Let us examine a stranger.
She is sat, quite alone, in the corner of a busy chainstore coffee shop. She has ordered something, some concoction with too much milk and far too much foam for his tastes, but it sits untouched in front of her, growing colder by the second. She isn't reading, or checking her phone, or conducting in any of the frivolities common to her sex. She is sat completely still. Doing absolutely nothing at all. She is entirely content to sit doing nothing, without moving an inch, not flinching a muscle. It'd be difficult to tell if she was even breathing to the casual observer. Perhaps she wasn't. She didn't feel the need to validate her existence through actions. She is like a particularly lovely statue, cold, unmoving.
The people sat on tables near her didn't acknowledge her presence. They sat and gossiped and drank coffees and troughed down baked goods, ignoring the silent figure sat amongst them. The staff even ignored her smoking. She held a thin holder, trailing clouds of grey smoke around her like an abstract halo, flouting the smoking ban most obviously. She took a drag as if she hated it; sucking viciously, then spitting out the smoke as if she couldn't bear it, every ten minutes or so, allowing the cigarette to burn down to a stub, bleeding ash across the table. Why did no one come to stop her? Occasionally a barrister wandered over, only to return with a most bemused look upon their face. It was very odd. Surely she would stop if someone only asked her? She looked so very innocent and amenable. If she were to pick a card it would inevitably be the maiden, every time.
He will see her draw the death card once, only once, never to be repeated. This girl, this still virgin, is death and the maiden mixed together, in flesh and blood. This is her secret, and he knows it without a word passing from his lips to her ears. It is written on her face, her limited movements, her clothing. She is far too virtuous an image to be true.
She frequents this shop every Thursday at ten until one, happy in her own company, and never, ever putting a morsel past her lips. They are strange lips. They are fleshy, and the colour of dead meat, clashing fearfully with the flour whiteness of her skin. A whore's mouth, he thinks reluctantly, the same thought repeated again and again in his mind. It is what he thought the first time he saw her as he passed the window. That mouth was the first thing he noticed about her, what intrigued him the most. Those lips were repellent, disgusting, and oddly compelling. A fascination edged over the repulsion; there was small, overpowering part of him that desperately wanted to touch those lips, just for a second, just to know what they felt like, what they tasted like. It was such an unusual, peculiar desire that sometimes he wondered if it was even his, whether somehow the silent girl had put the thought inside his head.
He saw her every Thursday for four months. Then he decided to find out something more about her. His curiosity was strangely single-minded on the issue; normally he would have grown bored of this a long time ago. But her piquant strangeness had captured his fleeting attention and pinned it down. She seemed so normal she was abnormal. There was nothing he could possibly find out about her from the brief sightings. The only solution was an orange.
Frankly, there has been a shockingly few horror based Sherlock stories on this site; this is my contribution, and I hope that you find it somewhat enjoyable. It's a supernatural story that never uses the word 'supernatural'. There is no romance and it certainly doesn't end happily. I hope that you enjoy and review. If not, I hope you review anyway and inform me of your criticisms. They are incredibly useful.
