MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic violence

I have come to tell you a story, dear readers.

I suppose you will want to know me, my name, why I have been chosen as your narrator. Readers are very strange that way. But very well, I shall tell you.

Some of you will know me as a figure, some will know me as a person, and some a friend. I am your concept of heaven. I am your nightmare of hell. I am the moment when a clock no longer knows the second and the space in between heartbeats. I live in sword casings and gun barrels and the wheels of automobiles. I am the minutes that take away your sand-soft footprints and the vices that take away your minutes. I am the corner of an unfinished painting. I am the empty chair at the empty table that you studiously avoid and the perfume on the dresser that is no longer used. I am stone figurine on a cold headstone.

All of your gods are imitations of me. I have seen myself in black cloaks and with the bone-pale face of a monster. I have seen myself with the gaping maws of animals. I am not so frightening. Are not your white-robed angels pictures of me?

I am Death.

Do not gape in wonder, reader of mine. I am not new to you. Do not laugh. I have walked beside you. Do not shake in terror that I speak to you. I am your closest confidant and your most hated enemy. Do not stare so openly. You have met me many times this very morning; we brushed elbows. Do not turn away. You run from me all of your days and yet I hold your hand tightly in mine.

You are the one that put it there, dear reader.

But you have come to hear a story. I have come to tell it to you. These seem mutually agreeable do they not? Humans. You are all so fond of tales, chronicles, epics, yarn-threads that carry through the ages. You're all very desperate to continue on in memory after you have come into my arms.

And perhaps you shall. Your authors and your artists have certainly made a valiant effort in that direction. But you see, readers of mine, such is the beauty of my profession. The fact is, I am uncaring. I do not feel for you. I will simply take the painter and the author and you. All records are meaningless, as I shall one day take the record-keepers. You are all the same and you are all meaningless to me.

The same, an entire race full of the same. Each of you is just as alike as the one before, a set of skin full of dreams, full of hope, full of terrible light that is all the same. You never look around, never see me, never see my fingerprints on your palm. All your lives you scurry about, readers, running just as fast as you can towards the end when the end is nothing but me. I am everything's end. I am the roadblock at your silly little one-man parade's end.

You see, I have made a study of you. Yes you, reader. You are enemy and the creator of me. I am naught without you, you see. And I have noticed some things. One does that, when one is a watcher, a patient observer. Titles matter to you, it seems. Kings are set in place and taken down and propped up once more before I can touch them. You gather for weddings, awards, significations, crownings, but these, audience, are placeholders. They mean nothing to me. I hold you all the same, cold and singular in my arms. You all die the same way, dear children, quietly, without pomp, and so very, very alone.

And I assure you that the worms will not move along simply because you are buried with a crown.

But I digress.

My account is singularly fascinating for the fact that it is the only one of its kind. I do not remember you after I have held you. Where would I keep all of the thoughts? Humanity is many and the dead are more. It is best for us both if you are quietly forgotten.

Despite this, there is one that has remained. Surely he has long faded from the general consciousness of the living, but he has stayed lodged in mine. A remarkable man. He made his living following in the footsteps of the way I make mine. I could never shake him. He knew all my tricks and was never once afraid.

These things alone would not have been enough to save his memory. Many of you are remarkable, but in my profession one does not pause to remark. What set him apart was that I spoke with this man. Thrice we came face-to-face. And that, readers, is where my fairytale begins.

His name was Sherlock Holmes.

We met many, many times in his youth. I watched. I am always watching, dear readers. The living are interesting in the way that small, numerous insects are interesting. I follow your paths the way you may stare at an ant colony or a handful of ladybirds on your bedroom wall. You do not make sense. So much running and so much struggle when in the end you all rest your heads in my elbow. I carry you all the same.

He was a different sort. He watched me in return. I took a bird the first time I saw him. Large eyes traced my path. He knew where I had come from, that I had been in the stone thrown from a neighbor boy in a far-off window. He seemed to follow when I spilled purple-red onto the concrete, seeing the way I gathered in its small brain. He knew as he examined the soul-less thing I had left on the walk.

