The Desolstation of Sherlock
It was the day when Sherlock went to his sad place.
One minute he was looking at the newspaper, and then he was instantly in his memory palace, descending its spiral staircase, his coat flowing behind him, down down, plunging as fast as his spirits. At the foot of the stairs, he ran across the entrance hallway and exited, out into a thick swirling fog.
Sherlock made his way to the kerb, and entered the black cab waiting for him. Public transport was so much more efficient in his head, not that that did anything to help matters.
"Where to?" asked the driver, Jeff Hope.
Sherlock just gave him a look and that was all that was needed, and so the cab pulled out into the empty streets and they sped away, in the silence that the situation warranted, across the vast distance that was Sherlock's mindscape. While his memory palace, a place of logic and information, was at the centre of things, his feelings had long ago been relegated to the outskirts.
With no traffic and no red lights the vehicle soon reached its destination, the silence being replaced by the sound of rain. The cab pulled to a stop and Sherlock stepped out, to see the rain dripping down over the station he'd built - a place in his mind for him to go when he was sad - his desolstation.
He entered and sat down on a bench while the crowds of people there ambled around aimlessly. When he'd first built it, he'd not populated it, but being alone with his sad thoughts meant that sometimes he'd be there for days, and so, because misery loves company, he'd added people, modeled on murder victims, to remind him that his life really wasn't that bad. Having said that, these miserable people hadn't just suffered the way he had, and even worse he now realised it would soon be his turn to take his parents to see Les Miserables - fortunately he'd already started work on a mental concrete bunker in readiness for that.
As the music in the background switched from The Smiths to Leonard Cohen, he looked over at the one train waiting there. Painted blue, like the whole station, was a Thomas The Tank Engine with its smile turned upside down. He'd created it to cheer himself up, but at the moment he just thought it was silly and out of the place. Just as silly as the name he'd come up with for this place, desolstation; plays on words just didn't seem funny or clever anymore. The singing was suddenly interrupted by an announcement saying that happiness was subject to delays and that fate apologised for any inconvenience caused.
Back in the 'real' world, John was still trying forlornly to cheer him up, suggesting seeing a movie. He looked up at the movie poster that had suddenly appeared on the wall opposite, some movie about a cranky dragon, Smaug Is Bored. Surely that wasn't the title? He should really be paying more attention to names, names were important, names were everything.
He looked over at the newsstand, selling just the one edition of the one paper. Admittedly he possessed a slight ego, but the headline would have been devastating regardless.
And then there was another announcement, this time in John's exasperated voice: "It's only a typo, Shemlock."
The End
