Got it off the back of a lorry, no questions asked. Soldered on some new bits and bobs, and gave it a fresh coat of paint. Good as new.
Snow was falling on London, a heavy snow that obscured everything in mounds of white. High drifts that might have been cars or post boxes or might have only been piled snow were scattered down the street. The swathe of snow muffled sound as if all the buildings of London were sealed in baffles. Cars and other noises of city life came through muted as if from much further away, as if Baker Street was on the edge of some tiny village in the Cotswolds rather than in the heart of a giant metropolis. The snow that crippled the country seemed to have driven the criminals indoors as well, and Sherlock and I sat by the crackling fire, lost in our own books and our own thoughts.
The white lights on the small Christmas tree in the left front window shed their meager glow across the frost on the glass, while the fire made the shadow of the Evergreen loom and dance on the wall above the table. The strange skull ornament, upon which I had festively placed a jaunty elf cap, was alternately lit and shadowed in a peculiar chiaroscuro.
I reached a pause in my reading, "Tea?" I offered.
Sherlock was gazing into the fire, his silver eyes gleaming and seeming to spark, lost in thought. He nodded absently and I went to the kitchen to start the kettle.
I returned with the mugs, passing one to Sherlock and then going to the right window to gaze out into the street, "Looks like it will be a white Christmas for London."
Sherlock joined me cradling his mug as well. Although it was late, a lone, hunched figure was struggling into the billowing snow, desperate to get home for Christmas Eve.
"Poor sod," I said. "He needs a good King Wenceslas to guide him.—not that horrible art curator, of course. Her footsteps would probably chill him more than the wind."
Sherlock smirked a bit, but his expressive face quickly returned to its brooding mien.
We turned from the window, shivering in its draft, to return to our cozy chairs. Sherlock resumed leaned back in his chair, fingers templed, eyes shut.
"Sherlock? What's wrong? You've been brooding all night. Is it Christmas, a lack of case, what?"
There was a long pause and I was just thinking that Sherlock wasn't going to answer when he suddenly said, "Did I ever tell you that I was stranded in Chicago during a blizzard like this on Christmas Eve some years ago?"
"What, no? What on earth were you doing in Chicago?"
"Mycroft had gotten me a position with the American Detective agency, Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations after…after I went through a bad patch here. I was bored. Their cases were petty, dealing mainly in corporate espionage and security. I could find the holes in their systems and identify stealing and cheating employees in seconds. But I was on a case that took me to Chicago.
"It wasn't difficult, but it was time consuming to find the proof that I needed, and I had been in Chicago for nearly a week. I was staying in a small hotel, rather old, dating from 1926. The rooms were worn but clean, with a simple wooden writing desk in addition to the bed. In America the ground floor is called the first floor and I was in a first floor room, number twelve. The hotel had a peculiar convention in numbering. Rather than alternating with all the even numbers down one side and the odd down the other, as most hotels do today, the numbers ran down one side, and then continued back the other way to the lobby. My room faced a narrow alleyway filled with skips from the hotel and nearby businesses, not exactly a room with a view, but as you know, I am not given to contemplating the scenery and my time in my room was spent working on my laptop. This was in the winter of 2002, just before my 27th birthday and the hotel had only dial-up connections.
"As I had no family with whom I wished to spend Christmas, the holiday didn't bother me, and the agency was only too happy to have me continue working. All would have been fine, except that I finished what I needed early on Christmas Eve, only to be confounded by a blizzard that buried the city in nearly twelve inches of snow in a matter of hours with bitter winds of forty miles per hour. The temperature was around negative fifteen and felt much lower in the wind. The city was in a state of emergency. O'Hare was closed and non-essential personnel were urged to stay home. You can imagine the severity if a city as used to hostile weather as Chicago was paralyzed.
"Fortunately there was a small pub next door to the hotel that was doing a thriving business catering to stranded visitors. I went next door at about eight-thirty and had a basic dinner of the soggy American version of fish and chips with a dreadful cold beer. Why they thought we would want cold beer in the middle of a snowstorm…
"At any rate, I returned to the hotel at nine-forty-five with the intention of doing some research on my own topics before going to bed. Chicago has a fascinating criminal history and I was considering staying a few days to look at some of the infamous locations and at records. I remembered clearly that my room was the second from the end. I was not drunk by any means, but when I went down the rather dimly lit hall to the second to last door and tried it, my key would not work; moreover, I thought I heard movement behind the door as of someone pacing. I quickly realized that I was at the door of number thirteen and that my room must of course be the third from the end.
