Chapter X. Black Stories

It was an evening a few days later that John was on his way home from work, his usual bag slung over his shoulder, one hand clumsily clutching a small parcel wrapped in brown paper, the other holding an umbrella above his head. It made it difficult to keep his bag in place since it kept threatening to slide down his shoulder, but it had gotten incongruously warm the day before which resulted in the clouds above weeping thick drops of rain down upon London's streets instead of the snow he had still been hoping for. Well, there was still time until Christmas Eve, not all hope was lost just yet.

It did prove a challenge, though, to get the door to 221B to open whilst juggling his bag, the parcel, the umbrella, and the keys to the flat. John had uttered quite a selection of colourful, half-suppressed swears before he at last succeeded in finding refuge from the torrent the rain appeared to have transformed into during the last five minutes. He cursed his luck, for had he just been a little faster, he might have avoided the worst of the downpour yet, but as it was he now found himself decidedly wetter than he was comfortable with.

Shaking out his umbrella and trying not to let his mood veer towards the morose, he quickly started to ascend the stairs, his ears already picking up on the sound floating through the stairway from behind the closed door of their shared flat. Apparently, his partner had taken up the violin once again, and he seemed to be actually playing a melody instead of making random assaults upon the innocent chords.

What he was playing, though, was still fit to at the very least confuse John a little.

"Seriously, Sherlock?" he asked upon finally entering the flat, with a faint incredulous undertone. "Could you have possibly found something less suitable for the season?" Not that he truly minded, of course – Sherlock was a fairly good player, and mercifully also knew John well enough to hear the amusement in his exasperated voice.

True to form, he was ignored entirely while Sherlock continued to draw the bow over the violin's chords, calling forth the lively notes of Vivaldi's Spring which therefrom accompanied John as he shed his damp coat and provisionally dried off his equally damp hair, having set down the parcel on the living room table. Eventually he simply let himself sink onto the couch and fiddled with the packing paper while he waited for Sherlock to finish his little concert.

"I brought biscuits," he announced when Sherlock set aside his instrument and glanced over at him with a lifted brow. Motioning to the by now opened little parcel, he then patted the free space next to him. "I think you'd throttle me if I attempted to bake here while you're on a case, and I'm not sure me baking would be a good idea anyway, so..." John could cook basic meals and with a bit of concentration might even manage something a little fancier, but he was fairly certain that Christmas biscuits were far out of his league.

He smirked when Sherlock wordlessly flopped down next to him and snuck away two of the small sweets, examining them for a moment before slipping the first between his lips. John felt a tiny flicker of relief when he didn't object to the taste.

"So... Spring, of all things?" He nodded to where the violin had been placed while taking a biscuit of his own.

Sherlock frowned. "What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, all in all. It's just not exactly a Christmas tune."

"I don't like Christmas tunes. They are preposterous, and I refuse to waste my time learning to play them."

Sherlock's expression was one of deliberately overdone disdain, and John chose not to point out that he had in fact played Christmas songs on more than one occasion over the last years. "You could have played Winter though. I mean, nothing against Spring, it just always reminds me of waiting loops when I try to call some company or so. 'You're on hold, please hold the line, I'm sure one of our lazy and uninterested employees will have time for you at some point during the next three hours, here, listen to Vivaldi's Spring in the meantime, perhaps it'll drive you crazy before we actually have to talk to you...'"

Sherlock actually snorted at that, throwing him a look. "I suppose you had to make some phone calls during work today." John didn't dignify that with an answer, and after a second Sherlock simply smirked knowingly. "Well. While we're at calling people, could you pass me my phone? I think it was ringing a while earlier, but I was playing the violin."

And naturally he could not be bothered to pick up his phone while playing the violin. Not even after he was finished with that. Shooting Sherlock a dirty look despite knowing it wouldn't be taken notice of, John heaved himself up again, regretful at having to leave the warmth of the couch, if only for a moment. Often he had already vowed to himself that he would have revenge on Sherlock for these things that happened much too regularly, but so far he had not come up with an idea on how to carry out said revenge. Perhaps Molly would help him, or maybe Lestrade. He would have to ask about that.

John returned to the couch carrying Sherlock's phone in one hand and a colourful, shiny package in the other. He recalled having seen Molly handing it away at their latest hospital visit. „Did you really carry that around in your pocket all the time?"

Sherlock grabbed the phone and glanced at the screen before he set it aside with a derisive snort, his eyes turning heavenwards for a moment. Only when John reclaimed his seat beside him did Sherlock deign to answer the question. "It seems that I did."

