Chapter Text
It was springtime in London and yet the primroses and the bluebells passed me by, for I kept long hours and did not dare to visit green, quiet places which might necessitate me to be alone with my thoughts. My days were filled with my patients and my nights with writing. Frantic, compulsive writing.
I cannot say the task brought me happiness, but it staved off some of the darkness. In those hours Holmes felt near to me again. When my pen scratched away at the foolscap, I could see him vividly just behind my eyes, hear his voice or feel his hand slip into mine.
It seemed to me that no other meaning remained in my life save to document the intricate soul of the best and wisest man I have ever known. While he lived I had lacked the courage to tell him the depths of my love for him, and so now it was the least I could do to make him beloved to the world. My mind was merely a vessel to contain remembrances of him, my body an engine to render them in ink.
I was about to begin a new paragraph when Mrs Hudson gave a gentle knock on the door and entered. I braced myself for one of the little acts of care she had lately begun to impose on her remaining lodger: sudden pots of tea, flowers to ‘brighten the room’, bowls of artfully arranged fruit. Instead, she looked slightly shaken.
“There's a gentleman to see you, Doctor. Says he needs your help,” she explained.
“Is he injured?”
“I don’t think so, sir, but I think there’s something strange about his face, and he’s twitching and pacing in ever such an odd way."
“Very well,” I sighed, laying down my pen and locking away my writing, “Send him up, and I shall see what the matter is.”
The man entered the sitting room very slowly, looking around carefully as he did. At first he did not seem any more remarkable than many of the unfortunates who eke out an existence in London’s lowest places. His shabby clothing reminded me of some of Holmes’ disguises. It was unseasonable for the warm weather and did not fit his tall, tremendously slender frame. His hands were wrapped in rough-knit fingerless gloves, and he wore a large brimmed hat which he kept pulled down low. Under it he had dark glasses. A muffler was wrapped around his neck and hid his mouth, so that all I could see of his face was a beakish lump of a nose.
“Doctor, thank you for seeing me at this late hour,” he said, his voice high and articulate. “I feel you may be the only one who can help, and it is a great comfort to see you.”
“Of course,” I said warmly, “Will you not take off your hat and coat, and come sit here at my desk so we may talk about what has been troubling you?”
The man did not sit, but he shakily raised a hand towards his scarf before pausing.
“You must prepare yourself,” he said softly, “I have no wish to frighten you.”
“Please, sir,” I insisted, “I am a physician, and have seen all manner of strange conditions in my time. You must not feel ashamed.”
The man began to cast off his garments, gloves, scarf, hat, glasses and all. I assumed I would be confronted with some significant disfigurement: a scar, or growth, or burn. I suppose in a sense what I saw was a disfigurement, but not one that my medical training had prepared me for.
The man’s face was, in a word, unfinished. I do not mean to say it lacked any of the usual constituent parts, but like a painting which is not yet fully rendered, they were indistinct. It was a narrow face and I could tell that his nose and chin were prominent, but no more. His hair was a shade I could not place at all. The eyes were the strangest element. I could see that they had all the usual anatomy, and yet my mind could not discern any colour in them. There was something of the dead about them, like the glass eyes of a taxidermied animal.
Despite all this, I was certain in my mind who this man was.
I had last seen Sherlock Holmes alive on a verdant Swiss mountain trail, with his back against a rock and his arms folded as he gazed down at the rushing waters. I had last seen him dead in a Swiss morgue. He had been surprisingly intact, minus a few lacerations and the broken neck which must have painlessly brought about his end. I had been pleased to have a final quiet moment with him to commit that beloved face to memory, yet even the most vivid imagination grows weak with time.
It was this distant and indistinct face which the gentleman before me wore. I stumbled backwards and gave a horrified cry. I must have fainted: a grey mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone, that strange shapeless face close to my own and those eerie, inhuman eyes looking into mine.
“A thousand apologies, I hoped you would not be so affected. Don’t you know me, Watson? Say that you do,” the man pleaded. The voice was similar to the one I would have most loved to hear, but like his features, it lacked clarity.
“Holmes?” I choked out.
“Yes, my dear boy. This must be a considerable shock, but you must know that I would never harm you and so you must not agitate yourself.”
He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. They enchanted me, those hands. Unlike the rest of him, they seemed solid. Long, thin, delicate, mottled with scars and callused with the signs of a violinist. I had missed them terribly.
