Fic for mainecoon76: Impossible
Title: Impossible
Recipient: mainecoon76
Author: schwarze_elster
Characters/Pairings: Holmes, Watson (slashy gen or squinty slash)
Rating: R for violence
Warnings: zombies (therefore crack & violence)
Note: Dear recipient, I don't even know how 'cracky humour' turned into Victorian Zombie Apocalypse. I hope you don't mind that kind of thing. If you do, I'm sorry and I can only ask you to concentrate on the schmoopy and silly bits and skip a few lines each time the word 'ghoul' is mentioned.
Summary: A small Victorian village has a severe case of ghouls. Watson remembers what really happened in Maiwand. Holmes takes the impossibility of the events rather personally. Then he takes a head.
Impossible
Contrary to the majority of the population to whom spring was more then welcome after the bleak winter, Sherlock Holmes was prone to black moods when the days got longer. This was due to a slight hay-fever which made him in turns melancholic and irritable beyond the usual measure. It was a bright morning in March when I found my friend in the living room after two days of sullen silence and doleful violin music, engrossed in a letter.
“It is inconceivable what people will believe in order to avoid logical thought,” he said in an aggravated tone, when I sat at the breakfast table. “Superstition, my dear Watson, is hostile to scientific explanation; by providing a seemingly easy answer it makes us blind against a possibly complex but comprehensible truth.”
“Man has not yet reached the boundaries of his knowledge,” I countered mildly, glad to see him in higher spirits than he had been the days before. “You must concede that there might be more things between heaven and earth-”
“O that again! Why is it that everyone seems to feel obliged to cite that Danish ghost story when it comes to this line of discourse? No,” he sniffed after being interrupted by a sternutation, “there is much unknown between heaven and earth, but the fact remains that it is in this realm and thus in the realm of natural laws.”
“What brought this on?” I asked. “I assume it is a client's letter you're crumpling?”
“Read it!” he said and carelessly tossed the note onto the breakfast table.
Dear Mr. Holmes, [it said] I do not know how much of the occurrences here in Foxhole have made it into London press and if the articles that must exist make clear how strange the circumstances of the murders are. It is a dark and serious affair, the perpetrators are violent against everyone and without sense. It pains me to speak of demonic possession, but having seen one of them myself, I fear I cannot find a different explanation. Whatever this evil is, it spreads. Some of those who survived an attack of the monsters swear they recognized one or more of the recently murdered among them. What can be said without a doubt is that in the three days since the first incident their number has grown, as has the number of their victims. Our village is fairly secluded, but more than its extinction, which seems almost inevitable, I fear that the curse could spread wider and become a threat to the whole Empire!
In the hope that you can shed light on this horrible mystery, yours faithfully, Doctor Ignacious Gloster
I must have looked terrible, struck by a sudden wave of confusion and fear as I was, because Holmes came over with two long strides and sank down on his knees next to my chair, an expression of concern on his face. He gripped my arm, a welcome sensation in a moment when my surroundings seemed strangely surreal. “My dear boy, what is it?”
It took a few moment to gather my wits. Had I not sat while reading the letter, I might have sunken down to the floor, loath as I am to admit it. There is something deeply unsettling about being confronted with memories that one had believed to be nightmares and delirious distortions of reality brought on by fever. “We need to take this case,” I said at length.
I was deep in thought throughout the hasty preparations for the journey and the cab ride to the station. Holmes respected my silence, but for concerned and enquiring glances. On the train, we found an empty compartment and as we settled opposite each other, Holmes kept staring at me with those keen grey eyes. Were it possible for one person to read the thoughts of another, Holmes would have found the way. He was near enough deducing them most of the time and it troubled him more then he would ever admit, when he found himself unable to do so.
“Let it be, Holmes,” I said tiredly. “I'll tell you as soon as I make sense to myself again.”
He leaned back into his seat and looked out of the window with a faintly dejected look on his face, but it could not be helped. However veiled his ridicule for the supernatural was towards the clients who came to him with such an explanation - and I have to say, it was usually not heavily veiled - I felt that I could not stand it at the moment should he scoff at this. The descriptions Doctor Gloster had given of the attackers in Foxhole were too close to what I had decided to be figments of my feverish mind all those years ago.
A sneeze brought me out of my musings and I looked up at Holmes who was massaging his temples with the tips of his long fingers. “You can say what you want about London and its toxic atmosphere, but I would rather not leave it this time of the year,” he complained.
“Aren't you interested in the case?”
“I'd hardly be here if I wasn't,” he answered. “The papers reported violent riots in the country, which was interesting insofar that no motive was evident. Doctor Gloster's account paints a similar picture, likewise without giving a plausible explanation. In my experience there are two types of circumstances that demand my faculties for fine analysis and deduction: those in which everyone is sure they know what happened and those in which nobody seems to know anything.”
“Do you have a theory yet?”
“No. Judging by his letter, Doctor Gloster is an educated man and not habitually superstitious, but if I had to go by what he told us, I had to theorise that the dead are coming back as monsters to attack the living.”
He said this with the same light derision I had come to expect from him in these matters, but his tone did nothing to stop a cold sensation of imminent danger to run down my spine and settle deep in my guts.
From the train station we took a dogcart to Foxhole, a lengthy ride through a wild and wayless part of the country. The driver had many a story to tell about Foxhole and what was happening there, though Holmes had established early in the conversation that the man had not been to the village in more than a fortnight and neither was he acquainted with anyone who had been. In spite of this clear dismissal he rattled on about bandits, fugitive slaves from America and even werewolves, without giving the impression of favouring one of these rumours; maybe he believed in a combination of all three.
The rough path we were driving on led into a forest and after a mile or two over a bridge that wasn't inspiring confidence so much as a fairly clear mental picture of its eventual collapse. Behind it the village lay, ghostly quiet for the early afternoon, the only human noises were the hoofbeat of our horses, the creaks of the old dogcart and the occasional sniffle from Holmes.