The only response he received to that was an exasperated shake of John's head, at least until he grabbed the package right out of John's hands. "Sher– don't tell me you want to unwrap it now. Just because you had a somewhat acceptable reason to unwrap Mycroft's doesn't mean-"

"I have a reason," Sherlock interrupted smartly, sliding his finger underneath the sticky tape that kept the paper in place. "It's from Molly, and she will without a doubt want to know what I think of it soon after Christmas Day. Now, if I don't like it, I will need a few days to come up with something suitable to say to her, since you have repeatedly told me that apparently the simple truth is not acceptable in such situations."

While he was speaking, Sherlock had entirely ignored John's half-hearted words of protest and deftly removed the shimmering wrapping paper to examine the packet's contents. John finally accepted the futileness of his objections with a sigh and made do with simply taking another biscuit.

He was still chewing when Sherlock thrust a small black box under his nose. "Before I open this, please tell me you've heard of these so-called 'creepy mysteries' and they're worth my time."

John shoved Sherlock's hand away softly so he could actually focus his eyes on the box, and swallowed his biscuit before he spoke. "Black Stories... mmh... I think they're some kind of guessing game. You get a bit of information and have to figure out the full story by asking questions that can be answered with 'yes' or 'no', that kind of thing..." He thought of the package Molly gave him, for a moment. But, no. He was a reasonable adult, he could wait until it was actually time. The package would stay on his desk until Christmas Eve.

He reached for the wrapping paper that lay discarded on the low table, together with a small, hand-written card. Sherlock was probably planning to throw it away with the paper, but John wanted to at least read it before it disappeared, so he took it and glanced at it. There is always a case, it said in Molly's handwriting, just a tad squiggly. Love, Molly.

Smiling to himself, John looked up at Sherlock again, who was busily opening and closing the box of the game. "Do you want to try, since you've ruined the surprise anyway?"

"Oh for heaven's sake, John, it's not that difficult!" Barely ten minutes into their game, Sherlock had already reached the end of his patience. God knew what had possessed him that he had actually insisted for John to be the first to figure out a story by guessing, it should have been clear right from the start that he would not be satisfied with John's skills of deduction. "You're asking the wrong questions, the wrong questions entirely, and you're assuming things that I never said were true! This is hopeless. He's a beetle, John!"

"Toby is... a beetle?" That didn't seem to make much sense at all. "You mean, a beetle, like, a bug? Or a Beatle, a band member?" There most certainly hadn't been a Toby among the Beatles though. And John also saw no reason why a member of the Beatles should have died after a man stopped talking – which was all the information the riddle had given him.

Sherlock appeared to be on the edge of despair, judging by the look on his face. "A band member, seriously? A beetle. A bug. Small, scuttling thing with six legs. Oh, this is hopeless, truly."

John furrowed his brow. "A bug named Toby that died once some guy stopped talking. Uh... was the person talking also a bug?"

He was met with an incredulous stare for a few seconds, and then Sherlock put the card which held the riddle back in the box, ignoring John's request to at least give him the solution. "This is pointless, it's not even a crime, not to mention you'd take another hour to even get close to figuring it out. Read the solution later, you ask me something now."

With that, he placed the small box which held fifty cards with riddles in John's hand. John sighed, and began rifling through the cards, scanning riddle and solution alike until he found something that was bound to be fun. Suppressing a grin, he extracted the card and set the box down on the table.

"I've got one. 'The superintendent who examined the corpse was astonished. He had never seen anything like this before.'"

"They could just as well just write 'something happened, figure out what' on these cards, the amount of information would be about the same," Sherlock grumbled, but John could see a glint in his eyes that showed he was at the least a little intrigued. "Was it a human corpse?"

"Yes."

"No bugs, then. The superintendent was 'astonished'... at the person the corpse once was, or at the state of the corpse?"

"That's not a yes-or-no question."

Sherlock rolled his eyes, drawing his next words out like he was talking to someone mentally challenged. "Was the dear superintendent 'astonished' at the person him- or herself?"

"...no."

"At the state the corpse was in, then?"

"Yes, I guess you could say that..."

"Were they murdered?"

"Yes."

"Of course they were murdered, the question is how. And he was 'astonished', not disgusted or repelled, just astonished, so there likely wasn't much blood or any severed body parts and decay wasn't the problem either, all of that the superintendent would likely have seen before... So it was something surprising but not particularly revolting, I would wager. In what way can a corpse be astounding without being revolting? Maybe the corpse is less decayed than it should be. How long has the person been dead?"

"That's... not mentioned here." John was barely able to follow the rapid mutterings of his friend. He appeared to be attacking the game's puzzle with the same vigour as he did any real case.

