John shaved his moustache.

"And so it begins," Thea muttered into her teacup.

"Turns out Mary wasn't crazy about it." John was concentrating on buttering his toast.

"Mary wasn't crazy about it three months ago." Thea eyeballed him across the rim of her cup. "Why would it suddenly matter?"

"Because she's said so now, hasn't she."

"I bet she hasn't."

"Thea, I didn't shave for your father."

"And I bet you're not going round there tonight either."

"I-"

"It's fine, John." Thea put her cup down and stood. "I won't be home til late, anyway. We're going to admire some burning effigies and drink goon."

"Excuse me?"

"Remember, remember the fifth of November," Thea sang as she walked out of the kitchen. "The gunpowder treason and plot…"

()()()()()()()()

Not quite twelve hours later, her father dragged John from a pyre rather dramatically.

Three days later he did some weeping in an abandoned underground tunnel and – presto – things were back to business as far as John, Sherlock and Baker

Street were concerned.

Thea was unsurprised at this turn of events; still, she was fuming.

"You'd think he was the second coming or something," she hissed, shoving the paper at Lisa. They were sitting in their favourite coffee shop, five different

cakes on the table between them because Lisa was pre-menstrual and Thea was, well, fuming.

"It was a bit clever," Lisa said through a mouthful of ganache.

"Please," Thea rammed her fork into the carrot cake violently, "it was perfectly predictable. I mean, has no one ever seen V for Vendetta? They made a movie

about this very scenario and now the press are inflating his insufferable ego even further. He's even wearing the bloody hat again. It's John Lennon all over."

"John Lennon?"

"He abandoned his first son, did you know? And not one word of negative press about it. As if shirking parental responsibility is perfectly fine so long as you're

somewhat gifted in other fields."

"Tragic," Lisa deadpanned.

"Piss off."

A bag lady shuffled into the café and scanned the tables. Lisa started rooting through her pockets for spare change, Thea rested her head on the table,

admiring the layers of the black forest cake from up close.

"Smiles," the bag lady sang out, starting a slow journey from table to table. "Smiles for all."

It was the latest trend amongst the more harmless homeless folk to sell smiley stickers. It was a bit ironic and quite a bit genius. Thea enjoyed imagining the

smiley sticker factory, staffed by starving Cambodian orphans or some such, fuelling the free trade on the streets of London.

"I'll have a smile," Lisa said when the lady arrived at their table. "And one for my friend. She needs it badly."

"Piss off."

"Oh, I got a special one for her," the lady purred.

Thea groaned and closed her eyes.

"What-" she heard Lisa start but the lady had already wandered off and a moment later jingling bells announced her departure from the premises.

"Thea," Lisa said. "Something odd has happened."

Thea lifted her head. In front of Lisa lay one ordinary smiley sticker and one handmade sticker, the plain white kind people used to make name tags for

conventions and orientation days, sporting a detailed and rather nice drawing of a severed hand. Underneath it, in curly longhand, was written Property of

Alethea Holmes.

"Oh, for goodness sake." Thea let her head drop back to the table, missing the strawberry tart narrowly.

"What is that?" Lisa asked.

"Psychological warfare," Thea said darkly.

"What?"

"He wants to trigger fond memories." Thea sat up and took the sticker, turning it over in her hands. "That's not playing fair at all."

"Is that from your dad?" Lisa looked utterly confused. "How did the bag lady-"

"Homeless network," Thea sighed.

"Okay…so what's the fond memory?"

Thea was still staring at the sticker. She was fairly certain it was part of the original batch, it would have been lame to make a new one just to throw her off

her game.

"When I was in primary school I kept getting my stuff nicked," she said. "Pencil cases, notebooks, lunch boxes…"

"Why?" Lisa frowned.

"I wasn't popular."

"I can't imagine."

"Seriously, man, piss off." Thea smiled. "Anyway. It got so frequent he made me these stickers to put on my things, instead of name tags. He picked the

severed hand as a warning to thieves."

"What, because they used to chop their hands off?"

"Precisely."

