HEADLIGHTS
By Hallospacegirl
Chapter Nine
When Holmes finally wakes from his delirium in the golden sunshine of the late afternoon, a powerful urge comes over me, a powerful urge to avoid him. I'm surprised at myself. I expected that when this time came I would practically run to him in relief, and I mentally prepared against bursting into his room like a melodramatic happy ending to a bad movie.
Did I somehow become cold and unfeeling, I wonder as I continue sitting beside the fireplace of the study. A room away behind a closed door, Watson and Holmes are conversing in garbled words that I can't distinguish. My eyes stray to the pale slash scars peeking out beneath my simple calico sleeves. The scars are raised on my skin, and they also raise memories of leaning against the bathroom wall in pain, nursing reality as the alcohol bliss wore away. It never really hurt as the cold razor went in and the warm blood poured out, I realize. It only hurts later, the next day, and the years and the lifetime after.
And Holmes' scars must be so similar to mine, and perhaps it's only now that the pain will begin to flare in him. We both have scars. I don't know if I can see so much of myself staring back at me.
And besides, I remind myself, I have no idea what I meant when I talked to Watson by Holmes' bedside this morning. I have no idea what I feel. And I don't want to confront him about it, not when I'm a stranger from a hundred years in the future, and he's a detective from the past, and our paths can separate as quickly as they joined together.
"What do you feel for Sherlock Holmes, Ada?" Watson asked earlier. Suddenly my cheeks flush too warmly for a December afternoon as a few choice words now come unbidden to my mind, and I push them away, until only one word remains, and it echoes repeatedly in an icy whisper, "Fragility."
Fragility.
Separation.
My last dream is the most vivid one I have ever undergone, the woman with the red lips – Irene Adler or Madame Sosostris or whoever she is – telling me things I have known all along, but never wanted to accept. I must one day discover what happened to me and why I'm here. I must one day depart from Baker Street and Doctor Watson and Sherlock Holmes. There was a time when my daydreams were filled with ideas on how to escape back to my dreary little self-destructive life in San Francisco, with hardly a fleeting thought of the strange detective known as Sherlock Holmes, but now I'm not so sure.
From the bedroom comes a shout of impatience and a sharp admonishment, "My dear Holmes, frankly speaking, it will do your health no good for you to tell me about your dream."
"But Watson, it was unlike anything I have ever dreamt before!" Holmes' voice is huskier and weaker than usual, but filled with the same intensity he has so often displayed when hot on the trail. "At the forefront was a familiar woman, a woman with the face of an angel, if you will excuse the expression, and she taught me lessons in the middle of a deserted schoolroom. I addressed her as "Madame," and she ordered me to recite a long poem from a tattered textbook. Watson, do pull up the 'D' volume of my encyclopedia so that we may further explore the science of dreams—"
"You are ill, my good man."
"Nonsense, Watson, I am more refreshed than I have ever been. I vehemently protest your confining me to this bed for three days, but as my legs have the consistency of soft rubber, I have no choice but the obey you."
There is a small chuckle.
"Oh, dear Watson, do not laugh. I speak but the truth. As you know I am not prone to exaggeration nor modesty."
"I laugh, because I am relieved you seem to be in good spirits. For now, at least."
Holmes sighs lightly. "Watson. Watson... I recall that Ada had also experienced a most unique dream of her own," he says.
His sentence is like a single crystal marble being thrown into the air, and it hovers suspended, with bated breath. I have been halfheartedly perusing a stack of sepia press photographs of the Scotland Yard as I listened to Holmes and Watson's chat, but now I abandon the photos completely. They slide, softly splashing, from my knees to the carpet, and I find myself staring at the wooden panel of Holmes' closed door as if doing so can make me hear the detective more clearly.
There could have been a pause for one second or a hundred. But somehow Watson catches onto the conversation as an athlete would stand on tiptoe and reach for the ball. "And what was Miss Cooper's dream?" he asks, delicately.
"It was a nightmare that was filled with images of the murdered unfortunate Mary Jane Kelly, of blinding white lights, and of a woman to whom Miss Cooper claimed she signed away her soul." He speaks as he always does, but the tone sounds too clinical to my ears, as though he's merely describing another case. "It happened on the second night she arrived at our humble flat, Watson, of the day the fifth Whitechapel murder was announced in the newspapers. After you left, I was interrupted from my studies by a piercing scream. The sound was chilling, and I bolted to your former domicile to find Miss Cooper futilely struggling underneath the covers, her eyes wild and haunted." His voice is more animated now. "Do you know, Watson, that her black tresses, when loose, reaches nearly to her waist? To a hedonist or any other pursuer of art, the manner that her hair cascades over her shoulders can only be described as beautiful. Have you noticed?"
My hand flies to the back of my head, where my hair is pulled in a low bun. I haven't forgotten that to Mrs. Hudson I'm still supposed to pass as a maid in this house, and the bun is the hairstyle for all maids... and respectable women.
"No, by God, I most certainly did not notice that about her!" Watson is practically shouting. "I am surprised at you, Holmes."
"Surprised, my good doctor? It is merely – merely an observation, like any other." But the stutter, as tiny as it is, doesn't escape me. "And besides," he hurries on, "she has already shared our quarters for more than a month. It feels even to me that she has been living here forever, Watson, so strong is the power of illusion, and so willing is the human mind to follow. By now, it is nearly impossible not to notice such particulars."
