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We’re lying chest to chest beneath the false bottom of a wooden boat. We have been handcuffed together for six days. I am holding a gun to your head.
“Say my name.”
Shout-whispering through clenched teeth. “You know it. Damn you. Say it.”
Your eyes are wide with fury, with naked terror, but your lips stay sealed.
*
Just as I didn’t know I wanted you until the moment you pulled back my blankets and collapsed yourself into my bed, into my arms—trembling, chaotic, god so beautiful, how hadn’t I seen it before?—I didn’t know I loved you until one day I sank my fingers into the spaces between yours, and you hummed so quietly I wasn’t even sure, except that I was absolutely sure, and my heart thrummed with the sudden and thorough awareness that to hear that low-voiced hum was thrill enough to last me a lifetime. And once I knew I loved you. . .
Well.
It’s why we’re here—isn’t it?—being smuggled by fake fishermen over the North Sea in the dead of a bitter winter night.
Hard to believe it was only back in—christ—September when we first noticed Mrs Hudson’s confusion: bringing us tea at four a.m.; struggling for our names; once delivered back to us by a policewoman who’d found her well up the road in the tube station, asking anyone who made eye contact if they wanted to buy a private dance, or at least buy a girl a drink.
We wrote it off as her age catching her up. Of course we did. And we kept eyes and ears on her until her sister could make arrangements. But her decline was so sudden and so rapid I could see it take the breath right out of you, and everything you played on your violin was melancholy in those last weeks with her downstairs at Baker Street, and your cuticles were chewed to bits, and I heard you pacing the lounge floor night after night—sleeping even less than normal, though it seemed impossible you could still be sane on so little sleep—huffing out frustrated sighs and tapping away at your laptop keyboard for hours at a stretch. I still don’t know what you were writing; I never found it.
And then the sister came and took her away in a green Fiat, and that was that.
I don’t remember how long after that, but not long, certainly less than a month. . .that day you came in from checking your bee boxes on the roof and set that mayonnaise jar in the middle of the kitchen table. I just remember the weather was turning and even I know that bees hunker down in winter. It was you, of course, told me they don’t hibernate, just cluster around the queen and do their little bee dances to keep warm (you hate when I say things like “little bee dances” to describe scientific concepts, but I’m not wrong).
Anyway, there sat the jar, with a chunk of drippy comb and about a dozen bees inside, and their gentle humming could be heard through the holes punched in the lid, and you were positively morbid in your obsession with it. Staring at it fifteen minutes out of every waking hour. Consulting your moldy-smelling old books. Scribbling notes in the margins as if the smelly old books weren’t priceless.
Three or four days of that, and you spoke not a word except to breathe my name a few times as we moved against each other beneath your bed sheets that needed changing; just those breathless exclamations were enough to get me by for a while. And when you did at last speak aloud, it was so forceful and so unexpected I jumped half out of my armchair—half out of my skin.
“The bees have dementia.”
I so vividly remember rising from my chair, crossing the room to stand at your elbow, staring at the bees in the jar—which looked to me to be the same as ever: shivering in crooked figure-eights, in and out of the cells of the comb. I remember all this so distinctly because now I know—I must have known even then—that what you were saying was vital, devastating, the key to a lock we hadn’t even known needed picking.
“They’re confused,” you said, “Purposeless. Now and again it appears they are even reverting to juvenile patterns of behaviour.” You turned the jar with one hand, gestured with the long, knobby fingers of the other. I remember you were wearing those charcoal-grey trousers, and a silvery-grey shirt with the monogrammed cuffs turned back. Your hair wanted trimming: that curl at the nape of your neck was becoming unruly and I could wind it twice around the tip of my finger.
“They’re dying,” you said then, your voice etched with despair, and you pointed out three dead bees on the bottom of the jar. The creases in your forehead were as deep as they get.