"Somehow I don't see that deterring arsehole primary schoolers," Lisa pointed out.

"Correct." Thea couldn't fight the grin tugging on the corners of her mouth.

"So what was the point?"

"Hang on."

Thea very carefully peeled back the coating on the glue and affixed it to her empty coffee cup.

"So. The sticker is on, the dickhead robs me. But of course he or she has to take the sticker off now so he can either take it home or leave it somewhere

without it being returned to me."

"Yea?"

"Go on," Thea said and pushed the cup towards Lisa. "Peel it off."

Lisa took the cup and scratched off the sticker.

"And?" she asked.

"Wet your hands."

"Hey?"

"Wet. Your. Hands." Thea dunked her paper napkin into her water glass and threw it at Lisa. Lisa caught it and wiped her hands. Immediately, a bright red

stain appeared on her fingers, covering all areas which had been in contact with the glue.

"Oh, I see." Lisa wiped harder and the stain intensified. "Come on. How do I get it off?"

"Uhm, you don't."

"It's permanent?" Lisa shrieked.

"Not as such. It'll fade eventually."

"Define eventually."

"Couple of weeks," Thea mumbled.

"Oh, you complete and utter cow," Lisa growled. "That's pretty nifty though."

"Don't touch your face for at least ten minutes," said Thea. "It stains a bit."

"How come your fingers are fine?"

"Statistically people peel labels off starting from the top left corner, something about an inherent sense of symmetry, so that's where the dye is concentrated. I

put it on from the middle outwards. I suppose if we lived in Japan it'd have to be across the entire top…and on the right if we were writing Hebrew-"

"Yea, alright, I got it," Lisa interrupted. "Did it work?"

"Obviously, look at our respective-"

"No, you numpty. Did it deter the kids robbing you?"

"Yes. It also motivated them to throw my schoolbag on the roof of the gym hall, but on the whole it was a pretty successful scheme."

"It's no wonder you're odd." Lisa regarded her fingers with considerable dismay. "It's sweet though, that he kept one."

"He was probably saving it for this exact kind of situation knowing it would arise eventually," Thea said darkly. "And it's not sweet. We are not sweet people.

It's emotional manipulation, pure and simple, and it's not going to work either."

"Of course not," Lisa said quickly. Too quickly.

"It isn't."

"Sure."

"Absolutely not."

"Okay, Thea."

()()()()()()()()

John and Sherlock were up to their elbows in cold case files, searching for any fleeting reference to patchouli oil.

"What's Spawn hiding in the basement?" Sherlock asked without any warning at all.

"The drums," John said. "And some lab equipment."

"What's she experimenting on?"

"Here's a thought: why not ask her yourself?"

"Oh, smashing idea." Sherlock frowned, rifling through the papers at high speed. "Nothing that would be of interest to you, Mr Holmes. Action, reaction, nothing of

consequence."

"You can't really blame her for being ticked off," John pointed out.

"Quite true. I can, however, blame her for aiming to high. She'll never be able to keep up this level of aloofness, it's not in her nature. I'm a little impressed

she's maintained detached for this long, considering how…clingy, I suppose the technical term is, she used to be."

"Huh." John kept his eyes on the files and his tone disinterested. He was far too involved in this strange game of emotional chess as it was, he had no desire

to entangle himself any further.

"She didn't touch the ground for two months, four days and seven hours once," Sherlock continued. "From just after six months of age she simply refused to be

placed on the floor. It started without warning and then stopped for no apparent reason. She allowed me to put her down and started crawling almost

immediately. Baffling."

"Are you actually reminiscing?" John asked before he could stop himself. "You?"

Sherlock made a scoffing noise, scrunched up another sheet of useless information and pitched it into the fire place.

"Has it occurred to you to speak to her?"

"Dull."

"Oh, I'm sure bombarding her with strange mementos is much more amusing," John said a little hotly. "Still, I think you're only succeeding in getting her more

annoyed, if that's even possible."

"It's hardly a bombardment."

"There are three unopened packages addressed to her in your writing stacking up next to the front door. What's in them, actually? Anything that can go off?"

