Two Little Gods

Chapter 1: Raveling

Sherlock was sitting in the purple velvet chair, kicking his short legs back and forth; back, forth. It seemed to him he had been doing so for hours, kicking back forth, back forth as he watched the sun crawl across the opposite wall and listened to the innumerable ticking clicks of the many antique clocks arrayed in the room just behind him. From these devices arose, hourly, semi-hourly and quarterly cries of chimes and bells.

He looked into the palm of his hand and traced the lines of his hand over and over again, eying patterns, memorizing the swirls. He searched his memory for a clue as to where he had got that thin white scratch which ran perpendicular to the inner curve of his thumb. Or that smooth indentation under his ring finger - where had that come from? He could not remember, exactly. And he was, he realized, inexplicably frustrated that he could not recall. He thought, perhaps - well...

Perhaps he'd go stark raving mad if he wondered one more time where he'd got that grey smudge.

Perhaps... it was the long hours in the long hall which made his imagination twitch so. Or might it be the alarming chiming of the clocks, in their disruptive harmony, which caused a collision of colors and chemicals in his young mind?

He laid his curly head against the carved oak chair back, cool to the skin - despite the heat of the southern sun beating down upon the house. He looked upward to the high ribbed ceilings, the curves of which he could just barely distinguish in the darkness of the hall. The rippling glint of highly decorated carved surfaces caused him to question how his grandfather had managed to so effectively transport Victorian England into 20th century southern France. Yet somehow he felt more a part of this twisty and macabre world than that which burned outside the oak doors. He would rather moulder in the hall than be subjected to the radiation of summer which often burned his skin and made him squint painfully.

Bored, bored, utterly bored - sat in the hall. This is what the cunning old man did to punish him when he had been a very wicked boy. And he had been, Sherlock knew that he had been a very wicked boy.

But he had become so accustomed to this punishment that it was a punishment which no longer caused strong dread. He had developed the ability to, quite easily, escape all this tedious business of sitting in a dark hall in a hard chair - by slipping into a world of his own making. Left to his own devices, he was boundless within his imagination.

Until the cry of the chimes.

They clanged and sung and screeched down the echoing hall with what seemed to be an intended malevolence. Sherlock fell face first out of his reverie.

In his mind, he can see many things with startling clarity - he doesn't dream of horses running through the green fields of old England, not in his fantasies. He doesn't ride one off to fight the flying dragons like St George did in the songs sung at school - he dreams in puzzles, in complicated rhythms and the act of unraveling them. They are imperfectly mirrored in the tiles of the floor which he stares at, persistently - memorizing, naming and pulling apart the looping and interwoven imported Islamic designs - little masterpieces stolen by imperial conquest, he knows: Ripped away either by the words and or the swords of men with rosy cheeked affectations, he is certain - he dispenses with the personages and gently teases apart the patterns into cogent lines. He fantasizes of walking through a black and green sharply manicured maze, closing in with rapidity on something truly truly terrifying - but he is not afraid, his little heart beats, it races to the end. And there are monsters - monsters are the reward once the maze is conquered - but these monsters, they are the strangest - they have human faces. A thrill runs through his arms, causing his skin to prickle as he looks up at the paintings hanging, across from him, on the wall. The smiling rosy-cheeked stupid faces of the stupid peasants and lords - they smile stupidly and prance and prattle and make their hay - not knowing that the woman in the corner who is leaning on the hay stack, with her hand running through the hay? That is not her hand. That is the hand of the man whom she has murdered and hidden in the hay. But no one can see this but him and it excites more than disturbs him. She is covering up her heinous act by participating in the frolics of the day - she, by benevolently watching the dance, is getting away with murder. Clever woman - were he like her, he would have smiled and laughed and joined in the dance - then he wouldn't be sitting in this hall all morning. He would not be forced to listen to the irritating clanging which sounds like children crying, laughing on the playing field in Sussex - the laughing and the jumping, they're running their healthy little bodies around, their stupid rosy cheeks flushed - running, jumping, pushing - laughing, crying, crying and screaming -

He banged his head violently against the back of the chair, hard and repetitively. Shortly the oak headrest hammered a response from the adjacent room.

A door lock clicked and a cold hawkish face emerged and gave him a sharp look.

Sherlock had been slumped limply, his thin white leg in askew. He presently drew the cuff of his uniform trousers back down and twisted himself into a proper seating in the chair. His eyes drifted back to the tiles to trace a path away from the old man's hard expression -

- an expression Sherlock defiantly engaged in mimicking.

There was a sweeping sound of cloth and then an altogether different face appeared from the door way. Her countenance was as consistently mild as the tone of her voice:

"Sherlock?"

The thin line of his lips relaxed. His fingers untwisted from the ancient upholstery as he calmly slipped out of the chair and followed her into the study.