"As you can imagine, I was rather disconcerted, as I pride myself on the observation of my surroundings, but I attributed it to frustration, the single beer that must have gone to my head, and possibly the side effects of…"
I flinched because I knew what had driven him from England and haunted him in America, but I was too intrigued by where he might be going with his story and his odd decision to tell it to me on Christmas Eve to interrupt.
"I walked back up the hall to my room," he continued, "let myself in and settled down to my work. First I put my boots next to the radiator to dry. The short boots were completely inadequate for the weather outside.
"At eleven I took a break and despite the terrible weather, opened my window for a smoke. It was bitterly cold, but the driving snow had died down and the shallow alleyway was fairly sheltered. The light behind me threw my silhouette onto the banked snow. That was how I noticed that the inhabitant of the room next door also had their window open. I both saw their smoke trailing up and smelled the cigarette—a particularly harsh French brand called Gauloises—and knew that they had had the same idea as I had. I was afraid that they were going to try to engage me in conversation in that terribly friendly American way, but when my cigarette made me cough, they quickly shut the window and the light went out abruptly. Apparently they were also reluctant to become chums based only on proximity.
"Around two am, I at last fell into a troubled sleep with dreams of running through corridors, knowing that there was something that I needed to see. If I could just get to the turning I would be able to solve this problem. I didn't even know what I needed to solve, only that I had to get to the corner.
"I fell out of my jumbled dreams at four thirty-eight am according to the glow of the bedside clock. The room felt cold but strangely claustrophobic as well, as if the room had shrunk a few feet while I had been asleep, and that that compaction was continuing still, the walls smothering in on me. At first I thought that I had just woken up for no reason, or from the cold, because my sheets were all tangled around me as though I had been thrashing about.
"But then I heard it. I know you will hardly credit the fancy, John, but it was like nothing I had ever heard before and I have heard nothing like it since. It began as a wail, as of someone sobbing loudly, but then quickly crescendoed to a nearly unbearable pitch that seemed to be coming from multiple voices and yet only one throat. I know that doesn't make any sense, but it is the truest approximation of what I heard. It made the hairs on my arms and legs stand up and brought up that peculiar physical chill that people mean when they say that their skin is crawling. At the same time it had a scraping component to it that was reminiscent of hard chalk on black-boards that made one grit one's teeth. The closest I can compare it to is the sound a piece of machinery would make if it were simultaneously being run without oil and being crushed in a compactor. A sound of metal scraping on metal both internally and externally. The sound of metal screaming in protest. But I cannot emphasize enough that this was an organic sound! There was some living thing making this noise. I could hear its breathing when it paused in its ululation. Even that was a vast sound that seemed to come from some gigantic creature in enormous pain. In the way that it rose and fell in rhythm it was… it was like the birthing cries of some impossibly enormous and monstrous thing. How preposterous I must sound."
He ran a hand through his curls which I noticed were damp with sweat. He was clearly more agitated than I had ever seen him, and yet, I could not believe what he was describing.
"I couldn't imagine why there weren't alarms ringing everywhere in the hotel," he continued. "That the night manager and all of the other guests, few that we were, were not outside the door of number thirteen, because that was the side that it was most definitely coming from, breaking in to find out what could possibly be happening.
"I scrambled to find my shoes to make my own inquiries but I could not find them. I checked the radiator where I had left them, but they didn't seem to be near the wall so I moved all the way along the floor radiator looking for them. I traversed the whole wall but didn't find them. Had I moved them to keep them from drying out completely and cracking? Had I kicked them under the bed somehow when I was getting ready for bed?
"I looked under the desk, under the bed, along the other walls, in the bathroom and in the closet, but I could not find them. I had just decided to go out in the hall in my bare feet because the noise had not abated in any way while I was searching—if anything, it seemed to be gaining depth as if new tortured voices were being added—when, suddenly it stopped altogether, leaving near total silence.
"I waited for five minutes for it to resume, and then a further ten but there was no sound at all. I looked out of my window to see if the lights were on next door, but there was complete darkness.
I curled up in the chair wrapped in the blankets from the bed waiting to hear anything, but nothing came, and I must have drifted off, because when I opened my eyes again, it was nine-thirty on Christmas morning, the room bright with the startling blaze of sunlight bouncing off of ice covered snow.
"There was a continental breakfast in the lobby and I went down to get some food which I felt that I needed after the night and I wanted to ask the manager and the other guests if they knew what had happened.
"I thought of going back to look at room thirteen to see if there was any sign of the previous night's commotion, but I didn't. I know you will hardly believe it, John, but I had almost no desire to investigate. It already seemed something that was so far beyond empirical evidence that I was…genuinely afraid to discover something that might shake my rational beliefs.
