On his way back to Sherlock's room, John paused in front of a wall of portraits. He never took too long walking this stretch of hallway. There was a bad feeling just here. Before, he'd thought it to be an amalgamation of the angle of the walls, the unsettling effect of the huge, darkened mirror at one end, picking up the small movements of one's own body and reflecting them back in strange relief. The quick whiteness of a hand protruding from a sleeve, disembodied. How pale one's face looked, how it pulled the eyes back into shadowed hollows. The mirror turned all into ghosts.
This time, passing the mirror, quickening his (now shameful, lopsided) step, John paused, arrested by a face.
"Oh..."
John exhaled the word, slowed, stopped. He turned full to face her.
The portrait of a beautiful young girl.
It wasn't her beauty that stopped him. Yes, her face was perfect, but it was her expression that drew him in. She stood, her body at a slight angle, facing front. A slim girl, no more than a teenager John guessed. The solemn bow of her mouth was unrouged. Her dark hair was drawn back from the pale oval of her face, and she wore no wig. Her white dress, virginal, dipped low on her chest. And her eyes...
Dark as marsh-pools they stared straight from the canvas, knowing and direct. There was something plaintive in them too. Looking at paintings like this, John often felt the press of time, could feel the years in the expressions of the subjects. In exactly this way, he always thought, they looked at the artist. Centuries ago they held themselves just like this for the painter, and he froze them and varnished them in place.
It was not so with this one.
There was something alarmingly present about this girl's expression. She's not looking at the portraitist, John thought. She's looking at me.
John moved his eyes away and lit upon another portrait just below. This one showed three girls, and looking closer John recognised the dark-eyed girl in the middle. Sisters, he thought. He leaned in, the tip of his nose almost touching the canvas.
"How many of you are still here?" he murmured.
"They're leaving."
John almost jumped out of his skin at the voice behind him. He turned around.
Molly stood in front of the dark mirror at the end of the hallway. John sighed.
"Molly. Don't sneak up like that... That was almost the end of me."
"I'm sorry. It's the carpets." Molly moved closer. "Lady Ravensdale and Marion are leaving. It'll just be us here, now."
"Why?"
Molly didn't answer. Instead she stared at the wall of portraits for a while, biting on her lower lip. When she finally faced him again, John saw her mouth turned down at the corners, lines of worry knotting her forehead.
"I have a terrible feeling that we won't leave this place," she said quietly. "Ever."
777
John returned to Sherlock's room to find the detective looking listless and defeated. His hair was wet from the shower, but he hadn't bothered to clean up the mess on the lab table. He toyed absently with the unbroken vial containing his own blood.
"I'm worried about you," John said eventually. Sherlock glanced sideways at him.
"Don't. I'm fine."
"Thing is, I don't think you are." John sat down wearily on the edge of the bed.
"I know how you deal with dead ends Sherlock. Not... very well."
"What dead end might this be?"
Sherlock dropped the vial back onto the table and turned to face his friend. He looked frightening.
You haven't slept properly in days, John thought, taking in Sherlock's pallor, the dark shadows beneath his eyes. You haven't eaten properly since we arrived here.
John's gaze dropped.
"Your hands are shaking"
Sherlock clenched his fists.
"There is no dead end. I am not so quick to fall to superstition. Yes, I have yet to find anything, but the operative here is yet. Yet. I will find out what is happening here, in this House, to all of us."
Sherlock grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and pulled it on.
"Results are pending," he said, as he swept past John. "I have not failed."
"YET!" John shouted after him. Sherlock slammed the door.
John stood and limped to the window. A minute later he saw Sherlock's tall form stalking across the gravel and into the grounds. He hoped he planned on coming back.
777
A blessedly cool evening breeze swept over Sherlock as he left the House. Burying his hands deep in the pockets of his coat he walked blindly down the driveway and took a sharp right, the gravel changing to grass, he moved now with little sound. Pausing, he turned back to look at Ravensdale Hall. The breeze moved the wet hair on his forehead and stung his eyes. Coldly he took it all in.
Sherlock was rarely moved by beauty. Instead his mind quickly listed and arranged architectural information as his eyes roved over the House.
Portico, dormer windows in servants quarters (window tax, 1696 to 1851), side-gabled roof. Extension (built 1837), Jacobethan: Tudor arches, high chimneys, characteristic balustrades...
Even as the facts ran smoothly through his mind, he found himself focusing much, much harder than necessary, if only to drown out the only screaming thought based in no way on fact at all (and yet by far the loudest)-
It said, the House is Looking at you.
It said: Run.
Sherlock physically shook off the thought. Pulling his coat tightly around him he continued deeper into the grounds. Head down, mind working over the maddeningly inconclusive results of the blood tests, he barely registered the small building that appeared in front of him, half hidden by trees.
The groundskeepers shed.
777
Molly curled up in an armchair in the vast drawing room where they had first met Lady Ravensdale and arranged Marion's books on the table beside her. She chose one and began to read.
It was an old book, perhaps not as old as the House, but close. The pages were delicate and musty, the print faded to sepia. Molly waded through the archaic language, some words stained into to oblivion. Old magic.
Spells to bring a lost love back. Spells to start fires.
Molly turned the pages, fascinated.
Impossible things, soil to gold, spells to birth a Chimera.
Molly came upon an illustration and paused. The lithograph showed a girl asleep in a four poster bed. Standing over her was a figure, its face was nothing, dark as a hood. Molly read: 'The dead who have not pafsed wifh to take a living body as their own.' An incantation followed, to be repeated three times before sleep to guard the mind from possession.
Molly shivered and turned the page. The next image was of two men, almost identical, standing side by side. Instead of a mouth, the figure on the left had only empty space. 'Mimicry', said the heading.