The driver stopped, obviously unwilling to drive further into the village, so we took our sparse baggage and got off the cart. He agreed to come back for us tomorrow morning, but as we watched him drive away I felt strangely deserted.
“I'll admit, this is uncanny,” Holmes remarked drily and far too loudly for my tense nerves. His agile glance roamed over the houses along what had to be the main road of Foxhole. My hand had crept into my coat pocket to curl around the familiar weight of my revolver without conscious thought. After contemplation of whatever observation he had made, Holmes started walking in the opposite direction of the bridge and I followed hastily.
We had only walked for a minute or two when a dragging sound behind us made me look around. What I saw confirmed my earlier apprehensions; three ragged figures with the powerless posture of sleep-walkers who came towards us with sickly erratic movements. Their unholy eyes were empty and their faces pale and terribly contorted. I grabbed Holmes by the arm to drag him away from the ghouls, only to see that there were four more of them before us.
Many flattering words can and have been said about my dear friend's great intelligence and his unshakeable nerves, but in moments like this my uncharitable thoughts on the topic were, that he is simply too fascinated by unexpected turns of events - poisoned darts, fort example, or raving glowing dogs the size of a small horse - to be as terrified as any sane person should be. As I was looking for an escape route and berating myself for packing additional cartridges into the bag where I wouldn't be able to reach them fast enough, the confounded man looked at the monstrous creatures with the scrutiny and detachment of a scientist and smiled.
To our left was a small house surrounded by a well-kept garden. I took Holmes by his wrist, lest he forgot to flee over the novelty of bloodthirsty villagers trying to encircle us, and we scaled the low picket fence with little difficulty. There was not much hope that it would delay the ghouls for long. We ran over neat vegetable patches towards the house. The door led into a small hallway and I hurriedly closed it and barricaded it with a small cabinet.
“A disease?” Holmes murmured. “Or possibly a drug.”
I'm afraid this was the moment when I lost my temper and shoved Holmes against the wall behind him. “They are not interesting, you bloody imbecile! They're dangerous! Stop examining them and start running!”
“I did run,” he said with calm dignity in spite of the hard grip I had on his shoulder. “And I fail to see how any danger can be averted by not examining it.”
I stared into his cool grey eyes for a long moment and felt myself calm down again. With conscious effort I eased my hold on him, but found myself unable to pull my hand away, not yet ready to lose the contact altogether. “Alright,” I said with a deep exhale. “Just- by God, whatever you do, don't let one of them bite you.”
He lifted one eyebrow delicately. “I had no intention to do so.”
“Perfect, forget I said it, you will get ideas.” There was a hysteric laugh stuck in my throat and I could hear a noise outside, no doubt the ghouls coming over the fence. Then I felt Holmes' hand on my shoulder and it startled me how his expression had shifted from aloof to concerned in the few seconds I had looked at the door.
“My dear man, this is not like you,” he said softly and I felt his thumb brush over my collar bone as if to sooth me. “This is not the first time you and I have been in mortal peril together and we always get out.” His eyes were very serious and there was no doubt he was right. “I just need you to be yourself.”
“Yes,” I said automatically, and then again, “yes.” As myself this time. He was right, this blind fear was beneath the man I aim to be. “I'm sorry. It is- just not every day that one is confronted with one's nightmares.”
There was a fleeting look of curiosity on my friend's face before he settled for a tense smile. “It's quite alright, old boy. We need to get out now.” He pressed my shoulder before he let go to walk down the corridor. “You might have noticed that the windows are nailed shut, while the door was unlocked. Someone used this house as a hiding place, but left it - probably for a good reason.”
I followed him - what else was I to do? - and we passed the staircase and the doors to living room and kitchen. When we turned a corner and entered the dining room, we saw that the French windows that lined the far wall of the room were shattered, their shutters broken or ripped from the hinges.
“Out the back door,” Holmes commented under his breath as we crept silently towards the windows. He stopped at the fireplace to take the poker. Outside, the terrace and the small lawn were empty, as was the neighbouring garden for all we could see. Holmes inclined his head and lifted his eyebrows in question. Ready?
I drew my revolver and nodded.
He went first, cautiously stepping over the shards of glass and broken wood to avoid making a sound. He slipped through a gap in the hedge and waved for me to follow. We crossed two backyards in that manner before we turned a corner too rashly and ran into a dozen of the horrible creatures feasting on a corpse. We withdrew hastily, but not fast enough; some of them had seen us and took up pursuit.
We fled along the windowless side-wall of the house, through a chicken pen that was empty save for bloody feathers. They were close behind us, but I was hesitant to shoot for fear that he loud noise would draw more of them towards us. The fence at the far end of the pen had no gate; Holmes climbed it with the same ease and swiftness that had baffled me before and made me think once again what an excellent cat burglar he would have made had he put his singular mind to it.
I was only a second behind him, but as I pulled myself up over the top of the fence I felt the cold hard grip of one of the ghouls around my ankle. I tried to kick myself free and saw that Holmes had stabbed the poker through the fence. It was buried deep in the abdomen of the monster, but the grip did not shift by an inch.
“No good,” I said through clenched teeth, “aim for the head!”
A distasteful frown crossed his face, then he pulled the poker out again and thrust it through the skull of the appalling creature. Abruptly, my foot was free and I scrambled over and fell down next to Holmes, who let go of the poker that was stuck in the ghoul's skull, to take me by the arm. He pulled me up to my feet quickly and dragged me with him, away from the fence and towards the front of the house. This time, we slowed down before we reached the end of the wall and glanced around the corner; neither of us was able to suppress a startled flinch when the door flew open.
“Here, quickly! Come in!” A gaunt little man waved us into the house and started to barricade the door as soon as we were inside. “Have you been bitten?” he asked before he had even turned the key in the lock.
“No,” I denied quickly as we helped him to shift a wardrobe.
