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harrisonkitteridge-blog · 8 years ago

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Sherlock Holmes was a thing of the shadows. He was also the bearer of the light that drove out the darkness.

Before Holmes Met Watson by Harrison Kitteridge

Prologue

Sherlock Holmes was a thing of the shadows. He was also the bearer of the light that drove out the darkness. Living out this paradox could be quite stressful. Obfuscation. Lies. Deceit. He had always been fascinated by people’s attempts to subvert the truth while living in a world in which there were cameras everywhere, constantly recording, sending everything back to The Archive, where anything governments or other powerful entities hadn’t obscured was searchable. Everyone could see everything, know everything about everyone else. “The Age of Transparency” was how the headlines had heralded The Archive coming online. Mendacity now took careful planning. Saying you were working late when you were really at a seedy motel rolling around on the bed with a colleague was a nearly impossible sell now. As were most forms of impersonation. The ubiquity of biometric readers employed to do everything from unlock doors to sign for packages meant most impostors quickly set off alarms when The Archive recognised someone was in two places at once. It had become so difficult to hide, and detective work was about uncovering concealment. The spotlights The Archive shone into people’s lives made Sherlock’s illuminating insights seem like a flickering candle, and he feared he was obsolete.

As a boy, Sherlock would spend hours upon hours neglecting his school assignments to browse the Personal Archive Files of strangers. He watched in fascination as the chain reactions of their ill deeds accelerated towards their explosive finales. All the evidence was there. The outcomes were predictable, yet the affairs, the embezzling, the betrayals always seemed to blindside the victims. They see, but they do not observe, Sherlock often thought. More damningly, they thought The Archive could do the observing for them. Everyone was watching everyone else all the time, so the misapprehension wasn’t wholly unreasonable. Nevertheless, it didn’t erase the simple consequence: Sherlock Holmes was a detective who almost never had any cases to solve. If you are what you do, what did it mean that he was constantly doing nothing?

John Watson was a doctor and a soldier. He lived and worked in a war zone. He saved the dying and on rare occasions had to pick up a gun and kill the living. He’d been trained well to do both. He preferred the former. There were moments when John was alone that it seemed to him his life was some sort of dream or even a simulation. War was terrible and chaotic and hellish. It was also thoroughly ludicrous. There was always something to do, though, and that left you with little time to realise that nothing made sense. The why of the fight was impossible to appreciate when you were in the valley of death. And when you stepped away far enough to look in at the mass slaughter, you realised the why was never good enough, and the true insanity was anyone thinking the depth of the suffering was justified. John struggled with the contradiction in himself: he was a healer and a killer. There was something he enjoyed about the risk of standing next to that yawning, dark abyss. He tried to ignore that part of himself and focus on the bit that spent exhausting hours in the operating theatre patching up the wounded. He thought of himself as a surgeon first, but his title belied that. Everyone called him Captain Watson.

Day One: Shopping

Adaptation. It is the driving force behind evolution. The species that is better adapted to its environment is more likely to survive. Humans are incredibly adaptable. We can adjust to almost any circumstance, survive nearly anything. John Watson pondered these things as he broke into a clammy sweat and hid behind one of the large potted plants lining the gleaming hallways of the mall. He’d adjusted to life in Afghanistan, to the gunfire, the bombs, the blood, the death. Calm in the face of chaos had become his default setting, and all this… peacefulness had his nerves singing and his pulse racing. He wished he’d thought to spend his leave in his hotel room and just have everything he needed delivered: food, spirits, companionship, but especially the items he’d promised to pick up for his mates stuck back in Kabul. He’d thought the novelty of going to one of the few remaining shopping centres would be a bit of a lark, but he hadn’t realised just how much he had changed. He’d always managed to take leave with friends he’d been deployed with, and without that familiar buffer he was flailing wildly and on the brink of a panic attack all because he was in a shopping mall that was too brightly lit and filled with civilians whose situational awareness rivalled that of a thick plank. He was beginning to get strange looks.

In another part of London, Sherlock Holmes was doing shopping of his own.

