With special thanks to Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his story, "The Music of Erich Zann", which is the inspiration for this. Written as a fill for the "Let's Write Sherlock!" challenge 6: Horror.
Enjoy!
Sherlock kept strange hours. That wasn't anything new to his flatmate. The detective didn't care a whit about proper etiquette regarding when it would be appropriate or not appropriate to play his violin, and that wasn't new to John either.
But lately, lately, the middle of the night serenades were a bit too much to bear. The tunes weren't melodious. They were barely music at all, all screeching strings and wild notes, played with frantic fingers and a ferociously sweeping bow.
Many times John crept down the stairs and listened outside his flatmate's bedroom door. He always meant to knock, but as if Sherlock could sense he was there, the noise would cease.
John wasn't sure what was going on, and during the day Sherlock kept to his room, barely exiting for any length of time.
However, when John happened to notice that the cup Sherlock set on near the sink—tea courtesy of John, of course—had bloody fingerprints on it, he jumped up from his chair and rushed forward to catch his flatmate's sleeve before he disappeared behind his door again.
If it proved that he'd been watching the detective like a mother hen, he didn't care.
"You're bleeding," the doctor said, as if Sherlock didn't know, or hadn't noticed.
John took Sherlock's wrist and maneuvered his hand around to examine the raw fingertips.
"The blood feeds the strings," Sherlock answered. He said this plainly, as though it should be obvious, and not at all cryptic or worrying.
John sighed and didn't rise to the bait of asking him to clarify. "Sherlock," he admonished, "you need to give that violin a break."
That startled the other man. "No! I cannot!"
"Sherlock—"
"I cannot, John. I cannot."
The repetition of denial was odd, with its solid emphasis on "cannot" instead of the more expected, stubborn "will not". The conviction behind the words was undeniable. John tried a different tactic.
"Well, the music you're playing is certainly something different. Are you composing?"
At the pseudo-praise and sincere query, Sherlock relaxed a minute amount.
"No . . . these compositions aren't mine. An envelope arrived with handwritten sheet music inside. Not a full score—pages of the sonata are missing. But the note attached to them insinuated that perhaps I could fill in what had been misplaced, and that is a mystery I cannot ignore. I have done my best, and will continue to try.
"To my personal failings, I don't read much German, so I have only been able to translate a portion of the note."
"Let me take a look. I know a bit of German myself, I could help—"
"No!" The interruption was immediate and sharp, even more so than the refusal to stop playing.
"Sherlock—"
"No, John! Absolutely not!"
The detective twisted his wrist out of the doctor's grip, and retreated to his room. The door slammed shut, and the lock engaged, signaling the finality of the conversation.
John sighed and wondered what he should do.
That night the music was worse than before. John wasn't aware a stringed instrument could produce such grating, harsh sounds. He pulled a pillow over his head and hoped exhaustion would claim him.
He did not see hide nor hair of his flatmate for several days following. The midnight music had continued, but even John with his untrained ear could tell they were less powerful and stuttery in their execution. Was Sherlock succumbing to his own fatigue? Was the detective finished with whatever compelled him to keep playing night after night?
It was near ten in the evening now. John wondered if his flatmate had eaten anything in these past days. With a sigh of resignation, he put the kettle on and went about preparations for tea. While he waited for the water to come to temperature, he grilled a cheese toastie. If Sherlock declined both, at least he would have done his part as a concerned friend.
With plate and cup in hand, John went to Sherlock's door. He used his knee to rap on it, and to his surprise, it swung open several inches. He'd expected it to be closed and locked, and stood for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to enter.
When Sherlock made no acknowledgement of his door opening, John pushed it wider. No complaints about the door, and then no complaints about the room being invaded.
The room was dim but not pitch black. After several moments, the streetlights outside provided enough light for John to see by. Colors were muted, but not completely washed away. It was chilly; John figured it was due to an open window.
John found Sherlock sprawled face down on his mattress. John paused for a moment, to determine his flatmate was both alive (the slight rise and fall of his chest was evidence) and sleeping (the deep and regular pattern of breath showed that). From the unkempt state of the bed and the smears of blood in various places on the sheets, it was obvious he'd continually opened the wounds on his fingers without bothering to attend to them. The detective himself was also scruffy and unwashed.
Carefully and quietly John set the food and drink on the bedside table. When Sherlock still didn't move, he even more carefully and quietly crossed the room to the desk and music stand near the far window.
Papers were scattered haphazardly across the wooden desk. The sheet music that Sherlock had mentioned was on the music stand; John could see that the staff and notes were faded, and where his friend had scribbled in new ones. Some he'd simply filled in to make the original more legible, others he had crossed out and added other notes altogether.
There was no name on the arrangement.
John turned his attention to the papers on the desk. They were yellowed, brittle, and a few had the same disturbing smears and smudges that adorned Sherlock's sheets. The cramped foreign words had been written in a spidery hand, and John strained to read any of it.
What little he could translate made no sense, and a dull ache started in his brow.
"It's not that there's no light, you know."
John jumped. "Jesus, Sherlock!"
Sherlock was sitting on the bed now, watching him with hooded eyes. He didn't say anything more, until John prompted,
"What do you mean, it's not because there's no light?"
"That headache that's brewing," he replied dismissively. "You were rubbing your forehead like you do when you're getting a headache."
John hadn't been aware he'd done that.
"It's what the words say, John. Even if you can't read them all, they wiggle into the deeper crevices in your brain. The primal side of you, the lizard brain, senses the danger, even as your higher faculties do not."