“Doctor Gloster,” Holmes said to the man, when the door was sealed shut at last. “I am Sherlock Holmes and this is my friend and partner Doctor Watson.”
As the man turned around to us, his face showed the deepest regret. “You came,” he said. “I had hoped you wouldn't. I'm so sorry to have lured you here. When I wrote the letter two days ago I had no idea that it would turn out so badly for us.”
“It's quite alright,” Holmes said with a twisted smile. “Your problem seems more interesting than I imagined.”
“You could say that.” The doctor gave a tired laugh. “How did you know it was me who wrote to you?”
“Just simple observation; you are left-handed as the letter you wrote to me indicated and I should be very concerned about the state of my mind if I was unable to recognize a man of the medical profession under any circumstances.”
“I see you live up to your reputation. Alas, I am not sure it will help us.” He shook his head in resignation. “But come on in! It would be very rude not to offer you a drink.”
He led us into the living room and poured three glasses of brandy. If I had needed evidence that the events of today had unsettled my friend almost as much as myself, the fact that he drank the brandy while on a case would have been enough.
“I should look after my patients,” said Doctor Gloster after a few moments of brooding silence.
“How many people are left?” asked Holmes.
“Just us, as far as I know. The village is very small to begin with and a number of the houses are only rented to visitors in the summer. We are seven , including the two of you. My two daughters Rose and Anne, Anne's husband Jonathan Tyrone and his mother.”
“They are injured?”
“Jonathan and Anne, yes.” The doctor put his glass down and turned to go. “You can come along if you like.”
We followed him up the stairs an towards one of the bedrooms. “Anne has suffered a head injury when they had to escape from their house,” the doctor said, “but Jonathan...” he didn't finish the sentence as we entered the bedroom. On the bed lay the young man Jonathan Tyrone and next to it sat an elderly woman, clearly his mother. Despite the half-drawn curtains, I could see at once that he had a high fever.
“He was bitten,” I heard myself say even before the thought had fully formed in my mind.
Doctor Gloster looked at me with surprise. “Have you seen something like this before?”
I nodded and had to close my eyes for a moment to gather my thoughts. If everything was true, what did it mean? “There's a chance he survives, but if the fever kills him, you have to be careful.”
I could see Holmes' questioning glance from the corner of my eyes and looked away at Doctor Gloster. “You have seen it, too,” he said gravely. “They wake up again.”
“Impossible!” Holmes said emphatically.
Gloster looked at him with an almost apologetic expression and gave a helpless shrug. “Three days ago, I would have said the same thing. But you saw them outside. When they wake up, they're one of them.”
For a moment Holmes looked the way he did seconds before tearing apart a particularly stupid theory of one of his professional colleagues, but then he just stormed out with a pressed “Excuse me,” followed by a shout of “Watson, come!” from outside. I feigned confusion about this behaviour until I had left the room, then followed the sound of Holmes' steps downstairs and back into the living room, where he was pacing in front of the fireplace with uneven strides and bouts of eerie stillness.
It was no mystery to me what had angered my friend. Trust Sherlock Holmes to take something as nightmarish as the dead coming back to hunt the living as personal affront. I stood in the door-frame for a long moment, waiting for him to speak.
“My method, Watson!” he said at last. “Excluding the impossible to find the truth. Do you see? My method depends on the impossible being impossible. There must be an explanation!”
There was a desperation in his voice that made me ache for this man who believed in logic more than anything else in the world. I went over to him and stood in his way until he looked up and I could see his eyes. For a moment I regretted all of this like it was my fault; my friend was never meant to look uncertain.
“I am sure there is an explanation,” I said firmly, “and if anyone can find it, it is you.”
He looked away for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. “In order to do that,” he began, then broke of and started again: “You never told me what happened in Maiwand.”
In spite of the horrors I had to fight a smile. It would be easier to tell with the knowledge that he had already deduced it by half and would not derail me with an argument about superstition this time.
“We called them ghouls; I don't know who suggested the name. In Arabic folklore they are desert demons who eat the dead to take on their form. It seemed appropriate. I don't remember everything that happened. We came there expecting the enemy and found the whole village turned into demons. We still fought the Afghans and they still fought us, but the ghouls made no distinction. I don't remember much of what happened after I was shot and by the time I was in Peshawar I was already half convinced that the ghouls could not have been real. Some kind of ruse of the enemy. Then came the fever, everything became unreal and somehow I forgot that the ghouls were more than a fever dream.”
“What do you remember?” asked Holmes after I had fallen into silence for some time.
“They are not human, they don't talk and they are not the person they were in any way. They just attack any living person they see and seem to feel no pain, but you can kill them by beheading them or by destroying the head. When they bite someone, the person suffers a fever and-”
I was interrupted by screams from above and we ran up the stairs, but when we came to the bedroom we were too late: Jonathan had died and the monster he had become had killed the elderly Mrs Tyrone at his bedside. It turned towards us, face pale and smeared with blood, and looked at us with his unblinking demon eyes. Before the creature could fully stand up from his crouch over Mrs Tyrone's corpse, I shot the monster.
There was a commotion from the next bedroom and we hurried over. In the hallway stood Doctor Gloster with his two daughters, one of then crying out of her senses, held up with gentle hands by her sister and father who had clearly hindered her from going into the other room. “No,” Anne Tyrone whispered under tears, “not Jonathan!”
She was a beautiful woman with dark brown hair that fell in curls over the bandage around her head. Even under tears the set of her dark brown eyes was remarkably similar to that of Doctor Gloster. Her younger sister had darker hair and slightly softer features, but it was easy to recognize them as sisters.
“I'm sorry,” I said to the poor woman. “He had become-”
“I have seen it once,” she interrupted me, clearly fighting for composure. “It is not you fault, Doctor.”
“Nevertheless-”
A loud rattle from downstairs made me stop and we all listened in a breathless silence. There it was, a second time and again: a knocking and scratching at the front door.