"Unopened?"

"As far as I can tell." John did allow for the possibility that Thea had opened and resealed the packages or possibly had X-rayed them. "If there's ears in them

or something, tell me now before my front room starts to reek of decayed human flesh."

"Nothing of the sort. It's-"

"I don't want to know," John cut him off. "This is not my jurisdiction. You two sort it out, I'll be keeping well out of the way, thank you."

"What route does she usually take to school?"

"Ask your brother. He'll print you a map."

"Here it is!" Sherlock exclaimed, punching the air, his fist closed around a decade old witness statement, already storming out of the room.

()()()()()

Riding to school Thea tended to enter a strange sort of time warp. She'd cycled there and back so often, her brain immediately engaged autopilot; and while it

often took her an hour to reach Hampstead, it frequently felt as though no time had passed at all.

There was some vague awareness of her surroundings, some antennae primed to detect anything out of the ordinary, essential to prevent accidents. It was

this awareness that began to register flashes of colour on some of the drabber walls Thea passed, peripheral blurs of vivid reds, yellows, pinks and oranges

that had definitely not been there previously.

Must be a new graffiti artist in town…

It wasn't until she was stopped at a traffic light she could absolutely not avoid, that Thea tuned her eyes into the world fully and noticed the image on the wall

of the corner shop to her left. It was a multi-coloured monster about the size of a sausage dog. It was spiked, spitting flames and had wheels instead of legs.

There was something childlike about the style, but it was clearly the work of an adult, and quite an accomplished illustrator.

Thea frowned and rode on.

Not three hundred yards later another splash of brightness, this time on a wall enclosing an ugly stairwell, brought her to a stop. A twisted caterpillar, its lumpy

body studded with rusty nails.

Five minutes later another monster – bright purple with seven legs and three rows of teeth – snarled at her from a telephone pole, painted just at the right

height to be at eyelevel with her.

There was no moment of recognising the monsters as the denizens of Rotten Island – Thea had looked at William Steig's illustrations so often that the

association was immediate. The tale of an inhospitable island populated by vile, mean-spirited creatures who are driven mad by the blooming of flowers and

annihilate one another in the ensuing savage war only to end up as fertiliser for more flowers, had been both her and her father's favourite.

There was another monster painted on the road itself at the next big crossing, another next to the giant window of the record shop, yet another waving from

the top floor of a tenement building…they were everywhere and by the time Thea rolled up to her school gates she'd counted eighteen of them – not including

the one's she'd missed before she stopped at the lights.

Right next to the entrance someone had painted a little yellow flower.

()()()()()()()()

"That's so sweet," Lisa cooed over the phone.

Thea was folded up behind the bike sheds, rolling a cigarette, the mobile jammed between her ear and shoulder.

"If you say sweet once more, I'm electrifying your bass strings," she grunted.

"If a man did that for me I'd totally go out with him."

"Don't be disgusting!"

"What I mean," Thea could feel her friend rolling her eyes at her on the other end, "is that he's expending time, effort, possibly a bit of cash and a lot of

thought to get back into your good graces. It's swee-"

Thea hung up, lit her cigarette and groaned. Inside her castle a door flew open and before she could slam it shut she was curled up on a mattress, the sound

of some tinny techno album drifting up from the room below, a pathetic space heater growling away in the corner on electricity leached from the flat above.

Sherlock was balancing a half-empty teacup on his knee, his back propped against the wall, Rotten Island in hand.

"It got so the worst thing one monster could do to another was to push him into a flower. It made them hysterical with rage…"

"I thought hysterics was if you can't stop laughing," Thea interrupted.

Her father sighed.

"The English language is pockmarked with strange pitfalls," he said. "See, hysteria-"

Thea slammed the door shut and took some deep steadying breaths. So he'd spent hours reading her books. So he'd not shied away from explaining

vocabulary. So they'd been holed up in a cosy room drinking tea while the building raged around them. That didn't mean he wasn't still a bastard. It didn't even

mean he'd not been a bastard then.

Maybe it was time for her to send him some reminders of her own. Two could play this game.

Easily.