“Can bees--?” I started, as ever trying to avoid asking a stupid question I could answer myself if only I’d think a moment before asking it. “Can they have dementia? Do they even have brains?”
You looked for a second or two like you were on your way to scoffing and berating me for my dull and ignorant brain, but instead you sighed and pulled me to you by an arm about my waist, and shuffled a pile of papers on the tabletop until you found the one you wanted—a clipping from the previous Sunday’s Times, a small, third-section item about a surge in reported cases of senile dementia, notable not only for the exceptionally rapid decline and early deaths of patients, but for cases reported in younger and younger people—a handful in their thirties, and even one unconfirmed case in a teenager.
I took this in, tried to comprehend. “You mean—“ But it was enormous and I found I couldn’t take it on board, surely couldn’t say the words.
“The bees have been dying off for years, and no one knew why,” you said evenly. “But it’s. . .this.” You pointed hard at the jar, shaking your finger at it as if to shame it. “And now it’s not just the bees.”
“Jesus.”
“I have to talk to my brother.”
*
It’s a relief to see you so angry—that furious indignation is something I recognize, and for a minute I can lie to myself that nothing’s changed. Your cases put us in situations as strange as this one—so many times if I tried to list them all, I’m sure I’d leave some out. That expression of righteous anger on your face is one I can live with. So, yes. Keep it up. But while you’re at it.
“What’s my name? You know me.” I shift the pistol a bit against your forehead; the limited light coming in through cracks between the boards means there is little to see beyond these things closest to me: Your face. A wavy tendril of dark hair across your forehead. The top edge of your scarf beneath your chin. The muzzle of my gun digging a divot in the skin of your temple. Beyond that, everything falls away rapidly into darkness. The boat creaks, rocks. The fake fishermen thump about overhead. “You know what I’m capable of. Now, damn you, say my name.”
You let go a growl that in other circumstances I would take as an invitation to grab you hard, suck on your neck, push you against a wall, but which in the current circumstance is clearly meant as a threat. You make a frustrated grab at my collar, my throat, but there’s no room so you must settle for crumpling the lapel of my jacket in your fist.
“That’s it. Get mad.”
“Fuck you. Where are we?”
“Nearly there.”
I want to move the gun away from your temple. Of course I do. But I know you could kill me even in this tight space, even without a weapon. I know not only that you could, but that right now given half a chance you absolutely would. Of course I’m not going to shoot you; I’m only buying us some time.
*
A month after Mrs Hudson’s sister drove her away in the Fiat, word came back she was dead. And even though clearly it’s coincidental—the timing of her death and the utter Hell that broke loose afterward—it’s hard not to think that her dying set it all off. Because it went just like that, everything falling, one thing after the next, crashing down on top of us, to bury us.
The news media fired up and ran with the Dementia Epidemic—first just a mention on the telly or the radio, every other day or so. But soon enough, it was a full-scale obsession, and then it rapidly became a full-blown panic. There were lines out the clinic door like they were queuing for Smiths reunion tickets. Every other patient I saw was convinced they were going senile; every third patient actually was. It was fascinating. Baffling. Fucking terrifying.
Then the cable service went, and the fuzzy, static-tinged broadcast channels only showed messages from the NHS that rumours of an epidemic were exaggerated, that no one should panic, that researchers were hard at work. I meant to go to the clinic—every day I showered and dressed and packed my lunch—and every day I wound up sitting beside you, both of us staring at our laptops, gleaning information from wherever we could get it. American media was even more unhinged than the British press had been, but even their fever pitch didn’t seem like an overreaction, given what I’d seen in the clinic, what we were reading online. I printed off articles and you combed message boards and both our cell phones buzzed constantly with texts from anyone, anywhere, who might have a piece of the puzzle. Were we looking for a cure? Trying to assure ourselves we were safe, holed up there in 221B as if it were a citadel? Out came the test tubes and scalpels and magnifiers, and you stared at tiny bee body parts, picked them apart with miniscule tweezers and impossibly slender metal picks until your eyes were red and bleary. As sure as I am you were trying to work it like a case—the Case of the Baffled Bees, perhaps—I’m just as sure all I really wanted to find was a promise it was not the end of the fucking world.
