CHAPTER 9: THE BURYING (Part 5)
Sherlock can't stand the dim corner in the room. It's not dark, not really; but if he sits in the fixed chair or lays down on the bolted bed, he's not able to see it in its entirety; and that makes him uneasy, enough to keep him sitting in the floor by the other wall, where he has perfect vision of everything. Ever since they confined him to this chamber, he has not been able to take his eyes of it, keeping it always in the corner of his vision. He does not know what is it that troubles him that much, why it affects him; all he know is that he is terrified of it for some reason.
The little pale yellow tablets they give him seem to stare at him in mocking stillness, always, without fail. He somehow feels oddly betrayed by them, as if their sole existence disproved that of the detective's own; sending him swiftly spiralling into oblivion. He had no desire of ever feeling complete like he used to, only wanting to remain in shattered fractions of his self, sharp enough to harm that which had broken him in the first place. That skeletal demon that had made the most of the intrinsic acute fear of heights ,which has always been embed in his soul in prophecy since his very genesis, and had let him fall brutally in backwards motion, letting all of those spectres come out of hiding.
The catalyst of his misery had come into his life to transform him, to make him evolve into something unrecognisable; to ruin him. Then he was left untethered, alone in his roaming; forced to sail unknown dark waters on his own. With rain chipping loose whatever was left of him in the process, so much that he now refused to be ashes pulled back into form.
Or maybe Moriarty never deconstructed anything, maybe he has always been like this.
He cannot see beyond what his treacherous mind allows him, and he is always in the never-ending wait of the moment when he will be able to breathe again. Wondering whether he will be able to escape this sick entrapment that has forced him deeper into a hell he loathed. His brother seemed to believe he belonged there, amongst all other broken things, but he's unaware that he has locked him up with a vicious ghost.
He can't really see him, but he feels his presence everywhere he looks. No matter how far he could be, it kept finding him. It is there, in every corner of the room, watching him with dead eyes and an invisible smile. Making the hair on his neck stand on end every time he gives his back to the quarters; he has since resorted to move backwards against the wall, until no empty space is left unattended, until there's no place for him. But it never works. There are words, and sounds, and laughter liberating from the ceiling and the furniture, and he doesn't know what any of it means.
He fails to understand how can anybody else not know he's there, how do they not hear what he whispers in his ear in the dead of the night. His voice coming out of the darkness and into the labyrinth of his brain; those same eerie words that have tormented him for a long time now. Swirling in the air around him until he can see their madness; and then taking with them his entire life, leaving him wide open.
He feels as if someone had emptied him and had put something, someone else inside. Whatever it is, it moves like him, talks and walks like him, but he doesn't know them; and it is mesmerising. It sends him reeling with rage each time he is made aware of it. He broke his therapeutic mirror the first time he saw him; smashing his fist over and over again till the crimson of his blood joined that of his best friend's on the planes of skin in his hands, and all the lines of the skewed impersonator in the reflexion were gone.
The intruder's heartbeat in his chest was constricting, fighting for dominance over the bag of bones he called body. He felt the shadow twisting within him, chocking him from the inside and he longed to expel it. The constant haunting knot in his throat kills him a bit more each time. He's desperate, and he can't stand it a second longer. He scratches at his stomach, set on ripping out the spiders he feels crawling around inside of him; digging his nails hard over taut muscle hoping to be able to reach them, but he can't. They are still there.
His hands then came to his own mouth, almost without his consciousness; trying to get a hold of the thing from the top. Desperately pushing his fingers down his throat while fat tears fell relentlessly across his cheeks. His body coughing in an attempt to spit out the poison that had him drowned from the inside. Still, it was all futile, and soon doctors and nurses were flooding the room, shocked by the flagellation and trying to get him to stop violating himself, not realising it was not him he was fighting against.
The spectre was everywhere, attached to him like a lifeline. Digging his claws on the detective's back, and his lithe dark form trailing behind him. The musician thought he could handle it. Alone. On his own. He even managed to banish it a few times, gaining a bit of blessed silence in his turmoil. But something always happened. Something that would invite him in again; or more accurately, that would show the detective he never left. The moment the curly-haired man stared down at his plastic plate of newly-made alphabet soup and found the words "sinner man" spelled across the surface over and over again, he was sent in a fit of violent horror, spilling the food everywhere and forcing the doctors to sedate him so they could treat him for burns on his hands.
Sherlock did not know how it had found him, or where did it come from. He just woke up one day and there he was, like he had always been there. He didn't even know what it wanted, but one thing he knew for certain: he was cursed.