They claimed the stigma had been removed, but it hadn’t. He could see it in the eyes of the pedestrians who saw him make the left turn into the building; he could see it in the eyes of the staff. There was always a measure of contempt chased with a sharp spike of moral superiority. It was the pity that rankled him the most, though. But he kept coming to the Controlled Substances Dispensary because he knew the molar concentration of what he was getting down to four decimal places. The precision of it all provided a sort of comfort, although he found the blankness of the stark, unadorned white walls sinister – their cool inhospitality was quite deliberate. He provided a retinal scan and was assigned a number. He’d long realised that no one liked to sit by the vents on the north side of the room, which blew arctic blasts in the summer and seemed to ooze positively equatorial humidity in the winter. It was early spring, so predicting the temperature was a bit chancier, but he took his usual seat directly under the openings and was shocked to find the problem seemed to have been repaired. A pleasant, gentle breeze wafted over him, and, as he watched a young man (early twenties, art student, hooked on some variant of methamphetamines) shamble towards him, he knew his day would go poorly.

“Nice day for it,” the art student said, smiling as he took the seat right next to Sherlock.

“Is it?” Sherlock replied, giving him a scathing look.

“I suppose not,” the young man said, recoiling slightly. At least he had the decency to take the hint and move a few seats away. Sherlock sighed in relief. He abhorred familiarity.

Back in the shopping centre, John had abandoned his cover and made his way into a supermarket. He’d picked up some chocolates and biscuits for his colleagues at the hospital and was consulting his list for what to buy next when he came to the fresh fruit section. He paused in front of what seemed like acres of bananas and stared. The sheer abundance of it all seemed preposterous to him. It’s all that unblemished yellow, he thought. He picked up a hand of seven and added it to his basket. He consulted his list again and headed off to find some authentic hot pepper sauce for his Jamaican anaesthetist.

Sherlock’s number was called, and he was ushered into the back room to receive his standing order. He’d never seen the woman manning the inventory before. She had brassy red hair and a nosy demeanour. He braced himself.

“Mr Holmes?” she asked, and her nasal inquiry made him want to throw things. Of course he was Mr Holmes. Hadn’t his number just been called? Hadn’t he just been escorted in?

“Yes,” he replied. He could hear the faint whir of the machinery retrieving his medicine and felt the blood in his veins pulse a bit faster. The vials popped up from beneath the counter.

“A bit strong, isn’t it?” the clerk said, examining one of the labels.

“I prepare the final solution myself,” he replied, reaching for the vials. She withheld them.

“And you’re allowed?” she asked.

“Yes,” Sherlock responded, clenching his fist. “I’m allowed.” He stared at her without blinking, and after several moments she handed him the vials.

“Would you like some syringes?” she asked.

“I have my own, and I don’t share,” he replied, tucking the vials into his coat pocket. Part of him didn’t like the profound sense of relief he received from feeling their slight weight set him ever so marginally off balance. But hearing them clink together, knowing he had them if he needed them set his mind at ease in a way nothing else could.

As Sherlock left the dispensary, he witnessed a strange phenomenon. In the distance, dark objects were falling from the sky. At first, he thought they might be delivery drones that had been clumsily hacked and were part of an inept terrorist attack, but they were the wrong size and shape. In addition, there were no wailing warning sirens, no people running, no screams. There was only an ominous silence that seemed to have swallowed the noise of the city.

John heard them smack into the pavement wetly before he saw them out of the corner of his eye. It took every ounce of his self-control not to yell “Incoming!” and dive into an improvised foxhole. But they weren’t bombs; they were birds, plummeting from the sky like giant black hailstones, already dead before they hit the ground.

“It’s raining crows,” a woman wearing a mauve dress stated as their small crowd stood and watched disbelievingly as the avian projectiles exploded as they hit the pavement, splattering blood and entrails astonishing distances. “It’s raining a flock of crows.”

“A murder,” John said mostly to himself. “That’s what you call a flock of crows.”

“I think they’re ravens,” a man said, grimacing at the carnage and flinching at each thudding splat. “They roost in the bell towers of some of the cathedrals and in the Tower of London.”

“What are they called?” a boy asked, pulling at John’s sleeve. “If crows are a murder, what are ravens?”