And in all that time. No word from Mycroft. Not one. You thought he might be dead. I thought he might be to blame. We didn’t discuss it.
The cell service went, next. Slow-patrolling soldiers appeared on the streets, fearsome rifles slung low and to the side, at easy reach. We were discouraged from leaving our block, and there was a run on drinking water, bread, baby nappies. . .hours-long queues at the petrol stations, endless honking of horns as cars sat in snarled traffic until their tanks ran dry and the drivers abandoned them in the road. Where they thought they were going in the first place, only they knew.
No planes in the sky. No tube service. A persistent rumour that the rumble you heard the other night was the sonic boom let off when They’d collapsed the Channel tunnel. More soldiers every day, getting more and more forceful about turning people back into their homes when they tried to venture out. Garbage piling up on the pavements. Constant whine of sirens. Smell of smoke and fires that weren’t being put out because the fire brigades couldn’t get past the abandoned cars and buses in the roads. Gunfire. Especially at night.
Then, one early morning—you’d been up all night with the bees and the books, and I was trying to make half a loaf of bread last us the rest of our lives—and here was the prime minister on the telly, looking pale and with his lip shaking. The final broadcast: a tape loop of his announcement that the British Isles were under a quarantine order by the United Nations and the WHO. God save us all.
*
There’s a different sound from above, heavy ropes being dragged across the deck, some shouted questions and answers, a great deal of stomping back and forth. Then a flood of light, a hollow knocking sound and a sensation of being gently bashed against something. I pocket the gun—no easy feat in this tiny space, and your expression melts from fear-tinged anger to undiluted terror.
“I promise, you’re safe. You have to trust me.” You swallow hard, set your jaw. You look utterly, completely lost. I lower my voice, soften my lips around your name. “Sherlock.” Hoping to ground you.
The false floor is lifted, and once we’ve blinked our eyes to adjust, instead of sky on the port side, there is only the huge hulk of a Norwegian fishing boat, its floodlights trained down on our tiny wooden dinghy, and rope ladders arranged between the two.
“Be brave.” Telling us both. “Trust me.”
*
Your homeless network were an absolute treasure; they were largely out of sight of the patrols, constantly on the move, some of them taking to the disused Tube tunnels. And they knew everything. Met Police disbanded, sent home without badges or weapons. Hospitals’ doors locked with heavy chains and guarded at gunpoint. Anderson dead; Molly locked in at Bart’s. Houses of Parliament emptied. Martial law. Donovan and Dimmock both probably dead by now, they’d had it. Lestrade OK but rumour was his wife and son had both gone down with it. Harry? God knew. Still no word from Mycroft: presumed dead or in hiding. In either case, not to be relied on.
Finally, you developed a theory; I could tell because instead of staring at bee corpses, you wrote a lot in notebooks. Once, I caught sight of your profile as you leaned over your desk, scribbling away in your spidery handwriting, and I swear I could see exactly what you must have looked like when you were at university, long before I knew you, a younger man with a less-creased forehead, huddled in a library carrel drafting findings that the lecturer would later accuse you of plagiarising. By now, of course, the internet was inaccessible, but you could sometimes raise someone on the shortwave if the weather was right—in Poland, or Kenya, once in Oklahoma—for all the good it did, except to reassure us that there was still a world outside of London that wasn’t descending into a post-pandemic state of apocalypse. In fact, it was the very absence of disease elsewhere in the world that sparked your theory.
“It’s not a virus,” you announced, shifting your long fingers from the steeple at your chin to fold into a ball in front of your clavicle. “It’s not a fungus or a bacteria, either. It’s in the bees’ genes. It’s a mutation, and it’s in every cell of their bodies.”
