The walk to the lake should have been a pleasant one. It was still warm, the sun lower in the sky but still casting a beautiful golden light over the grounds. Dragonflies zipped through the overgrown grass. Despite the idyllic surroundings a heavy atmosphere had settled over all of them. John couldn't shake off the uncertain creeping feeling that had come over him when he witnessed Sherlock's confusion in the study. Molly was quiet, compulsively touching the bruises on her shoulder, and Sherlock was projecting an air of 'don't touch me, don't even talk to me' so effectively that the other two stayed at least ten paces behind him the whole way.
The lake was a vast expanse of still water almost a half mile from the main house. A small wooden jetty led from a boat house on its banks, and an ancient row boat with peeling blue paint bobbed gently in the water beside it. The smell of the lake, that same greenish, stagnant smell as the study and the bathroom after Molly's attack was amplified by the warmth of the day.
"Nice down here, isn't it?" John commented with a forced brightness to Molly. She smiled weakly.
"Do we have to stay in that building tonight?" she asked him. "I don't think I feel safe there. There must be more spare bedrooms in that place."
John reached out and squeezed her arm reassuringly.
"I'll ask."
"John!" Sherlock called from the end of the jetty.
"I overheard," he said quietly when John reached him. "We're staying at the stables. We can't feed into her hysteria."
"Hysteria?" John looked at him incredulously. "Sherlock, the girl is bruised to pieces! You saw that..."
"The power of the mind over the flesh is far greater than most believe," Sherlock muttered, kneeling to scoop lake water into a vial. "You're a doctor. You must have read at least one case study of some wretched individual convincing their own body into ruins."
"I don't think that-"
"Oh for god's sake." Sherlock straightened up and glanced over at Molly, sitting crosslegged by the boat house pulling up tufts of grass. He lowered his voice.
"The true ascendancy of hysteria is well documented. The witch trials in Salem, girls found bite marks and scratches on their skin... Patients in psychiatric hospitals were able to make writing appear on their backs under observation with their hands restrained... It's all there, John. Molly is more susceptible than I thought. The house is getting to her."
"You really think so?"
"Of course." Sherlock looked annoyed. "What else could it be? I examined that room. There was no way in. The lights went out, she panicked. Those bloody ghost stories that Lady Ravensdale was feeding us in the drawing room must have got inside her head. Either she did it to herself or it's psychosomatic."
"Do you think we should send her home?"
"No." Sherlock said, a little too quickly. John raised his eyebrows at him. "It might be useful to observe her reactions," he amended. "Whatever Somatoform disorder she is clearly suffering from may well hold the answer to the effect this place seems to have on apparently sane people."
"is that... Ethical?"
Sherlock looked confused.
"Of course." John sighed. "Right. She stays. I'll keep an eye on her."
777
Back at the stable building, Sherlock went straight to work analyzing the samples of lake water alongside the plaster fragments from the study. The open plan living area was more than large enough for John and Molly to hold a hushed conversation on the other side of the room without disturbing the detective.
"Do we have to?" Molly looked at John pleadingly, her voice practically a whisper.
"Just one more night." John was apologetic. He took Molly's small hand in his. "I'll be just across the hall. I'll leave my door open. If anything happens just wake me up."
"Sherlock doesn't believe me does he?" Molly's eyes were downcast now, her long eyelashes grazing her cheeks. "He must think I'm insane."
"No, no..." John said weakly. He glanced up in time to catch Sherlock's brief knowing look from across the room before he returned to his administrations. Damn, the man had the hearing of a bat.
"Do you think I'm insane?"
"I think... I think that this house has a funny effect on people. I haven't felt quite right since we got here myself." John gently thumbed Molly's cardigan away from her shoulder.
"And I believe these."
The bruises had turned a dark, angry purple colour. There was no way, John thought, that they were psychosomatic.
777
John went to bed at midnight, leaving Molly curled up on the sofa reading her book and Sherlock muttering to himself over his microscope. He pointedly left his bedroom door open, and shot Molly a reassuring smile before disappearing inside. Molly and Sherlock remained in uncomfortable silence together for another half hour until it became unbearable. Molly caught Sherlock's eye and smiled. He looked away quickly and cleared his throat.
"Right." He stood up abruptly. "I'm going to bed. If you experience another 'episode' during the night don't hesitate to wake John. Goodnight."
His bedroom door slammed and Molly was alone. For some reason she found it more of a comfort to be in the living area than her bedroom. She dragged the duvet off her bed and lay down on the sofa.
John's gentle snoring from behind his half open door provided her with enough semblance of company and reassurance to let her eyes grow heavy. Sleep came with unexpected swiftness.
Soon, the only sounds in the room were John's quiet snores and, from the bathroom, the gentle dripping of a tap.
777
Sherlock couldn't pinpoint when, or how the dream had begun. He couldn't even remember falling asleep. This wasn't unusual, he often drove his body to such levels of exhaustion that he had been known to pass out unexpectedly. But he rarely dreamt. And never like this.
The first image to rise in his unconscious mind was Molly. Beneath him. And a sensation of aching desire so overpowering that he groaned out loud in his sleep.
Her pale wrists, white as skinned switches as he held them down against the sheets, the thrust and want of his own body - I could break you, he thought, and his head filled with milky confusion.
So much. So, so much.
He moaned into her neck, and dream-Molly arched to meet him. The finger marks on her shoulder seemed to glow.
Why?
The rational part of his brain surfaced, gasping for air.
Why now? Yes, there had been stirrings before, feelings for the girl bordering on affection, but they had always been so easy to shake off. But now, in this house, under a veil of heavy sleep (that in itself unusual) these lustful thoughts overwhelmed him.
