human hand, by Holmes's hand. He set his fingers to the claret stains, saw how they matched his shattered nails and the scabbed broken skin at the tips. The moment reoccurred in Holmes's mind: he had surfaced from the haze of pain, the man's hands wrenched in his collar, and understood what was happening to him almost at once, clawing for the bricks and feeling his nail peel off as if it were made of wax.
Holmes shuddered, and said under his breath, "Quiet, old boy." His hand throbbed like a broken heart, and he wished Watson were here with him, only for a moment but with enough power that he was nearly overcome.
He shoved his hand into his hair, twisted hard. Agony burred through his head, the outsized lump on his skull jumping to life, and Holmes gritted his teeth, rode it out. Watson's company was the other thing he was not permitted until he had found the man with the tattoo.
At the embankment over which Holmes had been dumped, there was more of his blood, and a scrap of filthy woolen cloth. Holmes tested it with his fingers, and saw a flash of his hand hooking in the villain's coat pocket as he was tipped over the side, the vertiginous strength of gravity clutching at him. Holmes brought the ragged square close to his face, sniffing and squinting, and that was powder and beetroot, the smell of a woman's makeup.
Holmes pushed the pocket into his own pocket, and turned away from the river. He went looking for an actress or a whore.
*
Watson arrived at Scotland Yard just as night took full control of the sky. Boys on stilts came down the streets carrying torches to ignite the gaslights, strange macabre sight like creatures from another planet awkwardly invading. Whitehall was otherwise dim and hushed, the great clock of Westminster gazing like a cat's eye across the City.
Inside it was all dark-suited constables with shiny gold on their collars. Several recognised Watson and called to him, hail fellow well met, but he had no time for them. He moved directly for the sergeant's desk, and demanded to see Inspector Lestrade.
Lestrade emerged to meet Watson, a resigned expression on his face.
"I do not know where he is," Lestrade said before Watson could speak.
"What happened?" Watson asked, and his voice cracked, and he was awash with self-disgust for a moment.
Lestrade sighed, looking grizzled and old. "You've heard about Northampton's boy?"
"Yes, of course. How--was he there?"
They went into Lestrade's small office and took their seats. Lestrade steepled his fingers, mouth pinched within his trim beard. The solemn look on his face scared Watson as badly as anything that had happened so far.
"Holmes found the boy," Lestrade told him. "It took him longer than he expected, and he was--you know his manner when he becomes frustrated."
Watson nodded, dry-mouthed, filling in the gaps. Holmes had not slept more than a few hours at a stretch for days. Holmes had stopped sparing time to eat. Watson could imagine it to the last detail.
"He found the boy," Lestrade said again, and stopped. His gaze danced away from Watson's for a moment, then locked back into place. "The boy was still alive when Holmes found him, Doctor."
Shaking his head, Watson said, "I don't understand," but he knew that he should, that he could if he'd just try. His heart felt like it was shrinking.
Lestrade exhaled, aggrieved. "The villain was in the room when Holmes broke in--I told him to inform me before he intended to move, but of course he paid no heed--the man was in the room, and he fled, and Holmes. Holmes went after him."
"Yes, yes of course he did-"
"He left the boy, Watson," Lestrade said. "Cut his bonds and left him barely conscious and bleeding on the floor."
Watson's head continued to shake because surely the good inspector was mistaken. Even for a man like Holmes, there were untravelled countries, black continents that he would never attempt to cross. No matter how little sleep he'd had, how starved and obsessed he'd become, there were still things that Sherlock Holmes would not do.
Discomfited to an extreme, Lestrade pulled a hand over his beard, finished in a fast formal tone:
"Holmes was beaten by the villain and thrown in the river, but he managed to extricate himself and return to the room where the boy was being held. He gave a constable the alert, and the lads and I met him there. He was pressing the boy's chest but it was too late. The boy--Philip, I should say--he had been stabbed in the back. It was not a swift death."
Lestrade paused, and angled his chin at Watson. "Do you understand now?"
Watson nodded mechanically, numbness seeping across his skin. His mouth felt weak, untrustworthy. If he spoke he would say something unforgivable.