“OK, so, it got into humans by. . .stings?” I ventured. “Or by eating the honey?” I chewed my bottom lip, trying my damnedest, as ever, to see even a fraction of what you see. “Or. . .they leave behind traces—on the crops, bits of wings, torn off legs, those little hairs—and we ingest it?”
You shook your head. “It couldn’t have been so pervasive, so quickly, if it were by chance.”
I honestly couldn’t tell if you were waiting for me to guess correctly because you already knew, or if you were still working it out in your head and testing your theory by waiting to see if mine matched. I thought a minute. Mutated genes in bees, an epidemic of deadly mental illness in humans. . .I couldn’t link it up if it wasn’t communicable via the usual vectors. I shrugged a bit.
A pronouncement: “We’ve been poisoned.”
You let it land and I kept an eye on it to make sure it wasn’t going to blow up and kill us. We circled it a minute.
“But,” I said, and then there was another long silence.
“Not the water,” I offered, “Or it would be universal, and it wouldn’t have built up so slowly; everyone would have gotten sick at once. Food? Or some kind of. . .a gas or an aerosol—in the subway tunnels, maybe?”
“Think, John. People we know who’ve gotten sick—what might they have in common? And put it in the context of who’s been affected overall: elderly people—early and almost universally. Just over half of all adults, regardless of race, class, gender—every demographic affected equally. Youths and children, too, though a smaller percentage. Half the nation wakes up every day and performs a single, common ritual, and it poisoned them.”
I could tell by your tone that you had, indeed, sorted it, and were waiting for me to come up with the same theory, just as a failsafe: if even dull, unobservant John Watson could deduce it, it had to be correct.
“Oh. Jesus.” A whisper; if I was right, it was stunning. I looked hard at you and I was all at once absolutely certain I was right because it was so elegant, almost beautiful, if it weren’t so grotesque. “Prescription medications.”
Your lips widened into that particular smile you save for my too-few moments of brilliance.
“It’s some kind of experiment, massive, hideous,” you said, though you sounded on the edge of glee. And why not? You’d solved it. “Shadow government stuff—shadow of the shadow government—“
“Mycroft?”
“I don’t know. Possibly he knows something. If he’s even still alive to know it. The motive doesn’t concern me. . .It’s in the pills, John! Pills millions of people take every day, without question, because doctors like you—“
“Aw, Christ. . .”
“—tell them it will fix what ails them. People Mrs Hudson’s age take five and ten different medications every day! And how many adults are taking blood pressure medicine, pills for their cholesterol, mood stabilizers—“
“Opioid inhibitors.”
You stopped talking so suddenly your mouth hung open and it was a few seconds before you expelled the breath you’d drawn to make your next assertion.
“Anti-anxiety medications. Sleep aids. Iron supplements and B-complex because you won’t ever bloody eat anything—“
“John.”
“Sherlock, I line those pills up for you every fucking morning, right there on the saucer with your teacup.”
“John.”
“Tell me you were stuffing them in a paper towel and tossing them in the bin. Tell me you hid them under your tongue and spit them in the toilet when I wasn’t looking. For once in our lives, Sherlock, I am begging you to tell me you are off your meds.”
You were quiet, icicle eyes staring into me and if you were anyone else, I’d have sworn you looked frightened. Then my brain was racing, spinning, and my heart pounded so loud in my ears I couldn’t hear my fist crashing down on the tabletop, the thick sobs choking out of me. And here you were, folded onto your knees on the floor, your face buried in the front of my jumper, one arm around me, gripping my hand so hard both our knuckles were white. You murmured reassurances in your damp-velvet voice but damned if I can remember a single word you said. And, god, how I’ve tried.
Because it was only a few days later when first you said, “. . mainly in the—oh. But. Where was I?”
And then, “Damn. I’ve lost my train of thought.”
And later, “John? Do I smoke?”
And the earth fell away beneath me.