Gloster went to one of the windows to look out. “There are so many of them,” he reported and swore when we heard a new impact to the door. “They seem to retain remnants of intelligence. They clearly know that we are in here.”
A loud blow alarmed us that the wardrobe had fallen over under the assault of the ghouls and then it wasn't long before the first of them came up the stairs. Holmes and I threw a small chest of drawers down the stairs that made them tumble over in an ugly heap of moans and twitching limbs and bought us a little time.
“Can we get out from here?” Holmes asked.
“Over the balcony,” Rose Gloster said, “along the downpipe.”
She didn't waste time in leading us through a small drawing room and out onto a balcony that overlooked the garden.. It was empty; the riot at the door had apparently lured the creatures to the front of the house. After a silent debate that was as heated as it was short and fought with glares and Holmes' infuriatingly raised eyebrow, I pressed my revolver into his hands and went down first. It was easy enough, but standing on the open lawn with the knowledge that the ghouls were just around the corner was as nerve-wracking as the fact that Holmes was still in even greater danger. Rose climbed down next, swiftly enough, then nothing.
I waited for a few uneasy seconds. “What is going on up there?” I asked the girl, but she just looked at me helplessly.
“I don't know, Anne should come after me.”
I was torn between the impulse to go back and the knowledge that I couldn't possibly leave the poor woman alone down here. We waited for what seemed like hours in this tense situation but what must have been barely a minute, then Doctor Gloster climbed down the drain, and after him, nimble as a cat, came Holmes. At first, the relief to see my friend unharmed made me blind for the grief on Gloster's face.
“Were is Anne?” her sister asked with a frantic whisper.
“Locked herself in the salon,” Holmes answered hastily as Doctor Gloster seemed unable to form the words. “To delay them. I'm sorry, but it won't do any good to stay here.”
We ran to the neighbouring garden Holmes and I had come from as silently as possible. Without discussion we had come to a mutual understanding that we would try to reach the bridge and get out of the city. I led our little group, Holmes with my revolver at our back. As we passed a chopping block I pulled the axe out of it to arm myself and it wasn't long before I needed it. From a patch of hedges a ghoul sprang at us. It was alone, which was lucky as they were only truly threatening in a crowd.
“The head, Watson!” Holmes hissed with silent urgency when I was about to deliver the first blow.
I aborted the movement to throw him a confused glance and side-stepped the ghoul's attack, then decided that this was no way to conduct a conversation and smashed its head with the axe. “What?”
“I want a head,” Holmes said as we fled further down the lawn, his tone petulant.
“What? Why?” I would like to say that I was completely baffled by Holmes' lunacy, but long association with the irritating man had given me a good notion of what this was about. Still, I was loath to encourage him in any way.
“Don't be obtuse, man. A head. I want to take one. This has to be something in the brain, so could you find it in yourself to refrain from spoiling every single one of them and get me an intact head?”
In retrospect, I find it deeply worrying that I had anticipated this.
“On another occasion,” I ground out and the horrible man had the gall to smiled at me.
“At your leisure, my dear fellow.”
We crossed two more gardens without incident and I had hoped that said occasion wouldn't arise until we reached the bridge, when we ran into a group of three ghouls. I smashed the head of the first one - admittedly just to be contrary. With the second one that came at me, I tried to aim for the throat with the axe, but it ducked and the axe went in by the ear.
“Is it really too much to ask?” I heard Holmes behind me, clearly annoyed with me now. He threw himself at the last ghoul, toppling it over so that it lay prone on the ground. I heaved a resigned sigh and severed the head from the shoulders with two messy blows. I am determined never to dwell on what the Glosters might have thought of that display.
“You realise that is next year's Christmas present,” I remarked as Holmes smiled up at me from his crouch next to the body.
“Give me your bag, it's bigger.”
I threw it at him and he proceeded cram the contents into his own bag and to place the blood-dripping head inside mine.
“You disgust me,” I declared as he pressed his bag into my free hand, but Holmes' only answer was a delighted smile and a happy wiggle of the head-containing bag he carried himself.
After that it wasn't long before we reached the bridge. It was the work of a few minutes to make the decrepit construction collapse into the river.
We had fled with the intention to come back with help to face the threat the ghouls posed, but as we looked back after half an hour of walking along the path, we saw smoke curl over the place where the village lay. Whatever the source of the fire - an unwatched fireplace, a broken oil lamp or the brave Anne Tyrone - it grew quickly. There had been no rain for days and everything was tinder-dry. When dusk fell, the flames on the other side of the river where high; eerie yellow shadows on the darkening horizon.
~*~
“A parasite!” Holmes exclaimed as he ripped open my bedroom door to walk up and down the floor next to my bed. It was about two o'clock in the morning and I must confess I was unsurprised by his sudden and noisy presence, as I had anticipated something similar for the last three days.
“Indeed,” I mumbled into my pillow, which was, sadly, enough participation in the conversation for Holmes to go on.
“A parasite of the brain. Nothing supernatural about it. I admit that I have yet to figure out the minutiae of its biology, but it is without a doubt just a parasite.”
“Great.” I rolled on my other side, turning my back to him to disencourage further explanations - with little success.
“The eggs or larvae - I'm not yet certain about that point - are obviously in the saliva and transferred to the blood of the new host. When the old host dies, the parasite - which is, of course, also dying at this point - takes control over it and tries to spread to other hosts - no doubt, a cunning and elegant mechanism to ensure-”
He interrupted his monologue when I grabbed his wrist. I pulled him closer to make sure I had his attention. “If you don't shut up and let me sleep, my man, I swear I'll take that head and throw it into the Thames, parasite or not.”
He smiled. “I just wanted you to know that once again science prevailed over vague superstition.”
“I'm glad,” I answered already half asleep again.
He straightened himself and I could feel him looming over my bed for a few moments. “I'll tell you tomorrow,” he said eventually before he slipped out of my room.