"There were only a few guests milling about and as I knew none of them, I decided, after retrieving a cup of coffee and a Danish, to ask the manager if the night manager had told him of the incident."
"'Did you hear anything about what happened in room thirteen last night? The noise was extraordinary. I would have thought that it would have brought the police, let alone the whole of the hotel,' I asked.
"The manager gave me the oddest look as if I were the deranged one and not the guest in room thirteen, and then he said the five most terrifying words that I have ever heard in my life, John.
"He said, 'There is no room thirteen.'
"I became quite angry. At the time I was not as in control of my temper as I am now."
I had to suppress a smirk at that, as I would in no way describe Sherlock as being in control of his temper now, but it is not in his nature to admit a weakness of that nature unless as a thing conquered.
"'What do you mean, there is no room thirteen. Of course there is a room thirteen. I am in room twelve and there are two rooms beyond mine before the end of the hall,' I cried.
"'We don't have a room thirteen, Mr. Holmes, no guest will stay in a room thirteen. Almost no hotel has one.'
"'Then why,' I exclaimed, thinking that I must have him on logic, 'do the rooms align on both sides of the hall?'
"'Because of the supply closet. That takes the place where the first room is on the other floors. The other floors have space for the supply closet and ice machine above where the lobby is.'
"He seemed genuinely upset at my fury. Something he said resonated with me. 'What do you mean, no guest will stay in a room thirteen?'"
"'Because it's considered unlucky by some. Silly superstition, of course, but you know how people are.' It was clear from his tone that he thought superstitious people less silly than he was trying to imply.
"But that just means that room fourteen is really room thirteen, surely people can see that?
"Have you ever heard of such a thing, John? An entire nation crippled by a superstition?"
"I have heard it, Sherlock. Many hotels don't have a thirteenth floor, or rather, it's not numbered thirteen." I thought suddenly of an old rumor I had heard. "They say that secret government organizations are contained on unused thirteenth floors. Perhaps you should ask Mycroft?" I was trying to lighten the mood—surely this was some game he was playing to see how gullible I would be—but the desperately earnest on his face told me that this was something real, or at any rate, real to him.
"I stormed back down to my room determined to prove that there was a room thirteen, that the doors had been numbered correctly and that the manager had been mistaken."
At this point Sherlock actually put his head in his hands. "I'm sure that you've guessed by now. There was no room thirteen. There was my room, number twelve, and there was room fourteen and the wall at the end of the hall with its insipid table and potted plant.
"Everything that I had experienced the night before was impossible. I had drunk too much, I had slept too little. I was suffering withdrawal. I'm sure that you've thought that, John. I know that you are aware that auditory hallucination is common in cocaine addiction. Perhaps I had even dreamt the light in the window and the cigarette—hallucinations can all seem very real.
"I tried desperately to get a plane out of Chicago that day, but because of the delays from the day before, all planes heading to Atlanta where I was based were full. I even debated taking any plane that had a seat, no matter where it was headed, but I would have had to pay for my own ticket as opposed to putting it on the company and I didn't have the funds to spare.
"And so I had to resign myself to sleeping another night in that cursed hotel, and I do mean that word, or at least I was sure that I did then. And I was trapped. The streets were still snow bound. The holiday had put a hamper on clean-up although the next day was a work day, and indeed I heard the snowplows working late into the night.
"I stayed awake, fully dressed, reading, surfing the internet on my slow connection. I was desperate not to fall asleep, afraid of what I would dream, but if I stayed awake then exhaustion might cause me to hallucinate again. I dared not go to the window to smoke, afraid that I would see the distance of two rooms between myself and the end of the alley, afraid that I would see the light and the outline of the person in the room next door. The room that couldn't be real.
"Despite my best efforts, I must have dozed off, because I woke again to noise from the room next door. And, oh, yes, I knew that it was there the moment that I woke. My room was claustrophobic again. It felt smaller, as if room thirteen needed to steal space to exist.
"Where the night before had been the sound of something in agony, tonight the sound was full of fury. Inchoate growls that made my chest vibrate. Ragged and shuddering breaths that echoed as fiercely as water turbines. A howling that whined its way up to a pitch that made the windows rattle in their frames. All interwoven, again as if a thousand individual noises made up a single sound. Whatever had been born there was angry and it wanted out. Its cries were accompanied by crashes that made the walls shake as if they would give way. As if it wanted to force its way into our world.