*
Aboard the Norwegian fishing boat after an awkward, scary scramble up the rope ladders, still handcuffed together. Below decks, crammed into a bunk together and you still look at me like you want to murder me. Because you don’t know me anymore, I’m just some bloke who put a pistol to your head and who has probably kidnapped you, but you can’t even remember when the handcuffs went on, or how we found the smugglers, or how much I paid for the privilege of being sealed up in these floating coffins. You remember your name is Sherlock Holmes, and the houndstooth-checked swing coat your mother wore in winter, and the boxer with whom you had your first great love affair. You do not remember our great love affair. The one I am still having with you. The one I am determined to rescue you for, and return you to.
“Nearly there, Sherlock,” I tell you, and your eyes search my face, looking for a clue. I can see that you want to believe me, but I don’t expect your trust; you are too vulnerable now to trust. In survival mode, trust is no longer an available plug-in. You are a closed system.
What I do next is the largest leap of faith in a long series of very large leaps. I had faith in the rumours that Norway was open and sympathetic, and that it was possible to get out of England. I had faith in your homeless network when I told them my plan. I had faith in the smugglers as I handed them our money and stepped willingly off solid ground. And now I have just one final hope, one last soul in whom to place my faith.
I slide my mobile from the hip pocket of my jeans, and turn it on. A few long seconds, then: two little green bars. Cell service at sea; a miracle of modern technology. God bless Viking cruise lines and its norovirus-toting fleet of seafaring resort hotels.
I send a text; my fingers shake badly but I manage it.
SH end-stage. En route with him to Norway. Please advise.
Immediately after I send it, I fire off another:
Desperate.
I reach for you and you let me stroke the back of your hand. I’m sure you don’t realise, but it is the kindest thing you could possibly do.
*
We started re-using tea bags, had long since drunk all the wine and whisky, assembled weird meals of tinned corn and Japanese rice biscuits, whatever was left in the shop up the road, and we ate just twice a day. I did calisthenics to keep up my muscle tone but nonetheless had to put a new notch in my belt; you—thin as a mountaintop ascetic at the best of times—by then looked positively skeletal. There were queues for rice, bread, and milk, but I pushed it off because I didn’t want to miss time with you while you were still lucid. By the time I couldn’t put it off any longer, I had no choice but to bring you along with me and then tell you forty times an hour that you must stay here with me. . .No, not even to the shop across the road; it’s shut, anyway, see?. . .I need you to stay close. . .We’re waiting for bread; there’s been an emergency. . .No, that shop is shut; remember I told you? I wasn’t the only one on the bread line begging a loved one not to wander. A woman three or four spots ahead of us held her husband by the belt loop at the back of his trousers. Not far behind us were middle-aged parents looking much older than their years, taking turns sitting on the pavement with their teenage son across their lap while he sucked his thumb and they hummed lullabies against his hair.
“I’m deleting rooms in my mind palace,” you told me one early morning. “Maybe making a conscious choice to let go of some memories will mean I keep the vital ones a bit longer.”
“What’s vital?” I asked. I had a vision of your mind palace as looking like one of the old stately homes in the country, long central corridors running west to east, each lined with seemingly endless doors, one after the other, facing each other down across the velvety red carpeting. Now I imagined you emptying each of its contents with an eyeblink—abracadabra, then poof!—and boarding up each door.
“There isn’t much,” you admitted. “Without the Work, all that’s left are. . .” You looked slightly amazed to be saying it. “People.”
I wanted to say something sarcastic, crack a joke, but in the end I just patted the back of your hand, kissed the top of your head, inhaled the scent of your hair. “It’s a sound theory. With as many memories as you’ve got, paring down might not be the worst idea.”
All at once, a storm.
“It isn’t fair! I am the greatest mind in generations!”
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have to. . .Why am I—?!“
You flipped the kitchen table. The bee jar clanked and rolled toward the lounge. Your face was flushed and furious and when I reached out to lay my hand on your arm you ducked and spun away from me.