The manner in which Lestrade regarded him was almost shaming. Watson screwed his fist against his knee, the movement hidden by the edge of the desk. His body trembled with the urge to run.
"Whatever my own reservations about the man and his methods, no one can deny the good works he's done," Lestrade told him. "And I do not wish to blame him for the boy's death. This. This is a black time for us all."
Watson stood on watery legs. "Thank you, Inspector," he said woodenly. "I must take my leave of you now."
Lestrade nodded, saddened. "Of course. Godspeed, Watson."
And so the doctor escaped back into the great city, his mind alight with the face of his absent friend.
*
Holmes visited a number of brothels in the vicinity of Blackfriars, looking for a woman who knew of a man with a ouroboros tattoo. Each interview required a nominal fee and soon Holmes's ready money was exhausted. Holding morality to be somewhat cheap at this point, he applied the art of the pickpocket to a well-fed gentleman, and went on with his investigation.
In the fourth house of ill-repute, Holmes was at last rewarded. She was a spotty girl with a thin fox's face, watchful clever eyes not too dulled by the reek of opium that surrounded her. Her body in its narrow white shift asked obscene questions, the wings of her shoulders like knives.
For the tenth time, Holmes described the man and his self-consuming tattoo, the words stiff and rote in his mouth. A buzzing pain hovered in the back of his mind.
The whore said, "Aye, I know him," and Holmes's head snapped up, clarity rushing through him.
"What is his name?"
She gave him a long look, the dilapidated gears of her brain squealing. "Why do ye want to know?"
Holmes recognised the scrofulous malice lurking in her eyes, the vicious thrill of hopeful violence. He told her, "I intend to kill him."
A faint pleased look crossed her face, her lips twisting into a barb. "Good enough for me, love."
The man's name was Melchiori. He had been in London for one month, having been summarily run off of the Italian merchant vessel that had brought him to England's grey shores. The tattoo he had acquired in the company of a band of Corsican pirates, famed for their barbarity. He would show up at the brothel at irregular intervals, flush with money and cruel-handed, sharp-toothed, wanting honest cries and whimpers of pain where other men looked for her feigned pleasure. The whore hated him, desperately and soullessly, but her decisions in these matters were not her own.
She turned over all she knew of him to Holmes, and made the detective swear that when he found the villain, he would take his time.
*
From Scotland Yard, Watson set out for the Blackfriars tavern where the unfortunate boy had been found. He had no stable plan, his thoughts weltering, storming and riotous like an army whose leaders had been slaughtered. All that could occupy Watson was the vision of Holmes pressing the dead boy's chest, shivering and soaked from the river.
The tavern was shuttered and barred, a forbidding notice from the constabulary nailed to the door. Watson went around back, put his hat to a window and punched it through the prinkling glass. He climbed in, slipped on a greasy counter and fell hard onto the floor.
Now he was in a fair deal of physical pain on top of everything else, the old wounds speaking up with petulant volume like bad-tempered children who had been ignored too long. Watson's hands shook as he rummaged for a candle in the drawer, and he held fast to his cane, limped up the stairs to the rooms.
Holmes would have been able to decipher a week's history from the dust in the hallway, the scuff marks and scorches on the doors, but they were different men. Gold fingers of candlelight and shadow wicked along the walls. Watson opened every door without ceremony, until he found the room with the trail of blood on the floor.
And then he froze. His hand dug into the burnished doorknob, his body sagging in a paroxysm of horrified dismay.
There was so much blood.
There was a pool by the wall, darkened to a black lake by the passage of a day, and stretching out from it like a banner unfurled was a long streak the colour of dulled ruby. The streak was as thick as a young man, and beside it crawled the flared shape of a grasping hand. Philip had managed to drag himself almost all the way to the door.
Watson closed his eyes and reminded himself that he had seen unholy things before. The destroyed women in that cave in Afghanistan. The pile of amputated limbs that they had built outside the hospital tent at Maiwand. The small boy with half his face eaten away by acid in that factory near Southwark, his single wide blinking brown eye. After a moment, the old memories were enough to banish the terror before him now, and Watson felt his composure return.