“Are you a spirit?” I asked.
“Tch! It is extraordinarily hasty to wander into the realms of the preternatural on such scant evidence. You will find I am as corporeal as you.”
He held out one of his hands towards me and I took it in my trembling fingers. It was tangible, at least. It seemed to be the hand of a living man. It was soft and warm and pliable. Perfect, save for one thing.
“I am not so certain about that, Holmes,” I said raggedly, unable to raise my voice to more than a whisper. “You have no pulse.”
“I don’t?” he said, drawing back his hand.
“You don’t.”
I took my stethoscope out of my medical bag and he stood in rigid compliance while I put the diaphragm to his chest and listened. As I had feared, I heard none of the sounds associated with life. When I offered him the earpieces so that he could hear for himself, his eerie features shifted into a look of deep concentration. After some time he returned the device to me and sighed.
“Ah. An unconscionable oversight on my part, but in my defence, it is not something I am accustomed to checking and I am missing many more readily noticeable things.”
“What sort of things?”
He looked at me wearily with those uncanny, colourless eyes and finally took the seat I had offered him. We sat across from each other in the strangest consultation of my career.
“Memories,” he said, “Knowledge. Around four hours ago I discovered myself here in these rooms, with no indication of how I arrived. Then there is the matter of my appearance. Forgive me my vanity, but it is a pretty mess. It is not an easy thing for a man to go about the world looking like a chalk painting after a downpour. Since you were not home, I put together a disguise and left. I needed time to think. You were out visiting patients, of course.”
His eyes flicked down to my shoes.
“In Lambeth. Ah, Watson. They cannot afford to pay you, but you go anyway.”
I could not help but smile at this display of the playful intellect I had missed so much.
“I am overjoyed you are here, Holmes, but I wish I knew what has caused this to happen to you.”
“All indications are that you did this to me.”
Protestations rose to my lips, but before I could form them into words he had risen once more and made his way to the little bookshelf where I keep some of my treasures. He pulled down the two slim volumes of memoirs I had already published concerning his detective work, and presented them to me.
“The evidence is right here. Read this paragraph for me, if you would,” he said, turning to a page in ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and pointing with one of his thin, delicate fingers.
It was the description I had given of him, concerning him being “...rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller.” His eyes I had described as “sharp and piercing,” his nose “hawk-like,” his chin “piercing”. His hands had the most words devoted to them.
“And now this one, doctor,” he continued, pointing to a page in The Sign of Four. I had been even more brief in my description here, concentrating on his hands once more and his “sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks.”
While I read, Holmes unbuttoned his shirt cuff and held out his arm to me. It was true to the text in vivid detail, riddled with small pock marks and darkened veins.
“Behold your Galatea, Pygmalion,” he announced, covering up once more. “I do not know precisely how, but it seems your pen has resurrected me. I say resurrected , as earlier you described me as a spirit, and I cannot help but notice my chemistry set is packed away, my violin is in its case. I conclude that on some occasion I do not remember, I must have died.”
“You did.” It was all that I could manage to say. I closed The Sign of Four and laid it aside. I ran a hand over my brow, then got up to pour myself a measure of brandy. Another quickly followed. “Holmes,” I ventured at length, “you said you have no wish to frighten me.”
“Never, my dear Watson.”
“Yet you have just informed me I have the power to write you back to life - or some unpolished facsimile of life, at least.” I looked down at my hand. It seemed no different than usual, with smudges of ink on my fingertips and the groove in my index finger where I held my pen.
Holmes picked up the book, idly thumbing through its pages. “Unpolished, you say,” he murmured. “We can see, however, that the more detail you devote to your descriptions of my person, the better I am rendered in reality.” He wiggled his fingers.
The implications of this were strangely grounding. In matters of mysticism I am lost, but give me an ailment and a cure and I can forge a path forwards.
“If I write about those parts of you which are indistinct, they will come into focus?”
“That is my hope. Will you try, Watson?”
I immediately unlocked my desk, took out a crisp sheet of writing paper and seized my pen.
I usually found writing about Holmes to come very naturally, but it felt more challenging when the stakes were so very high and while those inscrutable eyes were boring into me. Surely they must be the first aspect which must be corrected.
