"One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead men got up to fight.
Back to back, they faced each other,
Each drew their sword and shot the other"
Sherlock threw down his violin in frustration. He had not had a case for months. It was quite difficult to find one, as everyone thought that Holmes the younger was a fraud… a suicidal fraud, who had killed himself by jumping off St. Bart's Hospital. Sherlock had moved into a flat on the opposite side of London to Baker Street, because a man like John was very hard to deceive. Under the name of "Herr Selohm Colok" he had taken on a job as an arranger for a small-scale musical theatre company. It was quite well paid, but boring work and he desperately needed something to utilise his enormously intelligent brain, but without revealing his identity to the world here was little he could do about it. Daily papers littered the floor, evidence of futile attempts to amuse himself.
"SOLAR ECLIPSE – DAY WILL TURN INTO NIGHT" warned one.
"One fine day in the middle of the night," Sherlock muttered to himself as he strode around the room, "Two dead men got up to fight…" he froze midstride in shock.
He leapt across the room to the newspaper to check the date. Tomorrow. The eclipse was tomorrow! To be confident, he checked the name of the journalist who had written the article… Kitty Reilly.
"Yes, yes, YES! Kitty Reilly!" He couldn't contain his excitement as he sprang up and almost smashed his laptop keyboard in his hurry to obtain more information, more knowledge, so that he could be certain about what would happen the following day. Suddenly, he ran back to the pile of newspapers – where was it? He had seen in… yesterday? The day before? Every day was the same now, so he couldn't tell. Yes! There it was. The report was from three days ago, "GRAVE ROBBERY – ACTOR'S BODY TAKEN". His name, what had the actor's name been? Richard Brook…
"YES!" he punched the air with excitement. What on earth would happen tomorrow, when two dead men got up to fight?
Kitty Reilly walked into her office after her lunch break, her high heels clicking on the wooden floor. Since she had published her article on the fake detective, Sherlock Holmes, business had boomed for her. She had a much flashier workspace, with the newest software installed on her iPad and Blackberry. Not all of the money had come via the reporting profession though – she had been rewarded extravagantly for publishing two articles recently – one about a church yard robbery, the other about an eclipse – she didn't know why or who had sponsored her, but she didn't give a shit. To her, it was just money, wherever it came from. She checked her emails – two new messages. One was some poor sad whose house had been burgled and wanted her to report on it, but the other was more interesting. Or terrifying, depending on how you looked at it. She quickly opened a Word document and started typing her fingers a blur as they hit the keys. "JOURNALIST RECEIVES DEATH THREATS IF DOESN'T KEEP QUIET", she could picture the look on her boss's face when she sent this article in.
"Ha!" Kitty said to the empty room. "Like I'm going to listen to a death threat!" She looked at the email again, for reference.
"Perhaps you should listen to it, Miss Reilly."
Kitty's heart skipped a beat. She knew that voice. It was the voice of a man who had gone out with her, a man Sherlock Holmes had hired to portray the arch villain Jim Moriarty, a man who had died five months ago and a man whose grave had been robbed three days ago. Richard Brook.
Looking at him now, she began to suspect that perhaps Moriarty had been real – her suspicions were grounded on the fact the he was coming straight towards her with a loaded gun in his hands.
"One fine day, in the middle of the night…"Jim Moriarty smirked as he walked past a news-stand filled papers with the headline "JOURNALIST SHOT". It was ten o'clock, with sixty minutes to go until the solar eclipse.
"…Two dead men got up to fight…"
Sherlock Holmes grunted as he extracted a rather special rapier from underneath a large pile of oddly shaped packages. There were forty five minutes to go until he solar eclipse.
"…Back to back, they faced each other…"
Moriarty didn't knock as he entered the house of his second victim – one of the "grave robbers". The unfortunate man was dead before he hit the floor. There were thirty minutes to go until the solar eclipse.
"…Each drew their sword and shot the other."
Holmes paced around his room, then jumped up and put the kettle on – you never quite knew what would happen with a man like Jim. There were fifteen minutes to go until the solar eclipse.
At precisely eleven o'clock the sky grew dark. "One fine day had turned into the middle of the night."
A man who had shot himself in the mouth five months ago let himself into the flat of a man who had jumped of a hospital roof five minutes afterwards. "Two dead men had got up to fight."
Jim Moriarty walked slowly backwards through Sherlock Holmes's flat. Its inhabitant turned in his chair towards the intruder as the man turned to face him. "Back to back, they had faced each other."
They unsheathed their modified foils at exactly the same time, flicked the point towards their enemy's heart and gripped the handle tightly, depressing he trigger. "Each man had drawn his sword and shot the other."
"Nice enough place you've got here" remarked Jim as he dusted off the discharge that comes from firing blanks, "But not even near 221b standard."
"Well, in Baker Street," Sherlock replied as he poured out the tea, "I had Mrs. Hudson."
"Oh yes! I must say I'm rather surprised you survived this long without starving." There was humour in his voice, but no smile reached his lips as he tapped his modified rapier on the side of his shoe.
"The nearest Pizza Hut wasn't hard to find." Sherlock drank his tea thoughtfully, looking over the rim of his cup at his 'guest'. "You didn't kill me."
"Oh no, of course not! Honestly, Sherlock, you think I'd do it again that quickly?" Sherlock's archenemy laughed and shook his head. "You're far too interesting to kill! I really thought I'd lost my only way of having fun on that rooftop… But I'm sort of glad you're still alive, means I'm not gonna be bored for a least another year… Fun times coming up, Sherlock!" The man stood up and walked out of the flat.
"Catch you… later?" Sherlock stared out of the door warily.
"No you won't!"