Chapter 1 - The Void
Disclaimer: I own none of the characters except for my original.
It must have been days now. Yes, he was sure it was days. And it made itself felt, oh yes it did. His mind was beginning to fail him, skipping beats. Yet to succumb to the pressure meant… It simply wasn't an option.
He knew what was happening. He knew he had been a dead man from the very moment he saw his friend fall to his death from the rooftop of a hospital.
John Hamish Watson was a dead man.
The specifics didn't matter now. On his commute to work every day, he saw the world, he felt it as he brushed by faceless men and women, he tasted it in the curry he had for lunch. But the world blinded him, numbed him and any taste that reached his tongue turned to rot then and there. He stood for long bouts of time in the shower and only noticed afterward that two hours had gone by. He didn't see faces in the crowd, as some people were wont to do. He didn't see anything.
John was a façade. He was a shell without an inner. He had seen friends die before, right in front of him, one second being there and the next sprayed like paint over the canvas of the desert. But if pain was a spectrum, then this would be far beyond it.
He wanted to die.
His desire was duly noted.
Moments before disaster, Neill Rowley was slowly driving his polished cab through a sunny London. He had the window on his right down to let in the breeze that shook the lime trees that lined the streets.
What a time to be alive, he thought. What a time to be in London.
He had a photo of his wife on the dashboard.
It was nearing late afternoon and when no more calls for a cab came in, Mr. Rowley decided to call it a day. The arrow of the accelerometer moved. He started to whistle jovially.
When he passed St. Bartholomew's, he was momentarily distracted and thought about a Daily Mail article he had read recently in passing. A Study in Scarlet – the blood, the deceit & the myth of Sherlock Holmes. His eyes inadvertently latched on to the spot where the blood was still a rusty smudge.
There was a jolt. Then a spin as Mr. Rowley instinctively gripped the steering wheel. A deadly spin. The alarm of the car he crashed into went off.
A silence followed, a silence always follows a storm.
There was a man lying in the street with a punctured lung and a bleeding heart. His body was contorted with spasms. The blonde hair was matted with blood.
"Sh-"
That was the last time he spoke. They took him to the emergency room, they performed surgery on him and heroically kept vigil over his fragile state. Mr & Mrs Rowley had already sent flowers. The handwriting of Mr. Rowley on the card was shaky.
But death had already come for him, settled over him like a sheet of snow on a garden bed.
In the early hours of morning the next day, John Watson passed away.
Looking back, dying was the easy part.
Free from corporal restraints, the essence of John Watson comfortably fell through layer after layer of softness. It was all colours and it was all silence. Time, space, all those common things fell out of importance. It wasn't a question of being anymore, it was having been.
Of course, when John would an eternity or a mere minute later open his eyes in a very alive manner, he couldn't remember anything happening in between dying and waking up. Only a trace of it remained inside him, like a print of a moth on his heart.
It was the heartbeat that he noticed first, then the red under his eyelids. Oddly it was not the contradiction of the situation that puzzled him, but the way it seemed so familiar. Listening to a heartbeat, cocooned in red, was part of a primal memory of himself as an embryonic mass in his mother's womb. It was the innermost comfort man could reach.
Yet he couldn't stay in that comfort for ever. He opened his eyes and looked up at a sky heavy with clouds. The clouds were edged with black.
He was lying on a patch of yellowing grass and he became aware of his own body. He could bend every joint and tense every muscle. No lung was punctured as they filled up with air and sank thereafter like bellows. He scratched the back of his hand and felt the pain.
Whatever life this was, he was alive. Whatever world this was; he was in it. How had Sherlock put it? – Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
John Watson had died. There was no mistake about it. But whether he had come back to life, or had been revived, he was most definitely not dead anymore. So much could be proven by hearing the blood rush through his veins and feeling his brain buzz with thoughts. He was as he had been just before his death. Same age, still as slim from the weight he had lost after the fall, even still wearing his clothes. He smelled the sleeve of his jacket and it smelled like London, of exhaust and wet crowds.
When he got up from the grass and looked around, he found himself standing in a small park, surrounded on all sides by tall buildings. Behemoths with holes of darkness, looming over the naked trees. The streets were empty, as John saw. They were empty of people; they were empty of cars. There was no sign of life, no shop window with neon lights, no pub out of which a stream of music and football could be heard. Everything was clean and sterile and John knew that wherever he was, he certainly wasn't home.
Without knowing where to go, he began to walk. First out of the park, then along the broad city avenues. Aside from the buildings and the walkways, there were only a few streetlights here and there and perhaps a bin or two.
He thought of crying out in the hope of evoking a response from this desolate place, but thought better of it. There was something about the deafening silence of this city that worried him. A gnawing feeling in his gut that something was not quite right. Though the streets were empty, by the grime of the footsteps on the concrete, he could make an educated guess that there was life somewhere. The question was: Should he pursue it?
He squared his shoulders and continued on under the ever darkening sky. Any minute now, the clouds would give way and rain shower the city. Except the minute never came.
All of a sudden he stopped. He was robbed of the breath he was about to take.
The black of the door. The shine of the numbers. He approached the door of 221B cautiously, afraid that a step in the wrong direction would shatter the illusion. A knot blocked his throat as he looked at the home that he had thought he would never see again.
The door opened as he gave the knob a light push. The light of the stormy world outside streamed into the dim hallway. The interior he stepped into was completely different. The wallpaper was flaking off the walls, there was no carpet softening the floor. The architecture was more similar to a postmodern approach than a Victorian one.
But there the stairs were. John steeled himself and ventured upstairs. He had already died once – what was the worst that could happen? The wooden floor creaked and groaned. If this building was occupied, he had made himself heard.
At the top of the stairs he came to a second standstill. The door to what most likely had been his and Sherlock's apartment was wide open. The windows had been blown out and in came a cold hard wind, making the curtains flutter about. The sitting room was bare save for a smiley face spray-painted onto the wall.
But that wasn't what made John stop.
The tall figure standing looking out of the window, a violin resting on his shoulder, turned around.
Sherlock Holmes smiled. "It's about time you showed up, John!"
More coming soon.
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