He forced himself into the room, candle held before him as a shield. Holmes would have burst in, banking as he ever did on the element of surprise, and the villain would have sprung into action, flying for whatever secondary escape route he'd devised. Holmes had gone to Philip and cut his bonds, left him there on the floor. The scene played out behind Watson's eyes, concrete in every breath and sob, every drop of blood spilled. Watson could see it; he could feel it. This was how Sherlock Holmes lived every day of his life, bound in the straits of such a crippling awareness, and at that moment Watson would have given what was left of his leg to relieve his friend of this ravening curse.
The doctor moved to the window in a trance, and saw that the drainpipe had been ripped from its fittings, bending out from the building like the fragile trunk of a willow tree. Watson closed his eyes and saw Holmes dangling as the pipe folded down under his weight, his feet kicking for balance.
Down Holmes had gone, and so down went Watson too.
*
Holmes's search took him into the lower rungs of the East End. The fox-faced girl had given him a catalog of things that Melchiori had mentioned, common haunts and proclivities, and Holmes knitted them together into a skein of the man's everyday routine, and from there extrapolated where he would most likely scarper when his luck turned sour. It would be a favourite pub, of course, someplace secure and familiar where he could get food and drink without having to show his face outside, a small room in poor condition where he would fancy himself as well-concealed as a rat in its hole.
These deductions stood out like illuminated signposts, drawing Holmes onward. He was blind to the hustle of the street, the broken slabs of pavement rising hard under his boots. He was tired, fuzzy silver lining the edges of his vision because tired was perhaps a bit of an understatement. Heaviness dragged at him, a blanket of soft steel laid across his shoulders, but he pushed through it, kept moving. Holmes knew if he passed out in this part of town, he'd wake up dead.
Someone called his name. Holmes tripped over his feet, barely caught his balance. His head whipped around and there was a constable coming up the block behind him, one hand hailing.
Badly off his guard, Holmes straightened, forced his eyes to come into focus. He set his mouth in a standard sneer, because he did not have time for this.
"My dear Constable Nelson, surely you have erred in your navigation tonight. Whitechapel is not the safest place for your kind, or hadn't you heard?"
The constable huffed out a breath, but he was not new to Sherlock Holmes and so rightly ignored him.
"Inspector Lestrade requests your presence at the Yard, sir."
"Naturally he does. Unfortunately I am engaged at the moment, and so I must bid you farewell."
Holmes turned smartly but the constable caught his elbow and the detective went still. Only one man in the world was allowed to grab him like that.
"Remove your hand," he said, the words misshapen in his throat.
The constable complied at once, but he had Holmes's attention and that was enough for his purposes.
"Every man on the beat tonight has orders to keep an eye out for you," the constable told him. "The inspector would know what you've discovered about Philip Townshend's murderer."
"He would know, if he had the competence to do his job himself rather than forever wringing my brain. Send him my regrets, would you? Good lad."
Holmes turned to go again, and Nelson tossed a hook into his back, saying, "Your doctor is among those in search of you, Mister Holmes."
Holmes faltered, hesitated. His mind filled like a balloon with the image of Watson limping through the filthy streets, teeth gritted around Holmes's name. A twisting painful thing happened in the detective's stomach, but he squashed it down to nothing because he needed to concentrate, he needed to focus. Melchiori was somewhere ahead of him, that sick black heart that Holmes would crush between his hands, and he couldn't allow himself to become distracted.
"I wish him luck," Holmes said like it was ripped out of him. "Good night, Constable."
Nelson let him go that time, muttering an expected oath at Holmes's back. Holmes ducked around the first corner he came to, feeling hunted even though that was backwards. It was all wrong.
*
Watson stumbled upon Holmes's trail almost entirely by chance.
His concentration was fused into a beam of light, as forward-thinking as a shot arrow. Somewhere ahead of him was his damaged friend, and somehow Watson had to find him, and that was all that mattered.
Out of the slack open mouth of an alley, a pair of hands latched hold of him, dragged him into the dark. Watson staggered on his bad leg and would have fallen had he not been jerked upright by his assailant.