It was unnerving, audience.

So I stayed around. Looking back, I should not have. But we all must have our indulgences, would you not say, dear friends? This child was an indulgence. I had never seen one like him. Would you not wonder at the ladybird that met your gaze? I wondered. And so I watched.

He must have been quite young when we began this dance around each other. I learned quite a lot in those first years. How he managed to track me so thoroughly lost a little of its mystery. Before delving into that, however, allow me to paint the backdrop for you.

A cold country home is the background of our artwork. It is alone, like the boy, a towering structure that sprawls across its five acres. Brick is not covered in ivy and windows stay shuttered. It is not a place that will ever decorate a glossy postcard. It is beautiful, surely, but unwelcoming. Servants are quiet and voices stay low. The brush is dipped in blues and grays, picked out by the best interior designer English money could buy. I think she must have specialized in sadness, this designer.

The edges of our canvas frame featureless countryside. It stretches into the horizon-line in an unbroken wave, an ocean of grey land wishing to be grey sea. The long drive vanishes into a dirt path. There are no more manners to break the monotony. This ship stands singular in its massive amounts of alone.

Now the eye moves restless to the middle ground of this little boy's life. Here we see a handful of disgusted governesses. They never stayed long, for the young Sherlock already knew more than they ever would. His father's tomes had all been digested by year three. Oxford sent him an application at five. You see, ignorance does not tolerate well anything but more ignorance. These women are immortalized in harsh angry brushstrokes, dark purples and the reds of the slaps they delivered when a tongue was too cheeky. Happiness is not a guarantee, readers. I know this best of all.

But our middle ground is not all blurred. One stands out, a softer violet than the rest. A middle-aged woman at the time, she was tolerant of our protagonist's knowledge and mostly let him do as he pleased. Mauve fades into white of sunlit afternoons on a beach. She is a brightness in the washed-out painting. Mrs. Hudson he called her, though this was not her name.

When she left to join her fiancée was the only time I saw the child cry.

Finally the brush touches the foreground. Here stands a family. This is not what it was, readers, but this is what we shall call it, for brevity's sake. You see, it has been my experience that a family is built by what you refer to as love, or at the least mutual affection. Not so in the Holmes's household.

The looker first sees a mother, well-dressed and empty around the eyes. Pale and quiet she was; Sherlock gained his skin and depthless eyes from her. "Mummy" we shall call her. Broken is an appropriate turn, I believe. She much resembled an expensive porcelain doll that had taken one too many tumbles down a flight of stairs. Her head did not sit so correctly upon her slender neck, as if she was often forgetting it was there. Money and pure seclusion had done to her what I have done to so many. There won't be much left to carry when I come to take her.

Next to this young, soiled mother we see a rounded brother. He is also impeccably turned out. A child-sized umbrella is clutched white-knuckled at his side. A security-blanket of sorts, as we shall see. He is the older of the two offspring and the most prevalent member of the kingdom in Sherlock's head. An absent mother would of course require a substitute.

Finally we come upon the father. A genius of business, he has been called after I have carried him away. A monster was what they called him in life. Millions, he made, in some market or other. Not all of his tactics were savory, but we must not judge dear readers. He took a pretty young wife and carried her away to his home and his money and his enforced solitude. No visitors came to see her or the boys, when they were eventually conceived. They were alone in every sense of the word.

If we peer more closely, we see a man who has come to truly despise himself.

He traveled. This was preferable to all, for when he was in England, well, then the mother wrapped her best furs around her neck and wore low hats. Sherlock's nursemaid was careful to keep him quiet and out of sight. He once spent a week asleep after being daily drugged by the sharp nursemaid. Even so, the girl often found herself pulling out longer shirts for him to wear and wrapping him in scarves up to his cheeks to hide what all could see.

