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If life had really favoured me, it would have at least prevented me from picking up the vices in my early twenties. It was the Christmas of 1878, as I remembered, when I was spreading my wings with the career of a detective. The rent of Montague Street had once drained my finances, but now, finally free from worries of accommodation, I decided that I could at least allow myself a little celebration. I was thinking, then, about where I could procure from a chemist the product I wanted.
I had my wish fulfilled. I injected the long-desired cocaine and then stood at the window with my violin, playing a piece composed by myself. It was a duet, as I clearly remembered - or rather, imagined. Honestly, I was better at solos, but during boyhood I was devoted to any kind of trivial rivalry between me and Mycroft. A duet was, for me, war in an underdeveloped form. I contrived to design flourishes that would challenge my brother's technique, and he willingly accepted my provocations like a condescending old gentleman. Just as all firstborns of his generation, my brother had matured and aged too early to bother fighting with me, and it almost seemed that I was the only child of this pathetic family. My only connection to the world was so curious that I did not care much when our childhood intimacy faded at a certain point into tacit distance. We were like two sides of one coin, me and my brother, sharing the same disposition of solitude and apathy merely by chance. He had found himself a boring post in the government when I moved to Montague Street to start a life of myself.
The street was extremely crowded that evening, and for several times I looked down from the window, feeling adrift in the endless current of life. The maelstrom of noise made by the dark silhouettes and their vehicles drove at my brain, and my bow cut into the strings, a bastion against the eternal cacophony--always only the treble. I was used to playing in the treble since childhood, adept at realizing the extravagant springy notes, while the missing voices were sealed in the loft of my memory. Speaking of the memory loft, it was more decent than the flat I was then living in, a chair in the place where Mycroft had been. I sat on its left and played to the void. Sometimes the chair would be occupied by my clients, all and sundry, people I had closely observed and deduced on surveillance, people wanted on the walls of my workshop, thugs put to justice, victims at the crime scene. They sat composed in silence, and I, though perplexed at their arrivals, had no complaints, because I knew my brain would soon forget these randomly captured faces, and then the chair would resume its emptiness.
I could have spent the hours in exhausting yet comfortable drowsiness under the effect of the drug until the sunbeam crawled along with the shades from the endless streets of London. But thinking back, I had probably taken too much cocaine, for my heartbeat was climbing at an alarming speed, gradually taking over my body. I found myself dejectedly in a miserable state of my own making: every finger of mine seemed to have acquired its own volition, and my right arm was trembling. The air around me floated in upward streams, circling in the whole room, and I was thinking, then, if someday a case deemed that I fake delirium, I already knew what sort of hallucinations I would describe - vividly, the circulation of the atmosphere, the erupting submarine volcanos, or simply the infinitely proliferating oysters. When I finally returned to myself, the world had subsided as sediments under water, and all was calm and clear like Bach's D minor. I put my violin back in its case and turned, and at that exact moment, I saw the figure sitting in my empty chair.
He wasn't any of those I had seen, I dare say. The moonlight shone past him on me, outlining his gaunt contour. From his posture and the slight angle at which he slanted his body, I presumed a military history cut short out of injury. I would assert that the wound was in the shoulder if the nightly dimness had not confused my senses and hence my conclusion.
Sitting in the chair that seemed to be exactly made for him, he watched me in an equally thoughtful manner.
I was used to people unexpectedly popping up in my Memory Loft and their usual silence, so I merely straightened up a little, crossed my fingers in front of my chest, and observed. The fire crackled in the hearth, a strangely reassuring sound in this bizarre scene.
You can introduce yourself now, I ordered in my mind.
"John Hamish Watson." He answered abruptly. It took me a moment to realize that no, it was not me that he was answering, but rather - a solitary, unechoed soliloquy. His eyes were still on me, frank and not expecting any response. I was unsure if he was just looking at some imagined character. The idea felt ridiculous, for his presence was clearly for me also an effect of hallucination.
"My name is John Hamish Watson." He said slowly, when I noticed an open notebook on his lap, a pen lying on the pages. He sounded most certainly to have been thinking aloud. His words were illogical, the same sentences in distorted repetition. His face showed morbid emaciation, his eyes cast low and lost. "John Hamish Watson is my name. I have a bull-terrier...I served in Afghanistan. I now live in London."
He looked like a fugue patient, or a foreigner who stepped for the first time into the English world. I studied him, minds reeling: tropical service had rendered his complexion red, and the stiff knuckles on his legs coarse. The location of callus on his hands proved him a fusilier. His palm was dry and the skin was peeling, results of regular alcohol disinfection—he was also a doctor. A patient of serious insomnia. Who had no friends in London, since his voice sounded like it hadn't been used for three days.
He muttered several more undistinguishable words, and his head drooped to be supported by his hands. He had fair hair. As I saw it, he was in fact looking at his manuscript - he was writing.
So I stood up and walked to him.
"Sherlock Holmes." He said suddenly. I was automatically alarmed, but he didn't look up. "Not Sherrinford Holmes. I'll call him Sherlock Holmes." Finally he lifted his face and looked straight in my eyes. His eyes landed on me with what I realized was a fervent gaze. It was an absurd scene: He watched me unquestionably, incontestably, as if we were destined to meet.
"A chemist, working in the lab. Arms eroded by acid for years, only due to his obsession of experiments, bordering on morbidity." He commenced these incredible, indisputable facts in a rapid, excited tone. He was thinking almost as fast as I; one could even say he was observing me using my own methods. "Loves cigarettes. Lives in solitude. Addicted to the thrills of cocaine and crimes. The most secluded and peculiar soul in the United Kingdom, absolutely."
I extended my hand to him, which he should have taken.
"By the way, a horribly remarkable violinist." Instead, he only gave a sincere smile, "And I think, also the only consulting detective in the whole London."
I had never believed the gypsies in the streets who claimed to see the past and future of strangers in a crystal ball, but I could not help but feel utterly fascinated by the miracle in front of my eyes - then it occurred to me, melancholically, that I would like this man to appear genuinely in my life rather than merely existing in the fleeting cocaine-induced ecstasy.
I deemed myself entitled to read his scripts—since all evidence pointed to the pervasive correlations between his words and his writing. Moreover, the fact that he spoke as if he had fancied me when he himself was but a hallucination created by my own brain somewhat irritated me.
"Sir, can I humbly take it that you are a writer?" I asked, surprised by myself.
"Of course." He said, "I will create the extraordinary adventures of a truly brilliant man, stories that would outmatch Poe and amaze the whole Europe. And perhaps by then," his voice suddenly quivered, "perhaps by then, I wouldn’t be this lonely."