"Yer in the wrong part of town, toff," said the man, grinning with black teeth, smashed porcine eyes buried in his dirty face. "Ye must pay the toll." He held a ragged length of blade in his hand, moving to press it under the doctor's chin, but Watson would have none of that.
In a clean motion, he yanked himself back and to the side, let his arm come sweeping up, cracking his cane into the man's face and abruptly shattering his nose. The makeshift blade scraped along Watson's throat but it was shallow, insignificant, and then the weapon clattered to the ground. The man choked on half a shout, both hands to his face, and Watson walloped him again, the hard knob finding the man's temple and sending him to the ground in a boneless collapse.
Watson exhaled. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to the short seeping wound in his neck, checked the man's pulse without much interest either way. The felon lived still, and so Watson came out of the alley to locate a constable who could haul the man away.
The constable he found was named Nelson.
Much later, Watson would wonder at the coincidence, the disparate snaking lives brought together so briefly and with such great impact. Watson had never been a devout man, and Holmes would surely call it superstitious folly, but when it was very late at night he would be certain that there had been an eye on the two of them at that moment, an Eye. Someone had been keeping watch.
*
Holmes assembled a rough tradesman disguise from the random detritus cached in his coat, pulled his hat low over his eyes and affected a limp, slouching into the tavern. No one paid him any attention as he took a seat in the corner where he could see down the hallway of rooms for let. He struck a match alight with his thumbnail and nursed his pipe, feeling scoured and covered in skin thinner than smoke.
A period of minutes went past. Holmes observed the movements of the barkeep, the single harried waitress, the sparse yabbering crowd. There was a card game going on to one side, and the man with the Breton accent was cheating. The two sullen-looking youths playing darts were engaged in a guilt-ridden homosexual relationship that could end in nothing but violence. The old man with his face in his hands had lost his mind to syphilis.
This was certainly the place, Holmes decided. The fox-faced girl had named it as Melchiori's favourite, the only address he might call home, but more than that was the feel, the villain's ghost snarling just beyond where Holmes could see.
He touched his fingers lightly to the lump on the side of his head. Last night's fight was in kaleidoscopic splinters in his mind, single blows remembered out of sequence, fractured cries echoing and redoubling in his mind. Somehow Melchiori had knocked Holmes to his knees, and then the brick, that blunt thud of stone on skull, and then blackness.
It infuriated Holmes beyond the telling of it. He couldn't abide losing.
A boy came in wearing a butcher's apron that hung on him like a musselman's long tunic and bearing a covered plate of food that leaked steam. Holmes tracked the plate to the bar where it was surrendered for a few coins, and then the waitress took it down the hallway to the rooms.
She rapped on the third door down, and Holmes watched the changed light spill over her as the door was inched open, an arm emerging to accept the plate. From where Holmes sat, he could see the dark ink spoiling the arm, the hard black circle of snake.
Holmes let out a slow careful breath. He set his pipe down on the table and noticed absently that his hands were shaking. His head felt dizzy and light, his body made of nothing more than breath. The pieces of his plan slotted into place, and he got to his feet.
The first thing he needed was a diversion.
*
Constable Nelson took Watson back to the spot where he had encountered Sherlock Holmes, and pointed out the direction in which he had gone, and Watson barely took the time to thank him before rushing onward.
Adrenaline took him over like a possession, a demon sinking into his blood. He was close; he could feel it. Holmes had walked this street, peered into these same battered shops. His afterimage flickered before Watson, an underdeveloped photograph.
Watson was not thinking about what would happen when he found his friend. He required data, evidence. He needed to see how badly Holmes was injured, how long it had been since he had slept, how much blood he had on his hands, and then he would be able to determine his next move. Holmes was always telling him, never act in advance of the facts.
The dense pain in his leg had receded like a battling tide, waiting for him just off-shore. His shoulder felt pounded like raw meat, supporting too much weight on the trembling strut of his cane, but he wasn't concerned with anything physical just now.
Then ahead of him, a hansom cab burst into flames.
Watson stopped dead, blinking in detached disbelief. It seemed that nothing would stay reasonable tonight, the fell caprices of the world overwhelming and devoid of all sense.
