The Baker Street Record
A/N: Presenting: an epic Sherlock Holmes/House of Leaves crossover. This was written for Part III of the Sherlock Holmes kinkmeme over at sherlockkink. It was a long and wonderfully arduous process and certainly the most rigorous exercise in dual pastiche (not to mention HTML) that I've ever engaged in. The original prompt was made by buriedbooks in Part II, then
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------beside the fireplace,” he said, and took a heavy drag on his pipe, watching me.
“Don’t be absurd, Holmes,” I said wearily. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Where could it lead to?”
“Don’t you think I considered that, Watson?” he said with faint irritation. “Come and have a look for yourself.”
Grumbling, I rose and followed him into the room, which was in its usual disarray, product of Holmes’s latest case, concerning XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXand all his papers. But there it was, plain as day-a door, where there never had been a door, where there should not, could not have been a door. Where there should only have been the thin layers of the outer wall ( ... )
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I think I’m going blind. I’ve been reading his cramped handwriting for weeks now. Normally it’s much more elegant, the way a collected man, a doctor, should write. But this one borders on illegible, and then there’s the burns and the scribbles and the ripped edges and the infuriating fact that it seems to have been intentionally shuffled about and left scattered and all out of order.
The Baker Street Record, as Dr. Watson called it, is an account like no other the man left behind, which were mostly little two-cent mystery stories about Sherlock Holmes, renowned as brilliant genius and perhaps the world’s only private consulting detective. This particular mystery was something different, and they both knew it. Now it is left to me to tell ( ... )
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“I wonder about the incident with Gladstone. That he was so effortlessly propelled from something that seemed to openly beckon me in… Perhaps the house rejected him.”
This seemed to me so absurd a thing to say that for a moment I did not know how to proceed. “What do you mean?” I asked finally.
He looked at me. “Perhaps… the house is trying to communicate with us.”
At this I nearly laughed. “Holmes, for God’s sake,” I said. “The house?”
“Communication is not just words, Watson,” he said, sternly, as though I were a schoolboy disregarding some sort of common knowledge. “It is architecture. Think about it-a house without the desire for communication, for understanding, coherence, comprehension… the syntax of a structure, the connection of all these parts which make up a whole… well, it would fall to pieces.”
“You talk as if the house had a mind of its own,” I said with wonder ( ... )
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The wait. It is agony, it manifests as the residual pain always in my leg, as frustration leftover from the unfinished conversation (one of too, too, many), fear and abandonment, a temperamental bout of feelings of betrayal, then of despair. He has left me. I could have stopped him. I didn’t. I am utterly, stupidly, resignedly, inescapably, inevitably, unhappily, irreconcilably, incomparably alone, alone, alone.
I am not convinced this was written by Watson at all. Though it might have been: when Watson is alone in the house, his writing sometimes becomes a mockery of itself, agitated, wandering further and further from his usual idiom. The unsettling fluidity of sentences that are too long. The tense shifts and his script grows increasingly slanted, the verbiage unsteady, unsupported, fluctuating between perilously experimental and ornate or unnecessary, the structure breaking ( ... )
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