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This is where it begins. He laughs at you, because you’re small, and not a little strange. His name is Carl, and he’s popular and the school’s best swimmer; he’s good-looking, and tall for his age. Not terribly bright – none of them are ever going to be even a fraction as bright as you, because you’re not just bright, you’re a god, a titan. But nobody knows this. Not yet, anyway.
Carl Powers doesn’t know this, so he mocks you as you bring your tray to the table in the farthest corner of the lunch room. He mocks your clothes, he says you’re a fag, he calls you Lizard Boy because of your dark eyes and the strange, quick-sharp way you move your head. One day, he and his friends pelt you with tablespoonfuls of mushy peas; you come home with dried green clumps stuck to your clothes and hair like they grew there in the course of the school day. Another day they catch you in the washroom and pour a glass of water down your pants. You walk back to class looking like you just peed yourself. Everyone laughs, it’s soooo predictable; they’re sheep, bleating their way through life. You go back to your seat and open your books and somehow they’re still laughing, even after Mr. Salter has yelled at them to be quiet. If you were capable of crying, you might have shed a few tears by now. But instead you let the laughter seep in, let it feed that growing blackness inside, it’s always hungry now.
The teachers can’t help much, won’t help much. Partly because they’re stupid, but mostly because Carl is good for the school, he’s won all the district competitions and the divisional ones are practically in the bag. He’s important, and you’re just a small, odd kid with no voice and no apparent personality and you’re practically invisible to the grown-ups anyway.
It’s like this for nearly a year, but your plans are in motion. You have three separate little experiments running, but in the end you decide on clostridium botulinum, succeed in isolating a tiny amount of the neurotoxin from cultures. It’s so potent that you’ll only need around 75 nanograms, and the spores are devilishly hard to kill. But more importantly, it’s elegant. It isn’t difficult to look through Carl’s belongings to find what you need. He has eczema -- the ointment would be a perfect method of delivery. It’s chance or fate or lucky coincidence, but you prefer to think of it as your due. It’s what’s owed you.
The day of the tournament dawns. All your classmates pile into the hired buses and for once you’re not faking your excitement. Like everyone else, you can’t wait for the school’s best hope to hit the water, but of course your reasons are so much more complex and interesting and delightful. Carl looks pale on the bus, his eyelids droopy like he wants to sleep. You dosed his trainers yesterday; the medical books say 18 to 36 hours from infection to onset of symptoms.
It happens even better than you had planned it. You knew you had this window of time before the neurotoxin took effect, but as it turns out, the timing is excellent, so logical, so deliciously symmetrical. It seizes him right in the pool, in the third lap, in mid-stroke. An act of God, or better yet, of a god. That’s what you are, after all.
It’s panic, it’s pandemonium, it’s perfection. You take your time in the locker rooms until you find his things, slip your gloves on and put his shoes in a bag. You think you’ll keep them. Something to remember him by. The first of many.
On the bus back to school, Mr. Salter sits beside you, eyes red from weeping. He starts speaking, and it all registers as a tinny yammering in your head. You nod like you understand, and smile sadly like you’re supposed to. You actually feel like whistling, but you know it’s not the done thing.
The blackness looks out through you, and it’s well-fed. For now.
This is where it begins. You read about it in the newspapers. Such a tragedy, champion swimmer drowns in a school tournament. But something about this bothers you, you can’t put your finger on it. Young, healthy male teenager, no previous health problems, no history of seizures. Why the rush to attribute the death to natural causes? Laziness? Stupidity? The all-too-common convergence of both?
You find the family’s number in the telephone book and pretend you’re a classmate. You say you’d like to come by, to pay your respects. Easy enough to do your research and speak with them like you know the school, know their son. You know what face you need to put on so that they’ll like you, trust you. You charm your way into his bedroom. You ask about his personal effects. That’s how you find out that they don’t have his shoes.
The police returned his books, his clothes, his gym bag – but no shoes.
The parents somehow don’t think this is odd, even though they tell you in almost the same breath that he had scrimped and saved to buy them, but the fact explodes in your brain like fireworks against the backdrop of a night sky. No shoes! Ah, wonderful! and you drop the mask so suddenly that the parents freeze where they stand and the colour drains out of their faces. They look at you as though you’re a monster in a young boy’s body, but you’re used to that anyway. You take advantage of their momentary inertia to waltz out of their flat, and the knowledge that you were right shoots through your entire body like a powerful electrical current, and you run, you run like the wind, you run like the devil.
The first person you tell is your brother, because he will understand as no one else can. Breathless, you explain everything you know: the state of Carl Powers’ health, your visit with his family, the things you found out from looking through his room and speaking with his parents, the missing shoes. It pours out of you like water from a broken dam, but it’s all right, Mycroft can keep up, he’s the only one who can.
Oh, he understands, all right, but as always he’s too cautious, too prudent. He says it’s best to approach the police with the information and let them handle the matter. You argue that they’ve already bungled the case, so you and he should investigate it yourselves.
He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, drawing from that special well of patience he's set aside just for you. When he opens them, he puts on his Older Brother face and tells you, firmly, no.
You hate him for it.
This is where it begins. Your little brother is consumed by this story. And he’s right, of course; he always is, but he’s hurtling down an unknown and unknowable trajectory whose variables are beyond your control. He’ll kick, he’ll struggle, he’ll fight, he’ll question your authority. But you’d rather bear his anger now than see him hurt or damaged later.