For you see, readers, monsters never like to be looked at very closely. And our child had very keen eyesight.

Now that the artist of fate has constructed the canvas of our story it can begin.

As I have said, I watched him. There was quite a lot to be seen behind those quiet walls.

He was bright, so bright. It was the life in him. It was painful some days, to watch such a lightness, so much mobility of feature, and so much life, readers, he was full of it. The child in love with Death was himself made of life. He was loose-limbed, quick to speak. Always thinking, I remember. That stands out now as I look behind me down the path of years laid out like stones. I could hear it, his mind. It clicked like a machine. I suppose you, you humans, would not notice such a thing, so enclosed in your own heads, but I did.

He was made of opposites as well. He was a lover of silence but was fond of plucking absently at a violin as he grew older. Conversation was a bore but he chattered to himself all the while. He was hurried. Walking was only used as a tool. Running was preferred. Yet when he was not moving, he was perfectly statuesque. (It might interest you, dear audience, to know that he learned stillness from the cats. They were his mother's one fondness. I once watched him stare unblinking at one for two and a half hours, mind whirring like cogs.)

There was very little in the musty home that could hold his interest. At the same time, there was not much that could not, if only for a moment. Science, mainly chemistry, though he did not always call it that, was a lasting love. Books were his escape as they are for many of the young. They spoke to him in a way that few in his life were capable of.

And of course there was his great obsession, me. I am the great problem. And there is nothing Sherlock Holmes enjoyed more than a problem.

He followed everywhere I went. A memorable occurrence-though everything is memorable with Sherlock-was a sparrow I carried away. I became the floor-to-ceiling window that it winged into on a silent winter day. A black head watched dispassionately as it fell to the ground with a broken neck. Almost before my hands were upon it, there he was, readers, as immovable as the daylight, and with the same keen brightness in his eyes.

I simply had to stay. What would such a young thing do with a dead thing? Children and corpses do not occupy the same planes. It carries a wrongness in it. And that I believe sums up his problems nicely. He carried a wrongness all his days that you, you readers, look at and retract from. You look the same at me. That is the reason that I stay a step behind, hand in yours. For when you look fully on my face, you all scream. Such screams I have caused.

But I digress.

He carried it away, held fully in his palm. Held, not cradled, as other children would. But he was never a child in the correct, accepted way. He laid it out on a coffee table, sweeping crayons away to leave marks on the wood flooring. Kitchen knives held its wings spread. Firstly he plucked the feathers one by one from its red breast, taking note of the bumps and bruising that followed. Ribs separated like pages beneath his fingers and he did not seem to note the blood that covered his trousers. He took its tiny heart out and examined it. The dissection was put to an end when his mother entered the room and promptly fainted.

This, dear readers, was only one of many meetings between the boy and I as his shoes pinched tighter and were replaced. Time and I strode side by side and we watched the curls grow longer on his forehead.

But you, audience, are not interested in the existence of a single boy, if a singularly remarkable one. You came for a tale, and a tale I shall give you.

I have now sketched the outline and can begin to fill it in. You will wonder, I am sure, why I hung about. Wonder you should. I was curious myself. But Time has his mysteries the same as I, and mysteries he surely had in store for me. Over the years I would discover, readers, what kept me. I stayed for a conversation. Well, truly I stayed for three.

Three times I looked fully into the face of Sherlock Holmes.

Three times I spoke to him.

Three times he looked fully into mine.

Three times we came to understand each other.

The first will be an unremarkable spring day. Well, the Holmes family found it remarkable, I believe. The benefactor, the father, had returned. Mummy was sweltering in a hat pulled low over a cheekbone and sleeves that were very careful to conceal bruises in the shapes of fingers. The youngest offspring knew why his nursemaid had taken out his best silk shirt. Cotton was much too rough for the welts creating banners across his spine. He had also come to understand why it was his father never took the riding crop with him on rides. He had seen the stable boy rub the red from it.