John looked down at the boy. He was slender to the point of breaking, white as milk, and something about the seriousness in his pale eyes and the wildness of his dark curls set John on edge. He reminded John of the stories of the Daoine Sith his grandmother had told him. The strange boy standing there looking like one of the faie, the dead birds, the constant prickle down his spine – it all seemed to augur ill, and suddenly he wished to be back in Edinburgh starting his medical studies. That’s when he’d been happiest. Hadn’t he? “An unkindness,” John finally answered, feeling compelled by the child’s unwavering stare. “They’re called an unkindness.”

Day Two: Gardening

It was dark, dank, and everything smelled of shit. But that was how you grew magic mushrooms, Sherlock mused to himself. Psilocybe Stantonia to be precise – powerfully hallucinogenic and highly in demand. They were the fungal equivalent of precious gems – more valuable than truffles even – and, while not strictly illegal, trading in them was a dodgy business. But dodgy businesses were Shinwell’s speciality, weren’t they? That and bare-knuckle boxing.

Sherlock Holmes had met Shinwell Johnson at The Ludus, an underground club dedicated to the pugilistic arts. It was a dark, cave-like, medieval sort of place with sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood and sweat. In the pits of The Ludus there were only two rules: no weapons, and you couldn’t kill anyone – it was too much bother to clear up the bodies. Oh, and there were no rounds; the bout ended only after one of the fighters couldn’t get up any more. Shinwell had grown up there, taking on his first fight at the age of sixteen. Twenty-five years later, he had seen every combination, every dirty trick, and the vastness of his experience more than made up for the slight slowing of his reflexes. He also still had a right hook that could drop a mule.

Sherlock’s first night at The Ludus had become the stuff of legend. According to Shinwell, he had “fooking swanned in like His Majesty, the King” and stunned the onlookers by requesting to fight in the open category. To keep the fights fair and the bets coming in, there were rough weight classes, and the organisers tried to match fighters by skill. In keeping with the spirit of the founding of the club, however, there remained the open category where you could fight any and all comers. Over time, it had supplanted the heavyweight class, but every now and then some arrogant sod swaggered in and received a spectacular thrashing. There were a flurry of bets on Sherlock’s fight, and when he stripped to the waist and revealed the track marks on his left arm, the odds against him surviving more than three minutes soared to 50-to-1.

Shinwell had objected on principle – an addict wasn’t in the proper state of mind to appreciate the consequences of the suicidal decision he was making. That, and he was obviously a toff. If he died, it would bring the filth. Shinwell had nearly come to blows with the bookmakers, and only his long history prevented him from being thrown out and barred. He looks made of marble, Shinwell thought as he observed the swathe of pale skin stretched over Sherlock’s thin frame. He’ll shatter at the first blow. Shinwell had watched in concern as Sherlock meticulously wrapped and taped his hands. At least he knows to do that much, Shinwell thought, some of his worry easing. As he watched Sherlock warm up and stretch, he began to wonder if he’d jumped to a parlously mistaken conclusion. Yes, the man needed feeding up, but there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, and Shinwell recognised the camouflaged strength in his muscles and tendons that practitioners of kung fu called “iron wires”. But more than that, it was his economy of movement; there was a precision there that could only be the product of a disciplined mind. He began to shadow box, beginning with some simple combinations, and Shinwell choked on his chips. God, but his hands were fast. His strange, almost translucent eyes were clear and focussed, and there was something distinctly lethal lurking behind them. Shinwell had seen enough of them in his time to know: The man was a killer. Shinwell downed his pint, headed back over to the bookies and placed all of his night’s winnings on Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock’s opponent went by the moniker The Butcher, and he was a literal giant – enormous, thick-necked and notoriously able to absorb punishing blows. But he had grossly underestimated Sherlock’s speed, skill and strength. The quick combination that had The Butcher stunned then out cold before he hit the ground came after only thirty-five seconds. Shinwell had never heard The Ludus so quiet. Sherlock asked to fight again, and Shinwell let his substantial winnings ride.