I began to describe the precise shade of grey of Holmes’ eyes. In the daylight they were like wood-smoke, while in the evening they took on the hue of leaden sky just before the rain. I recounted the fractal patterns of his irises, and the dark flecks towards the edges. Once I had completed two thirds of a page on the topic, I glanced up.
I had not expected my words could really hold the power Holmes had suggested, but the evidence was clear. His eyes were his own again, or a near enough facsimile. My relief must have shown on my face.
“A success?” he asked mildly. I confirmed that it was.
“Excellent!” he cried, his new eyes sparkling. “Now burn the paper, if you would."
“Burn it!” I recoiled, clasping the page protectively in my hands.
“Yes, burn it. We must know if what can be done can be undone. I have faith in your ability to reproduce the text again if required.”
Well. It would not be a true scientific experiment if we did not at least attempt to replicate the results. I read and reread the page over to try and commit my words to memory, then, feeling a bit queasy, I reached into my pocket for my matchbook and set a flame to the corner of the paper. It caught at once, curling into ash within seconds. When it was gone and I had swept the last of the grey dust off my desk, I dared to look back at Holmes's face.
His eyes had returned to that peculiar, colourless, undefined shade. To describe them would be like attempting to describe the colour of water, though they were not transparent.
“Well, Watson?” he asked impatiently.
“They are back to how they were,” I said, “which is to say, their colour is gone. Did you feel anything?”
“Nothing at all.”
I didn't want to look at them any longer. Those eyes in his strange, oddly familiar face; they unnerved me. I turned away and picked up a fresh sheet of foolscap to once again write out my best description of Holmes's eyes as I remembered them. I kept it as close to my original paragraphs as I could, then copied it all out once again and set the pages to dry side-by-side. Thankfully, when I turned back, my friend's eyes were his once more.
“We must be careful,” I said thoughtfully. Though I kept my voice calm, my mind was reeling at the implications of what we were doing. “If damage to the words can result in your body losing something vital, then I will make copies of everything I write down about you. Duplicates, triplicates even. One copy of everything must be kept somewhere safe.”
“An excellent suggestion, Watson.” Holmes had gone to the drawer of what had been his desk, and turned the key in its lock. He pulled out a small hand mirror and examined his face. “Ah! That is much better.”
“I should attend to your hair next,” I said, fishing out a new sheet of paper, but Holmes held up a hand to halt me.
“As much as I am looking forward to looking more like myself, it is rather late, you have had a terrible shock and I dare say you will do a more efficient job after a night’s sleep. Besides, no doubt Mrs Watson will be missing you?”
“...Mrs Watson? Holmes, there is no Mrs Watson.”
“I do not remember much of our past, but surely you married Miss Morstan, who we met during the affair of the Agra Treasure?”
I eyed my tantalus of brandy again, but ultimately decided that another glass would not help.
“Holmes,” I said firmly, “Miss Morstan was actually a young man called Michael West. In my narrative I made our client a woman in order to heighten the tension of his predicament and keep his anonymity. I wrote a romance for myself because… well, it seemed an expedient way to create a happy ending. I know you are disinterested in such things, but many readers enjoy a love story.”
Holmes' new face was even more inscrutable than his original and I struggled to guess his thoughts as he sat rigidly in deep thought. After some time, he tapped the cover of The Sign of Four meaningfully.
“I suppose there are too many copies of this book for us to burn them all, so my memory will have to remain faulty.”
“I'm sorry,” I said. Various ways to continue that sentence sprang to mind: I'm sorry my florid prose is inadequate. I'm sorry I have subjected you to whatever strange half-life you seem to be living. I'm sorry I failed to prevent your death in the first place. They all caught in my throat.
Holmes gave the upper part of my arm a firm, sympathetic touch.
“We are certainly sailing in strange waters, my boy, but we shall navigate them in time. Up to bed with you, now. I will stay here and read through your writings, and we shall make our plans over breakfast.”
I was reluctant to leave in case he should vanish from me forever, but it was a relief to go to my own room, shut the door behind me and allow myself the shudder of horror and exultation which I had been holding back. Unfortunately once my defences were down, there was no raising them again. I knew I was breathing too fast, that my heart was racing, that I was on the edge of some precipice that I may not be able to crawl back from.
My suffering was pierced by the gentle lilt of a violin from below my feet. Mendelssohn’s Lied ohne Worte, one of my perennial favourites. In its warm embrace, I found enough peace to be able to lie down and ultimately drift into a dreamless sleep.