Sherlock moved fitfully in his sleep, struggling to escape the dream.
You've been drugged, his rationality screamed at him through foggy layers of sleep and arousal. Yes! That must explain it. It's Baskerville all over again...
Sherlock's eyes snapped open and he sat straight up in bed, breathing hard. He ran his hands through his hair roughly, remnants of the dream clinging to him like wraiths. His face felt warm. There was a dizzy fluttering sensation low in his stomach, slowly ebbing away as he came to himself. Sherlock noticed as an afterthought that between his legs he was rock hard.
God. How disgustingly human. How predictable.
His cheeks flushed as he registered an urge to touch, to bring himself to shuddering release. It felt like a nicotine craving, but deeper. Cocaine? More chaotic even than that, an irrational desperate want. And more than that - much more - he wanted her.
What drug had undone him in this way? Sherlock thought back over what he had consumed since arriving at the House. No food obviously, just water, tea, he had touched the walls in the study though, could it be absorbed through the skin? Was it in the air?
If it had affected him it would have gotten to the others as well. He had to wake John and Molly. Actually, he amended, perhaps not Molly. Rising from the bed had brought his attention back to the hardness in his pants. Until he worked out what was causing this uncharacterised appetence he needed to avoid her as much as possible. Right now, he had to sit quietly and wait for the inopportune protrusion to go away.
Sherlock closed his eyes and breathed deeply as his brain fought to control unfamiliar levels of prurience.
After seven minutes of meditation, Sherlock could at least trust himself to be able to walk.
777
John lay still. Perhaps if he lay quite still enough, he thought, he could stop it from happening. He could always tell, in the past, when he was going to have one of THOSE dreams. Like a migraine aura he would sense a vignette of true darkness at the edge of things, and then a sudden inrush of sound and light, like a train emerging from a tunnel.
The stillness didn't help. He knew it wouldn't. And suddenly he was there.
Another dream about the war.
In the dreams, blood was a colour that painters fantasised about. The brightest, most perfect red imaginable. Screams were magnified. They left a trail in the air, you could see it.
Just a dream. That's all.
The fear. You didn't feel it at the time, because adrenaline lifted you up and you didn't feel a thing really, until later. The fear, and the pain in his shoulder. They came after the fact. And oh, he could feel it now.
The thumping of his heartbeat was too loud, it hovered in the air above him like a target, pulsing and throwing out ribbons of light. If they see my heart, he thought, I'm dead. In the dreams, sound was visible too. That was how it felt out there. So very exposed. Too aware of the frailty of bones and flesh. The panic was rising now. John tossed, murmuring in his sleep. Please let me wake up before-
Two hands grasped his shoulders and shook him violently. John awoke with a start to see Sherlock's pale face staring down at him.
He had never been quite so happy to see him.
"You had it too?" Sherlock hissed.
"Wh... What?" John muttered, still half asleep.
"You were thrashing about, moaning, you dreamt it too, didn't you? There's something in the water, that must be it, some kind of aphrodisiac..." Sherlock had left John's bedside to pace around the room. John watched him, bewildered.
"Aphrodisiac? Sherlock, what are you talking about?"
"The dream! The dream you were having, what was it about? No need for details, obviously.."
"The war." John answered quietly. "It's been ages since I had one of those. Anxiety dreams, you know. I suppose being in a strange place, coupled with what happened to Molly, maybe that set it off."
"Oh." Sherlock stopped pacing.
John yawned and rubbed his eyes.
"Sherlock... Not that I'm not glad you woke me up, but what made you come in here? Was I really making that much noise?"
"Ah. Yes." Sherlock seemed to gather his bearings for a minute. "The door was open," he added, gesturing vaguely. "Well, goodnight!"
Sherlock turned to leave, just as an almighty crash resounded from the living room.
John leaped out of bed to follow Sherlock. The sight that greeted them as they left the bedroom made the hairs stand up on the back of John's neck.
Molly was standing in the centre of the room, her hair obscuring her face. She held her arms at an odd angle, bent at the elbow and slightly contorted. Her dress was torn at the shoulder, and the bruises there looked darker still. She was soaked to the skin. But it wasn't Molly that made John freeze where he stood and Sherlock murmur "How in the hell..."
Every piece of furniture in the room had been flung to the perimeters as though there had been an explosion in the centre. Two heavy chesterfield couches lay at angles against the wall. The mahogany coffee table was split down the centre over by the kitchen. In the middle of the chaos, Molly wrapped her arms around herself and screamed. The sound was ragged, inhuman. She dropped to her knees and spoke.
"He took her to the stables to do it. Here. Here. He did it here. He took her here to do it."
She repeated it like a mantra, over and over, until her voice rose again and she was screaming the words.
John rushed to her side.
"Molly. Molly, can you hear me?"
He took hold of her shoulders and her head fell back. Her eyes were blank, only her lips moved. The scream had dropped to a quiet murmur.
"He took here here. Here. He took her to the stables to do it."
John looked up at Sherlock.
"She's not conscious. I mean, I think she's sleep walking. Sort of. Night terrors."
Sherlock knelt beside her and took Molly's face in his hands.
"Wake. Up." he commanded.
Molly's lips stopped moving and her eyes fluttered closed. They opened again a moment later, dull with sleep.
"What are you two... Am I... How did I get out here?"
"Molly," Sherlock said urgently, "What's the last thing you can remember?"
Molly blinked.
"Oh, that's right, I fell asleep on the sofa." She pointed to where the sofa had been. Sherlock watched panic register on her face as she finally took in the state of the room, and the fact that she was soaking wet.
"What happened to me?" she asked tremulously.
"Funny, that," Sherlock helped her to her feet. "Was just about to ask you the same thing."