Recipient: mainecoon76
Author: schwarze_elster
Characters/Pairings: Holmes, Watson (slashy gen or squinty slash)
Rating: R for violence
Warnings: zombies (therefore crack & violence)
Note: Dear recipient, I don't even know how 'cracky humour' turned into Victorian Zombie Apocalypse. I hope you don't mind that kind of thing. If you do, I'm sorry and I can only ask you to concentrate on the schmoopy and silly bits and skip a few lines each time the word 'ghoul' is mentioned.
Summary: A small Victorian village has a severe case of ghouls. Watson remembers what really happened in Maiwand. Holmes takes the impossibility of the events rather personally. Then he takes a head.
Impossible
Contrary to the majority of the population to whom spring was more then welcome after the bleak winter, Sherlock Holmes was prone to black moods when the days got longer. This was due to a slight hay-fever which made him in turns melancholic and irritable beyond the usual measure. It was a bright morning in March when I found my friend in the living room after two days of sullen silence and doleful violin music, engrossed in a letter.
“It is inconceivable what people will believe in order to avoid logical thought,” he said in an aggravated tone, when I sat at the breakfast table. “Superstition, my dear Watson, is hostile to scientific explanation; by providing a seemingly easy answer it makes us blind against a possibly complex but comprehensible truth.”
“Man has not yet reached the boundaries of his knowledge,” I countered mildly, glad to see him in higher spirits than he had been the days before. “You must concede that there might be more things between heaven and earth-”
“O that again! Why is it that everyone seems to feel obliged to cite that Danish ghost story when it comes to this line of discourse? No,” he sniffed after being interrupted by a sternutation, “there is much unknown between heaven and earth, but the fact remains that it is in this realm and thus in the realm of natural laws.”
“What brought this on?” I asked. “I assume it is a client's letter you're crumpling?”
“Read it!” he said and carelessly tossed the note onto the breakfast table.
Dear Mr. Holmes, [it said] I do not know how much of the occurrences here in Foxhole have made it into London press and if the articles that must exist make clear how strange the circumstances of the murders are. It is a dark and serious affair, the perpetrators are violent against everyone and without sense. It pains me to speak of demonic possession, but having seen one of them myself, I fear I cannot find a different explanation. Whatever this evil is, it spreads. Some of those who survived an attack of the monsters swear they recognized one or more of the recently murdered among them. What can be said without a doubt is that in the three days since the first incident their number has grown, as has the number of their victims. Our village is fairly secluded, but more than its extinction, which seems almost inevitable, I fear that the curse could spread wider and become a threat to the whole Empire!
In the hope that you can shed light on this horrible mystery, yours faithfully, Doctor Ignacious Gloster
I must have looked terrible, struck by a sudden wave of confusion and fear as I was, because Holmes came over with two long strides and sank down on his knees next to my chair, an expression of concern on his face. He gripped my arm, a welcome sensation in a moment when my surroundings seemed strangely surreal. “My dear boy, what is it?”
It took a few moment to gather my wits. Had I not sat while reading the letter, I might have sunken down to the floor, loath as I am to admit it. There is something deeply unsettling about being confronted with memories that one had believed to be nightmares and delirious distortions of reality brought on by fever. “We need to take this case,” I said at length.
I was deep in thought throughout the hasty preparations for the journey and the cab ride to the station. Holmes respected my silence, but for concerned and enquiring glances. On the train, we found an empty compartment and as we settled opposite each other, Holmes kept staring at me with those keen grey eyes. Were it possible for one person to read the thoughts of another, Holmes would have found the way. He was near enough deducing them most of the time and it troubled him more then he would ever admit, when he found himself unable to do so.
“Let it be, Holmes,” I said tiredly. “I'll tell you as soon as I make sense to myself again.”
He leaned back into his seat and looked out of the window with a faintly dejected look on his face, but it could not be helped. However veiled his ridicule for the supernatural was towards the clients who came to him with such an explanation - and I have to say, it was usually not heavily veiled - I felt that I could not stand it at the moment should he scoff at this. The descriptions Doctor Gloster had given of the attackers in Foxhole were too close to what I had decided to be figments of my feverish mind all those years ago.
A sneeze brought me out of my musings and I looked up at Holmes who was massaging his temples with the tips of his long fingers. “You can say what you want about London and its toxic atmosphere, but I would rather not leave it this time of the year,” he complained.
“Aren't you interested in the case?”
“I'd hardly be here if I wasn't,” he answered. “The papers reported violent riots in the country, which was interesting insofar that no motive was evident. Doctor Gloster's account paints a similar picture, likewise without giving a plausible explanation. In my experience there are two types of circumstances that demand my faculties for fine analysis and deduction: those in which everyone is sure they know what happened and those in which nobody seems to know anything.”
“Do you have a theory yet?”
“No. Judging by his letter, Doctor Gloster is an educated man and not habitually superstitious, but if I had to go by what he told us, I had to theorise that the dead are coming back as monsters to attack the living.”
He said this with the same light derision I had come to expect from him in these matters, but his tone did nothing to stop a cold sensation of imminent danger to run down my spine and settle deep in my guts.
From the train station we took a dogcart to Foxhole, a lengthy ride through a wild and wayless part of the country. The driver had many a story to tell about Foxhole and what was happening there, though Holmes had established early in the conversation that the man had not been to the village in more than a fortnight and neither was he acquainted with anyone who had been. In spite of this clear dismissal he rattled on about bandits, fugitive slaves from America and even werewolves, without giving the impression of favouring one of these rumours; maybe he believed in a combination of all three.
The rough path we were driving on led into a forest and after a mile or two over a bridge that wasn't inspiring confidence so much as a fairly clear mental picture of its eventual collapse. Behind it the village lay, ghostly quiet for the early afternoon, the only human noises were the hoofbeat of our horses, the creaks of the old dogcart and the occasional sniffle from Holmes.