You drive with him to the police station. Even though you’re barely 20, you’ve already mastered the art of persuasion via gentle coercion. It’s something that came naturally to you and Father, both of you with your artificial smiles and the veiled danger in your eyes and the casual authority in your voices. The officer at the reception desk asks both of you to wait while he contacts someone more senior.
The inspector who eventually comes out to see you is a massive cement block of a man encased in an ill-fitting blue suit, and apparently just as dense. When your brother puts forward the matter of Carl Powers’ shoes, the man’s face grows dark, then darker still. The look can’t be explained away as merely the antipathy that Sherlock’s abrasiveness commonly inspires. No, there’s something more, something else –
“So you’re the little runt that came round to Mr. and Mrs. Powers’ flat, are ya?” he thunders at Sherlock. He pounds a meaty fist on the desk and looms over your brother. Your heart clenches to see him momentarily stunned, his grey eyes wide and unblinking. “You `ave no right to go sticking your nose into other people’s business, you hear? The family rang up to complain about some kid what pretended to be their son’s friend. Came up to the flat and all, snooping around.” He now has his face so close to Sherlock’s that you can see flecks of his spittle landing on Sherlock’s cheeks.
You rise to your feet as well, anger bubbling up from the depths. Bullies awaken something dark inside you, something with teeth and claws. You’ve had to deal with bullies most of your life, it only stopped with that growth spurt when you were 12 and you shot up to 5”10 seemingly overnight and kept going. Since then you’ve had to look out for your brother, whose physical development is lagging his mental development by many, many years.
You attempt to wedge yourself between Sherlock and the man, and you say, smoothly, “My brother may have been overzealous, sir, but surely you can appreciate the validity of what he’s telling you.”
“I want you and that little bastard out of here. And if I hear that he’s been bothering the Powers family again, I’ll have him detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.”
“You’re an idiot,” you hear your brother tell the man in that small, grave voice of his. “You never bothered to conduct a proper investigation, and now you’re turning your back on the first genuine lead that you have.”
The man’s face turns red, then purple, and you think he’s about to have a coronary. “Get out! Both of you, get out!” And he stomps off.
“Whoever did this, he’ll be back,” Sherlock calls out after him. “He’ll want to revisit the scene of the crime, they always do. He took a trophy, can’t you see?”
Nobody listens. Your brother is shaking with anger, with frustration, with the force of certainty. You put a hand on his shoulder but he shakes it off, finding touch unbearable.
He is silent the whole way back home in the car. When you stop inside the gates, he doesn’t move. You’re both quiet for a long time. When he finally speaks, this is what he says.
“This is how it will always be, won’t it? For you and me?”
You wish you had a different answer, but lies and platitudes are pointless because he already knows.
“Yes.”
Years from now you’ll remember this as the moment your brother changed, began the arduous journey to the man he would eventually become.
This is how it truly begins. You weren’t expecting to hear voices at the pool. It’s nearly midnight, who could that be at this hour? You peer through a door and you see a young man, possibly 19 or 20, tall but pudgy. He’s talking to someone in what you recognise as a reasoning tone. You’re not afraid, just very, very curious. You move a little closer; not too close, just enough to be able to listen in on the conversation. The young man is saying, I understand you’re upset about this, Sherlock, but if the police won’t listen, I highly doubt that there’s anything else we can do.
And then you hear it: that voice, small and low, and so very, very grave. I had to come, Mycroft. Nobody’s watching the pool, and they always come back. Don’t you see?
The young man moves to one side and now you can see who the voice belongs to. It’s a boy, 13 or younger, very slim, glossy swirl of black curls on top of his head. Any day now, he'll rocket through puberty, and you can tell that he's going to be tall and lithe and breathtaking.
They’re brothers, it’s plain to see, and from the way they’re discussing Carl Powers, it’s apparent they both know that his death was not an accident. The boy starts pacing, his fingers steepled together, touching his lips. He’s defiant, he’s frustrated, he’s fascinating. He’s saying something about Carl’s shoes, why they weren’t at the pool, or with his things. Collecting trophies, he says. We have to do something, find someone who will listen.
He’s talking about you. He knows – about you. Who are you? You’re so excited, your heart beats wild in your chest and a thin film of sweat forms on your brow and your upper lip. If you didn’t know yourself better, you might mistake this for arousal; you’re at the age, after all, all those hormones surging like violent tides through your body. The younger boy is oh, so beautiful: pale skin, pale, wide-set eyes, delicate bone structure. It takes every ounce of will power you have not to run out to him with your arms outstretched, not to tell him how happy you are that you’ve found him, or that he’s found you. Doesn’t matter either way. He’s intriguing -- this is wonderful, you’ve never been intrigued by anyone, ever. People are usually so boring. All your life, you've searched for a distraction: could this be it?
Sherlock. What a strange name. You say it again and again, turn it over and over in your mind like a piece of coloured glass or a hairy spider. Curl your lips around the shape of that soft sh, roll your tongue around the l, feel the ck hard against your palate.
You’ll remember this. You’ll remember this pool, and this name, and this beautiful boy. The very thought of him will console you in the years that lie ahead, in the long nights that stretch into nothingness, in the empty beds in the empty rooms in the empty cities where you let your black beast roam, always hungry, never satisfied.
You’ll keep the shoes. You might give them to him someday, as a present. You might ask him to be your friend.