The next bout remained one of the most beautiful fights Shinwell had ever witnessed. Sherlock’s adversary, a skilled mixed martial artist who called himself The Sword, was much more careful than The Butcher had been, circling Sherlock warily, trying to get the measure of the new phenomenon. Sherlock waited patiently until he had no choice but to attack, and Sherlock seemed to melt away only to surge back towards him, raining exquisitely placed blows to his vital organs. Shinwell almost wept at the elegance of the execution. Wherever The Sword went, Sherlock was there first. Can he read minds? Shinwell thought as he watched Sherlock sidestep a blow that would have at least glanced anyone else and viciously box his opponent’s ears. Shinwell knew how disorienting that ringing inside your head could be and was unsurprised when The Sword met his end.

Sherlock retreated to his corner seeming deaf to the cheers at his triumph. He was glistening with sweat and flushed, his dark curls nearly sopping wet. Shinwell was straight enough to calibrate a level, but he realised the enigmatic stranger could have nearly anyone in the room if he thought to ask, but he seemed uninterested in making any acquaintances. He had come alone and wasn’t celebrating what were thrilling victories that would be talked about for ages. He quickly cut the tape from his hands, towelled off and dressed. When he left, ignoring the many offers to buy him a pint, Shinwell followed.

Too many egos had been bruised and too much money lost for there not to be an attempt at retaliation. Sure enough, a group of The Butcher’s mates already had Sherlock cornered when Shinwell exited the building.

“Now, now, lads,” Shinwell warned. “No one likes poor losers.” There were enough of them to subdue someone of even Sherlock’s prodigious skill, but with Shinwell added to the mix, the odds had shifted out of their favour, and they wandered off muttering threats.

“I could have managed,” Sherlock said.

“Of course you could,” Shinwell replied. “There’s nothing like a good street brawl, though, is there?”

“I suppose not,” Sherlock said, something approaching humour entering his expression. At that moment, Shinwell Johnson decided to adopt Sherlock Holmes. He was an absentee parent, but Sherlock found he could count on him whenever another pair of fists were needed, and Shinwell actually had someone clever to consult about his schemes. That’s how they’d ended up covered in shit, harvesting mushrooms in a derelict greenhouse.

“How long will it take you to test them, then?” Shinwell asked.

“Most of the night,” Sherlock replied, looking at Shinwell’s thrice broken nose and scarred knuckles. All the abuse he had taken would soon tilt him towards a dilapidation that matched the disrepair of the greenhouse they had just been picking through. Sherlock turned away, wondering if he had caught a glimpse of his future.

Approximately 40,000 feet above, a military transport plane had just reached cruising altitude. One of its passengers was John Watson. He hated flying. He wasn’t frightened of it or anything; he just found it depressing. Shouldn’t there be some sort of teleporter that beamed you thousands of miles away in seconds? Or at the very least a hyperdrive that could complete the journey from London to Kabul in minutes not hours. What on earth were they doing on an aeroplane in this day and age? He sometimes wondered if they were part of the problem – he and his colleagues. Ready bodies to throw in front of the canons and pull the triggers made the decision to fight more palatable than it should have been, and violence and war thrived on fear. Fear is a powerful motivator, but it is also the destroyer of dreams. They’d stopped dreaming, hadn’t they? They lived perpetually crouched in a defensive position, their minds crippled by the uncertainty wrought by decades of instability.

Not liking the direction his thoughts were taking, John rifled through his bag in search of something to eat. He was slightly overwhelmed by the variety of snacks he’d crammed into his baggage, but he managed to decide on some savoury crackers and a paradoxically firm but creamy new variant of White Stilton. He offered some of his meal to his neighbours, who gladly accepted in lieu of army rations. The crackers were crisp but not hard and flaked pleasantly on the tongue. The seasoning was well balanced if just the tiniest bit over-salted, and the cheese complemented it well. Some wine was in order, John thought in disappointment. Curious about the ingredients, he read the label as he bit into another cracker. Rosemary, thyme, and (yes!) that was a bit of dill. He didn’t have a sophisticated palate, but he grew up with a father who was an excellent cook, and his mother had kept a small herb garden in the back yard. John was often called to help with the weeding and harvesting. As light as the work had been, he had always complained.

“Johnny,” his mother would say. “I want you to always remember that we are connected to the soil. We have to respect it.” And she would plunge his hands into the wet earth and laugh as he grimaced.