The driver stopped, obviously unwilling to drive further into the village, so we took our sparse baggage and got off the cart. He agreed to come back for us tomorrow morning, but as we watched him drive away I felt strangely deserted.
“I'll admit, this is uncanny,” Holmes remarked drily and far too loudly for my tense nerves. His agile glance roamed over the houses along what had to be the main road of Foxhole. My hand had crept into my coat pocket to curl around the familiar weight of my revolver without conscious thought. After contemplation of whatever observation he had made, Holmes started walking in the opposite direction of the bridge and I followed hastily.
We had only walked for a minute or two when a dragging sound behind us made me look around. What I saw confirmed my earlier apprehensions; three ragged figures with the powerless posture of sleep-walkers who came towards us with sickly erratic movements. Their unholy eyes were empty and their faces pale and terribly contorted. I grabbed Holmes by the arm to drag him away from the ghouls, only to see that there were four more of them before us.
Many flattering words can and have been said about my dear friend's great intelligence and his unshakeable nerves, but in moments like this my uncharitable thoughts on the topic were, that he is simply too fascinated by unexpected turns of events - poisoned darts, fort example, or raving glowing dogs the size of a small horse - to be as terrified as any sane person should be. As I was looking for an escape route and berating myself for packing additional cartridges into the bag where I wouldn't be able to reach them fast enough, the confounded man looked at the monstrous creatures with the scrutiny and detachment of a scientist and smiled.
To our left was a small house surrounded by a well-kept garden. I took Holmes by his wrist, lest he forgot to flee over the novelty of bloodthirsty villagers trying to encircle us, and we scaled the low picket fence with little difficulty. There was not much hope that it would delay the ghouls for long. We ran over neat vegetable patches towards the house. The door led into a small hallway and I hurriedly closed it and barricaded it with a small cabinet.
“A disease?” Holmes murmured. “Or possibly a drug.”
I'm afraid this was the moment when I lost my temper and shoved Holmes against the wall behind him. “They are not interesting, you bloody imbecile! They're dangerous! Stop examining them and start running!”
“I did run,” he said with calm dignity in spite of the hard grip I had on his shoulder. “And I fail to see how any danger can be averted by not examining it.”
I stared into his cool grey eyes for a long moment and felt myself calm down again. With conscious effort I eased my hold on him, but found myself unable to pull my hand away, not yet ready to lose the contact altogether. “Alright,” I said with a deep exhale. “Just- by God, whatever you do, don't let one of them bite you.”
He lifted one eyebrow delicately. “I had no intention to do so.”
“Perfect, forget I said it, you will get ideas.” There was a hysteric laugh stuck in my throat and I could hear a noise outside, no doubt the ghouls coming over the fence. Then I felt Holmes' hand on my shoulder and it startled me how his expression had shifted from aloof to concerned in the few seconds I had looked at the door.
“My dear man, this is not like you,” he said softly and I felt his thumb brush over my collar bone as if to sooth me. “This is not the first time you and I have been in mortal peril together and we always get out.” His eyes were very serious and there was no doubt he was right. “I just need you to be yourself.”
“Yes,” I said automatically, and then again, “yes.” As myself this time. He was right, this blind fear was beneath the man I aim to be. “I'm sorry. It is- just not every day that one is confronted with one's nightmares.”
There was a fleeting look of curiosity on my friend's face before he settled for a tense smile. “It's quite alright, old boy. We need to get out now.” He pressed my shoulder before he let go to walk down the corridor. “You might have noticed that the windows are nailed shut, while the door was unlocked. Someone used this house as a hiding place, but left it - probably for a good reason.”
I followed him - what else was I to do? - and we passed the staircase and the doors to living room and kitchen. When we turned a corner and entered the dining room, we saw that the French windows that lined the far wall of the room were shattered, their shutters broken or ripped from the hinges.
“Out the back door,” Holmes commented under his breath as we crept silently towards the windows. He stopped at the fireplace to take the poker. Outside, the terrace and the small lawn were empty, as was the neighbouring garden for all we could see. Holmes inclined his head and lifted his eyebrows in question. Ready?
I drew my revolver and nodded.
He went first, cautiously stepping over the shards of glass and broken wood to avoid making a sound. He slipped through a gap in the hedge and waved for me to follow. We crossed two backyards in that manner before we turned a corner too rashly and ran into a dozen of the horrible creatures feasting on a corpse. We withdrew hastily, but not fast enough; some of them had seen us and took up pursuit.
We fled along the windowless side-wall of the house, through a chicken pen that was empty save for bloody feathers. They were close behind us, but I was hesitant to shoot for fear that he loud noise would draw more of them towards us. The fence at the far end of the pen had no gate; Holmes climbed it with the same ease and swiftness that had baffled me before and made me think once again what an excellent cat burglar he would have made had he put his singular mind to it.
I was only a second behind him, but as I pulled myself up over the top of the fence I felt the cold hard grip of one of the ghouls around my ankle. I tried to kick myself free and saw that Holmes had stabbed the poker through the fence. It was buried deep in the abdomen of the monster, but the grip did not shift by an inch.
“No good,” I said through clenched teeth, “aim for the head!”
A distasteful frown crossed his face, then he pulled the poker out again and thrust it through the skull of the appalling creature. Abruptly, my foot was free and I scrambled over and fell down next to Holmes, who let go of the poker that was stuck in the ghoul's skull, to take me by the arm. He pulled me up to my feet quickly and dragged me with him, away from the fence and towards the front of the house. This time, we slowed down before we reached the end of the wall and glanced around the corner; neither of us was able to suppress a startled flinch when the door flew open.
“Here, quickly! Come in!” A gaunt little man waved us into the house and started to barricade the door as soon as we were inside. “Have you been bitten?” he asked before he had even turned the key in the lock.
“No,” I denied quickly as we helped him to shift a wardrobe.
