"Sherlock." John looked down at the frail, slip of a man shackled to the table and then around at the abandoned autopsy theatre. "Once this is over, I mean assuming we survive the night and make it to dawn; do you suppose we could take on a boring case? You know, a straightforward murder, or a kidnapping? Anything really, as long as it doesn't – "
"involve werewolves?" Sherlock finished for him. He gave John a lopsided smile. "I must admit, when I asked for a diversion, I never imagined this. Still, I've enjoyed the challenge." He glanced at the clock, and then his gaze travelled to the window and the night sky beyond. "Five minutes to go. Are you ready?"
John donned a pair of latex gloves and then flexed his fingers. He picked up the syringe, checked the fit of the needle, pulled back a little on the plunger, and then set it down on the tray again. He nodded. "Yeah. As I'll ever be. You sure this will work?"
Sherlock shrugged. But what other answer could he give? He had concocted the solution in the syringe using the formulae brought to them by their client – the man currently strapped to the table – gathering the ingredients as he'd been instructed: St John's Wort by the light of the waning crescent, aconite in the dark of a new moon, ferula root in the first quarter. Then he'd prepared each by a set of complicated procedures before finally compounding all three into a viscous dark gold coloured liquid on the night before the full moon.
John doubted he'd ever get the sulphur and vinegar stench of the mixture out of his nose, but then he doubted he'd ever forget the evidence they'd been given to prove the existence of werewolves, either.
It had all started late on a Saturday morning. The pair of them in their dressing gowns and pyjamas lounging over the newspapers and a breakfast of toast and coffee, trying to decide which case to take on next.
"Choice of three in the email, Sherlock," John had said. "Well, two really, the last one sounds like a crank."
Sherlock had raised an eyebrow at that. "Really, John? Do tell. Those are usually the interesting ones, if you can get past the over-emotionalism of the clients."
"He thinks he's a – "
Before John could get out what the client thought he was, there had been a pounding on the door and the sound of feet charging up the staircase. A man burst into the flat. He was of smallish size, and not terribly distinguished looking. He would have fit right in behind the counter of the local green grocer, or maybe a desk at the bank. That was until you saw the desperation in his eyes. He carried an irregularly shaped parcel wrapped in brown paper. Blood leaked from one side.
"Mr Holmes? Mr Sherlock Holmes?" He zeroed right in on Sherlock for a second and then his gaze darted to John. "And Dr John Watson? Thank God. Please, gentlemen, I apologise for imposing, but I need your help."
Sherlock had looked at John with an air of expectation. "Well, John, what are you waiting for? Show Mr – " he waved his hand at the interloper.
"Brown. Cornelius Brown."
Sherlock had given him a tight smile before issuing instructions. "Show Mr Brown to a chair and give him a cup of tea, he looks like he could use one."
Brown shook his head. "No. Thank you, but no." He thrust the parcel at Sherlock.
"What's this?" Sherlock asked.
"Proof, Mr Holmes. That I'm not off my head, or lying. I need your help. And I need it before someone else gets killed or worse."
At that, Sherlock and John had exchanged puzzled glances, because what was worse than death? But John had cleared a space on the table, and Sherlock had unwrapped the parcel and exposed a bloody sheep's haunch, still covered in wool and torn roughly from the hip socket.
"I'm afraid I don't understand, Mr Brown." Sherlock turned an irritated expression on their caller. "Why are you showing me a poorly butchered piece of mutton?"
"I woke up in a field with that at my side," Brown had said, and he sounded as if he was terrified of himself. "It sounds impossible, but I'm a werewolf. I want to hire you to cure me."
"Excuse me?" John had said as a list of medical conditions that Mr Brown might suffer from – conditions ranging from psychotic break to alcoholic blackout – ran through his head.
Something had caught Sherlock's attention. He had gone from bored by Mr Brown to fascinated by the remains of the dead sheep in a matter of seconds. He had darted to the mantle and retrieved his high powered lens and then trained it on the ravaged flesh. "This was not done by human teeth. Nor those of a dog, although the bite pattern is quite similar."
He pocketed the lens and turned his piercing gaze on Brown. "Tell me more, Mr Brown."
Mr Brown had told them. An impossible tale of an amateur mycologist out mushrooming on a moonlit night. Of how he'd been attacked, and yet his bites had healed by morning. He'd thought it all a very bad dream, at least until the moon rose again. He told them about months of blackouts that corresponded with the full moon, and of waking naked in wooded places miles from home with no memory of what had gone on. Finally, he explained how, in desperation, he'd consulted a psychiatrist. But the psychiatrist had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, only to be found later, his body horribly mutilated as if it had been torn apart by wild animals.
"The police wouldn't believe me," Brown concluded desperately. "I tried locking myself up, but last night I broke free. Please, Mr Holmes. Dr Watson. Help me. I've searched for a cure, and I think I've found one." He pulled a folded document from his jacket pocket and thrust it at Sherlock.
Sherlock had taken it gingerly. The document he showed John was old. Very old. And written on parchment, not paper. The writing was Latin. "How did you get this?"
"At great cost," Brown had replied. "It cost me almost everything I had. What's left I'm offering to you. The moon rises one more time this month. I want you to guard me, and then make that elixir. Will you do it?"
"Will we need silver bullets?" John had asked. Everything he knew, which wasn't much and had been obtained from late nights watching old movies on telly, said that silver was the ticket when dealing with a werewolf.
Brown shook his head. "A nineteenth century myth, popularised by the media. Silver will hurt me, just as it might you, but it won't stop the wolf."