He’d made her stop calling him Johnny when he was a teenager. It had seemed so important then. When his parents had left him at his dormitory that first day at medical college, their eyes had been shimmering, and his mother had embraced him. “I’m so proud of you, Johnny,” she’d said, ruffling his hair. He’d blushed and smoothed his hair down, embarrassed for his roommate to see him being coddled. The insane idiocy of youth: making people ashamed of being loved.

“I told you to stop calling me Johnny,” he’d said, not wanting her to leave but desperately needing to be out on his own.

“She’ll call you whatever she likes,” his father had said gruffly, pulling him into a tight hug. “Work hard,” he’d admonished.

“I will,” John had promised.

That was the last time he’d seen them. The accident had been so bad they’d had to close the caskets. Everyone told him he should have sued the automobile manufacturer and the company that had made the self-piloting software, but that would have meant reliving it all, thinking about them like that. He couldn’t have borne it. Someone else had brought the court case, and he’d eventually received part of the settlement. He gambled the money away over the course of a single weekend.

John had started an herb garden many times over the years, and each time neglect had caused the plants to wither and die. He lived a soldier’s life, and it censured the delicacy required to make things grow.

Day Three: Gifts

Besides the quaintness of the mode of transport, the thing John hated the most about flying was how shattered he always felt after a long trip. It didn’t matter if he’d had a good kip and drank his weight in fluids; he always got off the plane feeling disorientated, dehydrated and in the mood to punch things. It’s all that recycled air, John thought, blinking to try and moisten his arid corneas. Kabul was parched, and so was he.

John was taken aback by the immense relief he felt when he entered his stark quarters. The tightness in his chest had eased with each second he got closer to the base, and the sight of his cot, camp stove and canteen almost brought him to his knees. This temporary structure in the middle of a war zone, these humble necessities created more of a feeling of home than the country of his birth. Part of it was his comrades-in-arms. The smiles and warm greetings of “Captain Watson” provided succour he hadn’t quite realised he’d needed. There were people here who knew him, who valued him. There was also a bracing sort of comfort in how unequivocal the mortal threats that surrounded them were. Death comes to us all, but for most it was an abstraction. Its proximity removed some of the fear. John found there was a certain purity in living in purgatory. Afghanistan was filled with friends and foes bent on destruction; England was filled with strangers. John strongly preferred the former.

As news of his return filtered through the base, his surgical team, poker and rugby mates all dropped by to welcome him home with warm hugs and claps to his back. And this was his home. He could see that now. He swallowed over something tight in his throat and emptied his luggage onto his cot. He sorted through the gifts he’d brought back, feeling a bit like Father Christmas. Nearly all of them had asked him to see if he could find the sweets and biscuits that had been their favourites when they were children. John supposed it lessened the sense of insecurity somehow, brought them back to a simpler time, made massive problems seem solvable. A few bottles of spirits also made the rounds. Those were for a bit of fun over a game of cards or to obliterate even temporarily the memories of the particularly bad days when it seemed they’d wandered into hell itself and the Devil had everything turned up to eleven.

John could spin a good yarn when he was in the mood, and his recounting of his sojourn to the mall had his visitors in stitches. He left out the bit about the ravens, because it seemed like too ill an omen. None of the gathered were religious or superstitious, but imagery had the power to lower morale, and, as an officer, it was his duty to keep their spirits up, even if he had to sacrifice a bit of his pride and admit he’d been overwhelmed enough by his shopping expedition to take cover behind indoor shrubbery.

They all shared a bit of scotch, and John listened as they recounted what he’d missed. Thankfully, there’d been only a few minor skirmishes, and, while any single death was keenly felt, the days when the bodies (or what was left of them) had to be stacked like cords of wood were nearly impossible to manage.

A few hours later, John was on his own again. There was one gift left in his bag. Once he’d stumbled across the snow globe with the single, blazing red poppy inside it, he couldn’t leave it behind. He’d even taken the time to have it wrapped at the store. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the gift’s intended beneficiary to come and welcome him home.