“Doctor Gloster,” Holmes said to the man, when the door was sealed shut at last. “I am Sherlock Holmes and this is my friend and partner Doctor Watson.”
As the man turned around to us, his face showed the deepest regret. “You came,” he said. “I had hoped you wouldn't. I'm so sorry to have lured you here. When I wrote the letter two days ago I had no idea that it would turn out so badly for us.”
“It's quite alright,” Holmes said with a twisted smile. “Your problem seems more interesting than I imagined.”
“You could say that.” The doctor gave a tired laugh. “How did you know it was me who wrote to you?”
“Just simple observation; you are left-handed as the letter you wrote to me indicated and I should be very concerned about the state of my mind if I was unable to recognize a man of the medical profession under any circumstances.”
“I see you live up to your reputation. Alas, I am not sure it will help us.” He shook his head in resignation. “But come on in! It would be very rude not to offer you a drink.”
He led us into the living room and poured three glasses of brandy. If I had needed evidence that the events of today had unsettled my friend almost as much as myself, the fact that he drank the brandy while on a case would have been enough.
“I should look after my patients,” said Doctor Gloster after a few moments of brooding silence.
“How many people are left?” asked Holmes.
“Just us, as far as I know. The village is very small to begin with and a number of the houses are only rented to visitors in the summer. We are seven , including the two of you. My two daughters Rose and Anne, Anne's husband Jonathan Tyrone and his mother.”
“They are injured?”
“Jonathan and Anne, yes.” The doctor put his glass down and turned to go. “You can come along if you like.”
We followed him up the stairs an towards one of the bedrooms. “Anne has suffered a head injury when they had to escape from their house,” the doctor said, “but Jonathan...” he didn't finish the sentence as we entered the bedroom. On the bed lay the young man Jonathan Tyrone and next to it sat an elderly woman, clearly his mother. Despite the half-drawn curtains, I could see at once that he had a high fever.
“He was bitten,” I heard myself say even before the thought had fully formed in my mind.
Doctor Gloster looked at me with surprise. “Have you seen something like this before?”
I nodded and had to close my eyes for a moment to gather my thoughts. If everything was true, what did it mean? “There's a chance he survives, but if the fever kills him, you have to be careful.”
I could see Holmes' questioning glance from the corner of my eyes and looked away at Doctor Gloster. “You have seen it, too,” he said gravely. “They wake up again.”
“Impossible!” Holmes said emphatically.
Gloster looked at him with an almost apologetic expression and gave a helpless shrug. “Three days ago, I would have said the same thing. But you saw them outside. When they wake up, they're one of them.”
For a moment Holmes looked the way he did seconds before tearing apart a particularly stupid theory of one of his professional colleagues, but then he just stormed out with a pressed “Excuse me,” followed by a shout of “Watson, come!” from outside. I feigned confusion about this behaviour until I had left the room, then followed the sound of Holmes' steps downstairs and back into the living room, where he was pacing in front of the fireplace with uneven strides and bouts of eerie stillness.
It was no mystery to me what had angered my friend. Trust Sherlock Holmes to take something as nightmarish as the dead coming back to hunt the living as personal affront. I stood in the door-frame for a long moment, waiting for him to speak.
“My method, Watson!” he said at last. “Excluding the impossible to find the truth. Do you see? My method depends on the impossible being impossible. There must be an explanation!”
There was a desperation in his voice that made me ache for this man who believed in logic more than anything else in the world. I went over to him and stood in his way until he looked up and I could see his eyes. For a moment I regretted all of this like it was my fault; my friend was never meant to look uncertain.
“I am sure there is an explanation,” I said firmly, “and if anyone can find it, it is you.”
He looked away for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. “In order to do that,” he began, then broke of and started again: “You never told me what happened in Maiwand.”
In spite of the horrors I had to fight a smile. It would be easier to tell with the knowledge that he had already deduced it by half and would not derail me with an argument about superstition this time.
“We called them ghouls; I don't know who suggested the name. In Arabic folklore they are desert demons who eat the dead to take on their form. It seemed appropriate. I don't remember everything that happened. We came there expecting the enemy and found the whole village turned into demons. We still fought the Afghans and they still fought us, but the ghouls made no distinction. I don't remember much of what happened after I was shot and by the time I was in Peshawar I was already half convinced that the ghouls could not have been real. Some kind of ruse of the enemy. Then came the fever, everything became unreal and somehow I forgot that the ghouls were more than a fever dream.”
“What do you remember?” asked Holmes after I had fallen into silence for some time.
“They are not human, they don't talk and they are not the person they were in any way. They just attack any living person they see and seem to feel no pain, but you can kill them by beheading them or by destroying the head. When they bite someone, the person suffers a fever and-”
I was interrupted by screams from above and we ran up the stairs, but when we came to the bedroom we were too late: Jonathan had died and the monster he had become had killed the elderly Mrs Tyrone at his bedside. It turned towards us, face pale and smeared with blood, and looked at us with his unblinking demon eyes. Before the creature could fully stand up from his crouch over Mrs Tyrone's corpse, I shot the monster.
There was a commotion from the next bedroom and we hurried over. In the hallway stood Doctor Gloster with his two daughters, one of then crying out of her senses, held up with gentle hands by her sister and father who had clearly hindered her from going into the other room. “No,” Anne Tyrone whispered under tears, “not Jonathan!”
She was a beautiful woman with dark brown hair that fell in curls over the bandage around her head. Even under tears the set of her dark brown eyes was remarkably similar to that of Doctor Gloster. Her younger sister had darker hair and slightly softer features, but it was easy to recognize them as sisters.
“I'm sorry,” I said to the poor woman. “He had become-”
“I have seen it once,” she interrupted me, clearly fighting for composure. “It is not you fault, Doctor.”
“Nevertheless-”
A loud rattle from downstairs made me stop and we all listened in a breathless silence. There it was, a second time and again: a knocking and scratching at the front door.
