Chapter 4
"So, the skull?" Mary asked as they ascended the stairs of the housing estate balcony. John coughed.
"It was Sherlock's," he said. They reached the top of the flight, and John saw Mary's expression in the corner of his eye. It was horrified. "Oh, no, god!" he exclaimed. She shot him a look. "It wasn't, like…his his! It was more of a bizarre Hamlet brain-fetish." She put her key into her door lock.
"That doesn't exactly comfort me," she said. The door swung open and she flung her school bag in. "Then again," the light flicked on, "who am I to judge?"
The yellow light splashed onto a cluttered room with orange floral wallpaper and burgundy carpet. There wasn't a space of wall without a stack of papers and files at the foot of it, or a box of some bottles of paint, or some permabound French books.
A dozen or so dolls sat on a dusty mantelpiece, greeting them with coy glass eyes.
"I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I make dolls," Mary said casually, pulling off her shoes and flinging them into the bedroom. John tripped closer to the mantel as Mary padded into the kitchen.
They had heads expertly molded of polymer clay, and each of them appeared artfully bloated or deformed, their dimpled, potato-like heads hand painted with rosy cheeks and small features. Each looked serene, even glad, despite their horror-film aesthetic, and they ranged in size from a half a foot to a full one. Their bloodless limbs, some deathly pale, some darker, were spindly and delicate, and their hair was either brightly dyed wool in bulbous styles on their heads, or thin, sparse human hair. Their clothes were hand sewn, hand knit.
"You made all of these?" John called. Mary was flicking through songs on a stereo, passing by numerous depressing beginnings to find one that was marginally more appropriate for a friendly leftover dinner.
"Yeah, it's just something I do in my free time," she said, pulling the lid off a Tupperware container. "Which has been considerably more plentiful lately. I've been on a roll." A few beeps on the microwave.
"And how long have you been doing this?"
"Oh, gosh, I started around the time Kieran and I started dating, so probably…five years?" she said. "I mean, I've always sewn, and I've made cloth dolls since I was a kid, but that was when I started getting serious about it, and using the clay and whatnot." The clatter of dishes. "I sell them on the internet. They're pretty expensive to make, but some collectors will pay all sorts of money for a good one. They were going to pay for Kieran and I to go to Iceland on holiday. Would you like a beer?"
"Yeah, sure, thank you." He tottered into the kitchen and took the can she held out for him. "Kieran was…?"
"My husband." The microwave rang out, and Mary pulled out a large dish of steaming soup. She ladled the lumpy mixture into two bowls, and grinned. "Look at me. Slaving away to feed you. A proper domestic goddess." He chuckled, sitting down at a card table with place settings.
"Don't overwork yourself on my behalf." She slapped a bowl of the soup in front of him. A pat of butter floated, melting, on the surface of it, and Mary tore him off a piece of bread.
"Potage parmentier!" she announced, sitting down across from him.
"Yes, bon appetit!" he muttered politely, stirring the mixture.
"No, that's the name of the soup, John. It's French," she said, smiling and taking her first bite. He chuckled and blushed. John Watson was blushing.
"I used to eat this all the time during my exchange," she said. "I studied in Paris for a semester during college. My boyfriend there used to make this for me all the time. It's so easy, just potatoes, leeks, water, salt, stewed together and served with butter. It's perfection in a bowl."
The mush had looked questionable, but John remembered what he was used to finding in his own refrigerator, and discovered shortly that leek soup was his new favorite. Mary curled her legs up and sat cross-legged on her folding chair. She hummed along to the music as she ate. Her eyes were still so sad to look at, but her lips curled into a small, contented smile for most of the evening, and she talked more than he'd have expected her to
Mary pulled out a pint of ice cream when they finished their soup, not bothering with more bowls, just two spoons.
Kieran Fisher had been a concierge at Hotel Russell. He had always wanted to go to school to be a veterinarian, but that dream had slipped away from him. He and Mary had met when Kieran went to see his niece in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, which Mary had directed. They both liked Harold & Maude, long bike rides through Hyde Park, the Talking Heads, and antique shops. They were both the shy ones at parties, and they didn't like being the center of attention, unless the situation absolutely called for it. They made a ritual of buying a new set of novelty bed sheets every season, the last one being a vintage flannel set covered in repeated images of the Virgin Mary weeping. Kieran had gotten Mary a Gustav Klimt print every anniversary they'd had so far. He'd proposed to her over the phone when she was having a particularly bad day and he was working an unexpected night shift.
They'd been married for little over a year when Kieran, a chain smoker since he was a teenager, was diagnosed with lung cancer. The battle had lasted seven months. He lost all his hair, and his spirit slowly left with it. His death was well prepared-for, clean, and dignified, in a hospital bed nine weeks previously.
It seemed like Mary's eyes had been too dried out from explaining this so many times to cry about anything, but she seemed to appreciate John's listening to her recite the facts in a dry, distant voice. John was thankful for this, because it would have been awful if she'd expected him to say anything in response. He didn't have any words. All he could do was laugh when she reminisced something funny about her husband, and frown empathetically when she spoke of holding his hand as the life went out of him. When she had nothing else to say, there were a few moments silence, and he slid his hand toward hers on the card table so their fingernails touched. That seemed to be enough.
She suggested he call her in the morning so that she could make sure he got home all right (he'd had more than one beer), and to let her know how the cat was adjusting.
Mrs. Hudson was still in her easy chair, fast asleep, when he got back to 221B, so he switched off the television, draped a crocheted afghan over her and poured her cold tea down the drain.
Upstairs, he knelt down slowly to see if the cat was still in its carrier, but it had moved. He fought the urge to panic a little—he'd panicked reasonably over much worse in his life and he was not going to panic over a rogue cat. He checked the kitchen, in all the open cupboards, and between the stacks of Scotland Yard contraband in the sitting room. He checked under Sherlock's bed and in his closet, and in the bathroom, in the toilet. Just as he was about to ascend the stairs to his own bedroom, he saw at the base of the staircase a tiny splash of blood.
Deep breath. How bad could it be?
He went up the stairs and stepped into his bedroom. The cat was contorted at the very center of his bed, licking its own privates and looking up briefly to shoot John a severe expression. On the blanket just next to him was what remained of a mouse—apparently just a head and a small length of spine, surrounded by dots of now dried blood.
"I'll call you Martin," John said.
He turned and went downstairs to sleep in Sherlock's bed.