A nebula of shouts filled the air from all directions. Humanoid black shadows tumbled out of the sagging buildings, shoe leather scraping on the stones. Watson's instincts clicked on finally, and he ran for the fire, a jolting staggering wreck on his bad leg but what could he do about it?
"Hallo!" he shouted into the loose gathering that had formed around the flaming cab. "Does anyone need a doctor?"
There was a general rumble to the negative. An older man, his mouth hidden in a flocculent beard, sidled close to tell him, "Wasn't anybody inside. That's her driver there," with a nod to a red-faced man who was currently bellowing curses at the sky.
Watson shook his head, dreadfully confused. "How did this happen?"
"It was that dark fellow," a ratty-looking woman answered from his other side, arms crossed like stone gates over his chest. "I seen him mischieving about just before the flames took. Looked a right scoundrel, he did."
Watson's skin tightened. He whirled around, shouldering out of the crowd with his eyes scanning feverishly. Every face took extra scrutiny because who knew what mask Holmes might have affixed.
He should have known, of course. Holmes had told him a thousand times: there were no real coincidences in the world.
He reeled to a stop near an emptied tavern, and bent over his knees, wilfully trying to stop his heart from thumping so hard. His vision shivered into focus and he saw before him on the grimy step a crushed box of matches. It did not register with Watson for a long moment, because it was something he saw every day of his life, because it was Holmes's brand.
The doctor jerked his spine straight, his white eyes staring furiously through the tavern's open door, the abandoned tension of the knocked-over chairs. He screamed once, mindless, "Holmes!" and then he was running again.
*
The accelerant had been a bottle of cheap whiskey nicked from behind the bar. Holmes had hunched and skulked around the cab like a horse thief, using the last seven matches in the box to set it alight at strategic points. He sank back into the shadows, watching the flames catch around the liquor-soaked wooden frame, the fire roaring suddenly huge, a blast of heat rolling through the street.
People began pouring out of the tavern, clangourous voices echoing between the rows. Holmes pressed his back to the wall, his face bent back into the darkness of the alley, and waited until he saw the hulking barkeep stamp out with the rest before slipping through the door.
Holmes kicked a chair over and snapped off one of its legs for a cudgel, feeling basely satisfied by the splintered heft of it in his hand. He stalked into the hallway, his mind flooded with red savagery. He was going to beat a man to death. He felt primeval, as brutally powerful as an old god. Action hummed through his body.
Just before he lifted his knee to kick in the door, he heard Watson's voice, screaming his name. It stopped him.
It stopped everything.
*
Holmes was there, halfway down the hallway with a makeshift club in his hand. Holmes was there, turned to blink dumbly at Watson, his eyes still black and deadened, his face still glowing pale with despair.
Watson had to put a hand to the wall to brace himself, his legs suddenly made of air. He said Holmes's name again but there was nothing behind it, and it fell soundless in the space between them.
They stood there for a moment, rocks in a pounding river, and then Watson urged his body to motion, and moved to his friend's side. He carefully laid his hand on Holmes's arm.
"Have you found him?" Watson asked, hushed and unsteady.
Holmes nodded his head trancelike, his foggy gaze stuck on Watson's face. The blunt force of shock in Holmes's expression made Watson feel like the detective had thought him dead, looking at him now as if Watson had risen from the grave.
"He is within," Holmes said, a faint angle of his head indicating the door.
As subtly as he could, Watson tugged Holmes away, walking softly backwards down the hallway. "We must inform the police."
Holmes stopped, boot heels scraping, and jerked his arm out of Watson's hold. His throat ducked several times as he swallowed, and Watson noted the track of dried blood on the side of his neck running from under Holmes's hair to disappear in his shirt collar.
"Leave the police," Holmes said. "Leave him to me."
Watson shook his head, glancing down at Holmes's hand gripped whitely around the club. Fear had lodged itself behind Watson's ribs like an evil second heart that pumped ichor and acid.
"It's the rope for him anyway," Watson told his friend. "He'll be just as dead if you apprehend him legally."
