Chapter 35 - Sunday
Sherlock spent the rest of the day in a numb stupor and went to bed immediately after dinner because he was so exhausted he couldn't think straight. He was overall grateful that he - until now - had escaped the mandatory activities due to the wound on his leg. All this would change the next day; from Monday on he was expected to take part in everything they threw at him. He feared that his time in the asylum would soon become even harder to endure than it already was.
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After merely six hours of sleep, he woke, defeated and restless. Sitting up was a struggle. It was cold and he kept the blanket wrapped tightly around his torso when he leaned against the wall. The healing wound on his leg had progressed to the state of itching, which was probably what had woken him.
For several minutes, he tried not to scratch it and listened to the silence. It was oddly quiet. The question of the time was answered some time later, when the clock tower in the distance announced it was a quarter past one.
Sherlock sighed and rubbed his hands over his face, trying to chase away the mist of sleep and exhaustion.
Chances were high he would be unable to sleep again any time soon no matter how tired he felt. He might as well use the night to continue exploring the building and memorizing the staff's movements.
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An hour later, Sherlock had made it to the administration wing. He tiptoed down one of the upper corridors. On both sides were offices; he stopped now and then to look out of the large hallway windows. Once he had left behind the patient areas there were no more guards on rounds. This part of the building seemed completely abandoned at night.
At least he thought so until a sudden noise from within a room he had just passed made him flinch.
With his heart pounding he ducked into a corner, pressing his back against the wall.
But whoever was in the room didn't come out - at least not immediately.
Sherlock waited with bated breath. His hiding spot was not a good one. If someone looked in his direction they would see him. But people didn't see what they didn't expect and it was relatively dark, so chances were good.
Unsure if he should go back the way he came or continue down the corridor, his gaze fell upon the door on the opposite side and he froze.
Sherlock stared at the sign, dumbfounded.
Dr William A. Portmann, Director, Superintendent.
He knew that name!
Overwhelmed and unprepared, he gasped.
Then, suddenly pieces started to fall into place. At first it was like a few pebbles rolling down a slope. Disconnected images, the face of a young man. He tried to focus, remember how he knew the name. He was caught by surprise when his mind was caught in an avalanche of things falling into place.
They didn't just fall, they rearranged themselves with the equivalent mental noise of a nearby ship collision. Sherlock had to lean into the support of the wall.
More fractions of memories flooded his mind.
He had found the missing link between the Victorian reality he had chosen to dwell in as a safe place, and the asylum.
Then he gulped repeatedly, staring at the golden name plate.
A tiny noise behind him caught him off guard.
The door next to him opened and the thing he should have done was keep whoever it was silent, but the second of shock slowed him down.
Someone gasped in surprise. He started to turn, but apparently the person's reaction time was a lot shorter, because a fraction of a second later, the man was yelling, even before Sherlock was facing him.
Sherlock reached up to muffle the screams. In the resulting struggle, they landed on the floor. Only a moment later, the door with Portmann's name on it opened behind them.
That was the moment Sherlock realised he was in deep shit.
More yelling.
Sherlock tried the only option left: run.
His aching limps moved. He started sprinting from a kneeling position, adrenaline kicking in hard. But he had barely made it four or five leaps when another door a few metres ahead opened and another man stepped into the corridor.
Sherlock tried to run him over, shove him away, but the man had seen him coming and was prepared. He rammed Sherlock into the wall with unexpected force and Sherlock's head collided with it.
Momentarily dazed by the impact and the pain, he slid down the wall.
It was all his opponents needed. Hands were upon him, pinning him down almost instantly.
"Get me something potent!"
"He's trying to escape."
"You'll regret this, bub," someone with an American accent hissed.
More voices mingled into the chaos, but Sherlock couldn't really make out many details. His view was limited, his face was turned towards the wall. The dim lighting became brighter at some point but his field of vision didn't change much, even when more people joined to restrain him.
Violent hands pinned him to the floor, pressed his chest and face into the cold marble. They overpowered his weak struggles without much effort. There must have been at least ten men present at that point.
"Greenberg!" the first familiar voice yelled a few moments later. It was Hughes.
"Get me something to sedate him with," someone repeated and it reignited Sherlock's will to fight. Unconsciousness might mean he would never wake up, because Portmann might choose to make him disappear permanently.
The thing was he didn't even know if the out-of-sight man was Portmann.
The hands forced his left arm outwards, tight around his biceps.
He fought, tried to kick, aware what would happen next.
"Hold him steady," someone boomed.
The iron grips shifted to bare his painfully twisted arm.
He mustered all his strength, infuriated by the idea that he had finally solved the mystery and they would neutralise him before he could use his knowledge to get out of this godforsaken place. Then he violently jerked him arm back, curled around it to protect it.