"I had packed my bags during the day in the hopes that I would find a plane. I slammed my laptop shut, stuffed it in its case and ran, ran from that room. I didn't look back to see whether there was a door to room thirteen. I didn't want to see it bowing in pressure, or cracking open.
"I shook the night manager awake, and demanded a taxi, cost no object, checked-out and was taken to O'Hare. Airports in the middle of the night are a desolate place, John. Even more so, this being Christmas. But I put myself on every wait list for every flight to Atlanta that they would allow. And I felt far happier and safer there with the floor polishers and the tired attendants than I had in that hotel room.
"Within two weeks I had resigned from Pinkerton and was on a plane back to England.
"This is all madness. I have no explanation. No explanation that is not impossible. I have run through every improbable scenario, that there was machinery or excavation happening beneath my room in the hotel. That I misread the numbers in the dim florescent light and that the sounds must have come from room fourteen, amplified directly to my room somehow so that the rest of the hotel was not disturbed.
"The only possible explanation is that it was a withdrawal induced delirium. That I was simply out of my mind for two nights. But why only nights? Everything seemed as normal during the day. The work that I sent in to my superiors was perfectly reasoned and adequate as everything I did for them. I held conversations with and made my usual deductions about the other guests.
"Do you have an answer for me, John? You know that I value your rationality and common sense above the nonsense of almost all other people." He leant forward in his chair, hands clasped in front of him, his intense eyes scrutinizing my face to read the truth in my answer. He looked almost ghostly or otherworldly himself at that moment.
His appeal was couched in terms of such terrible anxiety, that I was at a loss for what to tell him. Did I give him irrational comfort and if so, to which side should it fall? That he was suffering severe delusions; perhaps a good way to discuss his self-destructive tendencies, but not comforting in the slightest. Or, to confirm that there are more things in heaven and earth…
"Sherlock—" I began as gently as I could.
"Don't humor me, John," he snapped. "I expect better from you."
"Alright, then. How far into your addiction were you? How many days had it been since your last hit?"
"Ah, so you think it was the drugs?" He seemed almost resigned to this. That this was the answer he had given himself many times before, the only rational answer.
"I don't know. I can't make a diagnosis from over eight years before I even met you."
"If, John, it wasn't the drugs, then what could it have been?"
I chose my next words carefully. I didn't want him to laugh at me, and it was not something that I had wanted particularly to discuss, ever.
"On the battlefield, in a war zone, you hear of many things. Things that seem impossible, but are too frequent and too detailed to simply dismiss out of hand. You hear of mothers who sit up in the night a half a world away and know that their child has died at that moment, or fallen comrades who come and warn their unit of IEDs and snipers ahead.
I paused, "A soldier I believed I had let die who came to me in the night and held my hand to say that he forgave me." Sherlock looked at me curiously at that, but made no comment, for which I was grateful.
"I think we don't know, Sherlock. That's my answer."
"But those things are comforting. Whether true or not, they make people feel better. Even I can see the value in an extreme situation of needing to hang on to supernatural beliefs. Why would I imagine something so horrible?"
"Perhaps because you felt that you didn't deserve comfort?"
He looked away at that—back into the fire. If he had heard machinery, I could almost hear the thoughts in his whirring around as he tried to fit this idea into his world view. Which would win out, his fear of the supernatural or his fear of armchair psychoanalysis? I went on.
"But I have heard too, although thankfully never witnessed, of a darkness described that descends on battlefields. Soldiers say that it's like a cloud or a dust storm, but that it seems that you can make out shapes, figures that fight amongst the cloud, and sometimes hear noises as of far more voices than those that should be there. And then it dissipates. That kind of vision gives no comfort at all.
"I think that it is something that you must resign yourself to never knowing. I'm sorry. I wish that I could say something that would answer it definitively, but I can't."
"Thank you for listening without judgment, John. That is perhaps what I needed most of all."
"Will you tell me, someday, why you have felt so often that you don't deserve comfort?"
"Perhaps," he smiled ruefully at my deduction. "But not tonight.
"It's Christmas, after all. And I am told that Christmas is supposed to be about celebration, happiness, family…and friendship. As it is now officially Christmas by some seventeen minutes, may I be the first to say, Happy Christmas, John, and to suggest that you go to bed so that you can do all of the kind and caring family things that I know you will do tomorrow."
"Happy Christmas, Sherlock." I knew he would probably not go to bed that night, so I stood and stretched and started towards my room.
"John," he said, quietly, stopping me at the door, "Whatever you think you did, I know that you didn't let anyone down out there, just as you have never let me down. I am…I am very honored to be your friend."
John's voice is a little more canon than 2010, also story changed direction slightly at end. Hope you enjoyed.