A black look flashed through Holmes's eyes, and Watson tensed as if for a physical blow, the muscles of his back petrifying into stone. Holmes was more than half mad, this lunatic quest burning all through him.
"Death is only the last of the punishments he deserves," Holmes said, his voice a sharp hissing thing. "The boy he killed was not given the blessing of a quick demise, nor one so civil as the end of a rope. He was left bleeding on the floor, and I will see his murderer suffer the same."
Holmes turned back to the door and Watson grabbed his shoulders, pulled him back. Holmes lost his balance and would have lost his feet if not for Watson steadying him, and worry plucked at the doctor, seeing how weak and shaky Holmes was, how very near to falling down.
"Unhand me," Holmes said, a strained note in his voice. He wasn't looking at Watson, his face turned down and away.
"I cannot let you do this," Watson told him.
"You have no say in the matter."
"I do, by God." Watson tightened his grip on his friend. "Your body and mind are yours to use or ruin as you see fit, but your soul is my responsibility."
The grandeur of the statement stilled them. A small spastic gasp ran through Holmes, and his gaze flew to Watson's for the briefest glance. Holmes's eyes were depthless, an enervated plea echoing on his face. He looked more boy than man, but that was only for a moment.
"Come away," Watson said in a tone softer than cotton. "You are very tired, my friend."
Holmes's body sagged, and he leaned into Watson, closing his eyes. "Yes."
"Then come away."
Watson stepped backwards, drawing his detective with him. Watson's heart was beating in unwieldy thumps, an admixture of terror and bizarre elation spiralling through him. He wanted to take Holmes to Baker Street, and press him into bed. He wanted to barricade the door and hammer the windows shut, empty the immediate world of everyone but the two of them. He wanted to solder a thin chain to stretch between them so that he would never lose track of Holmes again.
*
Holmes let Watson lead him away from Melchiori's room, a mantle of obeisance resting uneasily on him. His brain felt disjointed, lying sideways inside his skull like an upset bookshelf, his thoughts piled broken-spined on the floor. He had a very bad headache; he'd had this headache all day long, but it was impossible to suppress now that Watson was here and it was quiet.
Watson was here. The adrenaline was pouring out of Holmes, sucking strength from his arms and legs, and the feeling that was left in its place was hollowing and fearful. Holmes kept his eyes locked on the good doctor, the single clear point in a world of haze. He wanted to grab hold of his friend, the full strength of his arms around him, cling to him like they were shipwreck survivors set adrift in freezing waters on a small broken piece of deck.
There were several bobbies already gathered outside the tavern, overseeing the operation to extinguish the burning cab, and Watson went up to the highest ranked, waving his hand to scatter the smoke and ashy black flakes that filled the air. Holmes slumped on the wall, thinking for a second that he might pass out. The chair leg slipped free from his hand, clattered on the paving stones.
Melchiori did not come easy. Holmes roused to the sound of his struggles, his spat-out Italian curses, and together with Watson and a trio of constables they subdued the villain, stripped him of weapons and locked his wrists in a pair of darbies. Melchiori lay on his stomach, his snarling mouth against the dirty floor.
Holmes tipped his head to the side, studying him like a particularly intriguing insect. "Doctor," he said in a rasp. "Don't look."
Watson said, "Wait," but Holmes would not. He kicked Melchiori hard in the back of the head, driving his face into the floor and sending a crimson burst of blood out his nose. The villain went limp, insensible, his shattered nose pressed flat. A small pool of red spread out around him, and Holmes let out a long stuttering breath.
He turned back to the doctor and constables, his head on fire with renewed pain, his shaking hands buried in coat pockets. The policemen were leery, hands curled protectively around their cudgels as they regarded Holmes like an unpredictable madman, which was not wholly unreasonable. Watson had his fists clenched, his mouth set in a rigid shape. His eyes were so blue that they made Holmes dizzy. His vision sparkled, began to disintegrate.
"It was necessary," Holmes explained woozily. He let his eyes flutter closed, a piceous wave crashing down on him from above. He was about to lose consciousness and so he said, "Watson," to ensure that he would not wake up alone.
*
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