Back in London, Sherlock had managed to wash most of the stink of excrement from him and was in one of the laboratories at St Bartholomew’s Hospital testing the potency of the mushrooms he and Shinwell had collected. Shinwell had a mate of a mate of a bloke who was flatmates with a mycologist. It was a convoluted history to which Sherlock had paid scant attention then routed away from his long-term memory. At the centre of the labyrinth was the claim that this particular variant of Psilocybe had been bred to produce enhanced psychedelic effects. Sherlock’s preliminary tests confirmed that the mushrooms consistently contained much higher levels of the psychoactive compounds than would be expected – enough to defeat the purpose of their creation. The dosage of psilocybin was well above what was ordinarily consumed and would almost certainly poison anyone who consumed them.

Sherlock thought of the greenhouse Shinwell had shovelled full of shit and where he had devoted hours to meticulously minding the spores he’d spent nearly his entire savings on to ensure they sprouted. He called the fruit his “gold nuggets” – they were meant to fund his retirement. There had to be hundreds of pounds of the things.

Shinwell was a good sort for a degenerate, Sherlock thought. They weren’t exactly friends, but there was a measure of trust and loyalty in their relationship that Sherlock felt bound to respect. If the mushrooms had to be scrapped, Shinwell would get spectacularly drunk and instigate a pub brawl, but the next day he would bounce back and find some other get-rich-quick scheme. He always did. But the mushrooms could be salvaged, Sherlock pondered, if instead of drying them and selling them as edibles, the psilocybin were extracted into some sort of tincture that would administer the correct dosage. A new delivery method would set Shinwell apart from his competitors and perhaps even allow him to charge a premium.

Sherlock sketched out some ideas for the extraction and began a rough first attempt at the procedure. In the lab next door, an exhausted graduate student had fallen asleep standing up and missed a crucial step in her experiment, which exploded. It was nothing catastrophic, but it was enough to startle Sherlock into knocking over his equipment and breaking some of his glassware. He cut his hand rather badly and sucked at the gash while he reached for paper towels to staunch the bleeding. He tamped down on the wound and looked for the first aid kit. He spent longer than he’d care to admit awkwardly using tweezers he’d hastily sterilised to remove the splinters himself. He was minutes away from the casualty ward of a major hospital, but he didn’t want to wait for hours to be seen for a laceration, which, while nasty, didn’t appear to need stitches.

After he cleared all the debris from the wound, he cleaned it thoroughly and bandaged his hand. As he replaced the first aid kit, he heard the sound of bees buzzing. How on earth had they found a way in? He turned around and saw an enormous swarm across the room, and his usual fondness for the creatures was supplanted by a deep fear. They were too large, he realised. They were the size of sparrows. They weren’t real.

“I’m hallucinating,” he said.

He was suddenly and violently ill, turning himself inside out vomiting. The extraction. When he’d cut his hand, some of the concentrated extract must have got into the wound. It was being delivered through his blood, and he’d ingested some of it when he’d sucked the injury.

The bees were coming.

There was someone laughing maniacally.

Was it him?

His heart.

He could feel it slowing down.

It would stop.

He would die.

He needed to speed it up.

The cocaine. It was still in his coat pocket. He needed a syringe. He managed to pry the first aid kit back open, sending its contents flying.

Everything was tinted hot pink, and the sound of the bees tasted like burnt roast.

What was he looking for?

He picked up some ointment and some tablets. No, that wasn’t right.

His heart. It was dying. That’s it: a syringe for the cocaine. He rifled through the mess on the floor until he found one. He crawled back over to his work station and pulled his coat down from the stool where he’d laid it. His hands were too big to fit in the pockets, which were filled with tiny crabs. He shook the coat upside down, emptying everything in his pockets onto the floor. The crabs scurried away, and he slithered on his belly on the floor, following the rolling vials across the room.

He ripped the syringe from its packaging with his teeth. His hands were too small to hold it properly. It told him to go away, that men with small hands weren’t to be trusted. He roared at it to be quiet and shoved its pointy mouth into the vial of cocaine, pulling up the plunger to fill its throat and choke it with the solution.

A vein. He had to find a vein.

He injected himself, felt his heart begin to race, stumbled out of the lab into the hallway and collapsed.

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