'The dead may take the form of the living. The doppelganger can not fpeak.'
The spell below, in Latin, promised to 'bring the foul creature to its true form'.
She was so absorbed in the book that when it dawned on Molly that she was being watched, she found that she couldn't recall how long the feeling had been there. Eyes in the room, somewhere, locked on her. Molly's skin prickled and her mouth went dry. Flashing into her brain, Molly saw the eyes of the girl in the portrait. She laid the book down carefully.
"Emily?" she said
777
The rusted hinges gave easily when Sherlock put his shoulder to the door. Pale moonlight streamed into the shed. Sherlock waited for his eyes to adjust.
The shed was low ceilinged, a single room. One wall of tools over a workbench. A chair. A small portable television and a dartboard.
Sherlock raked the room impatiently for something of interest, and his eye caught a dusty finger of moonlight glinting off a bottle on the windowsill.
Ah. Not exactly what he had been looking for, but definitely something he could use.
Sherlock lifted the bottle and held it up to the light. Whiskey. Alcohol had never been his poison. He preferred the cold, clean high of cocaine, but he would have taken anything at that moment to quiet the incessant buzz of failure inside his head. Nothing had ever evaded him quite like this before. None of it added up.
Sherlock unscrewed the lid and took a deep swallow straight from the bottle. He winced as the alcohol burned his throat, but it was soon replaced by a warming numbness in his chest and he raised the bottle to his lips again.
Just enough to dull this for a little while. Just enough to take the edge off the failure.
777
After over an hour, John accepted the fact that he would have to go after Sherlock. Cursing, he descended the main staircase with difficulty, then paused as he heard a voice.
The low murmur of conversation. It came from the drawing room. Straining to hear, John recognised one of the voices as Molly's. He limped to the door and pushed it open. The voices stopped abruptly.
Molly looked up quickly as John entered, a look of guilt on her pale face. John recalled his young niece, at four, caught drawing on the wallpaper. The same look, when he walked in.
"Molly..." She hadn't said anything. Watched him, as he stood awkwardly in the doorway.
"Who... Were you talking to someone?"
Molly shook her head slowly.
"Reading to myself," she explained, smiling wanly and holding up a book. "It's so awfully quiet here. It helps to break the silence."
"Right." John hesitated. He thought to go and sit with her, but decided against it.
"I'm going to go outside. It's a bit stuffy in here."
Molly nodded and returned to her book. John backed out of the room.
He realised why he didn't want to sit with Molly with a wave of self disgust. Something in her eyes had frightened him. He wanted to get away from her.
777
John was sitting at the bottom of the stone steps to the main door watching the light draining from the sky when he heard a stirring in the forest. Footsteps. John stared into the treeline, immediately on guard.
"Sherlock?" he called hopefully.
He relaxed, relieved, as it was Sherlock who emerged from the forest and walked stiffly towards him. He stopped and stood beside John.
"Oh, hello." John, as always, tried hard not to let on how glad he was to see him.
"Mf." said Sherlock. They both stayed quiet, watching the sky. When the last veins of light disappeared John got up to go back inside.
"Coming?"
Sherlock turned to face him.
"Hmm?"
"I said are you coming in?"
Sherlock blinked slowly.
"Inside?"
John stared at him, catching the unmistakable scent of whiskey on his breath.
He narrowed his eyes.
"Sherlock... Are you drunk?"
"I have been drinking." Sherlock was fighting hard to retain his aloof demeanor through a fog of alcohol.
"My god. I haven't seen you drunk in the entire time I've known you." John looked half amused, half concerned. Was this another danger night? It was so hugely out of character for Sherlock to allow himself to lose control in this way. John wondered if he should call Mycroft.
"Don't." Even under the effects of the whiskey Sherlock could read him like a book.
"No need to call Mycroft. M'fine. 'Least... I will be."
A look of panic crossed his glacial features.
"Where's Molly? Is she alright?"
"Yes Sherlock. She's fine. She's in the drawing room reading."
"Right. Great. That's great. I'm glad she's fine. John-" Sherlock leaned in conspiratively. "I want to tell you something."
"Oh dear god." John was more than a little worried about what would come next.
"I've been feeling unusual."
"Of course you have, Sherlock. We all have."
"No. I mean, I've been having..." Sherlock looked disgusted, "...Feelings."
"Brilliant. Well done. You're having an emotion. Whiskey, was it?"
Sherlock's eyes began to cloud over.
"Yes. A... a lot. But John, listen. The dream. My dream, the first night. It was about... Molly."
John's eyebrows almost disappeared into his hairline.
"About Molly? Our Molly?: Works at St Barts?"
Sherlock nodded and regretted it. The movement made his head spin.
"And it was... You know. That sort of dream. That people have."
John's eyebrows now resided somewhere around the back of his neck.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
Sherlock frowned.
"I'm not enjoying this feeling. I'd like it to stop."
"Well, I mean," John grasped for the words to reassure the detective, "We're all a bit shaken by what's been happening, and I suppose that being in such close quarters with somebody, feelings develop and all that, but I'm sure once we get back to London it'll all-" He realised that he was babbling and stopped. Sherlock's eyes were entirely unfocused.
"No. Not th' Molly thing. The drunk thing. It was nice for a while but now it's-"
Sherlock swallowed hard and stared pointedly into the middle distance.
"I think I'm going to be sick."
He swayed and almost fell. John caught him around the waist as he leaned forward and retched.
"If you manage to actually throw up I'll be amazed," John said grimly, holding him steady. "I haven't seen you eat one thing since we got here."
Sherlock's body convulsed as he vomited pure whiskey onto John's shoes.
John looked down.
"Brilliant."
"There," said Sherlock, sounding much more like his usual self. "Are you amazed?"