"So it's not that. Maybe something's on the corpse, something the killer left there... some kind of decoration perhaps? Did the killer leave decorations?"

"Not... precisely..."

"But it's something on the corpse, not the corpse itself, and it's something the killer left there. Yes?"

"Yes. Both yes."

Sherlock's fingers snuck away another biscuit and then withdrew to tap idly against each other right in front of his lips as a delighted grin spread over his features.

Approximately seven minutes and nineteen seconds later, Sherlock was levelling John with a thoroughly unamused look. John had to bite his lip to keep his laughter in check. "Is something the matter, Sherlock?"

"Yes. You are. You realise that a fictional man being murdered with nicotine patches is not going to make me stop anytime soon, don't you?"

John nodded, keeping his face not even remotely straight despite his efforts. "Sure. ...seeing your face once you figured it out was worth it, though."

A snort. "Ridiculous. Well, ask me another one, maybe I'll get some inspiration for our dear Miss Spiegelmann..."

John obediently reached for the box and chose another card, this time on random. He was still chuckling silently to himself as he read out the sparse information on its front.

"Because Carlos was hungry, he had to die a horrible death."

Heaving a great sigh, Sherlock shook his head, looking at the card as if it had just grown a mouth and said something utterly preposterous. "This is absurd. Entertaining, but absurd. Was he poisoned?"

John hurried to scan the small paragraph on the back of the card. "Poisoned... uh, no. He wasn't."

"Too easy anyway. Ah, let's see..."

Five minutes later and Sherlock had figured out that Carlos was a dog, that the owner had forgotten to feed him but the dog hadn't starved, that he could see the food, wherever it was, and that he probably died trying to get to it but hadn't hit his head trying to get through a glass door or anything and that dying from a hit on the head wasn't enough to count as a "horrible death" anyway.

He had also determined that the owner was living alone, in a comparatively big house, that he left for work early and pretended to work more than he did because he was likely to have an affair with his married secretary who only engaged with him because she hoped to get money out of it, which he knew but didn't care because she was witty enough to make up for those intentions. And he had decided that the secretary was actually lesbian and had another affair Carlos' owner knew nothing about. None of this could be found on the back of the card or was in any way relevant to the story, but that didn't seem to deter Sherlock in the slightest.

After John had somehow managed to get him back on track, he was now guessing at Carlos' cause of death, having determined that he could figure out how that cause came to happen could still be deduced afterwards.

"Beheaded?"

"No."

"Drowned?"

"No."

"Suffocated?"

"...no."

"Caught in a snare that lay in front of the food with his hind leg so he dangled upside down until all the blood had run into his head and he died?"

"What- no! Why would there be a snare in front of his food?!"

"Perfectly reasonable, but since it's not the case, irrelevant. Did he freeze?"

"No..."

"Burn to death?"

"No- wait, yes! Yes, that's it. Now tell me how that happened."

"He burned to death... hmm... maybe he– oh!" And with that, Sherlock slowly steepled his fingers, the tips of his forefingers softly touching his lips, and sank into a grave silence, his eyes cast towards some invisible distance John knew nothing about.

John's eyebrows seemed to crawl up his forehead on their own accord while he wondered if this could still be attributed to their game or if something entirely else had started happening whithout him noticing. Either way, after almost a minute of silence from Sherlock (who hadn't been silent for more then five consecutive seconds since they had begun their game), John opened his mouth to enquire about what was going on, only to have Sherlock suddenly regain animation and speak right over him.

"Alyssa Craigston! Of course, that's why he used the snow, it's so obvious... he's a serial killer, how could I not have noticed..."

John sat frozen on the couch while Sherlock had jumped up and was now pacing briskly back and forth through the room. "Er... what?" This quite certainly had nothing to do with the dead dog Carlos.

Sherlock waved a hand at him impatiently. "Alyssa Craigston was found dead about four years ago, burnt to death between the remains of a house that burned to the ground, the general assumption was suicide under the influence of heavy drugs which was deemed confirmed after they backtracked her calls. I knew it wasn't a simple suicide, there was too much to it, but nobody was interested and they wouldn't let me see the crime scene and the evidence – and now he's done it again, maybe even more often since then, how did I not realise... John, the dog probably switched on the cooker while trying to reach the food bowl or something, I don't care, I have to check – what time is it, it's probably too late to get someone reasonable on the phone, he wouldn't be there so late..."

And with that, Sherlock scurried out of the room, leaving John behind with a box of mysteries, a thoroughly confused expression on his face, and the almost certain knowledge that he wouldn't see Sherlock anymore today.