Gloster went to one of the windows to look out. “There are so many of them,” he reported and swore when we heard a new impact to the door. “They seem to retain remnants of intelligence. They clearly know that we are in here.”
A loud blow alarmed us that the wardrobe had fallen over under the assault of the ghouls and then it wasn't long before the first of them came up the stairs. Holmes and I threw a small chest of drawers down the stairs that made them tumble over in an ugly heap of moans and twitching limbs and bought us a little time.
“Can we get out from here?” Holmes asked.
“Over the balcony,” Rose Gloster said, “along the downpipe.”
She didn't waste time in leading us through a small drawing room and out onto a balcony that overlooked the garden.. It was empty; the riot at the door had apparently lured the creatures to the front of the house. After a silent debate that was as heated as it was short and fought with glares and Holmes' infuriatingly raised eyebrow, I pressed my revolver into his hands and went down first. It was easy enough, but standing on the open lawn with the knowledge that the ghouls were just around the corner was as nerve-wracking as the fact that Holmes was still in even greater danger. Rose climbed down next, swiftly enough, then nothing.
I waited for a few uneasy seconds. “What is going on up there?” I asked the girl, but she just looked at me helplessly.
“I don't know, Anne should come after me.”
I was torn between the impulse to go back and the knowledge that I couldn't possibly leave the poor woman alone down here. We waited for what seemed like hours in this tense situation but what must have been barely a minute, then Doctor Gloster climbed down the drain, and after him, nimble as a cat, came Holmes. At first, the relief to see my friend unharmed made me blind for the grief on Gloster's face.
“Were is Anne?” her sister asked with a frantic whisper.
“Locked herself in the salon,” Holmes answered hastily as Doctor Gloster seemed unable to form the words. “To delay them. I'm sorry, but it won't do any good to stay here.”
We ran to the neighbouring garden Holmes and I had come from as silently as possible. Without discussion we had come to a mutual understanding that we would try to reach the bridge and get out of the city. I led our little group, Holmes with my revolver at our back. As we passed a chopping block I pulled the axe out of it to arm myself and it wasn't long before I needed it. From a patch of hedges a ghoul sprang at us. It was alone, which was lucky as they were only truly threatening in a crowd.
“The head, Watson!” Holmes hissed with silent urgency when I was about to deliver the first blow.
I aborted the movement to throw him a confused glance and side-stepped the ghoul's attack, then decided that this was no way to conduct a conversation and smashed its head with the axe. “What?”
“I want a head,” Holmes said as we fled further down the lawn, his tone petulant.
“What? Why?” I would like to say that I was completely baffled by Holmes' lunacy, but long association with the irritating man had given me a good notion of what this was about. Still, I was loath to encourage him in any way.
“Don't be obtuse, man. A head. I want to take one. This has to be something in the brain, so could you find it in yourself to refrain from spoiling every single one of them and get me an intact head?”
In retrospect, I find it deeply worrying that I had anticipated this.
“On another occasion,” I ground out and the horrible man had the gall to smiled at me.
“At your leisure, my dear fellow.”
We crossed two more gardens without incident and I had hoped that said occasion wouldn't arise until we reached the bridge, when we ran into a group of three ghouls. I smashed the head of the first one - admittedly just to be contrary. With the second one that came at me, I tried to aim for the throat with the axe, but it ducked and the axe went in by the ear.
“Is it really too much to ask?” I heard Holmes behind me, clearly annoyed with me now. He threw himself at the last ghoul, toppling it over so that it lay prone on the ground. I heaved a resigned sigh and severed the head from the shoulders with two messy blows. I am determined never to dwell on what the Glosters might have thought of that display.
“You realise that is next year's Christmas present,” I remarked as Holmes smiled up at me from his crouch next to the body.
“Give me your bag, it's bigger.”
I threw it at him and he proceeded cram the contents into his own bag and to place the blood-dripping head inside mine.
“You disgust me,” I declared as he pressed his bag into my free hand, but Holmes' only answer was a delighted smile and a happy wiggle of the head-containing bag he carried himself.
After that it wasn't long before we reached the bridge. It was the work of a few minutes to make the decrepit construction collapse into the river.
We had fled with the intention to come back with help to face the threat the ghouls posed, but as we looked back after half an hour of walking along the path, we saw smoke curl over the place where the village lay. Whatever the source of the fire - an unwatched fireplace, a broken oil lamp or the brave Anne Tyrone - it grew quickly. There had been no rain for days and everything was tinder-dry. When dusk fell, the flames on the other side of the river where high; eerie yellow shadows on the darkening horizon.
~*~
“A parasite!” Holmes exclaimed as he ripped open my bedroom door to walk up and down the floor next to my bed. It was about two o'clock in the morning and I must confess I was unsurprised by his sudden and noisy presence, as I had anticipated something similar for the last three days.
“Indeed,” I mumbled into my pillow, which was, sadly, enough participation in the conversation for Holmes to go on.
“A parasite of the brain. Nothing supernatural about it. I admit that I have yet to figure out the minutiae of its biology, but it is without a doubt just a parasite.”
“Great.” I rolled on my other side, turning my back to him to disencourage further explanations - with little success.
“The eggs or larvae - I'm not yet certain about that point - are obviously in the saliva and transferred to the blood of the new host. When the old host dies, the parasite - which is, of course, also dying at this point - takes control over it and tries to spread to other hosts - no doubt, a cunning and elegant mechanism to ensure-”
He interrupted his monologue when I grabbed his wrist. I pulled him closer to make sure I had his attention. “If you don't shut up and let me sleep, my man, I swear I'll take that head and throw it into the Thames, parasite or not.”
He smiled. “I just wanted you to know that once again science prevailed over vague superstition.”
“I'm glad,” I answered already half asleep again.
He straightened himself and I could feel him looming over my bed for a few moments. “I'll tell you tomorrow,” he said eventually before he slipped out of my room.