But these occurrences do not make our day remarkable. All commonplace, dear audience, for a young Sherlock. I have come to tell this tale for one reason.

Death's child was playing at pirates.

An inattentive nursemaid, an empty and much abused Mummy, a married and absent governess, and a brother scared witless had conspired to leave the boy unattended and to his own devices. Alone in his father's study he had constructed his vessel. A desk was a great table to lay plans upon. A map of the world covering the carpet provided a goal. Stuffed prizes from hunting trips provided enemies. For you see, our protagonist had acquired knowledge but had not yet created intelligence from it.

He was bright, but a light does not know to shy away from its father.

Before we meet him there, let us retract to the garden. Here smokes a father of the name Holmes. A once-white riding crop dangles towards the dirt. It has been stained quite red, readers. Tobacco forms a curling cloud but through it we can see stained trousers and a sleeve ripped from cuff to elbow. He has broken a stallion; its knees were dashed upon the ground by a too-tall fence. A stable boy holds a rag to opening on his cheek as he delivers a bullet to the horse's brow.

Now, if you please, allow us to peer a bit further. Into a preoccupied mind we now delve. Thoughts of morality swim thickly in nicotine. I do often produce these sorts of things, you see. I am the cause and you are all merely side effects.

Within this mind we see a past. It is not pleasant, readers. And I am sure that you shall not like to hear about it, so we shall skim quietly upon the surface. But we see a past. It is full of hate. He has been called a monster, you will remember. The past we see is monstrous. It is a clever one as well. He has stolen. Much of what he now rests comfortably upon, safe in a twisting sea, was the small buoy lifting another out of the waves.

Yes audience, he was monstrous. Still a monster, as the crop carves a trail into the dirt by his side.

Let us not dally longer. Our tale drags. The reader thirsts for action. What is so remarkable in a beaten boy and a pirate father to make a man such as Death recall them? Well I shall tell you. Right now, it seems.

Into the study he goes. The scene must be set before the actors can deliver their lines, do you not agree? Our set is very cleverly built. All the comforts of a loving family-man are present. Heads hang upon the walls beside photographs of long dead kin. Tomes that he never opened populate cities' worth of shelves. It is warm, leather, a womb. And in the womb we find the child.

He has not turned at his patriarch's entrance. He is aware of the fact, but a fact does not require acknowledgment to be acknowledged. He stays at his play. A brother has been recruited to reach higher shelves and to construct swords of a more sturdy nature. The brother rests on a corner and watches as thumb-tacks are going into the map; one by one they take residence in strategic ports and well-traveled trade routes. They are marks of future conquest. One by one they shall be overcome, until he is top pirate and best in the world. A reasonable afternoon for a small boy.

"I am going to be the best in the world. I will take everything valuable from the people beneath me and keep it on my pirate ship. I will be very rich, won't I, Mycroft?"

He does not see as the father takes a handgun from the desk at his back.

The brother sees.

All at once I am a man. I am a bullet resting in a readied chamber. I am a father and a son's only nightmare. I am a finger trembling on a trigger. I am holding a barrel of metal between stony eyes that seem to laugh at me. I am Death. The son will grow to be the father, will grow to be me. See how he talks of stealing, of conquering? He's smarter already. He's playing at pirates and he'll grow into me and I left the décor on his ribs and he's playing at pirates.

I look into the face of Sherlock Holmes and he looks into me. He understands what I am and he is unafraid. A face of stone meets mine. I can see his grave.

Then I am a mother's choked sob in the doorway. I am a gun turning the wrong way. I am a brother's hands holding an umbrella open above a head because someone told him that the rain was sadness and that if he had an umbrella sadness could never touch him. I am a bullet that is a half inch of iron away from a tongue. I am a seven-year-old's blank expression and widening eyes. I am trigger pulled.

I am Death and in that moment my arms were full of a monster of a man. I held him close as his blood stained a world red.

You see, readers, it is a terrible thing when a monster grows a consciousness.

Sherlock never did play at pirates again.

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