"Two minutes." Sherlock's voice sounded tense. John glanced over and saw that he was looking out the window, watching the subtle change in the shadows as moonrise grew closer. On the table, despite the fact he was heavily sedated and strapped down tightly, Cornelius Brown began to twitch. John peered closer and watched in horrified fascination as the muscles beneath Brown's skin started to crawl.
"It's happening." John looped a rubber tie around the animated flesh and raised a vein. Brown barked in his sleep.
"Not yet, John." Sherlock's warning was sharply delivered. "The timing must be exact, or we'll kill him."
The sight of meek Mr Brown throwing his head back and howling before he dropped to the floor and tore at his skin. The sounds of his bones breaking and reforming as he became something inhuman echoed in John's memory. They'd spent a long and horrifying night on guard duty as, inside an iron barred cage, the werewolf paced back and forth, its ears pricking in excitement when it caught the scent of its two guardians, and its great, slavering jaws snapping as it rushed to attack when Sherlock drew too close.
"Wouldn't that be a small mercy?" John asked.
The morning after had been no less disturbing than the night before. At Sherlock's insistence, John had given Brown a full physical, including drawing a great many vials of blood for analysis, before helping him dress, buying him an impossibly large breakfast to restore the energy he'd lost during the transformation, and finally escorting him onto a train. When he'd got back to the flat, Sherlock had been hunched over his microscope, and John had fallen into an uneasy, nightmare-fuelled sleep.
"Perhaps," Sherlock replied absently. "Thirty seconds."
Brown's cure was based on an alchemist's research. The alchemist had, in turn, taken his inspiration from the Greeks and the Romans, who were something of an authority on werewolves. They believed strongly in the theory of exhaustion as a purgative. Aconite or wolfsbane, would send Brown's blood pressure and heart rate sky-rocketing; mimicking a gruelling regime of exercise, and thereby arresting the transformation and purging the wolf.
The St John's Wort would soothe the torture soul; calming it and upping the probability the wolf-essence would find the environment inhospitable.
The asafoetida, made by collecting latex from ferula roots, and then once the resin had dried, beating it to powder between river stones, was supposed to be a synergistic agent, improving the efficacy of the other ingredients.
As for why the plants and roots had to be collected by the various phases of the moon, John had no idea, although going through the motions had made the experience seem more mystical as they trod parks and fields by candlelight, seeking out the necessary specimens.
"Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven..."
Sweat prickled John's forehead as Sherlock counted down. He took a deep breath and lifted the syringe from the tray, placing the tip of the needle against the raised and pulsing vein.
"Now, John!"
John pulled back the plunger, and tried not to think of the effects of aconite poisoning on the human body. In his current state, Brown wouldn't feel the neurological symptoms; the numbness around his face and mouth, and the pins and needles in his extremities, but visions of electrocardiograms, the readout showing irregular rhythms or worse asystole, danced in his head as he injected the deadly cocktail. He released the tourniquet. "It's done."
The moon rose, flooding the chamber with pale light. On the table, Brown went quiet for several long moments and then he began to convulse.
"Shit!" John leapt forward, fitting his stethoscope and placing the headpiece against Brown's chest. He heard a few seconds of hammering heartbeat and then Sherlock pulled him bodily away.
"Stay back, John!"
John fought in Sherlock's grasp, his every instinct telling him that he needed to be at his patient's side, but the arms around him were like iron bands.
"No, John, your safety is more important to me than his life." Sherlock's voice was a harsh thing, but John had to concede. Neither one of them could risk getting bitten or scratched.
The wolf fought against the alchemist's cure. Brown's naked body writhed against the straps as it morphed between forms, one second human and the next animal. Brown's screams were horrible things, screeches and keening cries that reverberated off the abandoned building's walls and echoed back at them as his bones broke and knitted and broke again.
Though he knew he should bear witness, John shut his eyes and buried his head against Sherlock's chest. It wasn't weakness, he told himself. If Brown survived the treatment he would need care afterwards by a doctor who wasn't stunned into a state of stupor by watching impossible horrors.
The minutes crawled. One by one they ticked by as Cornelius Brown, librarian and amateur mycologist, fought against something he might have read about in one of his books; if only he was the type who read those sorts of things. But he didn't, you see, they gave him nightmares. John giggled, venting his hysteria. That late Saturday morning consultation seemed a lifetime ago.
Sherlock rubbed slow circles against John's back. It would have been nice, in fact at first it was, until John realised that each circle lasted ten seconds. Sherlock was counting the minutes in ten second intervals, committing the surreal night to memory as precisely as if he'd recorded it on video. After awhile, John counted too.
Abruptly, Sherlock's hand stilled. "John," he whispered. "John, I think it's done."
John took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He disentangled from Sherlock's embrace and went to his patient.
On the table Cornelius Brown was still. John looked over at Sherlock and then he pressed his fingers against Brown's neck. The pulse beat was there, strong and regular. He used his stethoscope and listened. The heartbeat was fine, no irregularities. "He's okay." John whispered, not quite believing his observations. He checked again, measuring heartbeat and respiration and pulse rate before reaching for a blood pressure cuff and finding Brown's BP well within the normal range. "He's okay. Sherlock! He's okay!"
Brown moaned as he returned to consciousness. He blinked up at John. "I'm not dead?"
John shook his head. He grinned. And when he looked over, Sherlock was grinning too. The room was bathed in the light of a full moon and they smiled like a pair of lunatics at their client, who once more was a mousy little man.