Something collided with his temple. The pain was profound, not only at the temple but also on the other side of his head, where it had hit the marble floor.
Helpless and disoriented for the moment, his attackers used their chance to shove the needle into his arm and inject him with something.
Whatever it was, it was potent. Awareness was kicked out of him, hard.
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His return to consciousness was slow and he hovered in a half-aware stupor for quite some time. He did realise that he had trouble waking up at some level, but that fact didn't help him to speed up the process.
He felt groggy and nauseous when he finally managed to open his eyes.
The familiar sensation of drugs leaving his system was obvious and he struggled to remember what he had taken.
His transport seemed unsure if it wanted more or was just pissed that he had taken something in the first place.
Only when his eyes focussed on the padded leather under his head, did he recalled what had happened.
He was back in the 'quiet room'.
An unnerved groan escaped his lips. His physical affliction and the pain were better than being dead but he felt too sick to appreciate that.
All his muscles seemed to have tensed up. He tried to consciously relax and found he was in a strait jacket again.
At least the pain his joints and muscles threw at him when he tried to sit up woke him further.
No sitting, then.
Desperately, he tried to relax his arms and back. He was more than exhausted and it made him overly sensitive to stimuli, which was probably also the reason why the pain felt so intense. He closed his eyes again and tried to focus on blocking the unwanted perceptions one by one in the hopes of mental clarity.
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It took quite some time until he dared to carefully wind himself into a less painful position. Lying on his back turned out to be a bad choice.
The bulky buckles in the back hurt to lie on and he had to shift again.
Whatever they had given him, it gently cradled and calmed his mind, while it also seemed to have given his thought processes an odd tinge.
At least it helped him to relax once he had put his mind into it; he welcomed the latter effects.
Nevertheless, he would probably feel the pain for days - that was if he lived that long.
They might still kill him, sooner or later, he was quite certain of that.
He was in the asylum because someone had tried to make him vanish bloodlessly, but this was probably the point at which they would consider a more permanent solution to protect themselves.
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He jerked awake and - frustrated that his body had given in - actually hissed at it.
For god's sake what had they given him? His own thoughts felt foreign.
A strange mental spark ignited a train of thought and his mind powered up, processing the events. He felt more like a spectator than anything else. The realisations burned through his consciousness with a hot bright and red glimmer. The deductions came in faster than he could process them, scorched his mind in doing so.
Dr William A. Portmann was the superintendent of this asylum.
He must be the father of their client Avery Portmann - the name was suddenly there in his focus, complete with a overly sharp picture of the man. He now remembered what had been lost to him for days.
The last thing he did before waking up in the asylum was to interview Mrs Portmann.
The client had asked him to find his fiancé who had vanished - as had her mother.
It was highly probable that the missing fiancé and her mother were in the women's asylum nearby - or had been at some point, locked away under a false name, diagnosed with something that made their every word unreliable, in order to keep the woman from marrying Portmann's son. The parents weren't fond of her lower class origin.
Both women were probably suffering the same fate that had befallen him.
Superintendent Portmann had used his god-like power over asylum patients to cause him to vanish too, when he came too close to the truth.
Portmann had abused his position to do this. A superintendent's word was law inside an asylum and he controlled every aspect of life in the institution. The staff had to strictly obey him, which meant a superintendent could practically order his subordinates to do anything.
Though in this case - up to now - Portmann had probably only created a fake file for Sherlock and no one would ever doubt it. The patient's voice didn't matter.
Of course Portmann wouldn't grant Sherlock a meeting or allow him to see documents he had signed with his name, because that would've meant Sherlock would've understood. The man had the means to either slowly drive Sherlock insane for real or kill him and make it look like natural causes. A superintendent was in charge of treatment, medication, diet and even postmortems. It wouldn't take much work to make someone vanish forever leaving no traces of them.
Sherlock hoped that Emilia Rowe - Avery's fiancé - and her mother hadn't already been disposed of this way. People vanished into the system, even healthy ones no one wanted. It was not unheard of that wives with undesirable attitudes had been locked away by their husbands.
In an era when most doctors were convinced that a patient's diagnosis was their own fault and the result of their own weakness, rebelling was counterproductive - at least in a 'normal' way.
Patterson had warned him that the more one drew attention, the worse the treatments would get. Rebellion was dangerous in an environment like this, but he realised for him it had become deadly. Portmann would have probably left him alone had he decided to fit in and keep quiet. Maybe he would even have forgotten him over time.
He realised that maybe he had been kept in a private room and allowed more freedom than others to keep him relatively quiet.
A sharp ugly sensation in his chest accompanied the realisation that chances were high John was also incarcerated somewhere in this institution. This was when the panic started to stir, despite the numbing drugs running through his system.