“I know it isn’t fair,” I gentled, “Sherlock.”
“There is so! Much!” smacking the side of your head with your open hand to punctuate. “I spent years collecting it!” Clenched fists now, pounding at your skull. “Wasted! They poisoned me. Me!” I grabbed your wrists to stop you battering yourself, and you struggled, fought against me, but ultimately softened. I wrapped my arms around you and your knees went weak and I was holding you up and you wept, shuddering against my chest, and it went on forever. Eventually we lay down in bed, and you curled up impossibly small, and I wrapped you up and whispered against your neck all the ways in which you had saved me. And over the next few days, I was acutely aware of a particular expression on your face, of sadness mixed with resentment, and I knew you had just boarded up another door. Deleting all that information you’d so carefully collected and curated, to spare your memories of me. Of us.
Then came an afternoon when you couldn’t remember how to tie your shoes. You pulled the wall calendar down from its spot by the fridge, settled at the kitchen table, started making circles and X’s, tapping each box as you counted. After several minutes of page flipping and notations, you pinned it back onto the wall. There was a large black X near the end of the month.
“What’s that?” I asked, squinting across the room. “Christmas?”
“There’s not going to be a Christmas this year, John,” you replied.
“No,” I agreed, drawing back the curtains in the lounge to count the soldiers in plain view, mentally doubled it to account for hidden ones. “I don’t suppose there will be. So, what’s the big day, then?”
“You remember how bad it got for Mrs Hudson,” you said quietly, and assumed your folded-up position in your leather chair, motioned for me to sit. “Before her sister came.”
I sank into my armchair and you reflexively extended your bare feet across the space between us, tucked them under the cuffs of my trousers, stroked my ankles with your long, dexterous toes.
“Yeah. Of course.” I almost added that that was sad, it was awful, god it was awful, but it didn’t need saying.
“It was about six weeks after we started to notice her symptoms that we had to intervene,” you said quietly. “Less than a month later, she was dead.”
I nodded. “But the X on the calendar. . .?”
Your face was so smooth; you looked younger, but so tired.
A twinge in my brain like I was being stabbed. “No.”
“I don’t want—“
“No. Absolutely not.”
“I can’t burden you. And I can’t just let my brain rot away until I’m—“
“Shut up. No.”
“What will I be, though, John? I can’t become that. My brain is all I am.”
“That is not all you are.” I could feel my face contorted with rage and grief, the corners of my mouth turning down hard—I felt it in my neck. “You are so much more than that.”
“I’ve made up my mind; I’m sorry if that’s painful. But we do still have time, John.”
“No.” I stomped to the kitchen, tore down the calendar, tossed it in the bin, as if that could prevent anything. “You are going to stay.” I pointed at the floor: sit, stay. “With me. There’s going to be a cure, or, someone, some government—the Americans, maybe—will force Them to open the borders, and somewhere there’s an antidote. . .” I was raving; even I could hear it. You were patient and didn’t try to argue back, but I knew I couldn’t change your mind. “I want you until the very end.” I said then, and I choked on it. “I waited. . .So long.”
Quietly, so gently: “You’ll have me until the end, either way.”
I went into your room (our room) and screamed into your pillow, sobbed until my gut ached. Then I went upstairs to my room (my old room), strapped on my shoulder holster and secured my pistol. Damned if you would get your bony hands on it.
*
You’ll be met in Kristiansand, taken to hospital in Oslo. –MH
I kiss the screen of my mobile, promise myself I will apologize to Mycroft for the innumerable uncharitable things I have thought and said about him over the past few years. I turn the screen to show it to you before I remember you won’t be able to read it. “Your brother,” I say, “He’s having someone meet us. They’ll take us to a hospital.”
“What for?” you demand, indignant.