"I agree with you wholeheartedly. And... time is perhaps the reason she discovered your particular, Holmes. The seven percent solution."
Holmes is ominously silent.
Watson continues, "As cruel as it sounds, I heartily thank Miss Cooper for doing this to you, by the way. She has a woman's stubbornness and fire that will hopefully end your addiction to that dreaded syringe once and for all. She has thrown your worst vice into the disposal and you were powerless to stop her. I would to God that I had possessed as much conviction—"
"Thank you for the most illuminating summary, Watson," Holmes interrupts dryly. His good spirits sounds to have already withered, as Watson predicted. "I do not wish to state the obvious, but I was not powerless to stop her, my dear Watson. Miss Cooper possesses a burning curiosity to the unknown, and even more dangerously, an ability to rummage through as many articles as is within arm's reach. When she snatched away my syringe from this very room, I did not fail to observe that most of the items on my desk had been disturbed, and that, strangely, my clothing had also not been spared her little attack." He lets the words settle in for a while. "Women are intriguing, Watson, and their intents are almost opaque at times."
"Intent? Using your methods of deduction, I can say that she wanted to simply analyze the clothing of this century. We have settled on the theory that she is from the future, have we not?"
"Yes we have... but no, my instincts tell me that was not her intent..."
I wish they would carry over to a new topic. Thankfully, Holmes does.
"Watson, not only has she rummaged through my clothing, she has managed to find the photograph of the woman of whom you wrote in your overly sensational and dripping account of 'A Scandal in Bohemia.'"
"Irene Adler, Holmes?"
"Why must you refer to her by that name, Watson! Do not forget she is married, and now lives abroad," Holmes says with a tinge of irritation.
I take the bit of information easily, and I must admit I feel some sort of relief, some sort of closure to the mystery of the woman in the photograph. She is now married, I muse to myself, bending down to retrieve the scattered Scotland Yard clippings on the carpet. Where does she live now? Does she still retain her former passionate beauty, or did married life turn her into a tired, dried husk? What is her new name?
She is no longer a Mademoiselle, she is a Madame.
Madame Sosostris.
The name flutters through my mind absently, mingled with a thousand other thoughts, ready to be forgotten. The clock on the mantle clicks once. A placid second passes by, and outside a gust of wind blows a tiny crumb of dirt silently against the windowpane. Behind the closed door, Holmes and Watson's conversation has died down once again to an insignificant murmur.
Madame Sosostris.
Oh my God.
The calm is over. I have bolted up in the chair, photographs pinwheeling around me. The clock ticks once more, another second passes, but I can no longer hear the sound through the blood roaring in my ears.
Madame Sosostris, Irene Adler, the woman with the red lips. I know the connection now. I know it, even if the information is too jumbled up in my head for me to make any sense of it. Am I still dreaming or did the dream world pass into reality? I pinch myself on the back of my hand, and there is pain.
What was it that Sherlock Holmes said last night in his fever? "I saw the woman in my dreams."
I asked him if he saw Irene.
No, she was not Irene, but a familiar woman with a foreign name, a name of Madame something...
Sosostris. Foreign name. It has to be.
The rational part of me is demanding just how a name of someone in my head, a name that I have never even mentioned to Holmes, could possibly be in his dream, but I've gone too far to stop. I'm thinking only of Madame Sosostris.
God, just who is she? When was she first mentioned to me? I remember in my dreamscape a large, fog filled room, and a woman with red lips stepping out from the darkness, the mist swirling around her ankles and her heels tapping hollowly against the... dance floor.
The memory shifts, and now I'm at an event that happened so long ago I have trouble believing it ever occurred. That night at Joe's Club with Tony, the wine he offered me, and afterwards, the piece of paper he held in his hands as he gestured to the woman sitting in the shadows. That woman wanted me to autograph my story. The shadows parted, she lowered the slim cigarette from her mouth, and I could see that her lips were painted blood red.
That woman was named Madame Sosostris in my dream.
I grab on to the arm of the chair, but the images keep coming. And the mist and shadows suddenly disappear from my mind, and in the middle of the white headlights I see her clearly.
I am running to Holmes' desk, flinging open the drawer with shaking fingers and taking out a pair of scissors. Next to the scissors is a small, maroon matchbook. I rip the colored portion off, and cut from it a shape of a very flattened heart with no point at the bottom. Then, tossing the scissors away, I begin to pull out the leather file folders that have been neatly arranged in the far shelf of the desk, yanking off the strings and dumping the photographs and papers out from each one. They scatter to the desk, the chair, the ground, years of precious cataloguing flushed down the drain like garbage. I don't care.
Then I see it, the one photograph I am searching for, the one of Irene Adler. I slam it down on the desktop, and place the little paper shape I have hastily cut out – the little piece of almost cartoonish crimson lips – over Irene Adler's mouth.
And there she is, staring at me defiantly with those pale, large eyes, the woman with the red lips.
Simple logic guides me from there.
The woman with the red lips is Madame Sosostris. Madame Sosostris is the woman in Joe's Club.
Irene Adler is the woman I saw in Joe's Club.
To be continued...
Note: I'll let you hang on this one for a while, heh...