Sherlock hoped John had kept his head down. In a padded cell and without knowledge of John's locations he was useless. He needed to find a way out to help his friend.
It would take time until he collected himself enough to even try to escape. Chances were slim escaping would be easy, he knew from his first encounter with this sturdy room. His chances of survival might depend on a) how good he would be able to defend himself once they came for him and b) if he managed to get out before that happened.
The drug cocktail in his system worked against him and despite the danger, pushed him out of his mind and into sleep once more.
He drifted in and out of consciousness for a long time. At least it felt like that. He was losing time, precious time, but felt helplessly at the mercy of the drugs.
During one of the clearer moments, he continued to analyse how exactly he had been brought to the asylum, in the vague hope of finding details he could use to escape it. At least the drugs enabled him to go deep into his memories and remember more than he would have without them, his creativity enhanced involuntarily by the medication.
He focussed on the moment when he and Watson had headed to the house of Avery Portmann's parents to interview the mother. His leg was perfectly fine when they entered.
That was when things got sketchy.
He definitely remembered Watson using the heavy doorknocker, a bit louder than necessary.
The door was opened, but he couldn't recall by whom.
They found themselves in the drawing room, that much he knew. He concentrated on remembering the details of the room but there were more grey areas than details in his mental reconstruction of the room.
They had talked to Mrs Portmann, that much he knew but he was also missing the entire conversation.
Had there been a maid? He couldn't remember seeing her. There must have been, the woman of the house wouldn't serve them tea herself… There was tea?
Yes, tea. Served in expensive china with a floral pattern.
He hadn't tried the tea. Watson had, out of politeness, as he had shortly before at the Thompson's house - the landlords of the mission woman's mother. Sherlock turned his focus to that meeting and was able to remember most of it.
Good.
He turned back to focus on the drawing room, trying to remember the furniture and décor, but it remained fuzzy. He mentally looked at Watson, tried to use him as a focus. Inspected every detail of his appearance.
Then suddenly, his memory switched to the outside of the Portmann house again. It was not the superintendent's villa which was located on the asylum grounds, that much was sure. Paterson had mentioned that the superintendent lived in his villa on the grounds. So for whatever reason, the wife lived near London.
When they were on their way back to the hansom, Watson's appearance suddenly changed; he looked dishevelled and his clothes were dirty and blotchy with wet spots.
There were loud noises, but that was the last Sherlock could remember. No matter how much he tried to focus, that was the last of it.
Sherlock drifted off again and when he came to he was disappointed to find his situation hadn't changed.
"God, still not awake! I have solved it for god's sake!" he addressed the silence, then realised he had used similar words before and groaned.
Overall, the realisation that he might not be here because his own mind was punishing him, but because of some other reason was less unsettling.
It wasn't the first time that he thought he had solved something and he hadn't… But in the big picture, it made little difference.
He was restrained and incarcerated and maybe that was the point. Maybe all he needed was to free himself from this existence.
Could it be that simple? If he died in the mind palace, would it automatically expel him?
Would he wake up if he died in here?
Did he even want to return to real life?
Was his subconscious trying to tell him he needed to let go?
Transcribing the figurative into the physical to make him understand?
But why then was Mary visiting him regularly and encouraging him to hang on? Was she the manifestation of sentiment, his fear of letting John go?
Was the asylum a metaphor of him feeling trapped in his drug use and fighting to save John although there was no way out? Things he held dear were gone. During the time John had broken contact after Mary's death, Sherlock had felt isolated and alone, and he had given all he had to save John.
Just that now, after John was safe, he felt still isolated and alone… maybe even abandoned. The situation remained a conflict, nothing seemed solved. As if all the problems he had aimed to solve were now just simmering under the surface.
There were so many negative feelings it was overwhelming: loss, worthlessness, uselessness, as well as anger at himself. Ella had asked him where his own - healthy amount - of anger was about the woman who had actually shot Mary? About John's behaviour? About everything unfair that had happened to him? But he was at a loss; he couldn't find that anger.
Maybe it was needed to stay alive and that was the reason his self-preservation was rubbish, because it was just not there.
He was certain Portmann would try to get rid of him sooner or later, just giving in and allowing them to kill him could shorten his suffering.
Was he ready to risk that it might not bring him out of his mind palace but burrow him deeper?
Mary's pep talk the day before had had the opposite effect of what she aimed for. All he gathered from it was that people wanted him for their own selfish reasons, and he just didn't know where to get the energy and the will to do that.
He had run out of… everything that had kept him grounded and going before. All that remained was exhaustion.
He was too tired to fight or to even hope.
With his mind already drifting off, he tried to decide if he should fight them any longer. He was ready to escape the asylum, by any means necessary.
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Author's notes:
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