I realise I don’t actually know what for. I assume they can save you with an injection of serum, or by cleaning your blood, or by a bottle of pills that will undo whatever’s been done by the poison pills your brother certainly knew you were getting. Fuck him, he’ll get no apology from me. But no, he might not have known. He might be anywhere in the world right now, hiding from whoever it was really did orchestrate this. It doesn’t matter. I must assume you will be saved; I don’t want to entertain the notion They might only give you a place to lie down and die, in a plastic-draped room attended by nurses in haz-mat suits, with a guard posted at your door so you don’t get out and—not infect Them; you’ve already deduced it’s not infectious—expose Them. As if you could tell anyone anything now; it’s laughable. You don’t even know my name.
“You’re sick and they’re going to make you well,” I tell you. “They’re going to save you.” You tolerate my kiss on your cheek, in the hollow beside your nose.
*
We told each other everything there was to tell. You told me your life story, all the bits you could remember, sometimes out of order, but each story was rich in detail. Entangled in bed. Holding hands across the kitchen table. On the sofa with your feet in my lap. I told you about how my mum and dad had checked out of all parenting responsibility once we were both school age, left my sister and me to look after each other—she packed my school books and a sandwich in my rucksack every morning and I braided her hair for her. I told you about the day I was shot, and, oh, the look on your face when you heard the tale—you were positively furious, spoiling for a fight, god it was lovely.
You soon began to ask me to repeat myself, and louder, and quickly I realised it wasn’t that you couldn’t hear me, but rather that you couldn’t follow what I was saying; by the time I got to the finish, you’d already forgotten where I’d started. I clipped everything down to only the most necessary words: Have some tea. I love you. Do you want a cardigan? I love you. Go and clean your teeth. I love you. Come to bed now. God, how I love you.
A week before the X on the calendar, you were in obvious decline but every now and then you seemed like yourself for a bit, and I worried that it would be during one of those times that you would act on your plan. I kept my gun on me. I had long since flushed every pill I could find. Aside from the one I was wearing, I cut all my belts in three pieces and binned them, so you couldn’t use one to hang yourself. I watched you in the bath to be sure you didn’t drown yourself. I shaved you and then hid the razor, each time in a different spot.
We said, I love you, more times in those four weeks than we had in the four previous years. Every time I looked at you, I said it. “Sherlock, I—“
“I love you, too, John.”
Your smile. The unguarded one, the genuine one, mine alone.
One morning I left you in the kitchen with toast and tea just long enough to piss, even left the door open so I could hear you, because every day it was clearer you couldn’t be left alone, lest you try to wander outside, or toss a tea towel onto a flaming stove burner. When I returned, you rose, businesslike, from your chair: the practiced, fake smile, hand extended for a shake.
“Ah, good morning. Sherlock Holmes.”
I had no choice but to grab your hand and shake it because my knees were buckling and I would have fallen. We had reached the point where there was more sand in the bottom of the hourglass than in the top. I resolved to get you the hell out of England, or die trying. I had to save you.
That night I massaged your long fingers, worked open the wide palm of your hand with my thumbs, and your eyes closed and you hummed a purr. I could easily encircle your bony wrist with my fingers, and slid one hand up your forearm, chased it with the other.
“I love you, Sherlock.”
“It’s kind of you to say.”
I snapped the handcuffs to our wrists. You didn’t argue. You didn’t even flinch.
*
It’s morning and we’ve made it. You’re asleep; one thing this disaster has done is make you sleep more like a person ought to. I hate it. It’s not who you’re meant to be. You’re meant to sleep three non-consecutive hours a day for a week, then spend two days in bed waking only to shout at me that you want tea, or want the telly turned off, or want the telly turned on, or to remind me to pick up your shirts at the laundry. Your dark eyelashes splayed against your pale cheek are like a photo-negative of a spiders’ web: intricate, silken.
We’ve made it.