That dull ache hadn't dissipated, but it hadn't grown worse. John wondered, briefly, if it was because he wasn't looking at the paper any longer. Then he chided himself that that was ridiculous.
"What are you talking about?" he demanded, irritably.
Sherlock didn't get up. "The music, John. The music is the key. It creates its own symphony—no, discord! Cacophony! It uses horrid noises that worm through to our time, our space! Every night it makes its attempt! Perhaps the night is easiest for it to traverse the stars, slipping through the dark matter to our atmosphere, but that is a puzzle I have no energy or resources to devote to right now. It hates its place, it hates our harmony with our world, it wants to come here and—it doesn't want to take over, per se, that's a human trait and it is beyond the scope and breadth of humanity! It wants to fill our space with the same dissonance it must live in—"
The detective's voice had grown in timbre and urgency. John snapped,
"Sherlock! That's enough!"
He'd been in the military; he knew how to override other voices and shut them down.
Sherlock complied, in part.
His voice lost its pitch. It did not lose its fervor.
"Herr Zann was so close, John," he whispered. "He almost succeeded in closing the gate! But he stumbled—I don't know if he lost his concentration, or a string broke, or—"
John glanced down at the paper in his hand again. A name at the bottom caught his eye, "Erich Zann". Obviously the man who wrote these notes and probably the music. Obviously the man who had become Sherlock's obsession, and somehow managed to tip his friend dangerously close to the edge of collapse and what sounded like insanity—
Who this man was meant nothing right now. John had to calm Sherlock down; get him to eat something, bathe, and actually sleep instead of this catnapping that he'd been doing. He'd use force or prescription drugs if he had too; Sherlock was plainly distressed.
He dropped the paper and turned back to Sherlock completely.
"Come on, Sherlock. Let's get you up. A shower will help, and then we'll talk about all this—"
A deep thrumming sensation made the hairs on the back of John's neck rise. It wasn't a sound, not really, just a feeling, just a suggestion of sound that took up residence in his ears. Then came a slight pain, like diving too deeply underwater without equalizing the pressure in his head. That pain quickly escalated and John clapped his hands to his ears and doubled over.
"It's here!" Sherlock cried.
His flatmate's voice sound far away.
In a flurry of movement Sherlock was out of his bed, knocking John off balance in his rush to scoop up his violin and throw back the curtains of the window. He set bow to strings, and countered the thrumming with his own noise.
Walls and doors had shielded John from Sherlock's previous nightly musical endeavors. Now he suffered the full force of the abuse Sherlock whetted out to the instrument: squeals and shrieks and notes that couldn't possibly have a name or position on the scale. John alternately howled and grit his teeth and struggled to right himself.
The sounds continued, even as he made it to his feet. The noise that Sherlock produced clashed with the unearthly noise that flooded in from the window. Both sounds collided inside John's head, until he could no longer separate one from the other.
What could make such horrific, unnatural in the center of London? With the mattress at the back of his knees for support, John turned to see.
The cityscape, with its the familiar tops of buildings and light pollution, was not there. In its place outside the open window was a yawning blackness, too solid to be the night, too full of flitting shapes and visions to belong in this universe. Impossibly, the silhouette of Sherlock furiously sawing at his violin was visible against the nightmare outside.
Something in John's mind, something with the strongest survival instinct possible, turned him away. He fell backwards onto the soiled bed, the disharmony seeping in and filling in all the spaces between his cells, and he knew no more.
When he awoke, he couldn't open his eyes immediately. He cried out, panicked, and rubbed at his face. His eyelids had been crusted shut. After he picked them open, John recognized the dark brown flakes under his fingernails.
Blood.
His cheeks were stiff from the dried blood. Both sides of his neck were coated in it too; he'd hemorrhaged from eyes and ears. The sheer amount of it stuck him to the sheets. He carefully peeled himself off so he could sit up.
Sherlock's room was filled with sunlight. A breeze ruffled the curtains, and over the din of traffic, John could hear birdsong.
Sherlock was not in the room.
The detective was not in the flat. With growing dread, John searched every room, then searched them again. Then he tripped down the stairs to pound on Mrs. Hudson's door. He ignored her shock and questions as to why he was coated in old blood and demanded to know if she'd seen Sherlock go out.
She hadn't, but he knew that. He'd found his flatmate's jacket and wallet and mobile phone in their customary places upstairs. Sherlock never left the flat without them.
Wearily, and still ignoring his landlady's worry, he climbed the stairs again. He made his way back to Sherlock's bedroom and sank onto the bed.
He would never have the skills Sherlock had. He would never have the brilliance. He scanned the room and tried to put it all together: the papers from the desk and the sheet music were scattered. Sherlock's violin was in one piece, but looked worse for wear with a crack in the bridge, scorch marks like it had been burned along the lower bout, and dark, blood-stained strings. The bow had been splintered; its horsehair frayed.
There was no evidence of the detective—no fibers from torn clothing, no drops of blood, nothing to point to where he had been spirited away to.
"You stupid fool," John said aloud, to no one. "You should have let me help. The man wrote his music for a viol, not violin. It was right there in his notes! And you, you with your stubbornness, you with your refusing to let me plaster your fingers—the blood on the strings, the blood on the strings was enough to throw it all off, to tip the balance—and now you're gone and I'm . . . I'm . . ."
He realized he was shouting with a cracked voice, and weeping.
Sherlock was gone. John would never even come close to what he had accomplished. He had never picked up a stringed instrument in his life, but knew if he were to carry on what Sherlock had attempted to contain, he would have to try.
And if—when—he failed, he could only hope that he would meet up with the Consulting Detective again.
fin.