And once again we're back to the modern day. I have again drawn on The Sound of Silence, partly because we begin in a similar situation, and partly because it makes sense to do so when I am presenting an alternative timeline to what happened in that story. I don't wish to self-advertise but you are very welcome to read it. ;)
I am also going to have to apologise again for spoilers for the short story The Empty House.
Two years.
Two long years.
Mrs Hudson went quietly through to her little living-room with a cup of tea carefully balanced on a saucer, and sat down, sipping at it, finding it slightly too hot still, and so resorting just to sitting and thinking.
It was two years to the day since that call. She had used her favourite song for the ringtone, and she hadn't been able to listen to it since, not after it had broken an uneasy silence and announced the news she had never wanted to hear – the news even her nightmares had never managed to match.
He was dead. Sherlock Holmes was dead.
She had mourned at first, of course, everyone had. John had left and hadn't returned, nor even attempted to make contact with her. She had seen Lestrade a couple of times, and he was a truly broken man, not just because he had been utterly ridiculed for taking Sherlock on. And at any rate he didn't deserve such treatment.
Sherlock had committed suicide. It had been so much more shocking even than was natural, because it had been so at odds with his bright, sparkling, living, enduring character, and because his "note" – a horrid phone call to John – had contained information that Mrs Hudson couldn't, wouldn't, believe.
Apparently Sherlock had claimed to be a fake, not a genius, just a fake who had used trickery to reach some twisted self-aim. And when it dawned on him what chaos he had caused, what upset, he hadn't been able to live with it.
It didn't fit somehow. And there were more than a few people out there who claimed that he was still alive, that somehow he had faked his suicide – ha! That was ludicrous, wasn't it? John had seen him fall. He had seen him –
The sight had utterly broken him and Mrs Hudson did not doubt what he had seen. Sherlock Holmes was dead. Gone. Forever. Only his name remained, and it had become infamous, blackening his very self.
He couldn't have been a fake. Mrs Hudson knew he'd been a genius. Hadn't he? Of course he had!
Then why –
It was useless thinking on it. He'd had some reason for killing himself, a reason that would perhaps only ever be known unto himself. He was gone, and she had to accept that.
But, oh! how terrible it was still to remember that day, still to remember –
The little curiosity shop was a favourite of Mrs Hudson's, and she often went in when she passed that way, if only to admire the small figurines behind the dirty window that were probably worth a small fortune, to run her finger over the old books that lined the shelves, to exchange a snatch of slightly surreal conversation with the eccentric old man behind the counter. She hadn't been in here in a while. Indeed, it brought back a few unfavourable memories, as it had been the place where she had bought A Study in Scarlet – still Sherlock and John's laughs when they had read and discussed it came back to her, yet now they seemed distant and overwhelmingly sad somehow. And there hadn't been a long while between that and what John called the Fall...
But she needed to get back to her normal life, and she hadn't seen the man at the counter for a while, so she went in and greeted him, wondering if anyone except her ever spoke to him. She too now understood loneliness and she pitied him.
Her gaze went straight to the books. She had a thing about old books. They were pretty and, though she felt as if she would sound odd admitting it, she quite liked their musty smell. And there were occasionally among them some fascinating gems. Like A Study in Scarlet.
She already had the Dickens novels that lined the top shelf, or else she might have bought them. She admired a row of books about flowers and wild animals that had the most beautiful coloured plates. Then her eyes travelled down to W, and she was astonished to see the name John Watson.
It hadn't been there the last time she'd come – evidently it was a recent addition. Perhaps it was a different John Watson. She tentatively slid it from among the other novels, and found it to be a fairly slim volume called The Empty House.
She opened it carefully, and found half of the pages to be still uncut, but enough of them were intact for her to read that familiar name Dr John Watson, and not doubt that it was the same man as before.
The first page began with an account in the familiar very-Victorian prose of some murder, and Mrs Hudson smiled faintly. John – her John – was a very different writer to this one, yet similar, and she could never quite put her finger on what made them similar. Perhaps it was their tendency to romanticise the stories they told.
She went onto the second paragraph, and then her eyes fell upon a phrase that made her draw a breath.
The death of Sherlock Holmes...
A sudden morbid curiosity made her keep reading, skimming over Watson's account of some other incident that didn't seem to relate to anything, and arrived at last at the most surprising part of the tale, and one that Watson himself didn't expect: Holmes's reappearance.
When I turned again Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table...
She nearly dropped the book. So this Holmes, too, had died. But this Holmes had – well, he'd come back from the dead.
And the surprise that had so struck her at first left her in a long sigh. It was a ludicrous idea that had occurred to her. The two Sherlocks were not the same, and did not live lives that precisely mirrored each other. This damned book had set aflame a vain hope she had had – that Sherlock was indeed still alive, and that the conspiracy theorists were right. Yet he couldn't be...
Therefore as anger began to bubble up inside of her she made to replace the book; but something stopped her, and made her buy it, and go home then to cut the rest of the pages and so read it.