The fishermen nod at us, point to the dock, and that’s the end of them. I persuade you down the plank to the pier, and we dodge working men in comically stereotypical wool jumpers, most of them ginger-bearded giants with cigarettes clamped between their teeth. There is a black car nearby, and a boy in a razor-sharp suit steps out, motions for us to approach. I am hyper-alert, eyes sweeping for hidden dangers, mapping potential escape routes, identifying places where snipers could lurk or sticky-bombs could be stuck. I clutch your hand despite the fact we are shackled to each other, and I guide you toward the boy—a man, I suppose, but he is so, so young—who barely looks up from his phone. He must be the male, Norwegian Anthea, then.
“Welcome to Kristiansand,” he says. He’s English. “Dr Watson.” He nods deferentially. “Mr Holmes.”
You squeeze my hand harder; the gun-wielding probable-kidnapper is at least familiar by now, preferable to all this new, foreign stimuli. The wind is ferocious; I adjust the collar of your coat for you, covering your neck.
“You have to tell me,” I say to the young man, who is holding the car door open like a chauffeur. “Can they. . .? The hospital.”
He gives a tight-lipped smile. “Mr Holmes is waiting there for you.”
The drive takes hours. By the time we arrive in Oslo it’s supper time and the arctic sun has long since set. As promised, here is Mycroft, face unreadable, though when he says your name and you wonder aloud who told it to him, I see him shrink a bit.
I unlock the cuffs and remove them for the first time in a week and they whisk you away from me, put me in a conference room where a joyless woman with firmly cemented hair grills me about your health, your symptoms, the timing; she’s debriefing me. When they finally let me into your room, they’ve already given you a sedative, inserted IVs, taped monitors to your chest and back and head. Everything is beeping, or humming. They bring me a chair that reclines half-way but I can only sit on its edge, just for a few minutes, and then I must pace.
“Did you know?” I demand quietly, when Mycroft and I are, for a few minutes, the only ones in the room aside from your sleeping, half-starved body on the bed. “Did you know this would happen—to him?”
“I assure you, John. . .I argued—vehemently—against it. I was sent out of the country on what appeared to be legitimate business, only to find I was not allowed to return. As anticipated, They made a grave miscalculation.”
I scoff, shake my head. “So the plan wasn’t to kill half the British population?”
“Of course not. It was. . .” Mycroft runs a hand down the front of his suit jacket, which has never once needed smoothing. He looks at me with that weird, slight smirk that always reminds me of something sly—not a fox, though. A weasel. “It was a test,” he says at last, his voice tinged with regret. “We failed.”
You sleep for days; they want to keep you asleep. Every now and then you moan, or try to speak, and I hold your hand and talk to you and beg you to come back. Every doctor I approach pretends not to understand English, which is ludicrous. But clearly whatever protocol they’re using is experimental, or secret, or dangerous. Possibly all of the above. The nurses look at me pityingly, but none speaks to me. I begin to wonder if I am even visible. Mycroft has left; no one will tell me anything. You only sleep. You sleep and you sleep and you sleep.
And then one evening: a sudden flurry of activity, machines are rearranged, injections are given into IV drip lines, a nurse shakes your foot through the blanket. Your chin is a riot of grizzled stubble—you’re going to complain about my having allowed you to devolve into such a state of disrepair—and your skin is sallow, swollen from all the fluids, slightly waxy-looking. Your head rolls, purposefully. Your eyes squeeze and squint and your mouth comes open just enough to let go a little gasp.
“Sherlock?”
I admit I get more physical than is strictly necessary with the attendants crowding the side of your bed, but something is happening, something is different, and I have to be close to you. If you open your eyes, I need to be the first thing you see. I grip your hand, pet your shoulder through the cotton gown.
“Sherlock. . .”
Your eyes don’t open. Your voice is hoarse with chemical-induced sleep, raw and thick from disuse.
“I love you too, John,” you say, and somehow, in this moment I’ve saved you for, you’ve managed to save me all over again.
-END-